When the metal prices rise high enough the scrap barge comes to town and you can get rid of old cars without having to pay the dump fee. Of course, our town, like most rural Alaskan towns, is so full of old junk that this makes no appreciable dent on the local landscaping trends. The best part was stopping with the girls to watch the big excavators picking up and and crushing the cars. I love the colors of old cars that have been repainted and faded.
Even rainy windy days can be spectacular. We took this picture from the ferry and, like most photographs, it was even better in real life.
No Passing Zone
Normally I don’t worry too much about traffic on my commute. But earlier this week I re-learned an important lesson of the Alaska road: you cannot pass a moose. We don’t get many moose at my end of the road -too many bears- but a few days ago a big old lady moose popped out of the brush right in front of me as I was on my way to work. Thank goodness I wasn’t going too fast. The Alaska DOT divides crashes into five subsets: commercial vehicle, bus, motorcycle, bicycle, pedestrian, and moose. On rural roads, you are almost always more likely to hit a moose than another vehicle.
Now, when a moose gets in front of you on the road it is scared, so it runs. But it stays on the road as it runs instead of going back into the brush. I think this is because it feels better able to outrun an enemy in the open. (I don’t know that for a fact-I am not a moose mind reader- that’s just my guess.) Also, the moose looks frequently over its shoulder while it is running. A moose runs like a bad cyclist: where ever it turns to look it goes in that direction. So, now the moose is running and weaving all over the road. If it starts running straight enough and you pull up next to it in an attempt to pass the moose in order to save the moose from further wear and tear, the moose will look at you as you come along side. This will make it run right in front of your car. So don’t do that. If you stop your car, the moose will run up ahead of you, just out of sight, and then stop and try to look camouflaged. This is a good tactic for a moose unless it is standing in the middle of the road.
To make a long story short it was a slow ride for me, and a fast sweaty one for the moose. Finally she turned off into someone’s driveway and I was only a little late to work. I didn’t even really try to explain it. Nobody believes you when you use the ‘traffic’ excuse in rural Alaska.
Then on the way back home I had to stop and wait for a brown bear to cross. Sigh. Sometimes it is hard to hold back the road rage.
The Cloud and the Silver
The Cloud: my husband is recovering from hernia surgery and has been laid quite low. For the next few weeks I have to be both him and me around the house and it was tiring enough just being me. You know how sometimes you think: if I were gone, they would finally appreciate how much I do around here. Well, I am appreciating him.
The Silver Lining: I get to be the tough guy and do all the stuff he usually does and that I secretly want to do. I get to use all the tools: the power saw, the chainsaw, the big hammer. I get to fill the log splitter with gasoline, set the choke and pull the starter cord. I get to wrangle the rototiller in awkward bucking loops through the garden. I get to burn that big pile of brush and limbs in the yard, ducking the smoke to toss long branches back into the hot center and sweating right through my shirt.
Poor guy, he has the patience of Job with me, (“see, when you push the lever to the little rabbit, that means the engine is set to run.”)
Cutting Days
In Alaska, if you are wood heated, there are only two kinds of days: days for burning and days for cutting. Some days you might do both, but there are damn few days you’ll do neither.
I spent most of yesterday splitting wood; a big tree that came down in this last winter’s snow was already bucked and stacked with the heavy rounds waiting patiently for me by the log splitter.
The wood was fairly foxed, the center and one side dark and filigreed with rot,a mysterious and beautiful magenta blooming beneath the bark. On the rotten side the wood crumbled and broke but on the clean side it split with the sound of a kiss. My splitter bulled through the knotty parts, too, tearing and folding the wet grain until it looked like half-kneaded bread dough. I salvaged what was still good to burn and tossed it into the truck bed to stack and dry in the woodshed later (as much as anything can ever really be dried in Southeast).
Lots of wood still waiting for me back there; looks like it will take me all summer to get through it. Like I said: burning or cutting.
All For Science
The five year old takes her small green bucket down to the river. Her boots are printed with brightly colored puzzle pieces, but still, good solid rubber, no holes. She wades into the shallows where the hooligan fish have been trapped by the tide and catches them with her bare hands, slipping them into her bucket scooped full of river water. She is not the least afraid or squeamish. She inspects their slim silvery bodies closely, shows me how they move their bodies when they swim. She hands the wriggling bodies to her little sister who, seeing the fishes tiny mouths open and close in the air, calls out “bite, bite!”, and drops them on the sand before becoming braver.
She carries the buckets with the wriggling fish up to the house, struggling a bit through the uneven grass and splashing water onto her dress but hardly complaining until we reach the steep hill of the driveway.
Strangely, she is not sad as her catch expires, she does not anthropomorphize the fish or scoop them back into the river as they flop and gasp or turn upside down in the bucket. I am not sure why I am or do.
At home, she brings out her little stereoscope and smears some eggs across waxed paper to magnify and inspect. Now that I have cut a few open under her keen and careful supervision, she can tell you which ones are male and female, looking to see if their sides are fat and rounded with eggs.
When I question the merits of having fish and parts of fish scattered throughout the house and littering the porch, she rolls her eyes at me: Mom these are not for playing, they’re for science.
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Post script: I wrote this last week, but forgot it and it languished in the drafts. The hooligan are gone. Amazingly gone: their softening shining bodies disappeared from the riverbanks nearly overnight. Perhaps the dozens of congregated immature eagles I saw, hunched darkly against the rain, had something to do with that: Nature’s remarkably efficient clean-up crew.
