Aki wears herself out trying to herd her humans. They have spread out over the flatness of Mendenhall Lake. One powers forward on her jet skis. The other doddles several hundred meters away, trying to take a photograph that might convince someone that shafts of morning sunlight can paint islands of bright beauty on a sea of snowy spruce trees.
The recent wind-enhanced cold has given way to a day in the mid-teens. Aki and I walk, some might say tromp, along the edge of Mendenhall Lake with plans for a large loop through the glacial moraine. There is enough snow on the trail for a ski but the slow pace forced by the snow cover leads to contemplation. Aki contemplates the absence of other dogs or even good smells. Once, after burying her face in the soft snow, she stared at me, as if sending her thoughts to one with lesser mental powers. I use my height advantage (so there little poodle) to watch a line of supplicants heading toward the glacial ice cave. I would ask Aki what draws them to the cold space but she would think me even more a fool. In time I figure it out for myself. For most of the year those without wings, or willingness to take the risky overland trail, can never touch the glacier. We can only study from across the lake, the river of ice’s blue color fade and strengthen in our ever-changing light.
(Photo taken at another time and place)
On Chicken Ridge, it’s 6 degrees F. and a twenty knot wind makes exposed skin respond like its fifteen below. Inside, Aki stares at me as I spread peanut butter over another sourdough blueberry pancake. She must want some peanut butter. No dog would want to go on a morning walk, not in this weather. The little dog continues to stalk me around the house, discouraging any thought of me catching the last bit of the Liverpool-Everton derby on the TV. Okay, Aki, I need to go the Good Hardware anyway. You can come.
Outside, both of us dressed for the cold, Aki sniffs and pees, as usual until a strong gust catches her with her in mid-squat. She snaps her head into the wind and stares. Tough little pup. With the winds mostly at our backs we cruise down to the hardware store down near Gastineau Channel and find the door lock. A sign informs the one of that can read, “Closed, Big Going Out of Business Sale on February 12.” Aki, the one who can’t read, plants herself at the door and waits for me to open it. In time I convince her that no one is within to give her the expected dog treat.
We walk back up the hill, wind now in our faces; me wishing that I had brought a scarf; Aki knowing that she has been cheated out of a treat. We pass the Salvation Army store and come up against a gang of least twenty ravens squatting against the cold near the small hydro plant on Capital Street. The sun has come out, which brings out the purple sheen in the ravens’ feathers. Aki, shoulders hunched against the wind, powers along the conclave’s edge. Except for he two in her path, the big birds hold their ground. Even the two in her path only flit a few feet to right so we can pass.
Aki and ravens have a difficult relationship so this calm passage through their midst’s surprises me. Aki barks her resentment when ravens prowl in her yard. Just last week a raven swooped down on Aki and then, as the little dog followed, flew off over a busy highway. If she hadn’t come back when I called her, Aki would have been smashed flat by a car. They just don’t like each other. Perhaps, this morning, it is just too cold for combat.
We woke this morning to light snow falling, a thermometer reading of 7 degrees F. (minus 14 C,), and a thirty-mile an hour wind that hammered Chicken Ridge. At this temperature, the snow lacks the weight to resist wind. It just drifts away. The house humans dress in our old dog mushing clothes, stuff Aki into a doggie version of Walls insulated overalls, and head north to the Eagle River. On the road, our cross country skis rattle in their rack in wind that shakes our Subaru like a martini. The little poodle mix whines as she rides like she is in a hurry to herd her people together on the ski trail.
I spot the sun’s ghost, a yellowish disk softened by blowing snow, high above the river. Once on skis, the stiff wind pushes me over snow now covered with forest debris ripped from trees by last night’s 70 knot winds. That ends as soon as we enter the sheltering forest, which protects us from the worst of the wind. If it were warmer, I would have taken more pictures of the river filled with soft ice pans or clouds of snow not left to settle on the riverine meadow.
The air is clear blue and cold above Mendenhall Lake when we step into our skis. The sun rose while Aki ran circles around the car: her potty dance. Now, wearing her pink puffy vest, she hunches up as we adjust jackets and gloves before moving toward the glacier. Wind rises with the sun but can’t make up its mind as to direction. Our eyes water and a large tear, the size of a raindrop, freezes on my human partner’s cheek. I ignore the metaphor, watch a streak of sunshine move down the glacial ice, consider whether great natural beauty can really stimulate tears, think, “nah,” and ski on.
We take advantage of the uniform snow surface on the lake to make a beeline toward the lake’s sunny side. I stop to photograph a fracture line in the ice that runs almost to the glacier. Here is another metaphor but I am too cold to care. The wind now blows hard off the Juneau Ice Fields. It streams loose snow off the Mendenhall Towers and sends white spindrifts around my legs and over the grooved trail. We fly, without effort back toward Skater’s Cabin, where we started. Another metaphor with options: Glacial wind scouring away the rift raft or returning the speed of youth.
I dragged Aki onto this windy, if sunny meadow, to look for a lost ice gripper. The little dog is a good sport about it but does look stunned each time a forty-knot gust slams into her 9.9 pound body. We retrace where we walked the day I lost one of my grippers but can’t find it. When we cross the grooved trail left by a four wheel ATV I wonder it the damage was done by the same Yob who mucked up the meadow we walked over in the fog last week. Those tracks saddened and even angered me but the similar ones that mar this sun drenched meadow today are easier to accept.
We were heading to the glacier moraine but on this rare sunny day I couldn’t drive past the light washed wetlands. Neither Aki nor I have been to this section by the airport for a couple of years. Frost flowers sparkle on dead fireweed stalks and willow gall roses. Aki sniffs at one spot, dashes to another, and sniffs again. People rarely walk their dogs here so I can’t figure out what she is investigating.
To get to the high tide line, we have to walk along the Egan Expressway for thirty minutes. Cars rush by at 55 miles per hour. Aki ignores them. I go extensional: pretend that the highway a fast mountain river that brings life to a desert instead of shoppers home from Fred Meyers.
Leaving the “river” we walk over tussocks of grass bent low by snow to where the high tide replaced snow cover with a thin, flexible sheet of salt water ice. Portions of the ice sheet broke off when the tide ebbed and now lay on the banks of small, deep channels, draped like Greek gowns. When we return to the snow covered area, Aki restarts her investigation. We find a set of 
fresh tracks that must have been made by a large, running cat, say a Lynx. There are four tracks together as if made by the cat when it brought all four paws together just before springing forward. Maybe three feet away, we find a similar set of four, but also a “v” shaped groove that suggests that the animal dragged its right rear paw. While I was trying to focus my camera on some ice bling, did a cool cat leap across our tracks?
Relatively warm fog obscures everything but this mountain meadow and nearby trees. I know it’s warm. The sound of free flowing groundwater and snow texture on the trail testifies that it is well above freezing. But even my heavy winter gloves can’t warm my hands after I expose them when taking photographs. The moist fog is almost as efficient at removing body heat as cold water. The snow provides good purchase for Aki’s paws. She exploits it by dashing back and forth, sometimes stopping suddenly so she can enjoy the resulting slide.
By eliminating their visible competition, the fog provides a nice stage for the twisted meadow pines. Recently fallen snow dapples the meadow with a pinto pattern and partially fills twin wounds made by the wheels of an all terrain vehicle. The muskeg plants will eventually heal the scar but it will take many years. I’m wondering why the ATV guy drove in a cloud of noise and hydrocarbons to cut a path across a meadow that could be walked in twenty minutes. Was he or she a thoughtless yob or just someone who needed to leave proof of a sad life on earth.
An earworm has crawled into my brain. I blame the alders with their snow-covered limbs that reach over the trail for light. On days with good visibility, they appear to lean out in supplication to Mt. Juneau and Mt. Roberts. But today, a screen of falling snow obscures the mountains but I am still singing Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” over and over again. Without the mountains as their target, the alders look to be leaning out for something—the snow or something spiritual. Are they are Cohen’s ‘heroes in the seaweed, children in the morning…leaning out for love.” Will, “they will lean that way forever?” Heroes, children, and all of us that fall in between, we all long for love and the meaning it brings to our lives.
Aki, no long a child and a hero only in her own mind, might seek our affection when at home but this morning cares only for trotting over fresh snow and the scent of the meadow’s nocturnal visitors. We step on tracks of mink, red squirrel, and rabbit slowly filling with falling snow. During this rain-cursed winter, this is a rare opportunity so I ignore everything, including the direction of our progress, and scan for more animal tracks. Aki scouts a way across the meadow and into a strip of forest where we have never walked. Ten minutes later I realize that one of is lost: me. Without the mountains for reference, I am disoriented. Aki stops, wags her tail, and looks confident. “Okay little dog, find us a way home.” She returns us to a familiar trail just before it hits the access road that we can take back to the car. “Try not to brag, LD.”
can take back to the car. “Try not to brag, LD.”
Before Aki. Before moving from Western to Southeastern Alaska. I drove a sled pulled by huskies. In Aniak, the dogs spent the summer along a wind swept section of slough while we fished and gardened. Most springs, the Kuskokwim River flooded our garden plot, soaking it in water made rich with nutrients from decomposing salmon. Hundreds of thousands of the fish spawned and died upriver from us.
On the long subarctic days of early summer we could almost hear our transplanted cole crops grow. But frost stayed late up there so, on advice from village elders, we waited to plant until emerging birch leaves were the size of squirrel ears. Frost never touched things planted after that point, which left me with an article of faith: wild plants never leaf until out until it is safe. On today’s walk with Aki I found reason to doubt.
During our recent thaw mountain ferns, like our foolish Dutch iris, pushed out new growth. The mild frost that hit them last night flattened out the ferns. They will lose all the stored nutrients invested in the new growth when real winter returns. Maybe this is why our elders in Juneau look to moon and won’t plant until the first high tide in May.
Walking with Aki 