Having missed the big petal storm
I settle for the pale glow of those cherry blossoms
still clinging to the their tree in the face of a steady rain
for the lovely fallen
glittering and wet.
forming new flowers on the tree’s understudies
and a carpet that I crush
on the way to the pond
where the wind has
scattered cherry blossoms
over waiting koi.
Spring will come late to this working class stream but it will take away much beauty when it does arrive. Winding through a tight little valley and less and a mile from the Juneau Ice Field, Montana Creek will run around snow covered rocks for at least a couple of more weeks. The departing winter’s snow, ice, and hoar frost makes the beauty here. Without snow, this wonderful ski trail becomes a tired gravel road to nowhere; the creek a claustrophobic spawning ground for several species of salmon. They will draw the bears and eagles and ravens and herons who will hide from my view in thick riverine forest. Winter and summer, rifle and shotgun blasts spice up almost every visit to the creek.
The gun range was almost packed when we climbed into our skis. Since is such an an odd way to honor the pascal sacrifice, I wonder if those sighting down the barrels of their expensive rifles are celebrants in a church of gun powder and shot. Aki tries to ignore the near constant barrage but I can tell she is bothered by the bangs and booms.
The crows patrol this creek delta like rent-a-cops at a rock concert. One watches a few feet from the trail as my little dog passes by. Aki ignores it and the other crows policing the area. She doesn’t show any interest in the hundreds of migrating fowl that have stopped here for a top off before moving north. Only a small Kanji formed with found beach rocks intrigues the little dog. She barks, then growls like a Ewok before approaching it with head low. Looking a little foolish, Aki gauges my response to this new trail side shrine and then pads on down the beach.
Around the corner, Barrow goldeneyes are having a blast on the pond—splashing and rising up until almost free of the water and then more splashing. It’s 52 degrees and the sun brightens the dull, death beach grass until it competes with the snow covered mountains and glacier for our attention.
Last Sunday, while ecstatic over victories of my favorite sports teams, I wrote on Facebook, “It can rain all week in Juneau.” It almost did. Yesterday broke clear and we had sun all day but it didn’t seem like Spring. That night, not expecting more than a cold wind, I took Aki out for her pre-bed eliminations. While she searched for a deserving place to leave her sent, I looked up at a thin green vapor trail. It swirled into a vortex over my head, spinning closer and closer until I reached up to touch it. Other vapors joined it, some painting streaks of green over Mt. Maria while others expanded into a curtain over Mt. Juneau. Not willing to look away from the Northern Lights, I am still not sure if Aki took care of business. She did this morning, on the walk up to Gasteneau Meadows.
Cold settled over the meadow under last night’s Northern Lights to cover mud puddles on the approach road with thin panes of ice and hardened the meadow snow. The lights may have called the American robins north. We pass through a cloud of them traveling in the company of at least one thrush and a couple of grumpy jays. The Auroras may also have awaked the bear that dropped off the meadow after this morning’s sun rise. Our tracks cross the ones he left in softening snow. On the thinning meadow snow blanket we also find fresh tracks of an adult deer and later one that just survived its first winter.
The crisp, hard beauty of winter melted away in last night’s rain. Summer’s soft, sweet smelling promise is far away. We live and walk in a gray purgatory without a taste of the richer seasons. Rain soaked driftwood logs lay scattered on the wetlands like corpses on a battlefield. One shows more life—lifting a slender limb up and over to frame the flooded Mendenhall River. “There,” it seems say, “That way summer comes with its salmon, seals, and whales.”
I can’t find a speck of green on the wetlands this morning except for the yellow-green paint on the channel navigational aids. The grass lays dead on mud and weathered drift logs. There are crows, black silhouettes that spread out like new owners of a run down amusement park.
This is a day to look up, not down, as the morning sun milks the white beauty out of surrounding mountains and glaciers. We hear a beautiful song and find it comes from a song sparrow—a plump little brown bird. Another sings the refrain from 10 feet away. Another brown bird—this time a Canada goose, lifts off the wetlands in a noisy flight.
The muted palette suits Aki and I this morning and I find many reasons to click the camera shutter. It may bore the one bald eagle we spot. He sits atop a screaming red navigation aid and calls to the sun for a spotlight, the ham.
Like a detective trying to discover clues in an ancient crime scene, I try to puzzle out what made these faint tracks on the meadow snow. They wander across the snowy field like furrows set by an inattentive farmer. Crossing them are recognizable snow machine tracks left by someone who enjoyed banking his machine on steep creek banks, shooting over the shoulder of the big beaver house, and weaving through the bordering forest. Some, maybe the rabbits and deer that watched the show, would find the snow machine driver guilty of crimes. I don’t judge, just hope that the relatively short reach of the meadow will discourage a return.
I ski in the snow machine tracks while Aki sniffs about, pees here and there, but ignores the mystery tracks. This tells me that they were machine made. The mystery is solved mid-meadow, where a trail of two parallel wide grooves confirms that the tracks were made by four wheel all terrain vehicles. Stopping, I listen for silence—blood beating a tattoo in my ears, squawks of disturbed birds, then nothing. No wolf howling, rabbit crying, rifle firing, snowmachine whining. I can almost hear the slight breeze ruffling Aki’s ears.
Like intercity gangs, ravens and crows battle for turf in Juneau. The crows ruled Chicken Ridge when we first moved to the neighborhood. They would arrive at sunrise on a late March day like this, each member of their murder screaming taunts at the us from the limbs of Sitka Spruce trees. With this display of verb gang signs they staked out nesting areas for the summer’s crop of fledglings. One year they returned, found one spruce tree missing and never returned. Now a pair of frisky ravens controls our neighborhood skies. Unlike the cranky crows, the ravens tolerate the occasional visit by bald eagles.
On this morning’s walk we found our old crow neighbors staking out the trees along lower Fish Creek. After chasing off three bald eagles, they infested the little spruce covered island that forms part of the stream’s mouth. We heard but did not see them while circumnavigating the island. The strengthening spring sun robbed the glacier and surrounding mountains of drama but left us warm and content to let the crows rant.
This first taste of true spring might have affected Aki more than I. She shows little interest in passing dogs, and can only manage a half-hearted roll in the disappearing snow. At the end, I find the body of red breasted sapsucker. Even in death, it manages a spectacular display of red, yellow, and black against its snowy killing ground. Aki pays the corpse little attention but I can’t resist this chance for a close up view of the eye—dark, speckled pupil floating on a pale blue pond.
Back from Sitka, Aki’s other human and I take the little dog exploring on the glacial moraine. The wind that has hammered downtown Juneau since our return can’t reach us here. We have sun, lots of snow, and a temperature just below freezing.
We want Aki to enjoy this adventure because when it is over she is to be taken to the veterinarian for injections, teeth cleaning, and nail clipping. She dashes over a series of terraced beaver ponds while I muse over the good and bad provided by the industrious rodents. Beavers killed these trees and transformed their beauty from a living celebration to one created by blistered forms. Their dam works create habitat for young silver salmon, some that might be swimming under the ice beneath our boots. But when the temperature rises, the backup from their ever expanding ponds will flood our access trails to the troll woods and berry patches.
Finding myself neutral on beaver beauty, I concentrate on a cottonwood leaf that has spent the winter trapped by the cold. Like the beaver, the dead brown leaf transforms the moraine, using the heat from spring sunshine to carve Itself a steep walled sanctuary in translucent ice.
Walking with Aki 
