We ran out of blue berries this morning. The low bush berries we picked last summer are gone. Aki and I head to the mountains to survey this year’s crop. It looks strong. Little pink lantern-shaped blossoms hang from almost every diminutive bush. This must be a gift from our mild winter, the sun rich days of May and early June, and rain.

I lead Aki down off the muskeg onto an old growth forest trail that parallels Fish Creek. Aki is looking for the animals that marked the trail with scent. I am after early Salmon berries—a raspberry like fruit that tastes fruit sweet and swamp sour at the same time. The little dog is more successful than me. None of the red or yellow or orange salmonberries hang beneath the canopy.

Some plants in the rainforest are paying a price for their excesses during our recent stint of warm, sunny weather. The devil’s club bushes that expanded their platter-like leaves too fast and too far lay spewed open by yesterday’s windstorm. Three little bags of rain cling to a now horizontal limb. One rain is coalesced around a thorn that has pierced through it without shattering the surface tension. I see the dog and I reflected in another of the sacks.

         The columbines came through the storm without harm. Their flowers must have swayed gently as the surrounding goat’s beard plants absorbed the brunt of the wind. Few drops of rain cling to enhance their beauty. They don’t need more to attract than their pagoda shaped blossoms.

Wind ripped across Chicken Ridge this morning. It carried heavy raindrops that splashed when they hit your face. One gust severed a cluster of purple rhododendron blooms. I brought the cluster inside, tried to prolong its beauty in a water-filled vase, and took Aki out to North Douglas Island to photograph the wind.

You can’t photograph the wind of course, just the evidence of its presence on trees, flowers, ocean water, and one little poodle mix. Aki, often an excellent model, did her best by shaking for the camera every time a gust flapped her ears. But the camera’s high-speed shutter froze leaves, berries and flowers in mid-lean, robbing the wind of drama. I deleted those shots, but kept one of a false lily of covered in debris tossed onto it by the wind.

Aki and I have stumbled into a violent raven argument. Two of the large black birds face each other on a high spruce limb, open beaks just inches apart. Without pausing for air, they launch high volume caws into each other’s face. I think mom and dad are having a fight. Out on the beach a diminutive crow sulks along the water line. I have to tell my imagination that this is not the adopted child of the sparring ravens.

The sun makes a brief appearance when Aki and I stumble on a hedge of Sitka Roses stirring in the onshore breeze. A chubby bumblebee rattles around inside one of the magenta blossoms. The bee takes off after I snap a picture and flies a wandering course above the hedge, almost but never settling on another blossom. Again my imagination wants to lead me astray; wants me to hear the bee muttering to himself, “Been there, been there, been there, maybe here, no, been there.”

Aki showed little enthusiasm for this early morning walk up the Gold Creek valley. Only after I boot up and reach for her harness does she give a half-hearted tag wag. It takes twice as long as usual to walk from Chicken Ridge to the Basin Road trestle bridge. I watch dandelion seed float down like light snow as she nose-surveys big sections of the roadside. I also think about the paper’s weather forecast, which proclaims this the last sunny day before a multiple-day storm. Why then, are we the only ones on this popular trail? Maybe everyone else is worn out by the unprecedented stretch of warm, sunny weather.

While Aki distributes more of her bottomless supply of urine, I decide to focus my camera on illuminated things—flowers and running water beautified by shafts of sunlight. As if reading my mind, the little dog baulks where a little used path leaves the main trail. Taking the lesser used one will mean missing out on dog encounters and for me, mountain views. But we should find sunlit wild flowers along the diminutive trail. I yield, as usual, to her will. We take the smaller path, parts of which started out as a deer track. Hiker boots widened it to its present state—a narrow trail of brown dirt through walls of aggressive green plants. We squeeze between tall thimbleberry bushes that seem to push their white blossoms in my face. In spaces between thimbleberries and the jagged leafed salmon berry bushes, bright red columbine flowers dangle in the morning sun.

Every since we started down the seldom used trail, Aki is the impatient one. She dashes away and returns as I take a picture of dandelion down clinging to a columbine flower. I get the hint and pick up the pace. She pulls me to the front door when we reach the house rather than trot around the back where we hang her harness and store the doggie treats. I solve the mystery when I walk to the back door and see Aki’s other human exiting with a breakfast tray that carries tea and slices of home baked bread topped with cheese and sections of red peppers. Aki is all about the cheese and follows my partner out to the temporary teahouse we erect each summer in the side yard. Perhaps the little dog sensed the coming weather change and knew her other human would want to enjoy one last morning of sunshine drinking tea and eating cheese smörgás. On these occasions, she has come to expect a sharing out of cheese.

Under full sun on this Sunday, Aki, his other human, and I go for a bike ride. The little dog rides in a handlebar basket. In truth she would rather be running along side us but that would not be safe on this road between the Herbert and Eagle Rivers. We ride through a crowded picnic area to a meadow covered in blue lupine, wild flags (iris), yellow Indian paintbrush, and chocolate lilies, stopping where it touches a beach along the Eagle River.

We are not far from a picnic shelter full of people enjoying the weather, view, and each other’s company. Their conversations blend with the complaints of a gang of Canada geese watching the tidal moat that once protected their gravel bar island shrink on the ebb. When a land bridge forms, the geese fly away, shouting out the geese evident of, “There goes the neighborhood.” Aki ignores them.

Aki and I leave Chicken Ridge early so I can see the effect of early morning light on the birds drawn to the Mendenhall River. Walking an approach trail through the old growth, we hear the falsetto cries of eagles in the canopy and the lower register complaints of mallards and Canada geese coming from the beach. The geese and eagles leave before we make the beach but I can see a raft of mallards on the river. But, they burst away when I am still too far away to use the camera. Aki is fine with an eagle-less beach. She ducks when darkened by the shadow of the last eagle to fly away.

I am disappointed with the emptiness until we find a patch of lupine flowers just catching their first light. Their stalks resemble spear points painted a white at the tip that yield to lilac where the points swell.

Aki sniffs at the lupines but is much more interested in four water bottles that rest in a line. They look like lazy campers warming in the sun. Does the poodle catch the scent of someone who purchased the bottles at Costco and laid them out in a row so they could glow in the sun? More likely she is overwhelmed by the smells acquired by the bottles as they floated to shore on the tide.

Aki and I need this walk through the rainforest in gentle rain. The little dog needs to again enjoy freedom of movement after her 8-day stay in a boarding kennel. She luxuriates in the spacious forest, woods quiet except for the far away tapping of a red-breasted sapsucker on a metal signpost. I need the calming softness of the grey light that diminishes the differences between forest greens. Yesterday, Aki’s other resident human and I flew back from Washington D.C., worn out by the stark contrasts in temperature, sound, sights, and even shadows like the straight edged ones the early afternoon sun threw at the feet of the town’s famous cherry trees. We sometimes walked in silence, unwilling to sustain the high volume speech needed to be heard over city buses, honking cars, and surrounding conversations. We wore raincoats against the cold in the morning and were encumbered by them during the heat of the day. There were contrasts in emotion too, positive (produced by time with family and friends and from attending a wedding in Richmond, Virginia) and negative (from trying to ignore street poverty). There was the reaffirmation of the universal good by various African-American strangers who showed us nothing but helpful kindness when we were lost. Just before Aki and I leave the rainforest for the beach with its view of Shaman Island, I think of the off duty city bus driver who broke off his conversation about child support woes to help us find the Richmond train station; of how I offered him the respect expected in Southeast Alaska by standing quietly as he talked to a friend in an almost foreign dialect; of how he spoke as if he had nothing to hide; of how he drew a small breath before saying, “How can I help you sir?”

Aki slept in too long this morning and we missed the morning light. Now, with the sun high over the mountain meadow, there is no reason to point the camera at the surrounding mountains or trees. We did see a deer grazing along side the road on the way here but only a robin show themselves on the meadow. The bird makes a languid attempt to lure Aki into a chase but the little dog ignores it. When did she become board with the chase game?

There is beauty here but you have to look low for it—where water bugs dash between Lilly pads, Labrador tea flowers, and the petals of cloud berry pants relax in the sun. It is a time to enjoy shapes and light, like that penetrating through a skunk cabbage’s skin and turning the dew drops that cling to horsetails into tiny prism globes.

Remembering how a few years ago, rafts of migratory birds filled Eagle River at high water, I am walking along the river with my old camera, brought for its 420 mm lens. We find no ducks, swans, cranes, or scoters on the river. Instead, the subjects vying for a photographer’s attention are fiddle head ferns on the verge of unfurling, swelling lupine flowers, and my favorite guys—the shooting stars. Unfortunately, the camera is rarely able to to focus on flowers.

I inherited an appreciation for the little magenta shooting stars from my dad. He had to hike into the Montana high country to find a few of them. The name triggered for him images of clean, green meadows with an elk gazing on the edge lined by woods. This meadow drained by Eagle River is covered with the flowers. Aki dashes around them when retrieving her beloved Frisbee. Alaska is rich in these icons of wild country—the lupine, the shooting star, the bear, the whale.

I had to step around fresh bear scat today but fortunately, we didn’t see the guy who produced it. Yesterday, I spotted a large black bear lounging in a swatch of flowering dandelions, languidly grazing on their yellow flowers. Today, I see my first whales of the year. One surfaces in Pearl Harbor, near the Shrine of St. Therese. Its exhale sounds, as it should, like air being forced through a fire hose. It dives and surfaces like it is feeding on herring. A pod of other humpbacks paints the sky near Shelter Island with their white breath plumes, each vapor cloud hanging in the air long enough to sparkle in the afternoon sun. Frustrated by trying to photograph the flowers, I left the camera in car when we visit Pearl Harbor. This frees me from the responsibility of capturing the whales’ beauty, allows me to watch undistracted, the big creatures fattening up after their long, foodless swim, from Hawaii.