Aki and I walk along the lower Mendenhall River, now a world reduced to black and white by a heavy snow shower. This morning’s high tide melted away all whiteness from the beach, leaving only toppings of snow on clumps of severed seaweed. Fat flakes from the storm try to lighten the still wet sand but end up producing a transparent slurry that Aki avoids by walking above the tide line. We have dusk at 1330 even though official sunset is at least two hours away.

All the sand bars were under water when we first broke from the forest but now they grow in the ebbing tide. Ducks and geese, probably seeking a sanctuary from two hunting seals, form tight groups that cackle out warning when a bald eagle launches from its beach side spruce tree roost. By the time the eagle reaches the sandbar, its potential prey have scattered. The big bird returns to its roost.

Having no luck last week enticing a seal with song, I try to whistle in a pair cruising the river. One does change course and moves, head elevated from the water, in our direction. It dives when I bring out the camera. Down channel we enjoy a second dawn. The clouds crack, allowing views of a wedge of blue and weak sunlight that returns color to our world.

At least four adult bald eagles huddle on the far bank of Sheep Creek. Two more roost on the offshore channel marker. Others hang out in beach side red alders or on the creek delta’s edge. Kept here by the creek’s promise of food they endure each other’s company as the morning’s wet snowfall changes to rain. 

Figuring they need to conserve their energy, Aki and I give them a wide berth, moving to the delta edge where a solitary seal swims past the channel marker. Remembering a claim that seals can be drawn close by singing to them, I start in on, “Dark as a Dungeon.” It’s an odd choice, one I question the first time the seal slips under water. (“Oh come all you young fellers, so young and so fine, and seek not your fortune in a dark dreary mine. It will form as a habit and seep in your soul, till the stream of your blood runs as black as the coal.”).  The seal surfaces for the chorus. (“Where it’s dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew, where the dangers are double, and the pleasures are few, where the rain never falls and the sun never shines, it’s dark as a dungeon way down in the mine.”). Then he disappears for good.

The gulls, apparently unbothered by my singing or Aki’s presence stay for another refrain but I stop when the eagles we left on the stream register noisy complaints.  A dog walker heading right toward them, his herding dog close at his heals, flushes them to flight. Idiot, I think, then decide to give him the benefit of the doubt. He has temporary license plates on the pickup truck he parked next to my car.  He might not know better. It’s easier to tolerate ignorance than rudeness. (Isn’t  there is a song about that?). 

Patrons of MOMA, rather than the National Gallery of Art would enjoy a walk today on the Mendenhall Wetlands. A low marine layer cuts off mountain views and migrating fog obscures the horizon. The gray simplifies, allowing appreciation of contrasting shapes: grass collapsed by cold then woven by tides, snake like channels delivering runoff to Gasteneau Channel, mud formed into fish scale shapes by tidal flow,  the simple geometry of the Number 17 navigation marker where two bickering bald eagles roost. We cross the curving channels and approach Number 17. One eagle flies off, setting a chain reaction in motion as he flies toward a gang of Canada geese that rise in an alarm. startling geese a mile away from the eagle.