Category Archives: Dan Branch

Catching The Bottom

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All fishing trips start early in the morning, many before the breakfast caffeine can clear the mind. This one begins at the relatively late hour of 7 A.M. Aki remains home, looking forward, not doubt, to a planned visit with one of her best dog friends. If fishing was the only point of the trip, I should stay home. Thanks to a dramatic fall off in the local king salmon returns, that fishery is closed. With better weather we would make the one hour run to Lizard Head, where King fishing is legal. But neither the sky nor the weatherman gives much hope of calm seas.2

In a normal year, the waters of the bay we fish out of would be full of king salmon fisherman, human and sea lion, as well as the occasional whale. But today, I only spot two eagles. One roosts on top of a commercial salmon troller, confident that it won’t put to sea until after they reopen the fishery. The other eagle, still acquiring its species’ trademark white head and tail, stands at the water’s edge, looking at its reflection as if basking in his beauty.1

Later we will try for halibut by dropping weighted line onto a reef off of Hump Island. Humpback whales and Dahl Porpoise will fatten in the herring-rich waters. An adult bald eagle will pluck a bait herring off the water close to our boat. We will catch only the ocean’s bottom with our hooks. But we really won’t be there for the fishing.

A Complex of Clouds

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Aki and I walk on the spine of a long, gray gravel snake stretched out on the forest floor. On either side, the white flowers of food plants—crab apple, high bush cranberry, and Labrador tea—break the monopoly of forest greens. The snake will lead us to a beach where white gulls harass eagles away from food exposed by the ebbing tide. But my eye will be drawn to Lynn Canal where a complex of clouds, from white to dark gray, water the sea.1

Hot Mountain Dog

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Instead of the promised rain, Aki and I have unfettered sun. Feeling a little like Obi Wan Kenobi from Star Wars, I am wearing a heavy sweatshirt with hood pulled up so it covered my ears and neck. Yet I still feel comfortable. Another Jedi mind trick. We are climbing a gravel road that transverses a small mountain bowl. When the road crests we have fine views of Ben Stewart and other mountains in the Douglas Island ridge.2

Aki is panting in the heat, looking for a water source. She finds it in a small, fast moving stream. Willows choke the stream banks except where a small gravel beach has formed. Aki wandering into the creek chest-deep and sips from the stream.3

 

Rounding False Outer Point

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It’s the seventy-third anniversary of the Normandy invasion that eventually led to the end of World War II. Aki and I are rounding False Outer Point during an outgoing tide. Nothing about the scene inspires memories of D Day except the eagles that make my little dog nervous. During our approach to the point, an adult bald eagle, white head bold against the spruce where it roosts, dives toward the water with talons extended in the fishing position. But it carries nothing back to its roost. Aki gives me her “are you crazy?” look but still follows me around the point.3

A flood tide forced us to rock climb around each headland the last time we made this trip. That day ended for me at the local urgent care facility where a doc-in-a-box stitched closed a cut I received after slipping on razor sharp shale. Today, with the tide on the ebb, we have an easy passage. Four eagles make lazy circles above the beach after the point but Aki doesn’t seem to notice. The resident crows notice us. One takes up station on the top of a driftwood root wad and polices our passage back into the woods.1

False Finds

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Reunited after my stint at the Skagway writer’s school. Aki and I patrol Downtown Juneau. The little dog is all business, but doesn’t seem to hold a grudge about my absence. We walk in soft drizzle that dampens the morning’s color. A noisy raven, angry that one of his kind hold a tasty stick of something in its beak, lets us approach within a few feet. When he flies off, it is only to an alder a meter away where he continues to monitor the greed of his neighbor.1

The lucky raven seems more stressed than the one with an empty beak. After trying to squawk with food in its mouth, it stops feeding and shifts his prize to one of his claws. The other grips the wet skin of a Chevrolet pickup. Down on South Franklin Street, where the docks are empty and the stores are closed, three women of commercial beauty have been pasted to the side of a cruise ship perfumery. The brunette in the center declares her’s an ageless society. But soon, even her beauty will fade, victim of rain and sun.

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Laughton Glacier

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6It’s the last day of writer’s school in Skagway. Students and teachers, including Paul Theroux are in a White Pass narrow gauge railway carriage that rattles toward the Laughton Glacier trailhead. The conductor has stuffed all the writers into one carriage where the sound of thirty or forty conversations competes with the grumbles of the old carriage and the disembodied voice of a tour guide giving the railroad’s history.  5

Last night rain soaked the trailside forest but now we have to squint to the morning’s sunshine while disembarking. Conversations began on the train continue as teachers and students start up the trail, joined by a couple from Galway who decided to follow us to the glacier rather than continue on the train to it’s terminus at Fraiser, British Columbia.1

I hang back, letting everyone pass, until all conversation is being drowned out by a glacial river in a hurry to reach saltwater. The river also blocks out all birdsong. If a raven is scolding me, I can’t hear it. The forest plants aren’t steaming in the sun. That time has passed. But fat raindrops still cling to plantain plants and dead-brown foliage of last year’s bracken glows.2

After a mile the trail leaves the river and leads me up through wind-stunted spruce and cottonwood plants. Still alone, I follow it onto a flat valley formed by twin walls of naked moraine. Only tough plants grow here. Ahead the Laughton Glacier curves up into clouds that obscure a mountain ridge. The clouds also block my sun. Ahead one of the writers, in long skit and windblown hair, walks towards toward the glacier with the help of a tall trekking pole. She turns the scene into a black and white photo of a pilgrim approaching her ashram.

1I’ll pass the pilgrim and climb onto the shrinking toe of the glacier. The sun will return. I will hold sharp edged rocks just being released from glacial ice that carried them from mountaintop to my feet. “Look at these rocks,” I will shout to a much younger writer wearing heart-shaped sunglasses. But magic will be in their history, not their appearance so she will probably thinks me weird. Higher up the toe, I will fall into a conversation about wolverines: whether the grumpy loners are magic or just thugs. “Magic” will become my favorite word for the day.4

Skagway Cricketers

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I’m in Skagway, a town eighty miles up the Lynn Canal fjord from Juneau. Having no need of writer’s school, Aki is back home. During a break between classes I am riding my bicycle on the road to the old gold rush town of Dyea. On my right a red-breasted sapsucker hammers a tin mail box, repeatedly striking the words, “U.S. Male” with its beak. I wonder about the bird’s politics.1

It’s a relief to escape class and the town of Skagway, now filled with 13,000 cruise ship visitors. Later on the ride I will pass a group of cruise ship workers playing cricket on a baseball field. They are short one bat so they have to make due with a section of alder. I think of the cricket game I once watched never Devon, England on a perfect pitch where the batters wore pads and the bowlers a wooden ball. The rubber one used by the cruise ship crickets didn’t yield that satisfying “crack” when hit that a wooden ball produces. But today’s game brought the guys joy. 3

Tidal Table

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Tlingit elders teach that when the tide is out, the table is set. This morning, the tide is clearing the table as Aki and I walk toward the mouth of Fish Creek. From the sounds being made by eagles, crows, and gulls, last call is too early. Across Fritz Cove, a noisy cloud of white forms over Mendenhall River as displaced gulls and kittiwakes rise from an inundated sand bar. The cloud rises, falls, swoops, and settles on a still dry section of the wetlands.1

Rain falls through sunshine. In the American South, they would say that the devil must be beating his wife this morning.  A rainbow appears in the skies above Admiralty Island. The wetland bird noise drops. Perhaps they accept the bow as a manifestation of the tide’s promise to withdraw from the wetlands after the crest.

The rainbow has no affect on the crows and eagles. Inside the spruced island near the creek mouth, they bicker like kids on the playground. Bald eagles glide in and out of the forest, some to fish over the cove, others to perch on a mid-channel navigation aid.

3Two eagles, one wet, the other dry, sulk on the point separating fish creek from its pond. A minute earlier, one had crashed, talons first, into the pond water, struggled with something that appeared to pull it underwater. The then wet eagle released its prey and used its wings to lift out of the water for a short flight to the beach. Somewhere in pond, a sore backed king salmon drops into deeper water. .4

Bears

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Aki could be riding on my bike as I climb from Tee Harbor to the mouth of Eagle River. But she doesn’t like sitting in the bike basket. So, she is not here to see the cinnamon-colored bear that was asleep next to the bike path when I rode by. Startled, it bolted awake and crashed into the woods. Minutes later I pass a yearly cub chopping on dandelions. It has been a week for seeing animals from the seat of my bicycle. There was the harbor seal that chased dolly varden near the hatchery. Then I spotted two black tail does that continued to graze on grass as I rode past. On the way I stopped at the Arboretum where a blooming cherry tree frames a view of the Shrine.2

Back in High School

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4It’s hard not to feel derided by the ravens and crows infesting the spruce forest that edges the Mendenhall River. The mere presence of Aki and me seems to put them in a foul mood. I experience emotions not felt since visiting a neighbor bar when in college. (Image me in school sweatshirt and jeans walking past a table of shipyard workers in machine-oil-stained overalls). The corvid choir takes me further back to the time of high school dances with their rigid hieratical order. The other birds along the river reinforce my feelings.3A sole, immature bald eagle was exiled on our side of the river when Aki and I first broke out of the forest. Across the way, on a bar exposed by a minus four low tide, the big men and women on campus—a gang of mature bald eagles—reigned. Gulls, crows and ravens kept a respectful distance.1

We learned the crows’ true social status when a single gull drove them off the bar, across the river, and into the trees where they now hurl insults at my little dog and me. As is the case of the high school dance status, in the bird world size does not guarantee dominance.

2I’ve seen a sole arctic tern drive off a mature bald eagle and a raven do the same. I’ve watched a crow harass a raven into leaving a tasty morsel of food. Today, the Mendenhall River crows, having been embarrassed by a diminutive gull, are putting us in our low place.