Category Archives: Southeast Alaska

Waiting for an Overdue Bus

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For the first time in a month, the false outer point parking lot is almost empty. We pull in near the only other car and spot its owner fishing for king salmon on the point. Two crows stand on either side of the fisherman, waiting for him to clean a fish. Between the fisherman and us, an immature bald eagle stands erect on a rock near the tide line, surrounded by a small murder of crows. Duffer, not a scientist, I imagine the eagle is preaching or teaching to the crows. But they are more likely the bigger bird’s guards.

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The crows scatter when Aki walks onto the beach but the eagle stays. I wonder if it is waiting for the tide to ebb enough to reveal something to eat. When several of the crows fly low passes over the eagle, it flies a few yards down the beach. After this happens several times, I realize that the eagle just wants some peace. Our presence and its effect on his tormentors is giving him a little.

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It’s worst for the eagles perched in the spruce trees above the point. Squawking crows take turns diving on them. Some eagles hold their ground or try to place spruce boughs with their sharp-tipped needles between themselves and the little corvids. The crows drive off two who fly around the point to a crow free zone where they bicker over a perch that offers a good view of the expanding tide lands. When the sounds of crow and eagle complaints die away, I can hear sea lions grumbling. They are all waiting for the ebbing tide—eagles, crows and sea lions—as unhappy as commuters waiting for an overdue bus.

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Under the Fog

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I see this mountain valley every morning. Now it is filled with fog. Aki and head out to find out what hides beneath. After climbing up a gravel trail busted through the forest by a snow machine club, the little dog and I walked along the Treadwell Ditch, busted through the same forest a hundred years ago by Chinese immigrants to bring water to the Treadwell mines. We pass by the usual forest characters—shy maiden flowers, skunk cabbages, sorrel, and delicate blossoms that will soon set famine berries.

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When the trail leads us onto an open meadow, we get into mountain flowers—shooting stars, wild rhodendrens, and the remains of bog rosemary. In the flat light, the shooting stars have a violet cast. A Sitka blacktail deer breaks from cover to dash across the meadow to the safety of the bordering old growth forest.

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Waiting Game

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The eagles play a waiting game on the Fish Creek Delta. They wait perched on spruce limbs where they could spot the arrival of food or a rival. They wait for the tide to recede. They long for the day king salmon enter the creek. The delta crows also wait for low tide and the salmon. But I can hear their young calling out for their mid-morning feed. The adults must long for the day their hatchlings fledge.

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The impatient Aki rushes down a trail lined with blooming wild roses and cow parsnips. She has many scents to sample and cover with pee. The little dog doesn’t notice a formation of barn swallows dive on out matched mosquitoes. I feel like Aki and I are heavy bombers being escorted over enemy territory.

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Perhaps because it landed so near a nest or because the crow is tired of the waiting game, it flies into an immature bald eagle to force it off it perch. The larger bird screeches out a warning but doesn’t move. In seconds the crow takes up station just above the eagle and lets out a string of sounds that could be curses. The eagle looks up at the diminutive crow, cocks its head, confused, rather than angry. Below, the swallows, their waiting game over, hunt prey.

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Muting the Robin’s Song

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The eagles are testy today. During an early morning hunt for king salmon at Tee Harbor the captain and I watched two mature bald eagles throw down over a baitfish. One hovered ten feet about the water. Using the strong north wind, it gently lowered its talons onto a herring. Getting only its tail feathers wet, it rose up with the fish and headed toward the beach. Another eagle snatched for the fish. The two birds locked talons and twirled in a ball just above the harbor waters. Whether because of centrifugal force or a loss of nerve, the attacker released and fell backwards into the water. I was about to suggest that we motor over and lift its stunned body out of danger with the net when it stirred. By slapping its wings onto the water it managed to lift itself into the air.

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Now Aki and I walk through a soaked forest to the beach. Weak storm light hits the early-summer growth on the understory plants. The illuminated green growth sparkles with beaded rainwater. Robin and thrush songs further brighten the mood until an eagle gives out a shrill lament. Aki, who has gained a sensible caution around the bid birds, moves next to me the trail. The first line of a poem someone should write pops into my head: Grief mutes the robin’s song.

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Raven Cabal

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I sense tension in the raven community. Aki picks up on it. On Gastineau Avenue, they burst from beneath a salmon berry patch when we approach. One appears to act as a lookout from a perch that provides an unobstructed view of the MV Zaandam’s bow ropes. Ripe salmon berries, some red, others a milky orange distract me away from the ravens. But, like the ravens’ moods, they are sour.

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The little dog and I descend the Ewing Way steps to Lower Franklin Street and then walk past Tracy’s Crab Shack to the cruise ship dock. The disembodied voice of the Zaandam’s cruise ship director lets his passengers know that it is now safe to disembark. Early risers waddle down the Zaandam’s gangplank, pose for a picture with a crewman dressed as an eagle, and move into a swarm of land-tour hawkers. Aki powers past the false eagle and toward a gang of ravens shredding the ropes that secure the Zaandam to the dock. One, apparently the local lookout, watches us pass. Aki doesn’t even bark.

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Gathering Moss

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On wet days like this, when the wind whips up waves on the channel and the trees of Treadwell drip steady on the little dog and I, the forest seem to be eating the ruins of the old mining town. Water glistening on an old iron rail directs attention to the way it curves and then dives into a live spruce tree. Rain soaked moss fills the crevices of vents and covers concrete walls. Better keep moving little poodle-mix, before the woods claim you.

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Recovery

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Aki never enters the burn. She always waits with a worried expression for me to finish my search for recovery. Until today, I found little to report. Today, the flashy blue of lupine blossoms draw more attention than the skeletons of burn trees. Young poplar trees rise in a scattered pattern between ruined spruce. In a decade shade from the fast growing poplar will force the lupine to the sunny margin that lines the trail. In 100 years the spruce will have pushed out the poplar. But today, the lupine thrive in ancestor ashes.

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Bear Signs

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As if to encourage thoughts of our well-loved dead, clouds have jammed themselves tight against the channel-side mountains to diminish our view-shed. The same mass of grey now drops heavy rain onto picnic tables and popular beaches. The clouds haven’t spared Salmon Creek Trail where Aki, my now-soaked poodle-mix trots up a steep slope. Her enthusiasm wanes after she sniffs the severed trunk of a cow parsnip plant. She reacts as if the trunk were a half eaten salmon lying next to a spawning stream in August.

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A bear chewed off the root structure and upper portion of the parsnip remnant before tossing it on the path. Other bear discards form a wavy line on the trail ahead, like shoes and bits of clothes dropped from front door to bed by a drunk. The last segment of torn leaf lies next to a thick patch of cow parsnip plants with swollen flower pods. I imagine the bear, 100 pounds, black fur shinny with rain, waddling down the trail, a three-foot-long chunk of cow parsnip crushed in its teeth, stopping every few seconds for another bite. He drops the last bit on the trail and heads down to Salmon Creek to see if the chum salmon have come home from the sea.

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Garden Gnomes

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Aki chases after her Frisbee through a forest of lupine, tall grass, and buttercups that form road a verge along the North Douglas Highway. After she disappears I can track her progress by the twitching of flower stalks she shoulders during her passage. Now thickened with flowers, those lupines not disturbed by the little dog stand like garden gnomes on a lawn badly in need of a mow.

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Earlier, she had chased her Frisbee on a nearby gravel beach, empty except for one crow that strutted along the water line like a rich man leaving the funeral of an enemy.

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Dispelling Ghosts

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Does Aki see ghosts? We are on the sandy bight that arcs past the old Auk village site to Point Louisa. The little dog hops and squirms, her body an uncoiling spring. She could be playing with the ghosts of dogs that once watched their masters pull toward shore in canoes formed from the trunk of a giant cedar. More likely, she is reacting to the new crop of mosquitoes that buzz around her eyes.

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I strain to spot orcas in Lynn Canal, or closer in, the wakes of diminutive Dahl porpoises as they skim just below the surface of the bay. Memory ghosts of orcas and their smaller cousins float over the water. I try to give them some substance with my imagination, but fail. I also fail to see the reclining bodies of Stellar sea lions on a nearby island, growling like gluttons. This allows me to envision them as waist-coated gentlemen, spayed out in comfortable chairs after an enormous meal.

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Among the flowering lupines at Point Louisa, Aki and I stumble on a blooming Rugosa rose. Someone must have planted it here, perhaps to commemorate the death of shipwreck victims. In 1918 the 343 passengers on the Princess Sofia drowned after the ship stuck nearby Vanderbilt Reef. Only a dog survived. As if to dispel the ghosts, a bumblebee flies down the throat of one of the rose blossoms. While it gets to work, Aki and head back to the car, passing a focused sapsucker climbing a spruce tree. The woodpecker pounds a bug out of the tree and flies off. He has no time for ghosts.

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