High clouds with rain in the morning but warm in the afternoon with sun breaking through. The mossy grass was wet in the morning and Dot luxuriated in it on our morning outing so that she was soaked when she came in. I dried her off but she was still a wet dog during our morning snuggle until Jan called her upstairs for her lie down on the heated floor. Dot found new things to drag out of the weeds and the woods yesterday it was some very strange fungus I had not seen before: white with what looked like tree bark on one side. I put it up high so that I could save it and take it in to a botanist at the University when the time is right. Dot also has found new ways to break out of her new enclosure, I keep plugging holes under and through the fence and she finds new ways to tunnel under and around. She would have been useful in a POW camp, though she doesn’t go far enough, she almost always comes straight to my office about fifty feet away, and frolics around just happy to show me what she has accomplished, which would not have been a good thing for the soldiers in Stalog 17.
The Cherry leaves are opening and so too the salmon berry leafs. Slowly. The salmonberries in town about five miles from here have full leafs, but here we have a bit different exposure and more cool wind. I like to tease my town friends that we live further north in “the real Alaska.” The ground here is still cold and wet but just today with the smell of warm rain and the wind off the herring kelp, I am feeling spring actually stirring and not just flirting with me, actually touching my knee maybe and not just calling me on the phone late at night. Yes you are right, I am becoming a little desperate.
I love our little yard and I don’t mind spending the rest of my life here. Years ago when Jan was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease after the numbness wore off I asked her what was the very last thing she wanted to give up because of the disease and she said, “sitting right here at this table, looking out these windows.” It was pretty clear. We moved here in 1982, We transformed an old 20X 30 boat building shed into a cabin and lived there until 1989 and then after the Hazelwood case and a baby we built another house next to the shed and brought in a crane then lifted the old house on top of that and had the two story place we live in now on the beach near Old Sitka Rocks. Finn was born in Sitka Community Hospital and came home to the old cabin. He was a toddler when we lifted the old house and he had each of his first day of school photos taken in this house. (as a science nerd Jan used to put a measuring tape in each of his early baby pictures for scale… she stopped doing that by Middle School) As Jan’s disease has progressed we’ve added handrails, and higher toilets, a nicer bathroom with the oft noted heated floor. Soon we plan to add a hospital bed downstairs. We’ve talked of moving but there are still more thing to learn here.
The seasons are still mysterious, and the names of the birds still elude me. I am amazed each year by how spring unfolds differently, and how the animals ease in and around our habitation. I will start mowing the lawn this weekend and in the growing season I have the feeling of encroachment as if the life around me pushes in and would overrun all the space we claim as ours if I didn’t beat it back continually. Jan and I lived for four winters in a cabin on Admiralty Island in the 1980s doing bird and whale research. It was a flimsy cabin 12x16 made of plywood. When we finished they burned the place down. Ten or fifteen years ago we took Finn to see the spot and there was nothing there to tell we had ever been there. The cabin site was completely overgrown. it was humbling. Our own house would be like that if left alone for three years I’m sure. It would be a tangle of alders, salmon berries, spruce trees, hopefully there would be an old cherry tree and an apple, our only contribution. I would like to think of it that way, with only the familiar sound of the waves and whales breathing off shore. Today I saw daffodils I had forgotten about in the berry bushes. Dot brought out an old toy arrow from the berry patch from the era when we had a twenty dollar bill taped to a target out front and a standing offer to anyone who put an arrow through it got to keep the bill. Kids and adults were coming by all Christmas season all day and night to try their luck. They had to shoot from the deck. It was only about a fifty foot shot but we didn’t have very good equipment…. AND you had to use OUR equipment…. which was decided after some wise guy showed up with his father and his father compound hunting bow. My twenty dollar bill and MY rules. Dot found one of the old arrows that had been missing in the berries for twenty years today. So too when we were building the fence I found a horse shoe off to the left of the horse shoe pit that had gone missing for longer than than the arrow.
When we first moved here it seemed there was a Blue Heron that lived here and perched on the island out front, then there were no Blue Herons for twenty five years, now the herons are back. Why is that? The starfish had a wasting disease and now they don’t but they haven’t returned to our rocks yet. I’m not leaving until I see the return of the healthy starish. Same too for the abalone. There were sea otters thick around here for a while and they ate the abalone but then there were several native hunters thinning them out so abalone came back to Old Sitka Rocks.. But if the tourist trade goes belly up will the native hunters slow down, and the sea otters come back to OSR and our abalone like wise disappear? There is so much going on in the intertidal. You can see why Jan wants to stay put. So much to keep an eye on.
Our Cherry Tree this morning
MY FINEST WORK
Twenty-five years later
we went looking for our cabin site
but there was no trace of the place
where we had spent four winters
reading Russian novels
and playing dominoes in that sooty lantern light.
We had chased after radio collard geese
and photographed Humpback whales
shoaling in the bay.
We had eaten our first deer
and had rebuilt an outboard motor.
We bathed in a Hobbit hole of a sauna
and kissed naked while the north wind
blew our towels off the boughs
and froze the hair on our bone white skin.
This had been our precious world
twelve by sixteen feet with seams taped up from the inside,
and it was gone
completely,
dissolved into the steady drip-drip in the forest’s under story
no trace of the novel
I wrote in pencil
nor the letters we wrote home.
No trace of the arguments
or plans for the sumptuous
meals and long baths we would take in town.
No trace of how our memory
had burned a place in this cool
green world.
All that was left on the site
was a pile of wood I split just before I left
jumbled and slick
as uniform as a pile of bibles
and more readable
than anything
I have ever written.
jhs
Here is a recording I did this morning. I read an old short story I wrote for my friend Dana Stabenow and a collection she put together of fantasy crime fiction. I was honored she asked. I wrote a story from the point of view of a raven. I used some information I had leafed from Tlingit friends and from some scientific reading and I made up a bunch of stuff from just watching these fascinating birds. Dana’s readers thought my story was gruesome. I thought it was fun to write and pretty great. See what you think.
