Flooding tides, rain, and a warm front worked to take the beauty away from this stream delta. Just last week translucent ice capped rounded beach rocks and white snow brought the innocent look of new creations. Now we have a false spring, all gray and brown. It suits the gulls and ducks (Barrow golden eyes, buffleheads, mallards) but not the eagles, who no longer gather near the stream. It suits those in transit through sadness.

Rain falls, a soft shower that substitutes for the tears I should be shedding for a recently dead friend. He, a geologist, would have been bounding around the beach gravel, quickly reading the history that I can only tread upon. Years ago, we stood on a nearby beach in night made darker by fog and rain, sharing a unexpected joy at being alive. Most people would have scrambled away to warmth and artificial light. Eric stayed for the wild comfort on offer. He would have found more wild comfort here. May he be at piece.

The promise of sunshine after weeks of wet gray skies enticed me to Gasteneau Meadow. I found the promise first fulfilled in a shallow pool of melt water formed on an icy road.  Sunshine and blue skies reflected from the pool, a scene made more dramatic by the pool’s gray, icy frame. Aki posed herself in the reflection, drawn by some smelly clue of an animal’s prior passage.

Sunshine never touched our faces or the surrounding snow for we visited after noon when the sun leaves Douglas Island. It did flood the snow covered line of mountains across the channel.

After finding easy going on the main Gasteneau Meadows trail I took a snowshoe trail deeper into the meadow where we could see the peaks unimpeded by the diminutive pines that struggle in poor soil. While the snow supported us, it couldn’t do the same for a deer. Its hooves cut deep gashes while moving across the meadow that morning. How odd for me to move freely when an animal born to the place could not. The deer trail paralleled that of the snowshoers but for a long time did not cross it. The deer should have found easier going by moving onto the snow packed by passing men. Later, down a section of the trail that gets less use by man, I found evidence that the deer finally moved onto the snowshoe path. Here, his hooves only sunk a few inches with every step. Does each passing person leave behind a smell? Does it build until wild things would rather struggle in soft snow than walk through it?  

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?).