“How am I today?” Well thanks for asking, Cedar. It’s probably not a good sign that I’m navigating by old rock ‘n roll songs, but to answer your question so you can get back to plotting chewing the mail, “I’m somewhere between Bobby McGee (‘I’d trade all my tomorrows…’ and Stephen Stills’ “rose in a fisted glove.”

Here’s one more thing I admire about you, Cedar. It takes you no time at all to switch gears and love the one you’re with. As I took off short-notice for a weekend boat delivery, our most recent sitter was worried you wouldn’t heed her since you didn’t know one another. Somehow, magically you figure out who’s supposed to be in charge (although I think we both know you still always believe that’s you…that’s why you won’t quite hand me the fetching dummy, or why you insist on the victory lap after catching the frisbee). But anyway, for the sake of today’s blog post, it’s pretty cool how you can instantly “turn your heartache right into joy” (or skip the heartache altogether).

Not quite as cool but still kind of endearing was your split-second decision to go on a long walk with Holly and dog Griffey the other day. (I’m sure you would have texted me if you could.) Let’s hope that boundless love and opportunism holds through the next couple of months as my work travel beckons.

I may have made this up, dear girl, but you seemed pretty happy to see me last night, wagging your body with your head out the window in the dark sideways rain. I think the boat that captured my heart yesterday works an emblem of both the editorial standards of this blog, and of your sturdy heart that’s always open to loving the one it’s with.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair …, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way …”

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

People from out of state often ask, “Do you still get paid to live there?” I’ll resist a big digression (actually this blog is that big digression) into the many payoffs of living here, but there’s always tax time, too.

It is indeed Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) season here. Alaskans receive a check based on some black-box formula related to the performance of the investments on woefully undertaxed oil revenues. And we fight over that formula. Ironically, conservatives (no handouts) tend want as much in the annual check as possible, and liberals want the funds to be put to longterm fiscal plans, which Alaska somehow just can’t stomach. So we stumble on, year after year, receiving and spending our checks (three or four times over) while we underfund schools and social services and the headlines are about austerity.

Anyway, if you miss applying for your check it’s a big deal, causing all kinds of bureaucracy that may compound into multiple missed checks, etc. Tim had been on that roller coaster ride for a couple of years now, and on my way to prep the boat to go pull crab pots, I checked the mail, and YES… his denied check from years ago, finally. I gave Cedar a dog treat to celebrate and left her inside while I hooked up the boat.

Bro Dave and I had a great haul of crab, which will ensure a whole lot of work today, but many meals ahead.

Came home feeling pretty good. Despite the heavy going on in life, a moment of abundance.

Apparently, Cedar had her own opinions about the value of the PFD. (She has been in Alaska for the requisite year—long enough to get one, I suppose.)

Well, for now, dear Cedar, thinking about the Dickens epigraph on the Fall equinox, I have you as going “direct the other way.”

Spoon 1

I did a hard thing yesterday. I did it clumsily, inarticulately, and I hurt someone’s feelings badly. I went to bed early, unable to sleep but also unable to do much else. Cedar–who often curls up at the foot of the bed for a few hours just to be near me–actually slept in the little spoon position right next to me. I let her use the pillow.

Spoon 2

Today I led a meeting with some amazing young people. We always write together, so I prompted us to write in response to Marge Piercy’s “To Be of Use.” One prompt I offered was “Tell us about a thing that is beautiful and useful at the same time.”

These words surfaced near the end of my writing about a spoon Katie carved for me. “I’ve yet to sip anything from this spoon, except maybe my love for a young woman who is not afraid to make mistakes, who can imagine a gift into being.”

Spoon 3

I was recently telling Katie about how I had once seen photos of some fabulous driftwood spoons by an Unangan (Aleut) man named Phil Tutiakoff. They pushed the form of spoon by conforming to the form of driftwood. That memory made me think about how precious driftwood–yellow cedar, red cedar, and cottonwood, especially–was on the windswept Aleutian islands. And then I thought of my friend Ray’s stunning final lines of “Andrew Markarin Visits the Body of Lance Craig”. The speaker had last seen Andrew staring from a mountain pass, past his own skiff “anchored forever” and towards his abandoned village. In burning the chapel at Biorka, Makarin apparently did in the last vestige of traditional villages near Unalaska. “On these treeless islands,” the poem concludes…

I will tell you a secret.
A man burned yellow cedar. 
He burned the sea's gift. 
For the scent of yellow cedar,
because the scent of yellow cedar
pleased the one he loved,
a man burned what enabled him to survive.

-Ray Hudson, "Andrew Makarin Visits the Body of Lance Craig" in Moments Rightly Placed: An Aleutian Memoir, Epicenter Press, 1998.

I don’t think any of this adds up to anything. I don’t know if Cedar can smell grief. I don’t know why anyone else should care that my daughter gave me the most beautiful gift I can imagine. And I don’t know why Ray’s lines about Andrew Makarin have always haunted me so much, except maybe that tough times, like the grind of the ocean, teach what’s precious.

It’s a coho no show. Coho salmon (occasionally nicknamed ‘Hos by fisherman with a bit more cold blood lust than my own) are a staple for us here in weirdly urban Juneau, where most of us have to gather our winter food with hook and line. (Yeah, we have grocery stores and Costco and all that, making it decidedly too expensive to justify harvesting our own food, but that’s another story.) In other parts of the state, you set your personal use gill net, get your 25 fish and be done with it.

This post is to mark the fall without a coho run –or certainly without much of one. Theories among us lay folk are as varied as the excuses for late UPS packages (security check, extreme weather, customs inspection). Some blame the December 2020 flood (which wiped out the water source to the local hatchery and killed that year’s coho brood stock), others point to warming sea water, others just say timing is off; they’re late. Customs inspection seems as good a theory as any.

A year ago, my buddy Steve and I waded the wetlands we both view from our houses and watched literally hundreds of cohos finning their noses at us in a slough. We couldn’t entice ’em with our flies, but they were there in abundance. I remember a day in the early 2000s when I worked for the university downtown and took a lunch break on a beautiful September afternoon, got into a bunch of fish with my fly rod, took my limit of six, dragged them across the mud and grass to the truck, threw ’em whole in the fridge, washed up, got back to work in time for my afternoon 1:1 meeting, then, after the meeting looked in the mirror to see a big streak of dried mud and blood across my cheek.

So, Cedar, she who is scared to death of halibut, knows nothing about the lack of cohos. Somehow, though, in long days of anticipation like Saturday on the water with bro Dave, she seems to sense something else should be happening.

Luckily, Dave’s as much of a dog whisperer as fish whisperer so she seems cool with BroHo.

One of my favorite conversation memories is a driveby exchange I had with Paul, then a five- or six year-old sage who was enjoying riding around me on his bicycle, in his soccer gear—no training wheels, all freedom. I remember the conversation going like this:

“Do you like soccer, Paul?”

“Not really. I just play.”

A couple more quiet laps.

“Hmm. .. What’s your team’s name?”

“The SighKICKS” he said with a little kid kind of Doppler effect.

“The Psychics?” I asked.

“NO. The Sidekicks….!” A few more laps. “But what’s a psychic?”

“That’s someone who always knows what’s going to happen in the future.”

“Oh,” he said, confident and reassured. “My mom is one of those.”

Earlier this week as my sidekick and I walked the woods, I thought a bit about signs of the future and wondered whether Cedar had any sense of time other than the present. Devil’s Club seems to be the best psychic of our turf: clearly we’re rounding into fall and the giant plants are already starting to give us our views back.

The AKC missive had just arrived with a headline, “What to Expect in Your Pup’s Second Year.” No psychic insights there: My girl’s personality is almost fully formed and there’s a bunch of stuff I should have done already. I did Google around a bit and found some good advice for this being an important time to assert and reassert my leadership, and to remember that Cedar and I are on the same team…That felt a bit too much like real life, so I let myself drift a bit into the whole notion of a sidekick.

Thanks to Wikipedia, I learned that the term comes from pickpocketing, but there’s a rich literary tradition of sidekicks, from Don Quixote’s Sancho Panza to Porky Pig. The sidekick functions to humanize the “hero.” (Hey, it’s my blog.) But here’s the part that rang especially true for me and my sidekick:

While unusual, it is not unheard of for a sidekick to be more attractive, charismatic, or physically capable than the supposed hero. This is most typically encountered when the hero’s appeal is more intellectual rather than sexual. Such heroes (usually fictional sleuths and scientists) are often middle-aged or older and tend towards eccentricity. Such protagonists may, due to either age or physical unsuitability, be limited to cerebral conflicts, while leaving the physical action to a younger or more physically capable sidekick.

See that, folks? Cedar, while no good at telling the future, is well on her way to showing off my intellectual appeal.

And yes, Mom, you are not just my only remaining reader; you are also my favorite psychic. I’m glad you’re still out there to tell me about the future, however bracing the news may be.

In contrast to green. This is all I have today.

I have a confession. A couple of weeks ago, I stopped on a Sandy Beach walk. Apparently one of Homer’s sirens had slipped through time, and made it those few miles from the Rocks of Scylla to the wrack line of Douglas Island.

Instead of dutifully keeping my calling of steering Cedar away from gobbling salmon bones, I got distracted by a warm, engaging (and a little bit gorgeous) woman who spun tales of her and her husband’s recent sail around the San Juan Islands. I’d forgive myself if it weren’t for what happened next: That telltale drop of Cedar’s right shoulder, tail sweeping the sand, legs clawing the rainy sky in bliss, and upper back smeared in salmon carcass. The dreaded stink roll. I swear I had just been telling the very nice siren that luckily Cedar didn’t do that with salmon. Bear shit, raven shit, dead voles… a different story.

Days from the incident, wax put back into my ears — however imperfectly — I’ve done a bit of research into “scent rolls” as they are so euphemistically called. (Sort of like cinnamon rolls, but different.)

According to the AKC, scientists have gone to some length to find dignifying motives other than the simple observation that dogs can be disgusting. (An interesting parallel inquiry might be to study the EKGs of owners when that shoulder drops.) Theories about the WHY range from disguising their own scent for the hunt, to bringing information back to “the pack” (Look what I found, Dad!), to group bonding (early wolf predecessor to TikTok challenge cred; Let’s all smell like bear shit…Go!). So far the research base hasn’t included anything about Sandy Beach sirens, so remember you heard it here first, without even having to smell it.

I hope I can be forgiven for not having photos of a scent roll (or a siren). Rather than probing the possible karmic reasons for Cedar’s Sandy Beach performance, I’ll leave you with this morning’s clip of how Cedar usually “rolls”—a happy trot down the trail, reading the ferns for the morning news or sexy ancient myths. She’ll never tell.