Category Archives: solitude

Mystery

Leave a reply

L1220510Like a detective trying to discover clues in an ancient crime scene, I try to puzzle out what made these faint tracks on the meadow snow. They wander across the snowy field like furrows set by an inattentive farmer. Crossing them are recognizable snow machine tracks left by someone who enjoyed banking his machine on steep creek banks, shooting over the shoulder of the big beaver house, and weaving through the bordering forest. Some, maybe the rabbits and deer that watched the show, would find the snow machine driver guilty of crimes. I don’t judge, just hope that the relatively short reach of the meadow will discourage a return.

L1220497I ski in the snow machine tracks while Aki sniffs about, pees here and there, but ignores the mystery tracks. This tells me that they were machine made. The mystery is solved mid-meadow, where a trail of two parallel wide grooves confirms that the tracks were made by four wheel all terrain vehicles. Stopping, I listen for silence—blood beating a tattoo in my ears, squawks of disturbed birds, then nothing. No wolf howling, rabbit crying, rifle firing, snowmachine whining. I can almost hear the slight breeze ruffling Aki’s ears.L1220514

Two Sides to Solitude

Leave a reply

P1050889While skiing along Eagle River at sunset, we stop to watch seals, driftwood, and small pans of ice move downriver on the ebbing tide. As I always do when seeing a seal in river in winter, I wonder why they enter salmon-less waters on the flood tide. Unlike me, they can’t be seeking solitude for they usually travel in company. My volunteer job at the local hospital this week made me look deeper at the meaning of solitude, which assumes the shape of loneliness for patients during slow moving weekend days. As long as solitude promises me peace through isolation I will seek it in the company of my little dog; hoping it’s isolation will provide curative rest if I ever spend the weekend in a hospital bed remembering a seal gazing up at me from river waters painted by a winter sunset. P1050890

Fish Creek Anniversary

Leave a reply

 

P1110781Two years ago I started this online journal with an entry about Fish Creek. This morning Aki and I returned to measure the progress of fall in this sheltered place. The salmon were gone, of course, bodies carried away by carrion eaters or washed away by the autumn floods. With nothing to attract them, we found no bears and only one bald eagle. We inadvertently flushed her when well past the places marked by the tracks of other hikers. It is so easy to find forest solitude on these rainy fall days.

P1110785After that visit two years ago, I wasn’t sure if I could mine Fish Creek for enough material to fill even one blog post. But an old growth forest, even at quiet times, always has some new trick to show you. Today it offered white lacy ferns in transition from green to dead brown, clumps of fungus mimicking a pipe organ, a squirrel willing to stare down a poodle in fleece, a freshly fallen spruce tree blocking the trail. Grown large and tall in disturbed ground along the stream that fertilized it with spent salmon, the gambling spruce paid the price for its easy riverine life. It will never grow to maturity like the spruce occupying the ground just beyond reach of the fickle stream, but its flesh could change the stream’s course.

P1110788Leaving the forest I drove further out the road to wrack for sea weed. We use it in the garden. Only thin lines of rock week marked the high time line at the beach I usually harvest so I didn’t bother with it. A flood tide almost filled Bootlegger Cove with water the color of dulled mercury, reaching toward the Mendenhall Glacier. Only a bright red buoy floated on the calm water until a common loon popped, corklike, to the surface. I resented the presence of the rude-colored buoy as much as I enjoyed watching the loon’s graceful comings and goings; I who just left the woods with an alway curious toy poodle mix, she wearing high visibility yellow and I bright red.P1110812

 

It’s Best During a Storm

Leave a reply

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAki trots ahead along a wet, 12 inch wide plank trail that crosses this mountain meadow. Still wearing her red waterproof wrap, she ignores the wind driven rain. I fall behind while trying to photograph ancient, twisted pines in front of tendrils of mountain clouds. As usual, capturing the most seductive view would require pointing my camera into the wind and rain but I can capture Aki trotting in the other direction.

I don’t know about the little dog but I am drawn to mountain meadows on these last days of summer. They are best during the drama of a storm when rain water glistens on plants in fall color and on sweet blue berries suspended inches from the wet meadow by tough little plants.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAFeet encased in Extra Tuff boots and the rest of me in rain gear, I move away from the boardwalk and harvest the low bush blue berries. Aki wanders about then returns without her rain wrap. Snapping out of the zen like berry picking state, I search for the wrap, finding it on the boardwalk. Stuffing it my jacket pocket I lead the little dog on to a less visited portion of the meadow and fall upon a forest of miniature blue berry bushes, all bearing ripe fruit.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAForgetting about Aki’s wrap and the weather I reduce the world to this field of blues. As I pick the wind blows back my rain jacket hood. Rain soaks my hat and Aki. I don’t notice until standing up for a stretch. Shivering, Aki fixes me with a “this isn’t so much fun anymore” look. Leaving behind unharvested wealth, I head back to the car with a wet dog and several cups of berries.

Mountain Berry Picking

1 Reply

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAki, her back to me and the berry patch, watches a nearby path. I’d like to think she is on guard duty. She never has to prove herself as only mosquitos threaten on this mountain meadow.

Perhaps it’s the result of a high summer of sunshine and warmth, or just luck. but big blue globes hang from many of these dwarf blueberry bushes. They taste sweet, unlike their cousins that grow on larger plants under old growth forest canopies. Mixed in I find the segmented, orange fruit of cloudberries. We once picked them and the low bush blues on the Kuskokwim River tundra. These mountain berries taste almost as good.

I pick for an hour before moving on, boots soaked by the saturated muskeg meadow, mind suffused with the peace that comes from meditation, effortless playing of music, and picking berries.  My harvest will work its magic again in the morning, making a feast out of Scottish oatmeal and milk.  OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Tasting Salmon Berries in the Sun

Leave a reply

P1110112With the wealth of trails in the Juneau area, I knew we would have this one to ourselves, even on this warm, sunny Sunday. Just a gated gravel road ending at an old mine, the trail climbs through and then above an old growth conifer forest. Succulent salmon berries, red or yellow, grow along the trail. The red ones’ glittery translucent makes them the easiest to spot. When ripe they taste like watered wine and leave a wild after taste on the tongue. I haven’t worked out a way to describe the taste of the opaque yellow ones.

P1110094Away from flight and helicopter corridors, the trail offers silence as well as tasty berries. After minutes of climbing we only hear the sounds of boot strikes on gravel and Aki’s panting. Undeterred by the heat the little poodle mix pushes on ahead. I worry about the lack of trail side watering possibilities until we hear a small brook ahead. Even through thirsty, Aki won’t approach the water on her own but waits from me to slip and slide down a small slope to where the stream enters a culvert. Aki takes a few caution sips then moves up stream where blue berry brush and ferns form a shading canopy. When she has drunk her fill we return to the sun washed trail and find that American Robin just ahead— the one that all summer has waited for our approach on each trail taken.   P1110092

Lessons in Solitude

1 Reply

P1130434This trail, beginning at the Alyeska Ski Resort and ending in a string of beautiful subalpine meadows, teaches the value of solitude. The first half mile hosts a near constant stream of hikers, most just taking a curious peak into a northern rain forest. A smaller number push on to see the Winner Creek Gorge and take a promised ride over the stream in a bucket suspended from a cable. The trail forks before the gorge where I right turn to explore a less visited section of the creek.

Before the fork, I dottled along finding spaces between groups so I can enjoy the play of lights of darks in the forest understory. After taking the road less traveled I am alone except for a tiny vole galloping up the trail then diving to safety beneath a blueberry bush. Aki would have loved that. There was also a raven sounding like a honking Canada Goose.

After the junction the trail climbs through a forest of smaller and smaller conifers before delivering me to the subalpine meadows. I guess you should call them that. They form in places where the creek valley opens into a shallow “V”—large swaths of grasses and taller plants like the Elderberry and  Wild Rhubarb. In between I find almost hidden clumps of dark purple Monkshood, blue Wild Geraniums, and even red Columbine. Above rises two glaciated peaks. Here the wind cools and blows off the mosquitos, the stream sings its low sound without having to shout to be heard over the sound of passing conversation.

P1130449

Climbing the Road

Leave a reply

P1130143

I hadn’t meant to climb so far and fast up this mountain service road. Aki had animal signs to read and I wanted to study the emerging high country flowers, enjoy surprising mixes of P1130119magenta dwarf fireweed and white daisy, stand of  shooting stars rising above yellow butter cups. Noise drove us on —- in the form of a lecture about a 1960’s US presidential election given by a man to two woman as they kept pace just behind me on the road.  Finding a gear not used for some time I pressed ahead until no human voice could be heard above bird song and the occasional warning whistle of a marmot to it’s younger kin.

Once in gear I moved up without thought, like a Tour de France cyclist climbing in the Alps. Up P1130156we moved until only old wind battered spruce broke the horizon line.  Soon we even rose above them to where carpets of flowering heather cover the ground. I tried leading Aki across snow fields linked by a heavily damaged wood planked trail to a ridge line promising views of Admiralty Island.  Aki loved the snow, sliding and digging in it like a puppy as I struggled to stay upright. We turned around before having to cross a steeply sloped snow field that ended just above a steep drop.

P1130142

Patience Needed Between Storms

Leave a reply

P1110033

We find the rain forest trail between downpours. Only one car sits in the trailhead parking lot. In minutes Aki will find it’s occupants, a brace of identical chocolate colored malemutes—great brutes just barely controlled by their owner with stout ropes. After they pass we only share the forest with its occupants.

Perhaps it’s being between storms but Aki and I want to press on rather than stop to watch, maybe see something wonderful in this monopoly of green. While she pees, I do notice rain from the last downpour beading up on plump blueberry leaves; rain from earlier storms soaking into white eagle scat trapped in the leaves’ vein channels. With patience we might see rain wash the scat away, might see a branch above bend with the weight of an arriving eagle, hear the new occupant complain to God of our presence.

P1110045My red jacket, the color of wild columbine flowers, attracts a hovering hummingbird. I could patiently stand here while Aki whined and the red and orange blur might land on my shoulder then poke at the red cloth. I could camp out down at the beaver pond until a lodge occupant swam over to check me for weapons. I could squat on the beach, starring over the grey of sea until humpbacks, maybe two or three, broke the surface to breathe. I could simply be for while, taking in the empty beauty of forest, beach and a sea surface only broken by crab pot floats; smell the sweetness of beached seaweed and the sour assault of beach grass.

My mind and heart tell me to wait and watch, ignore the line of rain clouds moving down from Lena Point, block out the drumming of passing float places, curse the bass hum of a fish buyer’s tender moving slowly up Lynn Canal. When the rising tide dislodges a gang of gulls huddling on an off shore rock, their loud complaints push me back to the woods and up the trail as the first drops of rain spot beach rocks like holy water sprayed on a shirt freshly laundered for Easter.    P1110051

Ongoing Conversion

Leave a reply

L1210169

During this extended streak of warm, sunny weather I’m becoming a bit of a spend thrift; squandering daylight hours inside reading or watching the TV. The pattern even affects my selection of hiking trails. This morning we take a heavily forested path, one that alleviates the need for sun screen. There’s a beach at its apex but most of it will be in shade when we arrive there.

What starts as a lazy indulgence turns into a conversion experience, at least for me. Aki is Aki, a dog most interested in the pee and poop of other canines. For me it’s the light, now piercing straight down through the spruce canopy to transform the color of blue berry brush and expanding devil’s clubs. On the beaver flooded portions of forest floor each pair of illuminated skunk cabbage leaves seem to admire their reflections in dark pond waters. Looking up I watch a cloud of small white butterflies fly into and out of the dark spaces in the old growth.

L1210192Commercial companies guide cruise ship tourists through this cathedral of trees. If each step along the path enriches my spiritual life, what does it do to them; they who ate full fat breakfasts on one of the Princess Cruise boats then wandered among the downtown tee shirt and jewelry shops before boarding their Gasteneau Guiding bus for the trail head. The beauty must hit them like a sledge hammer.

Approaching the beach I notice salt flavoring the moisture softened air that Aki and I both breathe. On this gentle, almost windless day, tiny ocean waves mimic the breathing of a sleeping giant. Since the midday sun light washes alway all the sea’s drama we don’t spend much time on the beach, but the sound of breathing travels with us well into the forest.

L1210182