Walking through this dark, dripping forest makes it hard to look forward to New Year’s Eve. Blame the big spruce and alders that joined the other wind fallen during 2014. I walk by their shattered corpses, wonder at the wind that sent them crashing down and remind myself that future forests will feed on their rotting bodies. I pause and honor the past’s year’s human dead and resolve to read the obituaries of people I never knew.

Aki breaks from the frankly morbid woods onto the beach where many dogs have walked in 2014. She ignores the raft of Barrow golden eye ducks working the off shore shallows and can’t see a pod of Dall porpoise hammering herring in deeper water. The back backs of the small cetaceans form a field of rocks that form and disappear until I try to photograph them. Behind, a bald eagle gives what sounds like a derisive cry before the porpoise disappear for good. If the downed trees caused me to reflection on the past, these harvesting animals encourage a hopeful look to the future. They already prepare for 2015.

It’s 10 A.M. on a cold, windless morning. The sun cleared Douglas Island’s mountainous spine a half and hour ago and is moving like a spotlight down the channel toward Juneau. We have a good view of Mt. Juneau but the sun concentrates on Sheep Mountain. Later, Mt. Juneau will sparkle when nothing blocks our view of Sheep Mountain. We walk over a meadow in dusk, tucked against the island’s spine. I walk slowly, waiting for the sun light to make the frost feathers sparkle. Aki is bored and doesn’t appreciate my lingering. Does she know the sun won’t reach this meadow until the New Year? I poke about, run through my Tai Chi exercises then find a tiny pond bordered by a band of pale, magenta plants. I think, “heather” and look for flowers; find frost feathers serving the same purpose. Aki can’t tell me why the plants circled this pond. She is moving down the two opaque ribbons of ice that mark a cross-country ski trail off the meadow.

Aki squints into the low angle sunlight and muscles ahead in spite of the wind gusts that sweep over the frozen sand of the Sheep Creek delta. I lean into both wind and light until stopped by a forty-knot blast. When the sun reached the ice field peaks, it drove this cold air down the Sheep Creek valley to hammer us. When the gust ends, the little dog runs full speed into an Aki-sized forest of dead beach grass stalks.

Other dogs and their walkers pass us on their way down beach. They smile, and stroll, not feeling the bite of the wind because it is at their backs. When a father with two toddlers walks past, I am tempted to warn him about the cold his kids will face when they turn into the wind. But dad wears well-used winter gear and the kids are encased in down snowsuits. This is Alaska, between tourist seasons. Most know that it is best to begin each journey by facing into the wind.

Aki stares at me as we share this North Douglas Island beach. She wants someone to throw her orange Frisbee but it is not here. There are lots of flat rocks that one her humans is very adept at skimming over the water. We have perfect conditions for it—flat calm water pushed high onto the beach by a solstice high tide. When the rock skimmer was a toddler, Ester, a Tlingit elder told me that children should not skim rocks because the ocean, like all things deserve the respect due to those with souls. But I couldn’t resist the chance to teach my child how to hold a flat rock and fling it across the sea. I never wanted to prevent her from enjoying the simple game.

After my daughter runs out of good skimmers, a young seal lifts its head so that only its eyes are above the water. It’s close in, closer to the beach than I have ever seen a seal. It rises up a bit higher when we wish it a merry Christmas and then disappears beneath the waters of an ocean wave free to the horizon. Ester, was that you?