Oh Carl, what would you make of this Juneau Fog? The stuff obscuring Gastineau Channel didn’t come on cat feet. It manifested itself like a ghost. From Chicken Ridge, I could see the morning sun light up Douglas Island as I loaded the Black and Decker coffee maker. Fog blocked the view before I could take my first sip. Some days it outlasts the sun but today’s channel fog disappeared in an hour.

Aki and I find a slip of fog still haunting the mouth of Nine Mile Creek. It forms a line of parallel scimitars and heads toward a grove of still yellow cottonwood trees until dispersed by a puff of wind. More formidable fog patches recline like toga wearing drunks over ridges of the Chilkat Mountains. One tries to hide the glacier from view. It could hold there all night if the wind doesn’t rise.

I’m on my way to Pilipino Hall for Tai Chi class. Aki can brush my knee when she wants attention but can’t manage the parry-parry-punch so she stays home. I carry a camera because the low angled morning sun is turning even tired willow leaves into a show. I will be late to class. According to the weather service, we should be in the middle of week long stretch of rain so walking in sunlight, seeing the electric combination of light and fall color brings the kind of joy I once felt while Swedish milk chocolate melted in my mouth.

At Capitol School Park I swing over to a bronze rendering of an empty chair. Members of the Juneau High School class of 1942 placed it there to commemorate the forced internment of their valedictorian and all the other Japanese Americans in Juneau. Two strands of origami cranes, their paper bodies soaked by last night’s rain, hang down the back of the chair. The cranes are a prayer for peace and longevity, the chair a protest against the unfair incarceration of loyal Americans. I wish it were a binding promise of, “never again,” and hope that it will remind the generations of children that will sled past the diminutive monument of the destructive power of fear.

The beauty of the Gold Creek Valley shows through the fog, rain, and gloom. I credit the yellows of willows and cottonwoods whose leaves will be swept away in the next strong wind event. Aki trots over the top of the flume through a shower of rain and falling leaves.

Two battered silver salmon maintain station in a Switzer Creek eddy. I can see a child’s slide that the fish had to swim past to reach their holding water. The head of one fish is white with scars but neither move with the lethargy of spawned-out salmon. I’m thinking that they took a wrong turn out in the Gulf of Alaska or spent too long at a herring feed. For whatever reason they missed the procreation party. Nature won’t allow them to spend another year fattening up in salt water so they are doomed to hunker until death in an ice covered hole.

When Aki grows impatient we move up creek through an old growth forest, then onto the boardwalk trail across Switzer Meadow. Black slime makes the submerged boards too slick for my boots and I almost fall several times before we can reach an old corduroy road paved with fallen tree trunks. They must not be chasing eagles away from the nearby dump because none of the big birds perch in the spruce lining the meadow.

We hear city noise in the hillside forest: the city bus shifting gears as it heads to Lemon Creek State Prison, heavy equipment moving gravel, the beep-beep-beep of a truck full of televisions backing up to the Walmart loading dock. Except for the forest and the neighborhood of middle class houses drained by Switzer Creek, all the land we could easily reach by foot is zoned commercial. We drop down into a small creek’s drainage and find a place where kids could camp during the summer. With the stream noise blocking that made in our industrial area they could pretend they were in the heart of darkness.

Just past the campsite we enter the true dark heart of forest recovering from a 1930’s clearcut. Nothing grows beneath uniformly thin spruce. Their roots, thin and crooked as a witch’s fingers, reach across the trail. Someone has marked the way out with pink florescent tape. We follow it back to the older forest and find the two salmon still hanging out, still looking for the party.