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.