Miscellaneous photos

Here are some pictures from today's bushwack I had trouble uploading. Note the wolf poop.

Into the Muskeg

We tromped into the muck this afternoon and I finally found out what muskeg is (though having read the less recent edition of Nature of Southeast Alaska, I did not know that the term had gone out of vogue). Sphagnum is very wet. Richard grabbed a handful and squished the water out of it like one would when drying one’s car with a chamois. Anyway, my socks knew it. My boots reached a threshold of saturation up on the snowmobile trail where blackish mud sucked them nearly off my feet. They’re drying on the radiator in my bedroom now, so the whole room smells like upturned earth. Everywhere we went today, the ground was spongy; in the peatbogs and the fens, water oozed up around our shoes with each step, and in the forest, gaping holes opened if we misstepped on a rotten log or branch. Devil’s Club grew thorny and broad in the path. The forest had overindulged in its own wet rot, the excessive, green, cucumbery smell and the fur of mosses on every surface that turned the branches of a three hundred year old spruce into velvety deer antlers.
I have to laugh at my own overcautiousness as we forded a small creek or descended down a slick incline of tufty moss. My boots and the bottoms of my pants were caked with mud anyway, and I couldn’t even begin to hypothesize about the age of the forest or whether half of it had been destroyed in a windstorm in 1884. I felt silly there, walking on a bear trail, dwarfed by trees three, four, twenty times my age, forcing myself to think about a “wilderness” experience. Sure, it was old growth spruces all the way down, and I wouldn’t want to be out there alone, but we were twenty minutes from a gravel road and even fewer from a rickety hut covered with a blue plastic tarp. I should’ve just sprung for a pair of sixteen dollar boots at the Nugget Mall the previous day and I would’ve traipsed out of the wild looking clean and fresh-faced, just like in the L.L. Bean catalogue. Wilderness, indeed.
Before I close, a few meditations on goshawks and wolf poop. Both can kill you, or at least lay you out pretty good. It’s worth schlepping through the peat for three hours to get a good sense of your place in the food chain.

Close Encounters of the Hooved Kind

Bleary-eyed and stiff in the cold morning rain, I walked the asphalt path—entirely uphill both ways, I’m certain of it—to the rec center (where I would participate in vain exertions on the treadmill to eliminate all traces of the preceding night’s peanut butter chocolate chunk cookies), when I turned a blind corner on a doe and two spotted fawns. The fawns hopped in tandem down the path and out of sight, their hooves clicking on the asphalt, while the doe moved confusedly, first in the opposite direction of the fawns, then pausing to look at me. I looked back, and took a few steps forward. She gazed down the path after the fawns, then turned, then trotted with her lopsided left-right gait into the woods. I expected her to be more graceful somehow. Her belly seemed more rotund and her legs shorter than I might have hoped. Her hooves clattered in an embarrassing way on the manmade asphalt.
By the time I walked to where they had entered the woods, they were far out of sight. It unnerved me to think they could appear and disappear so quickly. I wondered what else lurked out there, and glanced nervously from side to side, taking little solace in the yellow emergency stations evenly spaced along the trail. At least there would be surveillance video of my untimely demise at the claws of a surprised bear.

Picnic at Auke Bay

The shore of Auke Bay is covered by largish rocks, tumbled and smooth, but not polished to pebbles or sand grains. The water seems too placid to erode anything anyway, with no waves lapping against the shore save for the short, tiny licks remaining from a wake. Here and there, between the rocks, sprouts a blossom of slick, yellowing seaweed. Dried barnacles speckle the rocks, and in some places, mussel shells fill the empty spaces between the rocks, like mortar. The mussels, faded by air and sunshine, are the purplish blue of old ink stains. A seal pokes his head above the water, watching a golden retriever paddle a few feet out after a stick. A dolphin arcs and blows. Fish leap like skimmed stones, wriggling their tails and flashing their white bellies.

Bald eagles are everywhere

Two Eagles
Two eagles flew overhead, close to each other, as I walked from breakfast back to Banfield. I looked up, and the spruce trees lining the path formed a window frame through which the birds flew. They were distant, and looked enormous at full wingspan.
Then, on a high branch, I saw ragged feathers in an unfamiliar, uncomfortable arrangement. I thought at first it was a dead thing. It had the impossible angles of roadkill, of wings flattened and fluttering. The eagle perched with its wings open, like a flasher opening his trench coat or an old man at the schvitz opening his towel. The bird did not move. He looked small and ragged with his wings awkwardly splayed; I could see individual feathers, ungroomed.

Downtown Juneau

4:03 Local
The first passengers are an obese native woman and her daughter, who has a broad brown face and bangs. The woman wears sunglasses whose dark purple tint recedes at the bottom of each lens. Her daughter folds a bracelet made of wire and beads from an hourglass into an octagon. Eventually she twists the two halves apart and stacks them into each other like little bowls.
The next passenger is Angel. She is babysitting two toddlers whom she refers to as sisters. One is blonde, blue eyed. On the bus in, we saw this trio too, and the blonde stared out the window of the back door of the bus, grinning as the Gastineau Channel and Douglas Island whooshed by. Her sister is dark, a native baby with chocolatey eyes. Angel has overplucked eyebrows and pretty lips.
The next passenger has a baby too, a five-month old boy who wriggles in her lap. She is Angel’s sister. She has long black hair parted in the middle, a curtain over her face with its full mouth and cheeks. Her voice is unfailingly even; she attends to the baby absently, listens to music, calls to find out if someone has a plain white envelope at her house. “I’m irritated,” she says, in that dark, husky voice.
On the bus, too, is a man with long graying hair and crooked sunglasses. He takes a while getting on, fumbling for fare or asking for directions. At the Mormon church, a man in a dusty black hat gets on. He wears Xtra Tuffs, black jeans, thick glasses, and a black leather jacket with shapeless sleeves that drown his arms. His dirty fingernails are long, and thick as toenails. The hairs of his grey goatee sprout like cactus spines.

At the Bus Mall

Bus Stop I: Here and Other
Into the bus shelter a man wearing glasses and turquoise rain gear walks a ten-speed, stands beside a tubby recreational fisherman and his son, while a long-haired vagrant in a Carhart jacket guzzles malt liquor. You gotta go inland, man, but they got huge skeeters up there. A bus passes on the opposite side of the road. It is ours, the 7:22, but we don’t know it. The schedule in the bus shelter has two columns with the labels “here” and “other” scrawled in semi-permanent marker on the protective plexiglass. It seems an apt metaphor.
We walk to DeHart’s to call a cab.

Bus Stop II: Check This Out
Check this out. I was in Fargo, North Dakota, and the temperature was 30 below zero and I had on one of them peacoats—you know what a peacoat is?—and I opened it up and wrapped it around my wife and we walked together like penguins across the street from the bus station to a bar and they were so good, they served us until the bus came and I offered to help clean up, y’know, but they wouldn’t hear of it; and you know what they got in that bar? Cowboys wearin straw hats and short sleeved Hawaiian shirts, and they were line dancing.
The air here will suffocate you; you can’t hardly breathe. You know the Haida painted their faces black when they went out to kill people? But anybody’d be in a bad mood if they lived their life in this.
I’m from the mountains of West Virginia. My only colors are the stars and stripes, understand? I don’t believe in no colors, I don’t wear no flags. Those people are trying to kill us, and they prosecute our Marines for killing them? I’ve never been a Marine; I’m a Ranger. I help people. You know what my colors are? The stars and stripes.
Check this out. You remember Jefferson Airplane? I saw them at Golden Gate Park and they used to have those redwood trees in Golden Gate Park but then they chopped them down so I said to my girl, I said, Sweet Pea, we gotta get outta here, we gotta leave. You remember the Grateful Dead? Wavy Gravy? Pleased to meet you, hope you’ve guessed my name…
I’m from the mountains of West Virginia. I’m a Cherokee. Evelina, where were you born? Russia? I thought you looked different. Why you so quiet? Why you standin all the way over there?
Check this out. My mother’s an Outlaw. You know the Angels? The Angels control the West and the Outlaws control the East. She’s a pistol-slinging, hard-drinking, bike-riding bitch. The Cherokee got a way. You kill one of ours, we’ll kill ten thousand of yours. Understand? You kill my buddy, I’ll kill ten thousand of yours. Understand? I can snap your back in a minute, boy. I could just snap your back.
I shouldn’t have said that.

Searching for wildness...and a pair of socks

Being in Alaska for a week has forced me to ponder some imponderables. Why do smart wool socks cost $17 a pair? Why does blue sky and glimmer of sunshine mean impending drizzle? What is muskeg? What will happen to me without a blow dryer at the edge of the Tongass National Rainforest? I'll be posting impressions of this great state for the next five weeks, so stay tuned for some answers...