Until the blueberries, this walk was all about sounds–the typical coast forest early morning symphony: complaints, mostly gulls but sometimes an eagle drying its wings; the distant jack hammer sound of a red breasted sapsucker; a slightly off key bird song (not the bell clear tones of Robin); buzzing of the cruising bumblebee; gentle shushing of small wave action on a gravel beach; wet slaps of rain charged plant leaves hitting my cotton pant legs. All this builds to the crescendo finale delivered by a flight of old radial engine float planes on the morning run to Pack Creek—loaded with cruise ship tourists hopeful to see Alaska Brown Bears.

With my ears still ringing with airplane noise I follow Aki to where she growls at a fallen hemlock across the trail. “This is new,” I say in part to let Aki know there is no danger. We’ve had no storms since our last use of this trail so I wonder what delivered the coup de gras to this rotten tree; perhaps it was the pressure applied by a scratching bear or simply a yielding of the few fibers still holding the hemlock upright. I start to tell Aki the riddle about a tree falling in an empty forest but remember she has heard it before.

Late in the hike we reach the a patch of load bearing blueberry bushes, fruit just ripe. For weeks I’ve stalked the early setting Salmon Berry, find only empty or picked clean bushes. Here I am at the opening day of blue berry season. Is this karma rewarded or just luck? It matters little for the berries yield crisp sweetness that define an Alaska summer as much as the salmon, eagle, whale, and industrial tourism.

 

“Aki, you can burn some freshly cut wood like birch, but not alder.” The little poodle mix doesn’t need this information but I have to tell someone if just to stem my anger at the yob who severed, with a dull axe, the top half of this lovely beach alder from its gray skinned trunk. Aki often receives lectures inspired by the minor criminals or fools and their active disrespect for the rain forest.

We walk a trail between old growth forest and a stunning line of alders reaching out over normally clean beach gravel. It’s the first day of rain following weeks of sun and almost record heat. Fog fights a losing battle with the rising south wind for control of Lynn Canal, its mass torn to shreds that hang over the water like canon smoke does over a battlefield. All normal on the water. The woods are full of trash and abandoned camping gear now glistening with rain drops. I see the expected — plastic bottles, empty boxes that once contained 24 cans of cheap American beer, hacked trees, crap.

“If they are drawn here for beauty, why do people celebrate Midsommer with thoughtlessness and small acts of vandalism?” Aki pees in sympathy.

Hoping to find nature still preserved on the other side of False Outer Point we round it and see things as they should be. An eagle complains of our presence or maybe at the crows feeding behind him at the stressed campsite. On the water a line of whale watching boats wait like supplicants for humpbacks to surface from their searching dives. Those on aboard the boats may watch a whale slide gracefully to the surface, exhale a sail of vapor, slide under the sea, repeat all that two more times before gracefully extending tail flukes skyward to announce a deep dive.

Being more tortoise with a camera than yob or supplicant I join Aki in a slow motion race with the tide to round a series of sea bluffs before they are made impassable by rising water.  We take a trail into calming old growth just after rounding the last bluff. Here high summer is celebrated with an explosion of green slowly being reduced by hungary insects.  It brings instant comfort, like a plunge into the cool water of a desert lake.  “Relax Aki, yobs can’t or won’t walk this far away from their cars.”