Category Archives: Aki

Aki is Going to Ask Santa

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1.jpgThis afternoon Aki is going to have her picture taken with Santa. It’s for a fundraiser to feed homeless dogs. But first we will take a walk together on the glacial moraine. Rain pours down on us when we leave the car. While Aki does her business, I climb up a small rise and look out over Mendenhall Lake. Its waters are almost as gray as the sky. I can just make out the blue of the glacier across the lake. Small pans of ice line the shore. They provide the only evidence of winter’s November visit.

2.jpg                  Backtracking to the car, I lead Aki onto a new cross-country ski trail that snakes through a belt of thin spruce and hemlock trees. A month ago, a foot of snow covered the trail. Nordic skate skiers would have flown past us. Today it’s a bare as summer.

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The rain forest has known grey and wet Christmases before. We might have to endure another one this year. Maybe Aki can ask Santa for a miracle snow storm next week.

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Ice Dragon

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In her poem, “The Mendenhall Glacier” Ursula Le Guinn describes it as an ice dragon. Why didn’t I think about using that metaphor for the glacier? It’s seems so obvious this morning with fragments of clouds hanging above the ice like steam rising from a dragon’s nostrils. Le Guinn, who lives in Oregon, may have only seen the glacier once, and that as a cruise ship visitor. The little dog and I have seen it many times. Yet all I have been able to come up for a descriptor is “river of ice.” Well, she has published 50 books.

 

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While I grumble to the little dog about metaphors, a bald eagle roosted in a nearby cottonwood tree lets go a ribbon of scat that arcs out of its rear and twists down to the ground like a dragon of poop. Aki looks at me like a dog tired of dragon metaphors. We push on toward Nugget Falls, now fully charged by recent storms.

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Three mountain goats graze near the falls. Two, a female and kid, move very close to the water on a steep pitch of glaciated rock slick with mist. One slip would send them into the torrent. But they safely reach a patch of willows, which might be succulent with sap sent out during our false spring.

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A woman with an 18-inch telephoto lens on her high-end camera appears behind me on the trail. When she points it at the two goats, the larger one stops to look at us. Its kid disappears into a hollow. I look down at Aki, tiny and quiet beside my right boot. She can’t be the reason for the goats’ defensive move. Between the goats and us the falls pounds into the lake. That fact alone should reassure the mother and child that we can’t harm them. Has the she goat learned to identify humans pointing rifle-like objects as threats?

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Busy Time

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This trail touches on two bays. The first one we reach today is empty of birds and seals. On the second one, a huge gathering of surf scooters have formed a quarter-mile long black crescent with their bodies. Here and there, one of their members bursts into a short flight, calling out a half-hearted version of their hysterical warning call. The rest are harvesting.

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So precise is the interior line of the crescent that I wonder if it forms a psychological barrier for baitfish between the birds and the beach. Does the long line of feathered bodies and paddling feet scare fish toward the shore? I can’t imagine any other explanation for the scooters’ precise work. If a bait ball passes under the crescent, the scooters splash into the water after them.

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The Scooters aren’t the only busy critters in the area. Perhaps panicked by the way the rain-swollen pond waters flooded over the top of their damns during last night’s storm, the big rodents piled sticks and branches on top of their main dam. But they couldn’t prevent water from escaping the smaller ones. Over these water now floods across the beach trail. Aki minces her way through the overflow. We both have wet feet after the passage.

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Sheep Creek Delta

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Happy Saint Lucy day little dog. Aki looks at with me like someone who had to watch a trusted friend eat warm saffron buns with his morning coffee while all she had to look forward to was a breakfast of dried kibble. Fortunately she forgot about my neglect by the time we climbed into the car for a drive out to the Sheep Creek delta.

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Using our car’s magic blue tooth connector, we listen to music recorded on my phone. This morning that device doesn’t allow me to choose songs. Instead we have to settle for an eclectic mix tape as the phone shuttles through my music library. After The Pogues finish a song about brown eyes, Yo Yo Ma starts playing one of the more obscure Bach cello suites. We reach the trailhead before the phone can shuttle over to the Texas Tornados. As if she doesn’t care for Bach, Aki bursts out of the car and into a heavy rain when I opened the door.

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It’s high tide so most of the delta is under water. What seems like every mallard in the greater Juneau area hugs the beach or sleeps on it. When I close the car door, one of the mallards makes a sarcastic chuckle. Crows have crowded onto the mid-channel navigation aid. More of their murder stand on a nearby gravel bar even though it is covered with a inch of water. When the tide turns in a few minutes and retreats from their gravel bar, the crows will fly to another one closer to the beach that was dry when theirs was wet.

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We won’t see or hear an eagle during our beach walk. But on the drive home the car will pass under a trio of them jockeying for position over a beach with a brace of stubborn ravens. The center of their temporary universe is something dead. I look on the beach but see only rocks and rubble.

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A Little Gift

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The little dog and I are pulling into the Fish Creek trailhead parking lot. And as if nature thought we deserved an early Solstice gift, it is not raining. Aki, you just never know what climate change will bring us. The pastel pinks of sunrise color mist rising off the pond. As if to gild the scene, a heron flaps through the mist to land on a pond-side spruce.

5The weather guys forecast heavy rain for tomorrow, which makes this break in the storms that must sweeter. But it is not all beer and skittles for the little dog. A shotgun booms across Gastineau Channel making Aki cringe and look back to make sure I know what I am doing. The gunshot drives a gang of Canada geese into a noisy flight. I wonder if they are giving warning or hurling curses down upon the hunter.

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It’s a day for finding bones. I almost step on a slim seal bone and later spot the large leg bone of a moose. Eagle feathers littler the beach grass. All these things were deposited here by a powerful flood tide.

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It is also a day for crows. The Juneau murder must have roosted in the small forest that at the end of the Fish Creek spit. They spill out over the water of Fritz Cove, their black bodies looking like music notes inked onto the mottled sky.

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Rainy Day Retreats

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Heavy rain has forced us to retreat into the Treadwell ruins. The little dog and I have the place pretty much to ourselves. Aki manages a brief dash about with a big husky mix. When that dog moves on her spirits drop. The rain must be getting to her. She hangs back at a trail junction, apparently questioning my decision to push on rather than take a shortcut back to the car. With human arrogance, I walk further into the ruins. In a minute she ends her strike and trots up to my side.

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The storm, which started last night, has engorged all the watercourses and filled up the ponds. Surface water flows down long unused rivulets to the beach where it cuts new courses through the crush gold ore that forms the sandy beach. No bird, crow, raven, eagle, duck, or even gull shows itself. I imagine them all down at the Triangle Bar watching hot dogs cooking on the open rotisserie. Or maybe they are in the Viking, nursing drinks while watching European football on the big screen TV. Too bad dogs are not allowed in either bar.

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Pioneer Road

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Aki and I are taking the new pioneer road on Douglas Island. To its advocates, it is valued because it may eventually provide access to housing developments and a hoped for golf course. Detractors see it as a yet-to-heal wound that cuts over two miles of forested hills. They have the stronger argument. When less than a quarter-mile in we pass the gravel borrow pit where the road builders blasted the side of hill into useable rubble. On Surviving hemlock tree still clings to the pit’s edge.

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The big spruce and hemlock trees, some that were at least 200 years old, that were cut down to make way for the road lay neatly stacked like the corpses of disaster victims along the roadside.

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Wind can still make music in the remaining forest as can the rivulets channeled through metal culverts. So, I do something I have never before tried on one of our walks. I turn on my phone and let stored music accompany the sounds of wind and water. First comes a lute playing a piece by Dowling. Then Sting sings the words to the song, bringing harmony, for a moment, to the scarred forest.

Cross Country Slogging

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There are a lot of things the little dog and I could be doing this morning. Recent rainstorms cleared almost all the local trails of ice. We could be walking on one of them. We could be on a snow free beach watching harlequin ducks paddle slowly away. But we are 30 miles north of town where there is enough just snow for cross-country skiing. Thanks to all the dead leaves, twigs and spruce needles on the trail my skis are doing more slogging than sliding.

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On a drier day it would be even harder to make progress on the trail. But the steady rain lubricates the trail debris. For some reason, I am the only one of the 30,000 Juneauites that thought skiing here today was a good idea.

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Aki would rather be dashing about on a popular dog walking trail but she manages to entertain herself by reading the wild animal sign. When we ski over fresh deer tracks I expect the little dog to growl or bark. But she ignores them. I still search the trailside woods for the animal that left the tracks. Nothing shows itself.

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The Piano Has Been Drinking

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Aki and I are driving out the North Douglas Highway toward the Rainforest Trailhead. It’s raining. Tom Waits is singing one of his downer songs. The piano has been drinking, the piano has been drinking. Not me. Waits writes the best music for rainy day road trips.

The little dog has insinuated herself in my lap, content to listen to Waits and watch the windshield wipers snap back and forth across the windscreen.

2After we pass the boat harbor, with its fair weather view of the glacier, strong wind gusts buffet the car. I tell the little dog: We’ll just make a quick dash around the trail and then dry out during the drive back home. But as often happens at the tip of Douglas Island, the wind and rain drop off. We barely notice either during our walk through the forest to the beach. It’s even calm on the beach. A half-mile away on Lynn Canal, strong winds bother the water into waves.

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I think of the U.S. Coast Guard helicopter that searched in front of Juneau all of yesterday for the two men who drowned during a short skiff ride on Gastineau Channel. At low tide, you can walk across the channel where they were lost. But the extreme tidal changes that day, from a plus 19 foot to a low of 1.9 must have flushed their bodies into Taku Inlet. Maybe I should listen to Beethoven’s 6th on the ride home.

Red Sky At Morning

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Red sky in morning, sailors take warning. Look at that sunrise, little dog. Know any sailors we should warn? Aki gives me her “don’t mess with me” stare and curls back up into a comfortable sleeping position. Down channel the water glows with an angry glare. I sip coffee and watch the fierce light fade to grey as clouds descend to block the sun.

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Hours later and we are walking the beach in front of the old Auk village. Even through it is just past noon, the sky is already yellowing like it does at sunset. A long strip of light reaches across Favorite Channel from the Chilkat Mountains to our feet. A rising wind raises small waves that slap the beach. As if the light could provide them heat, a small raft of harlequin ducks paddles into the thin strip of sunlight.

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We walk out to Pt. Louisa, the site of at least one killing shipwreck and watch a fishing boat move without difficulty towards the Auk Bay harbor. So much for the “red sky at morning” warning.

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I wonder if the boat carries home red king crab. Harvest of the once abundant crustaceans has been banned until this winter due to a population drop. But Fish and Game just opened up a season for them. Now fishermen who pulled their boats at the end of September’s silver salmon season are rethinking that decision. They ask around in bars or the vegetable section at Foodland if anyone has a boat they can use to go after crab on days when the sun doesn’t color the morning clouds red and the Taku winds don’t send water sprits dancing across Gastineau Channel.