“Aki, you can burn some freshly cut wood like birch, but not alder.” The little poodle mix doesn’t need this information but I have to tell someone if just to stem my anger at the yob who severed, with a dull axe, the top half of this lovely beach alder from its gray skinned trunk. Aki often receives lectures inspired by the minor criminals or fools and their active disrespect for the rain forest.

We walk a trail between old growth forest and a stunning line of alders reaching out over normally clean beach gravel. It’s the first day of rain following weeks of sun and almost record heat. Fog fights a losing battle with the rising south wind for control of Lynn Canal, its mass torn to shreds that hang over the water like canon smoke does over a battlefield. All normal on the water. The woods are full of trash and abandoned camping gear now glistening with rain drops. I see the expected — plastic bottles, empty boxes that once contained 24 cans of cheap American beer, hacked trees, crap.

“If they are drawn here for beauty, why do people celebrate Midsommer with thoughtlessness and small acts of vandalism?” Aki pees in sympathy.

Hoping to find nature still preserved on the other side of False Outer Point we round it and see things as they should be. An eagle complains of our presence or maybe at the crows feeding behind him at the stressed campsite. On the water a line of whale watching boats wait like supplicants for humpbacks to surface from their searching dives. Those on aboard the boats may watch a whale slide gracefully to the surface, exhale a sail of vapor, slide under the sea, repeat all that two more times before gracefully extending tail flukes skyward to announce a deep dive.

Being more tortoise with a camera than yob or supplicant I join Aki in a slow motion race with the tide to round a series of sea bluffs before they are made impassable by rising water.  We take a trail into calming old growth just after rounding the last bluff. Here high summer is celebrated with an explosion of green slowly being reduced by hungary insects.  It brings instant comfort, like a plunge into the cool water of a desert lake.  “Relax Aki, yobs can’t or won’t walk this far away from their cars.” 

With boots finally dried from the beaver pond dunking and the sun finally shinning like civilized people come to expect in summer, we returned to the mountain meadows. I bring little expectation of wildflowers since they hadn’t showned themselves during last week’s visit.  The almost cartoon yellow skunk cabbage still hold a monopoly on color in the highest meadow but we find tiny magenta treasures—the poisonous bog rosemary and something I call, “wild rhododendron” (see photo)  on the second. Here also blooms the cloudberry and bog blueberry.

Rather than continue to the lowest meadow we leave the path in search of the insect eating sundews. I found them here before but being blinded and made lazy by the sun we pass without a discovery. Aki really doesn’t care. She’s found the last patch of snow where she played chase the chunks of snow flying off somebody’s boot game. It’s a dog thing.

Six days of dry, sunny days in the northern rainforest can throw off my internal clock. Experiencing  it dog sitting at a friend’s beach house compounds the problem. Here at water’s edge, I feel my sleep patterns slipping as we stay up with the daylight of each lengthening day., seduced by how it deepens shadows on surrounding mountains while appearing to set alight their remaining snow. (My word selection is also affected).

Aki and her dog buddy seem unaffected. Yesterday, or was it the day before, we took them up a forest trail, crossing several small streams with the careful asymmetry of a Japanese garden, until reaching a pocket meadow dotted with stunted pines. For the dogs we could have been on any trail frequented by other dogs that leave behind signature smells. I hoped to find the magenta flowers of a Shooting Star. Even this long stretch of good weather couldn’t force that miracle in May.

Last evening, Memorial Day in the USA,  we found a patch of the flowers in full bloom in a beachside meadow. We had ridden there on bicycles, Aki riding in a handlebar basket.  While we ate a late picnic dinner at meadow’s edge the air filled with geese and gulls disturbed by others there to enjoy the convergence of sun, warmth, and the holiday that marks the beginning of our summer. A bald eagle, securely placed mid-river on a protruding drift log root, appeared to ignore the cloud of gleaming white gulls and scattering Canada Geese.