Back home in the grey, I walk with Aki on a North Douglas trail. Last night at the airport, the little dog acted happy that I had returned after 12 days at writer’s school in Anchorage. She might be the better friend. I had little time to think about her during my residency.

This morning she trots along ahead of me like she did on every previous visit to this rainforest. Juneau has defaulted to grey, a color it wears well. Drops of last night’s rain hang from every leaf, berry and display of chicken of the woods fungi. The orange and red mushrooms have sprouted on rotting spruce trees.

While I miss my friends from writer’s school and all the chances to learn some skills, I don’t miss the Anchorage traffic noise that provided background for my daily trips through Anchorage’s birch forests. Here, except for low-pitched airplane growl of Beavers hauling tourists to the Admiralty Island bear watching stands, no machine noise completes with the songs of animals, from eagles to squirrels.

On this, my last full day of UAA writing school, I ride down the Campbell Creek bike trail, intent on pedaling the entire 16-mile roundtrip on a hunt for moose. Yesterday I looked, without success for them on another trail system. This is my last shot.

I see other things that make the ride worthwhile: the early morning sun frying on a blue pan circled by gray clouds, two ravens catching some rays while perched high on a bone-white spruce snag, even a snowshoe hare in summer browns. But, I want to see at least one more moose, one with the typical bulbous horse body, dainty mincing gait, and oversized ears.

Fifteen and a half miles into the ride, I slam on the brakes to give some space to a cow and her twins. Busy ripping off the tops of young willow starts, they ignore me until I click my camera shutter. Then, the mother twists her ears in my direction. A few clicks later, she returns to her feed. If she doesn’t escort her kids off the trail, I’ll be late for my morning class on metaphors. I should chill and let the big animals inspire similes. (a moose is like Michelangelo’s horse without the mane or long legs (you see why I need the class). When they start moving away from the trail, I mount up and ride past them, camera clicking. The mom turns, holds her ground and gives me a “I’ll stomp you into a jelly” stare.

This morning, the land drained by Campbell Creek offers neither drama nor solitude. I don’t see anyone else but hear the cars of Anchorage on their morning commute. There are brown moose in bears in these woods. Either of the oversized critters could be just out of my sight as I stand on a bridge across the creek. But in my view shed of green undergrowth, paper white birch trunks, and clear water, only two red figures stand out—salmon in spawning colors. I wait, camera on automatic setting, for a bear to break after the 15-pound fish from the cover of creek side grass. But the bears are probably down stream where the water is too shallow to cover the salmon’s upper bodies.

Taking a break from writing school, I join some other students on a drive north of Anchorage where we find a soft mountain land. True, defeated glaciers once carved it down to bedrock and clouds could be impaled on the sharp edged peaks that backstop the valley. But on this warm, sunny day, we lay in comfort on its carpet of heather, crow berries, and other low growing mountain plants—the kind that thrive beneath the storm winds.

Once hard men dug gold out of this mountain valley. Their detritus remains: shatter trestles and freestanding walls with wood burnished a warm brown by Alaska winter weather. A pen and ink artist could turn their abandoned board piles, iron rails, and twisted sheet metal has into something beautiful

These are serious people with serious tools to study the few gulls that float a hundred feet away. They hunch into binoculars so large and powerful that they can’t be used unless mounted on a serious tripod. With body language they let me know I’m am not wanted here; that I had better not pull out my life list and check off whatever bird that has drawn them to this edge of Cook Inlet.

I wait until one of them rises up from his Leopold scope and say, “Do you know about the sandhills?” Two of the long legged cranes were feeding along a slough just 200 feet away. Low angled morning sunlight made their brown feathered sides look as rich as mocha. “No,” the man replied, suddenly looking like a lover crushed when the woman with whom he wanted to elope failed to meet him at the train station.

Bastille Day, and I’m cycling on Anchorage’s Campbell Creek trail. I stop around five miles up the trail to watch three moose graze on streamside willows. There are three moose, an adult female and a brace of calves. At first I miss my camera but then realize it would spoil my concentration. With a camera I wouldn’t notice that the mother’s dark brown coat provides a nice background for the lighter color of her children or enjoy how their mule-like ears flicker in my direction when I braked.

I passed through a cloud of urban noise and scenes to get to the moose: riding under rush hour traffic, over a dormant sled dog trail, near a shackled homeless man and the twin policemen who cuffed him. I startled a clutch of geese with markings as Canadian as a maple leaf and flew past a car lot and the theatre offering matinee performances of “The Adventures of Dusty Sourdough.” But the moose munch away as they did before man occupied the Anchorage Bowl.

In Anchorage, hundreds of miles away from Aki, I wonder what she would do on this willow-lined trail. I’ve passed a series of dog walkers. Some were tethered to their pets with extendable leashes. Others, like a brace of stubby-legged corgis, are free to bark and chase after my bicycle. Minutes after passing the little Welsh dogs, I slammed on the brakes when an adult moose walks onto the bike path and stands astride it like a crossing guard. Seconds later, her calf crosses the path. Mom gives me a long stare and she joins her child in a meal of young willows. After they have mowed their way into the woods, I continue on my way without having to dodge mom’s slashing hooves. I hope the corgis have the same luck.

The Mendenhall River could be a middle-aged uncle with body issues. He brings on dramatic weight changes by climbing on and falling off the latest diet bandwagon. Our last visit the Mendenhall flowed low in its channel, comfortable in the banks it cut for itself through glacier moraine. This morning, Aki and I find Uncle Men fat, sloppy and aggressive. His waters cover all the gravel bars that once offered a home to river beauty and stabilizing willows. He has even cut off the establish access trail into the troll woods. (Rain fall and accelerated glacier melt cause the floods but I can’t pass up a metaphor).

         Turning our backs on his disturbing excesses, we use a faint forest trail as a work around. Aki is ecstatic to be out of the house. The little dog ignores the steady rain as she hunts for sign. This morning she acted like her teacup sized heart would break if I left for the woods without her. When I drove off yesterday morning to drop the car off at a mechanic’s shop, she sang a very sad song. It’s the suitcases. She has been watching me pack for my two-week residency at an Anchorage writing school. (UAA). Yesterday afternoon, she stared out the window as I stuffed my disassembled travel bike into its airplane bag.

Tomorrow, she’ll calm down after she watches me pass through the TSA security line at the airport. She has witnessed this ceremony performed many times by me, my spouse, and our child. Each departee has returned through automatic airport doors. This witnessing has given her faith in TSA, Alaska Airlines and the 737. It gives her confidence that we will return to the glacier moraine in late July for me to sample ripening high bush cranberries while she rolls in beaver sign.

(Rain collected on sundews)

I listen to Traffic’s “Low Spark of High Heeled Boys” as I write a summary of this morning’s walk. The ancient rock music provides a suitable background for the just ended shuffle across several rain softened muskeg meadows for cloudberries. (rubus chamaemours). This summer presents the first opportunity in the 26 years that we’ve lived in Southeast Alaska to pick the plump, yellow fruit.

Near Bethel, Alaska, Aki’s other human and I picked cloudberries on the tundra. Like everyone on the Kuskokwim River, we called them salmonberries. The name made sense to a river people because when ripe the segmented berries look like a broken skein of salmon roe. We ate them in cereal, on ice cream, or mixed with sugar, whitefish, and whipped Crisco shortening (as akutaq or Eskimo ice cream). Aki’s other full time human called them hjortron when she ate them mixed with Swedish buttermilk at a friend’s breakfast table in Avesta.

(River Beauty or Dwarf Fireweed)

Sweetened by northern sun and the solitude enjoyed while meadow picking, the berries always taste of summer whether collected on tundra, muskeg, or Swedish hillside.

It was hot on the muskeg meadow, even at 8 am. I could adjust by slipping off my sweatshirt but Aki could do nothing but pant. So I carried away my cup or so of cloudberries and headed with the little dog into the old growth. Strong morning sun reached into the forest to turn a devastated alder bush into what might be museum quality art if the person who killed it acted with artistic, rather than malicious intent. Later we found another sculpture formed when an eagle let one of its white feathers settle on a damaged skunk cabbage leaf.

When we reached the beach, it and Lynn Canal were empty except for a skulk of crows and a woman wadding the submerged causeway that will provide a good trail to Shaman Island at low tide in a couple of hours. I thought of barefooted Irish pilgrims approaching their shrines and for some reason the lone killer whale I watched yesterday from the deck of a friend’s fishing boat. Before slipping back into the water, the big male hurled most of his body over the water surface, enough to show all of his high dorsal fin and a thick white strip that wrapped around his lower body. The whale repeated this one time and disappeared like a magician or stealthy performance artist.