Aki and I returned to the Eagle River today and find a land going to rest. The clouds and their brother fog provide all the drama. The siblings let the sun slant rays through the old growth forest where it manages to infuse beauty into lifeless devil’s club leaves. We have no sun on the big tidal meadow but fog tears itself on spruce of the foothill forests. Above, the north face of Mt. McGinnis shines in full sun, its fresh snow looking bright and new like still wet white paint.

Gulls and ducks squabbled in fog that obscured everything but the near sections of the beach. In such a world of almost total grey, displays of color from the tail end of autumn claim my attention. The sun formed a silver disk that I took to be a promise to power through the gloam. Across Favorite Channel, a snow covered sawtooth peak appeared for a minute.

“It makes me sad,” the tall man said. “So sad.” He stood in the glare from the sun about to break through fog so I couldn’t see details of his face, just the rolled watch cap from which a long ponytail emerged. A sea lion exhaled after surfacing, making it hard to hear him explain that for the first time in many years there weren’t clams for harvest. I was too inside myself to ask why. Something in the way he spoke—words used, pronunciation— suggested that he was of the Auk People who for many generations harvested clams on this point. Over my shoulder he could see their old village site. He could make out the areas once cleared for canoe haul outs just above a beach covered with dog tracks. As he left the silver disk of sun vanished, returning us to the grey. Promise broken.

Aki and I left the beach just after crossing in front of the old village site and took a trail through old growth. The returning fog silenced the ducks but we could still hear the song of a gull, sad enough to be the village’s lament.

We could have picked a better day for it. With wind smashing rain against the house, Aki and I mount up for a wracking expedition. It’s something we do every fall, like picking berries or raking leaves. The seaweed we collect will protect our perennials from hard freezes. Next spring it will enrich our compost.

            Like a child left with an inattentive father for the day, Aki entertains herself on the beach. She sniffs and pees, sniffs and pees, then noses a full collection bucket. Finding nothing of interest there, she searches the beach for a fun distraction. I carry two of the heavy buckets up a steep path to the car. Aki follows at my heels and appears more than willing to jump in and wait for me to fetch the other buckets. Did I mention the pouring rain?

   Chores done, I drive to the end of North Douglas Island and lead Aki through a swamp full of nonproducing lingon berries to another beach.. “This is just for fun little dog.” The sun muscles out from a cloudbank and partially blinds us with reflective glare. We stand at the edge of a rock shelf just above diminutive surf. We have sun and the comforting sound of breaking waves; the beauty of Admiralty Island partially shrouded in clouds and four buckets of wrack stored back at the car.

Oh Carl, what would you make of this Juneau Fog? The stuff obscuring Gastineau Channel didn’t come on cat feet. It manifested itself like a ghost. From Chicken Ridge, I could see the morning sun light up Douglas Island as I loaded the Black and Decker coffee maker. Fog blocked the view before I could take my first sip. Some days it outlasts the sun but today’s channel fog disappeared in an hour.

Aki and I find a slip of fog still haunting the mouth of Nine Mile Creek. It forms a line of parallel scimitars and heads toward a grove of still yellow cottonwood trees until dispersed by a puff of wind. More formidable fog patches recline like toga wearing drunks over ridges of the Chilkat Mountains. One tries to hide the glacier from view. It could hold there all night if the wind doesn’t rise.

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.