Aki dislikes baths. Does she know that I chose this walk over the Sheep Creek delta as a pre-bath treat. The flood tide has yet to cover the broad expanses of sand. My little dog charges down the beach after her beloved Frisbee. A handful of gulls hunt areas of died back grass for food. Just offshore, two bald eagles perched on the number 2 navigation marker, watch Aki run down her Frisbee. The promised rain hasn’t arrived and only ghosts of fog obscure the channel-side mountains. Small ponds and potholes capture most of the beauty from the snow-covered mountains. But my favorite view is of the edge of snow pack carved by yesterday’s nineteen-foot high tide.

“Aki, what is it like to live in a Christmas card? The little dog, just freed from 10 days at the doggie hotel, ignores my question and rushes down the trail. She zooms up the crusty mountain meadow trail, dives down and rubs the sides of her face on her first snow of the winter. Thinking she misunderstood my question, I restate it: “Aki, what is it like to live in a landscape so like the images on Christmas cards?” Popping up from her snow bath, she shakes away my question with the snow caught in her fine fur. Looking at the frosted bull pines that stand over the snowy meadow and the strips fog that underline the all-white mountain ridge above, I say, “Well, I like it fine enough you little brat.”

I watched my first sunrise of advent this morning. Without clouds to inhibit it, the sun popped out of the waters of Gastineau Channel like an angry orange god. It looked ready and capable to melt away the six-inch layer of snow that covers the ridge. Experience tells me that the sun won’t shift the snow without help from the rain, which is scheduled to make an appearance soon.

 Thick ground fog hampered our plane’s landing last night and made it hard to see the new snow covering Juneau. On the ride home from the airport I pondered how we were going to get through the snow to reach our front door. There was no need to worry. One of our neighbors had already dug a path. Am I naive to find hope for peace in such an act of kindness?

   Aki didn’t see the sunrise and hasn’t pockmarked the snow with her tiny paws. She spent the last 10 days in a dog hotel while her humans visited family and friends in Washington D.C. I’ll spring her when the hotel opens its reception desk at one this afternoon. Then we will go one an adventure to celebrate the return of the winter sun.

Downtown Juneau is as quiet as a forest pond this Sunday morning. The tourist shops closed when the last cruise ship headed south last month. Aki and I walk along the edge of the Starr Hill neighborhood where three mainstream churches stand. We pass the Catholic Cathedral first, the smallest in America. The faint sounds of chanted responses leaks through its 100 year old walls. Down the street, the Episcopal priest preaches on today’s Gospel, reminds his congregation that what they do for the least of God’s people, they do for Him. While I stop to look at the priest in his heavy medieval robes, Aki squats at if to pee. I drag her away before she can spot the sidewalk with her message.

Down on Front Street a congregation of European football fans (“Soccer” in American) watches a match on the Viking Bar’s giant screen TV. Their cheers mingle with the screams of gulls fighting for scraps floating on the surface of Gastineau Channel. Startled by the cheers, Aki growls a warning.

All this eavesdropping makes me think of the seal we saw yesterday near the Outer Point Beach. He was face down on the surface when we broke out of the woods. We must have startled him because he slipped quickly underwater and then raised his head up to stare at the dog in a fleece coat and her human companion. As I do every time the dog and I are the target of a seal stare, I wonder what the animal makes of us. The seal is sadness, itself. You find the same look on children watching a game from which they are excluded—the look of an exile. I don’t find a similar look on Aki. She, who would not be welcome in church or bar this morning, just ignores the congregations.

Aki and I are at the one place near Juneau where ice still covers water after the thaw: the glacial moraine. It’s where winter come first and leaves last. It’s where we ski and skate and do a lot of starring at the river of ice. I’m starring at it now. This morning’s heavy overcast has weakened to let shafts of sun strike the flank of Mr. McGinnis. New ice on the lake mirrors the image of the illuminated spots of forest, the moving mists below them, the pale blue glacier ice, sharp peaks of McGinnis, and the Mendenhall Towers. Has rock and H20 in its three phases of ice, vapor and water made art? Or does it require a photographer like Juneau’s Mark Kelly to elevate these images?

I image Aki and I as anthropologists drawn here by reports that members of the mineral community produce their own art. After cataloguing the glacier and mountains reflections on lake ice, we cross a mud bar to reach the moraine. Aki sniffs out a grotto of ice pillars, half clear as glass, half an opaque gray. They support a roof of glacial silt mud, “Clearly Aki an intelligent mind is at work here.” The little dog, a more detached observer than I, pees and walks over another section of ice supported mud that collapses under her weight. “Quite right, Aki. It just chemistry, not our field; more a matter of molecular bonding.” It’s still beautifully placed crystal that I’d be proud to capture in a decent photograph.

Dry clouds have descended on Chicken Ridge, giving the air and sky a visual neutrality that inspires contemplation rather than awe. At least that is how the opaque cover affects me. Aki only reacts to smells and my voice. We pass the colorful craftsmen houses on Basin Road and I notice, for the first time, that someone has painted her access stairs the brightest purple. Not even the cloud’s grey blanket can diminish its strength. Is that why it is a royal color?

Once over the old trestle bridge, only the green of some stubborn ferns and mosses stand out in the glom. Almost hidden in a moss-covered niche, we do find two wedges of ice. They are all that remains of the ice and frost formed during our first cold snap. Melt water varnishes the ice with a jewel like luster. I think of Néle Azevedo’s minimum monuments. With molds and vast freezer space, the Brazilian installation artist creates thousands of ice sculpts of people. Hundreds or even thousands of volunteers help her install them in a public area where they melt to water. (“Made to Disappear,” Sculpture Review, Fall 14 Vol. IXIII No. 3). In Birmingham, England, one of her installations inspired reflection on the human loss during the First World War. In other places they reminded people of the risks people face from global warming.

Normally I don’t get installation artists but Ms. Azevedo’s work excites. Like Elizabeth Kübler Ross, I want to accept the inevitability of death so I can appreciate life. What better learning tool than one of Azevedo’s minimal monuments. The volunteers who help placed the ice people watch the installation, first with the pride of ownership, then as the sculpted nudes begin shinning with melt water, the excitement produced by beauty. Soon exhausted by those emotions, they relax into acceptance and then relief when all that’s left is water. Then they can reflect on predictable loss.