“The practice of quarantine, as we know it, began during the 14th century in an effort to protect coastal cities from plague epidemics. Ships arriving in Venice from infected ports were required to sit at anchor for 40 days before landing. This practice, called quarantine, was derived from the Italian words quaranta giorni which mean 40 days.”
Well, it’s not Venice. And I’ve apparently given up smell and taste for Lent. But quarantine, Juneau-style, ain’t all that bad. Here are some of the things we’ve been learning this week:
Sweaty polypro underwear smells the same as laundry fresh out of the dryer.
I only have to ski 10k in the same time it might otherwise take me to ski 40k.
This is a great opportunity to use up that souring milk, or the cottage cheese that’s a year or so past the expiration date.
Staying 6+ feet in front of my tall friends makes me look a reasonable height.
Preparing meals by texture rather than taste is an interesting challenge.
There’s not really much incentive to have another ice cream bar, or more chocolate.
Cedar doesn’t seem to have caught my Covid yet. But if she does, thanks to the Mayo Clinc , I have some received some valuable advice.
“Don’t put a face mask on your pet. Don’t wipe your pet with disinfectants.”
With apologies to Jesus and all those Middle Age(d) Italians, we’re not going to make it 40 days. We’re sure to run out of snow (although last day of skiing was May 6 last year). Here on il quarto giorno, we seem to be already dragging anchor.
Yesterday the woods felt full of potential. As Cedar and I tramped on the Big Tree Trail for the first time in a week due to my travel, I expected to see more change. Most of the snow has melted or sublimated, neighbor Kelli spoke of seeing three deer yesterday, and I heard my first varied thrush of the year. The woodpecker I heard last week changed from acoustic (hollow tree drumming) to heavy metal (the Iha family’s gutter or downspout). But there were no signs yet of skunk cabbage, which I’m sure is doing its heat-generating thing below the ground.
Late March Devil’s Club time lapse over about a week.Not much action yet.
It felt like we’re on the threshold of spring, and maybe occupying a mini season-within-a-season. Still lots of room in the woods with very little spring foliage unfolding, but everything seemingly close to bursting with the increasing light. I looked up the word “threshold” as I thought of this mini-season, and was amused to find that it is related to “treading” or “tramping” in old English, and even, maybe the “Italian trescare ‘to prance,’ or the “Old French treschier ‘to dance.” While I’m not doing much more than tramping, Cedar might even have a little trescare in her. But we’re dwellers on the threshold of spring, no doubt.
Yesterday was one of those days in which Juneau challenges us to even try not to be amazed at its beauty. I failed in the best of ways, and I’m going to imagine that Cedar, while trying to keep her cool, was a little blown away, too.
This exhaustive (and I’d guess exhausting to anyone reading more than one or two of these posts) account of Cedar’s life would not be complete without a short review of her criminal record.
Already expunged, because of lack of photo evidence, are the visiting sweater incident, and half of a Birkenstock. In the former, Katie’s friend Izzy tried to be gracious about the hole in the beautiful hand-knit wool sweater she brought as her main warmth layer on her first trip to Alaska. Later in the summer, Cedar proved with one of Katie’s favorite sandals, that cork and leather are digestible. And of course, there’s the Permanent Fund Dividend check incident. (On the topic of money, she recently weighed in with her opinion of $2 bills. )
But this latest chomp, the island of Unalaska out of my new t-shirt commemorating our Kayak Club days out there, makes me wonder whether it’s time for some consequences. (The problem, of course, is that I can never catch her doing the dirty deeds, so a scolding after the fact doesn’t seem to do the trick.)
The experts might suggest that she has anxiety, born from too little exercise or too much separation. I’m gonna have to pack it in as a dog owner if that’s the case.
Months ago, I mentioned to a friend that Cedar might have a shoe fetish. He sensed I was using the word wrong (and I was), reminding me that the word has a very definite sexual connotation. The more I mull, the more I wonder whether Cedar may have a special relationship with shoes that needs some exploration. Maybe I could get her a juicy, sexy shoe or sock poster to put up near her bed, so she can have some alone time?
For now I guess I’ll ground her for the time it takes me to post this, leaving her to contemplate the consequences of her excesses, with the help of a book to allow her to embrace “the healing (heeling?) power of melancholy.”
Spring isn’t here yet. At all. But it is March, and the days are getting longer. And I guess I have to choose whether or not to let bird people, or birds themselves, serve as my meager inspiration for spring. Nah. Not yet, at least. I’m still having a good run with winter.
On this morning’s walk, Cedar and I listened to a distant woodpecker dude, apparently starting to scope out his territory for a hot(ish) spring date. Why not? Get it going before any of us acknowledge it’s spring, I guess?
These birds, with necks as strong as football players’, are acting like frat boys of the forest, whether they’ve been here all winter (ouch) or just arrived from warmer climes. According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game…
“The male sets up a territory by ‘drumming.’ This loud repetitive noise is made by hammering the bill against a resonating surface such as the trunk of a dead tree. Woodpeckers use various displays, including head-weaving and body-bobbing, during courtship and as signs of aggression toward intruders.”
Male woodpecker drumming (and Cedar snorting) this morning. Turn volume up.
It’s cold, we’re skiing still, and I’m not going to join the head-bobbing spring drum circle yet. I will note, though, that the woodpecker, like the struggling middle-aged writer, takes advantage of heart rot. Hollowed out trees not only make better drums (true story, no matter what beautiful things John Straley writes), but they also make better habitats for insect prey. The point of that non-story, I guess, is that we oughta leave our old growth forests in tact, allow trees and bad blog writers to age, so they can see themselves in one another, and so those drumming peckers can couple up. Male woodpeckers actually share all the domestic duties, and they can do in tens of thousands of potentially pesky insects, so laissez les bons temps (and drums) roller, I guess.
Meanwhile, some bons temps roll for Cedar and human…skiing (then snoring), walking, reading (ahem), and generally wagging to some fine March weather.
Footage of the bridge crash available to paid subscribers.
I’m sorry to have left you once more, but it sounds like you’re in good hands. Did I hear that you got to go shopping in PetCo and pick out your own toy? A frisbee sounds so you. Nice job. I’m getting very good reports from the Boxes, who tell me you have your own special snow spot lounge on their deck.
That makes me happy, kid. Keep it up, and go easy on the panting when you want to play, okay?
Your old man in front of the remainder of the old homestead: the sauna.
I suppose you’re wondering why I left again. This time it’s to go back for a reunion with some parts of the state and myself that I’ve lost touch with. I’ve been able to reconnect with my friends Clo and Bruce who have supported me through all kinds of crazy transitions and moments in life. (A transition is like when you go in and out the door a million times—one of those, but it takes a little longer and seems harder for us humans.)
They’ve been sharing their experiences doing things like crust skiing and winter fat biking and dragging docks to their cabin with snow machines, and flying planes and burying their old house and–I can relate to your panting–Bruce likes to heat the old sauna up to 180 degrees. (That’s even hotter than the Boxes’ house when the sun is out.) Clo and Bruce are both tougher than your dad, but I faked being tough by skiing for most of a morning through amazing trails around the whole city of Anchorage with birch and black spruce and lots of moose tracks. Moose are like a cross between a dog and a dinosaur.
Speaking of dogs, I’m sorry you didn’t get to meet their dog, Otter. You two would have had some fun together, I know. But when I come home smelling like someone else, please know my heart is still with you.
“Most carnivores would not pass up a meal of porcupine.”
This one sentence from The Nature of Southeast Alaska says more than I really want to fathom about the world.
My favorite other carnivore and I have only encountered one live porky on our walks so far, but over the winter Cedar brought me a few souvenirs –including one quill in her lower gum–from maybe the same porky we watched a few months earlier.
Porky parts, compliments of our trusty (?) retriever
According to neighbor Molly (and the new contender, sorry Mom, for most faithful reader), this poor porkster was done in by an eagle. If it’s the one I think it is (was), its life accomplishments included “girdling” and killing a nice ornamental pine in the yard where it met talons.
Turns out these funny looking pot-bellied waddlers may be the dominant herbivores in the nearby woods. Apparently, that domination is sponsored by its incisor teeth.
Again from The Nature of Southeast Alaska, about the rodent family of beavers, porcupines, and hoary marmots:
A rodent could be defined, with apologies to kangaroo rats and other racy exceptions, as a plump and visually unimpressive body designed to transport a truly impressive set of curved, chisel-tipped, ever growing, self-sharpening incisors. The incisor has been for rodents what gunpowder was for European invaders of the new world.
O’Clair, Armstrong, Carstensen, The Nature of Southeast Alaska, 1997
Well, even gunpowder backfires sometimes. I have learned a few interesting factoids about these dudes (and porkettes), though. First, of course, you’re wondering how on earth they mate, right? The Nature of Southeast Alaska calls it a “brief but spectacular” event, but gives no salacious details. Luckily (?) the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game edges us closer to porky porn (sorry, Mom).
Males seeking receptive females expand their home ranges up to five times the normal size. If more than one male shows interest in the same female, they will fight for the opportunity to mate with the female. Males use their incisor teeth and quills when fighting, and usually the largest and heaviest male wins. The breeding male then splashes the female with urine. If she is not ready to mate, she shakes off the urine and leaves. If she is ready, she stays and the male mounts in the traditional posture with the female in front and the male in the rear. She will curl her tail over her back, covering most of the quills.
North American Porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum) , Alaska Department of fish and Game Website
So, old Erethizon D. gets it started with a golden shower, and apparently a girl or two likes that. Who knew? They want to get it right, though, because they only make one baby per year and have a crazy-long gestation period (7 months). Maybe that explains why she only covers “most of the quills.”
But back to not passing up the meal. Should you find yourself famished in our neighborhood, you may want to do as fishers and wolves do, circling it, biting its nose repeatedly, and then flip when ready, and…it’s bon apetit from the underside.
Besides their quills (which I’ve learned some folks capture for art by making contact with styrofoam boards) porkies have a few more tricks up their sleeveless sleeves. And this may be of value to my carnivore. After flashing a “rosette” of quills under their tails, they also emit a chemical from under their skin that The Nature of Southeast Alaska describes as “a mixture of strong, unwashed human body odor, marijuana and coconut.” That ought to either trigger flight, or a nose vacation not unlike a trip to a beach in Mexico. We’ll see.
And you knew I’d get to Shakespeare, to make my not-so-gracious exit from this one. Looking at this porkster’s little “fingers,” I couldn’t help but feel a bit of empathy for this fellow as Hamlet did looking at the skull of the old jester, Yorick. That, and I don’t really want to dwell too long on what the next porky post may entail.
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?
I’ve written elsewhere about Gary Paulsen’s My Life in Dog Years, but it occurred to me this weekend, during the dreaded spring cleaning, that our girl’s little life is recorded in the complete backyard scatological record.
This post is mainly to disabuse myself of any remaining romance—that having a dog might place me in a Paulsen-esque narrative. Instead, it leaves me right here, in three or four hundred dollars’ worth of dog food’s deep shit. A sordid tale indeed. Hope your weekend was more exciting than mine.
(I herby relinquish any last claims to having an audience.)
Early reconnaissance
Aerial pup turds
Little cuties…(Wait, those colors are not found in nature.)
Once warm fuzzies
A Cedar platter (and more technicolor)…
Shit is getting real
You’re a big girl now…
“A redolent story of back yard adventures…”
“A rich and fervent performance by a young actor full of…potential.”
Today’s morning walk felt like spring. I swear the blueberry buds became full overnight. At 250′ of elevation or so, we were just above a low-lying fog over the channel. We walked in the sun under clearing skies. On the return trip I heard my first varied thrush of the year.
Most recent years, I’ve traveled in late March and come home to the full chorus of the varied thrush, having missed that first one. Last year, I went nowhere, but somehow they were singing in February.
Varied thrush are cool looking and sounding birds. They remind me of the whistle that would end recess and send elementary students sprinting off the playground; they send my spirit galloping into hopes for spring. Since the varied thrush tend to vocalize early in the morning, they also speak to my primal brain with its memories of fist light spring mornings after chinook, saying “You could catch a fish right now.”
It feels like cheating, since they’re relatively hard to see, but here’s a video of one in action.
And here’s Richard Nelson, expounding on them from some wild place near Sitka.
Richard Nelson, from Encounters, on the Varied Thrush
Cedar didn’t seem overly impressed. Once she got herself out of a tricky spot, she plodded on and used my elated listening stops to revel in the abundance of stuff to chew.
A few images from a beautiful spring day.
Fog below us
Waiting on the old man
A peak in the light above the channel
She loves nurse logs, too.
Just goofing.
Yup.
Ravine from Dec. ’20 Mudpocalypse
Ah youth.
Not a bad day… Bigtrees, 7 mile ski, and Sandy Beach eve.
This morning it occurred to me how happy Cedar’s happy-plodding sounds make me.
On the bigtree trail, she’ll get lost in some kind of smell- or chewfest then come plodding and jingling up to and past me. On this quiet springy morning–where I imagined the forest has one thing on its to-do list: GROW!–Cedar’s bass paw-plods and treble tag-jingles made me think of Irish music, the bodhran and the tambourine, maybe. Which in turn turned me to my man, Seamus.
Here are some haunting lyrics of his that suggest he had more than verbal music in his soul.
THE GIVEN NOTE
On the most westerly Blasket
In a dry-stone hut
He got this air out of the night.
Strange noises were heard
By others who followed, bits of a tune
Coming in on loud weather
Though nothing like melody.
He blamed their fingers and ear
As unpractised, their fiddling easy
For he had gone alone into the island,
And brought back the whole thing.
The house throbbed like his full violin.
So whether he calls it spirit music
Or not, I don’t care. He took it
Out of wind off mid-Atlantic.
Still he maintains, from nowhere.
It comes off the bow gravely,
Rephrases itself into the air.
And here are a couple of clips…the first an attempt to capture a few of Cedar’s given notes (not captured was fiddle-wail when neighbor dog Kamou–aka Kujo– sunk his teeth into Cedar’s flank), the second, maybe a nod to the lovely “bits of a tune / Coming in on loud weather.”
In any case, a moment of gratitude for these little notes, and I guess, “the whole thing.”
KENT Who’s there, besides foul weather? GENTLEMAN One minded like the weather, most unquietly.
King lear, Act 3, Scene 1
It’s been an active few days for our pup, including a frolic in some spring nasties. If she’s minded like the weather, unlike Shakespear’s mad king who “Strives in his little word of man to outscorn / the to-and-fro of conflicting wind and rain” our girl is merely trying to outPLAY them.
Here are a moments from the last few days, including some fun in some in the “conflicting wind and rain,” a gallop in some nice spring corn snow, and a still morning to approach an eagle.
Weather gives us a ready metaphor for our moods, but I guess there’s some science that suggests biological and psychological roots to these things. Apparently, the French researcher Guéguen established that a woman is more likely to give a flirtatious man her number on a sunny day. But Juneau dudes shouldn’t go all King Lear in despair here. His later research showed identified the “dog effect” a finding which his male colleague, Saad called “astonishing”: “…[A] man’s likelihood of obtaining a woman’s phone number increases three-fold when accompanied by a dog!” (Don’t worry, Katrina, despite the Manthropomorphic reporting in these pieces, I think it works both ways.)
In any case, the sun is coming out. Cedar is “most quietly” napping, in no less of a good or bad mood. And I’d settle for meeting a woman or a man or kid or robot who loves to exercise dogs.
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