Iceberg islands dot the glacial lake that we have skied across and walked around since last summer. Although not a comfortable canoeist, Aki doesn’t fight being lifted into the Holy Cow canoe as we slide it into the lake waters. She does whine and pace from the right gunnels to the left as we paddle a course between ice islands, taking care to avoid the sharp edged bits that float near the surface like marine mines.

Some of the ice bergs are pierced like a Barbara Hepworth sculpture. Others have the soft and abstract quality of Henry Moore’s work. Most glare white in today’s strong sunlight but one set is dark with glacial flour and gravel. Some glisten with melt water. Others appear as dry as Styrofoam. I want to float slowly about this sculpture garden, enjoying ice shapes and they way they stand out against the spring colors of the mix spruce and cottonwood forest. But Aki protests. She wants to land on a promised beach where she can wear herself out chasing her beloved orange Frisbee. Guess who wins.

Aki and return to the Outer Point trail where early morning sunlight dapples the old growth and lilies on a beaver pond. A male varied thrush waits for us at the edge of a muskeg meadow. He is doing the thrush/robin good parent thing: dangling himself in front of the little dog like a wooly bugger fly drifted across the noise of a trout. Aki ignores the bird so it comes closer. It flies down the trail when I walk toward it but not far. The thrush breaks back to his starting place when we move out of his nest’s privacy zone.

More woods and then we reach the beach. I scan for a grazing black bear on the strip of new growth grass across the bay. I look over the waters near Shaman Island for the black back of a surfacing humpback whale. But only a crow calling attention to itself with a raw call fills the void. The bright sunlight diminishes its blackness. Pondering the absence of animals, I blindly walk under a heron’s roost, flushing the wide winged bird.

Down beach I force myself to sit and just watch scoters and their brother fish ducks work the flooded tidelands. Some paddle forward with their beaks submerged. The scoters snap their heads under, followed quickly by their bodies. “It’s only to be able to identify them later,” I tell myself as I point the barrel of my old camera at the working birds. Now I’m clicking, not observing—attention on light and focus, not on the striking pattern of white blocks on a Barrow goldeneye’s black wing.

Home, on the computer, I enlarge my birdshots; learn that I had been documenting a red breasted merganser couple, surf scoters, and a small raft of party color harlequin ducks. The later dived each time I pointed the camera at them. It’s ironic that only now, on this machine, can I grasp their beauty.

Aki and I head out early to the glacier before the wind can rise on this sunny day. A dog walker turns into the closed campground as we pull up. His is the only car. Out of consideration for him and to satisfy my need to have offered beauty to myself, I lead my little poodle mix to the informal trail that traces the lakeshore. A light breeze dimples the lake but protected bays produce sharp reflections of Mendenhall’s river of ice. I feel light for the first time since finishing a week of lay chaplain work (visiting really) at the hospital.

If in London, I would let Mr. Turner’s paintings at the Tate lift me or listen to children play in a park. Here, morning light that illuminates optimistic spring growth and deepens crevasse shadows on the glacier substitutes for his masterpieces, robin songs for children’s laughter. Natural beauty backfills holes formed by settling sorrow.

Aki dashes over an expanse of exposed glacier silt after her Frisbee. If she could fly, she would be over the Mendenhall Glacier in seconds. A more romantic poodle might see the river of ice as a solemn stairway to the divine wrapped in cloud vestments. Sunlight breaks through the marine layer to backlight a hillside congregation of sap green alders that face their cold deity, faith unshaken by an approaching storm.

It was a morning to amble without a camera. I didn’t even try to take a picture of the Sitka black tail deer that grazed in the North Douglas Highway verge. It’s tense posture told me it would bolt if I did anything but continue up the road. I many unsuccessful attempts to capture a belted kingfisher piercing the surface of Fish Creek Pond for salmon smolt. A formation of crows diving one at a time on a perched eagle made compelling subjects but when I hit the shutter release button I got nothing but blur.

All the scolding we received didn’t help my mood. The little dog and I were chattered at by squirrels and Steller jays, verbally abused by the kingfisher, and mocked by the rack-rack-rack chants of crows. I even took personal the displaced eagle’s high pitched complaints.

After this morning’s walk up Perseverance Trail, I search the Cotman color chart for name the yellow-green of back-lit cottonwood leaves and come up with “Sap Green.” The name fits since rising sap feeds them.

Aki and I saw a wall of sap green leaves when we reached the Basin Road trestle bridge after slowing progressing past a line of craftsmen houses built for miners 80 years ago. The little dog had to check each urinary message and great all the dogs being walked by owners about to head off to work.

The bridge was in shadow but on the flank of Mt. Juneau the great cottonwoods of the Gold Creek valley were enriched by early morning light. The rising sun was already darkening the leaves. With camera in hand, I walked across the bridge in quiet mode as if beauty were a deer about to bolt.

Ravens and gulls are the salt and pepper for the Juneau waterfront. Maybe worn out from dealing with the first two jumbo cruise ships of the year that docked here yesterday, members of the raven cabal have draped themselves on the dock rails and the library roof. The gulls bob like newly husked rice on the channel waters. Prevented by the anti-terrorist fencing from giving the ravens comfortable personal space, we walk with a few feet of a small batch. Most keep their wings clamped tight to their bodies but one, with eyes squeezed shut, lets the breeze plays with his purple-black feathers. “Rock on dude.”

Aki runs wide circles around me in the troll woods as I walk down a little used trail in the troll woods. I feel like General Robert E. Lee must have felt with J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry reconnoitering his flank near Gettysburg. The quirky Stuart injected much uncertainty into Lee’s Pennsylvania campaign. My little dog, ear flaps bouncing with every step, charges across moraine covered with thick, electric green moss, leaps over a beaver felled tree and dives under a tangle of blueberry brush. I am happy for her evident joy but also worried about her possible run in with a porcupine or bear. I just exchanged bear sighting stories with another dog walker who warned of the presence of a sow with three cubs. Should I even be here, so deep in a forest on a trail that dips through country that blocks my view beyond 10 or 20 feet? As usual, I only have this kind of conversation with myself when we are halfway through a place we probably shouldn’t have entered.

It is hard not to think of church this morning. In every rivulet on the meadow, backlit skunk cabbage flowers glow like yellow sanctuary lights. Exploding leaf pods of cottonwoods fill the air with balsam incense. Small ponds capture stain glass images of the Mt. Roberts’ ridge framed by snarled bull pines. There is even a choir lead by robin soloists backed by thrushes and wrens.

A storm is moving in. Its first breaths of wind stir Aki’s curls as she dashes after her orange Frisbee. She flies by the royal blue shell fragment that rests next to the moraine trail—the top half of a robin egg shell of a shape and color that could have made it a fine wine goblet for the mouse king if not for a small hole on one side—evidence of efforts by the occupant to break into the world. Nestling it in my hand, I wonder at it’s lack of weight, how it stirs in the strengthening wind, if it protected its occupant until birth, or carried the little chick to its death.