I’ve alluded elsewhere in this blog to Frost’s “Reluctance” and in particular the lines, “When was it ever less than a treason / to go with the drift of things / and bow and accept / the end of a love or a season?”

Today, at seeing the beautiful moment of guarded red-pink in the unfurling devil’s club leaves, I have an answer for the old New England codgers (Frost and the one in me): Right now. 

The devil’s club transformation is a lovely and powerful mini-season in our woods, following the varied thrush, the skunk cabbage emergence, the pacific wren (and elswewhere the kingfisher), woodpecker, grouse, the early blueberry-pinkwhite-blossom-extravaganza, and fiddleheads. Next up: twisted stalk. In this moment–right now–as its leaves just begin to unfurl, the devil’s club offers the most amazing hue of red-pink, a flash of human-lip-like tenderness, before it unwraps to the sun-greedy summer green of the dominant forest floor foliage. Unfurling is the name of the game right now for the other big source of green at our level–ferns. 

The other night some friends circled up to show some love. I’ve been having trouble sleeping and am coping with some change in life which in turn, I think, opened me up to the past decades of… stuff. (Never good at timing, I seem to be a little late for a mid-life crisis.) But Tim B., one of my favorite optimists, opined, “No one is unscathed in this life.” We sat quietly on his beautiful observation deck, overlooking the Mendenhall Wetlands, and I think each in our own way found connection to one another through this simple end-of-day yield.

In the lead-up to the deck gathering, Merry was distracted by the possibility of losing dog Elsa, her 12-year companion to a tumor. When I stopped by to borrow some skis, I could smell the acrid aftermath of her forgetting her cast iron pan on heat. Later, we walked together and talked about the challenges of acceptance.

Our little backyard woods lessons are suggesting to me that it may be “less than a treason,” Robert, when we take the opposite tack of reluctance, and try to hold our hearts open to the speed of seasonal change in the north. We don’t so much “bow and accept” as hold on (or let go!) for dear life when we attend to the many mini-seasons that make up spring, grief, love, connection. I’m never ready for the speed of spring. Nor am I ever ready for a love to end, if that’s what actually happens. But somehow tuning into the micro-seasons makes acceptance more active for me, with lots of places to try and fail, and try again, at least. Ready or not, the red-pink will explode into green, the twisted stalk will untwist and yield perfect translucent berries.

When I circled back to ask Merry about Elsa, the news was good. The vet thinks he excised all of the cancer. About her pan, she replied, “I think we need to season and season for a few seasons.”

Don’t we all?

Morning’s silent snow
Reveals last night's spider plan
Hope comes too soon. 

Early blueberry
Tender stars of earth-fired hope
Blossom us awake.

There is news in the neighborhood. Spring again. Early blueberry is blossoming. Skunk cabbage is poking up for a peek. It won’t be long before devil’s club blossoms unfold their guarded pink. I’m trying to get my heart and spirits to rise to the occasion. That is never a problem for the heroine of our little lack of a story here.

(Above…climbing gear in the geocache tree [left], and our intrepid climber [right].)

The first part of the news was a little bit funny. A neighbor, Michelle, discovered climbing gear set in the trunk of Tim’s geocache tree… maybe the largest of the trees on our trail route. Kurt, who keeps the trail passable for all of us with chainsaw and endless energy, set up a game cam to try to identify the “climber.” The image he got was of an older man with a beer belly, gray hair, and stubble — a doctor known to many in town. He was chastened by the neighborly concern and removed the gear voluntarily, but not before Michelle reached out to Richard Cartsensen, local genius, and Landmark Tree project coordinator.

Carstensen sent some communication suggesting that a stand of trees (based on LDIR imagery, whatever that is) up the hill from the Big Tree Trail may in fact be the most massive in Southeast Alaska. What this means for the safety or notoriety of our little center of the universe remains to be seen.

Note the “extraordinarily dense stand of spruces more than 200′ high (in red).” (Carstensen.)

Meanwhile, though, the conversation has reinforced how precious our backyard forest is to many of us. And so, I’m inspired by this special place to reopen the blog for occasional offloading of words and thoughts and hopes, I guess. Cedar sighs a big “whatever” and begins to settle in until the next walk.

I don’t think this post is about a dog. And it’s not really on time—more retrospective than present. I haven’t written much in April, so I wanted to capture another mini-season: blueberry blossoms. 

Since just after mid-month, my heart has been lifted, again and still, by blossoming blueberries. I think most of them are the early blueberry, as distinct from the Alaska blueberry.  Their translucent whitish pink flowers hang like Japanese lanterns or hopeful teardrops, giving a sort of Christmas light effect to the brush. Apparently the early blueberry will produce the more blue of the berries, the ones with a chalky little dusting of white yeast, while the Alaska blueberry produces the slightly larger and more black colored berry. I’ll be on the lookout for emerging blooms of the Alaska berry, with its offset timing (early May rather than mid-April) working out for pollinators. 

It’s fun to see Cedar disappear in their cover, materializing like a bear from the brush. She’s been climbing a lot lately — chasing song birds and squirrels mainly—but when a blossom from a couple of sprigs I brought inside as a centerpiece fell in my yogurt with the last of last year’s blueberries, and I tasted its honey-sweet floridness, I wondered if she might be onto something. 

What is it about these little flower-lights that seem worth putting off work for a few minutes to capture? They are minimal, not at all gaudy, occupying a beautiful shade of the spectrum, and like so much else, reminders that beauty doesn’t stick around. As if to act out that simple lesson, Cedar wouldn’t stay still enough for a good photo amidst all the constellations of blossoms but somewhere in the tangle I found this little haiku. 

Early blueberry
Fingertips of morning love
We have this moment.

“People and bears have been like magnets to each other throughout our evolution, drawing and repelling in mutual fascination. When the bear is gone from our mountains, the heart is cut away. It’s a privilege to live where we can still be frightened by bears.”

O’Clair, Armstrong, Carstensen, _The nature of southeast alaska_

Last night I was at a dinner attended by a bunch of Juneau friends and a couple who had just moved here. The host asked us each to give a piece of advice. Her husband said something like, “Don’t be scared of the bears.” And his father, a remarkably nimble man in his 80s with a cabin on Admiralty Island (“Fortress of the Brown Bears”), said softly, “Speak softly to them.”

At the risk of going all Timothy Treadwell here, I’ll say it’s kind of exciting to get news of the first bears’ emergence this season. I’ve yet to see any signs of them on the Big Tree Trail, but just knowing they’re out there changes a lot. We’ll soon begin walking with a bell and bear spray, knowing full well neither of us is top dog on the trail.

Like much of America, Juneau is mainly black bear country. The males, last to den, are the first to emerge. Females, who may have given birth to cubs while sleeping (how ’bout that trick, mothers?) won’t emerge until more snow melts and more food surfaces for the cubs.

Here in Juneau suburbia, we’ve had at least one resident bear who forages inside of cars. I remember asking Tim some semi-accusatory questions as I was applying touch-up paint to my old truck, thinking he had been down a narrow brushy road (no doubt projecting from my own adolescence), when I realized the scrapes were–like those music scales across the chalk board back in elementary school–perfectly bear-claw spaced.

I’m mainly posting to log the first appearance in the ‘hood, wondering with a twinge of trepidation, what stories might be ahead. (I won’t embarrass Katrina by again telling the story of the time she ran out of her boots in the mud at Boat Harbor when a bear we never saw crashed through the alders above us.) Instead, I leave the last words to O’Clair, Armstrong, and Carstensen.

“Bears infest our imagination and quicken our love of the land. Comic, ominous, endearing, disgusting, incredibly beautiful, bears are our own wilder selves. When conversation [or dog blog writing fodder] lags, we revive it with bears.”

O’Clair, Armstrong, and Carsten, _The Nature of Southeas Alaska

***

A few Cedar-inspired moments from the week…

So here we are on the first Sunday following the full moon after the March equinox (using the Gregorian calendar, at least). It’s a quiet Easter Sunday here, with memories of the kids tromping around waist deep in snow to find the eggs hungover Dad planted an hour or two before they got up, trying to put them in places dog Bella wouldn’t get to them first. (Years later Katrina and I, on a triage mission to clean Tim’s room, would find one of those plastic eggs in a drawer with a soldering iron, some random electronic parts, and a math trophy. Inside the egg was a piece of his mother’s eye socket, collected when we scattered her ashes.)

I’m not religious. But I find something spiritual in the idea of renewal. On our walk this morning, with Cedar performing her everyday olfactory egg hunt, I felt the strangeness and the familiarity of our neighborhood forest. So much green, so much bizarre Dr. Seuss-ish adaptation, so much death, and yet, so much green. I missed a day in the woods, and I swear the skunk cabbage used it to rocket up out of the ground.

Let me close with one small victory: Miracles do happen. The tree we planted last Easter has indeed survived. Its crooked growth cracks me up on a daily basis. As it bends for the best light, it will likely take on its own Dr. Seussy trunk, telling a story of a well-intentioned planter, and reminding him daily to adapt.

The very good news is that Cedar is not in that hole, fertilizing that tree, and continues to provide that very same reminder.

We’re almost a week into April and I’m losing track of time. “Lake Effect” snows and the banded clouds that characterize them seem common in spring. Squall lines march through, driven, I assume, by cold interior air, and snow-fuel with warm rising water from the ocean. Next thing you know it’s whiteout snow. And then sun. 

In between bands of snow, we have had some blue skies the past couple of weeks and all of it while a thick layer of ice coats Mendenhall Lake. 

When we have lake ice, there’s another kind of lake effect here altogether. We leave our urban and suburban cloisters, take to the lake, and remind ourselves why we live here. Each day this week, I’ve received texts from Tim or Anya or Dan… “Get out on the Lake! This might be it” or “Lake still amazing!” Or, “Maybe best skate of the year!” One effect, I think, is we lose our collective minds to get out and ski through time.

What this means for me is I instantly become a better skier (no hills), and Cedar gets to run her big brown heart out or, if the sheer thrill of skiing isn’t enough, practice her break dance moves.

Skating the lake in dazzling sun or blinding lake effect snow squalls takes me back on the human scale, too, to my earliest memories of love for the outdoors. We summered on a lake near Cape Cod. I remember  our little Boston Whaler, like my skis now, gave us keys to another kingdom. The sparkles from the sun on Herring Pond  in the morning were things every bit as tangible as perch we caught or the boats we built from scrap lumber and set free to wobble their way out into the little wavelets.

It’s raining tonight. The lake party might be over. With luck we might get back out there once or twice more, paying special heed to take iceberg photos because we suspect we’ll be telling our grandkids about that strange ice agey time we actually lived through, when the glacier went all the way to the lake and giant bergs floated and froze right here. 

With the first skunk cabbage emerging (my first sighting last week), it’s almost time to trade skis for the bike. Before long, I’ll ride out to the Mendenhall visitor center for a view and a few breaths of that ice-chilled cottonwood-infused lake air.