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.

The day broke well on Chicken Ridge, announced by the slap of Sunday’s paper on almost dry ground. “Where shall we go today, little dog?” Aki ignores the question and heads for the kitchen, nails clacking on the hardwood floor. Her tongue lifts water from her dish when the first blast of wind driven rain slams into our house. Heavy raindrops appear to atomize when each strikes our neighbor’s metal roof. Wind carries the resulting vapor toward Gastineau Channel.

The poodle mix withdraws to the back of her kennel as I carry out the prep work for a walk in the woods—fill water bottle; grab camera, leash, pop bags, fleece for Aki; don rain gear, insulated Elmer Fudd hat, boots. She joins me just before I open the front door and we fight our way through wind and rain to the car.

We park at the edge of an old growth forest with a trail that leads to the sea. Aki dashes into the woods where it is calm and even free of rain. A gentle breeze tosses ferns that grow on the roots of a wind-tumbled spruce. Reminded of the power of wind, I look to canopy to see if the tops of the century old spruce trees bend. They don’t. Deep in the woods we hear the trickle of water in swollen streams but not the crack and creak of trees struggling in a serious wind. Still, Aki walks with caution; quick to jump when a stray alder leaf flutters toward her.

We follow a trail that snakes around broad circles of spruce root wads ripped from the ground when 100 miles an hour winds toppled the tree they once gave life. I’d like to be in the woods when such a wind drops giants but each time a storm brings them, common sense convinces me to hunker down on the ridge and ride it out.

Even on the bordering beach, the great trees shelter us. Gusts break over the tops of the tall spruce to darken the otherwise calm water with small, spiraling ripples. Some rip off isolated alder leaves that twirl and spin to beach. Apparently feeling exposed, Aki dances back into the woods. I follow, my mind filled with a memory of Cara Dillon singing “Donald of Glencoe.” I think of that exposed Scottish glen and the coast between Oban and Fort William so open to the wind. Is the sister to this Alaskan wind scouring the Highlands? “Ponder that little dog, those coastal Scots can’t even duck into the woods for shelter. The dog ignores my admonishment. We motor through the woods. She doesn’t doddle when asked to hop into the car.

I thought that three days of heavy rain washed all the smells off this trail but Aki manages to find lots of work for her nose. I walk, head down, parka hood up and listen to the simple tattoo of raindrops on my hi-tech rain gear. No one else shares the wet joy with us. At least it’s warm rain—falling through 50 degree F. air so I am safe wearing cotton. In a week or two, when the temperature drops to hypothermia range, I’ll be hiking in wool and synthetics.

At the edge of a mountain meadow the rain stops and the sun returns. A rainbow arcs over Mt. Juneau. I know it is nothing more than sunlight shinning through saturated air above the mountain and not a sign of better weather. In minutes we are back in the rain.