Viekoda Bay

Last week, I lived in Viekoda Bay in the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge. Perks of my job include getting dropped off by float plane in remote parts of the refuge along with four high school interns and a few other "grown-ups". Among other conservation related projects, we did trail work, maintenance on one of the refuge's public use cabins, and environmental education.

Some of my favorite memories from the trip include: 

During the lowest tide of the month, we waded through the water to two small islands within the bay. As we were exploring, we rounded a corner and startled a group of harbor seals that had been sunning out on the rocks. They rushed into the water and proceeded to swim along the shoreline, watching us as we walked, stopping every few minutes to ogle at eels in tide pools or wild chives growing on the cliffs.

On the night of Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, it was so warm that I sat on the beach with no jacket at all. At 11:15pm, I watched the sun set over the snow covered mountains of Katmai National Park, nearly 60 miles across the Shelikoff Strait.

The interns and I went on an evening walk and the sun poured into the bay, filling it with a golden warmth. We saw bears playing in the water across the bay. Eagles mated (or fought? It can be hard to tell), soaring high, locking talons, then tumbling through the air for a few seconds, screeching at one another. Rafts of sea otters, many of the individuals with babies resting on their chests, floated nearby. I racked my brain for ways to describe this place, but the vivid beauty of it all was impossible to sum up with any single word in my vocabulary. So, I asked the interns to describe where we were using three words each:

Green, natural, tropical.
Pristine, wild, unique.
Alive, warm, golden.
Colorful, untouched, calm.

All excellent describers of the place and those magical moments walking down the beach in our own, real-life version of Planet Earth.

A raft of sea otters in front of one of the nearby islands we explored.

Solstice sunset. See the profile of a face on the right side of the island?

Viekoda Bay Public Use Cabin in the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge.

Lichen seen on an evening beach walk in Viekoda Bay.

If you have time

If you have time to watch your T.V.,
to browse Facebook,
to spend time in front of the mirror every morning,
then you have time to go outside.

Silence your phone.
Netflix can wait, but you should not.

Go outside.
Soak up the sun, or the rain,
whichever your environment has to offer.
Hear the birds, the song sparrows will sing you their praise.
The wildflowers will remain open, their faces cupped towards the sky, for only so long.
Catch them in action.

Shamelessly watch the birds and the bees pollinate to populate.
The porn you'll find out of doors is kinkier, and of much higher definition than what you'll ever find online.
Maybe even invest in binoculars...

It doesn't take long to remind you, ten minutes will do,
that the world wide web of life has so much to offer.
Go outside.
Connect.

The Summer Day

Here is one of my favorite poems, which seems to sit well with this lovely summer day:

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

-Mary Oliver  

Reunido

I have never understood the way the world works.

Yesterday, I wanted to hike a mountain. I met friends, we drove to a trailhead, we parked. Everything was normal. Another car pulled into the otherwise empty parking area. Out of the other car stepped a friend I met a year and a half ago in Xela, Guatemala. I didn't know he was in Kodiak. He didn't know I was in Kodiak. There we were, reunido, at the base of a random mountain on a remote island in the Gulf of Alaska.

I will never understand the way the world works.

Fort Abercrombie

We all have a place that has been an important part of our lives since before we can remember. For me, that place is Fort Abercrombie State Historical Park. The house I grew up in was only two miles from the park's entrance, so we were regulars. My parents tell me of the first time I walked around Lake Gertrude on my own, instead of sitting in a backpack for the walk. A tiny victory, to have a toddler wobble up and down the salmonberry lined trails, probably tripping on roots and tasting spruce cones along the way.

As young entrepreneurs, my brother and I started a restaurant on the beach that lies between the ocean and the lake as soon as we realized our parents and their friends were willing to order "food" from us. Our restaurant was located within the twisted branches of an old piece of driftwood, and we would serve beach greens and seaweed to our loyal customers. We made receipts by etching words onto shale from the beach. The driftwood restaurant is still there, I walked by it today. I hope business is still booming.

As I grew older, I began to share Abercrombie with my friends who were less familiar with the trails and tide pools. In high school, we basked in the Alaskan summer sun besides the lake, and would return at night to swim beneath the never completely dark sky. When I was deciding what to do after high school, I would walk alone along the cliffside trails to think things out, stopping every once and a while to watch an eagle or stare at the horizon. Sometimes I would just walk and cry, realizing that I would soon leave this place to go to college in a town where I wouldn't have a Fort Abercrombie.

Throughout college, I yearned for that place. I had loved Abercrombie before leaving home, but I didn't realize how special it was to me. During midterms and finals weeks, I'd hold my head in my hands on the second floor of the library and close my eyes and imagine I was there in the midst of a winter storm - sea spray slapping the cliffs, the tall and thin Sitka spruce trees creaking in the wind. If the landscape there was resilient enough to withstand years worth of winter storms, I was resilient enough to withstand the stress of college.

This is my personal history of Fort Abercrombie. What awes me is that the land there holds so much more history than I can imagine. On the cliffs sit old World War II bunkers and canons. Today as I walked, I tried to image the place in the early 1940s, when hundreds of soldiers occupied Fort Abercrombie in an effort to protect the US from Japanese attack. Were the soldiers ever distracted by whales while looking for submarines? Did they, too, find peace among the lake and the ocean and the trees? Or was Fort Abercrombie merely their workplace where they were sent to defend their country?

And who was there before the WWII soldiers? Did the Aluutiq people of Kodiak subsist off of that same land? Did Russian settlers visit Fort Abercrombie before it was even named that? What did it look like before the non-native Sitka spruce grew there? I suppose I could probably go to a museum and find out the answers to my questions, but for now I'll wait a bit before an old black and white photo puts a stop to my imagination.

Mill Bay

The distant sighs of navigational buoys drift in with the wind. A heavy mist dampens my face as I walk towards the ocean. I can't see the beach less than a quarter mile away -- the fog is far too thick for that -- but I can hear the waves crashing and the gulls laughing. The smell of dewy pushki lingers with sea spray and the smoke from a wood stove. A song sparrow calls from an alder tree. I exhale the stale indoor air that I've been breathing all day, and inhale a new batch of cold, fresh air. I have the beach to myself; apparently no one else felt the need to sit on a soggy piece of driftwood and watch the water droplets fall from their hood to their Xtratuffs, then disappear into the saturated stand. The buoy whistles rhythmically on across the bay. I breathe with it. My meditation.