Grass

I went out and did some raking again today. I'm trying to get some of the Fireweed stalks raked up in the hopes the areas can be mowed. This time I didn't wear my wool shirt and I lasted much longer than last time. I lasted until a sneezing fit drove me into the house to wash my face. I've grown allergic to spruce trees when they dust their pollen all over the place, and early spring is when their dust is the thickest. Left over dust from winter doesn't help though.

During my raking I discovered a few clumps called Niger Head grass. I cringe every time I hear that name but if they have some more official name, I don't know it. Niger Head can get quite big - big humps of root clumps. Found out on the trail or on the perimeter of a swamp especially during the winter, they can dump a snowmachine over unless the trail is already packed and such lumps are compensated for. I don't think I'm going to have that kind of trouble with these little clumps. The lawn mower or the weed eater will have something to say about that.

All around the edges of our yard is last year's native grass, now all dry and laying down. Once was the time I'd go out and collect that dry grass by the haystack to use for the chickens and ducks the rest of the year. At the time I wished for a hay baler because finding a dry place around here to store a haystack isn't easy.

Of course, the vast majority of our yard is the normal yard grass most everyone has in their yard. Personally, I prefer the wild grass kept cut. You can't cut that short like you can lawn grass. Maybe if it was cut every few days, but I doubt it. Cut short, the wild grass is not so green and rather course. Cut kinda long though, say six inches or so, and it's really quite soft and rather lush. Course, if you don't cut it, it doesn't take long for it to reach six feet and a tunnel would be necessary to get to the outhouse.

Domestic grass really must be kept short. Allowed to grow long, it's no less lush but it lays over and can trip up one's feet. Sadly, it rains a lot here (usually) and cutting the grass in the rain really sucks in so many ways. The grass, however, loves the rain and positively explodes with growth, so waiting for it to dry enough to cut between showers just might not be possible. Therefore, it's either cut the wet grass when the opportunity knocks or wait for an extra long sunny break. Needless to say, such days don't always happen, so cutting the extra long domestic grass is a huge pain involving a good deal of raking.

This all leads me back to today. Though I'm concentrating on Fireweed, much of the rest will get my attention too, until I have to go to work, and if the ground isn't dry enough to rake before then, well, maybe I'll manage to get it raked up before we need to mow again. The whole thing is complicated this year. We dropped two trees in the yard last winter. I'll likely get the branches moved sometime this summer.

In case you're curious, there's still some snow here and there. There's still water running across the trail and now the ground is starting to thaw out there so it's getting really muddy. I'm taking the raked up grass and walking it into the mud. It helps, and with luck, enough seed heads are present to start some grass growing there. The roots will help to stabilize the mud somewhat.

It still freezes at night, but just barely, and the water in the river is still too low to drive a boat anywhere. I guess we should have kept the jet boat. It might have been eighteen feet long but it drove well and it could manage this level of water.

I Need a Cat or Two

My first experiment with a picture. Let me know how it works out for you. Yes, this is what the snow has left for us on the sunny side of my house. You can see in the upper right hand corner the ladder, right above that is my satellite dish.

These are mouse tunnels all carefully insulated from the snow by the grass they packed against the top of their tunnels. There are a few places where the tunnel goes down into the ground. I never see these little buggers, but there must be quite a few of them. What do you think? Do I need a cat or two?

I haven't had cats here for four years now, and though our dog catches a mouse or a shrew now and then, she obviously isn't keeping up with the population explosion. I love cats, but over the years I have increasingly grown more and more allergic to them. However, I have been thinking. There are other things I had been growing increasingly allergic to, apples being one of them, but since I started to lose weight last summer, eating apples was one of the pleasures I was able to re-indulge in. I know one allergy is not connected to another, but dare I hope?

Every day on Facebook I see the most adorable pictures of kittens and cats all doing what kittens and cats do. It makes me miss them all the more. I think, therefore, I am in the market for giving it a try. Allergy or not, I want another kitten around here. This place is just too quiet.

My only concern is, old dogs scarcely tolerated my other cats. They were mine, therefore they weren't to be chased, but that didn't mean she didn't REALLY want to. Same with the chickens I had back then.  Since I have decided I won't be spending great chunks of time away from here in the winter, having assorted animals around has been something I have been longing for. Maybe not so many as before, and maybe not chickens. I'll have to think about that one. It got to the point where an egg averaged about $2 when cost of feed was figured in to how many eggs I ended up with. Then there's the damage they were always doing to the yard.

I can do a cat or two. Maybe if my kids will read this, they will bring me one or two this summer. Do my kids read this? If I get a kitten this summer, the answer will be yes. haha We'll see.

A Pleasant Stroll

Actually, my day started out with another little surprise. When I let the dog out this morning (at 6:30 in the AM), I saw my first little tweeter bird; I haven't seen any all winter long. I know the harsh cold had to have taken a hit on them. I found a little frozen body some years ago that looked like it had been blown out of a tree. I didn't find any such thing this year, but the absence of their cheerful chatter said that either they had migrated (I hope) somewhere further south, or that something much more dire had happened to them. I have yet to hear them twittering to each other so this one little guy doesn't have anyone to sing to yet.

But in other pleasant news: Since we have been expecting to need to babysit the boats through breakup, I have been doing my best to make it down to the boats from time to time. It's been unnaturally warm over the last couple weeks, and the snow has been melting fast. I have also kept in contact with the lodge for river news. Since the entire winter was so abysmally cold all winter long, we expected breakup to come with the roar of an ice dragon (note, I didn't say 'lion'). Instead, unless it somehow isn't over yet, it came rather like a kitten, leaving the water quite low.

I walked down there on the 30th of April to discover that pretty much all of the portion of river I could see was clear leaving only our runway floating free but still in one piece. Surprise me, but if I didn't know that there was probably a lot of intact snow still blocking the narrower channels further up river, there might have been enough water to drive the boat completely out. But I say that just as an indication of what the level of water was, not that it was at all drivable.

Knowing the snow on the trail was soft (it hadn't frozen at night for several nights in a row), I wore my snowshoes. I took the dog with me too; she does take her duty as guard dog quite seriously and gets upset with I take off without her. She is getting old and she was having some trouble with the soft snow. Where she was having the most trouble, the snow was only around knee deep for her but she's kinda stiff now and she wasn't at all anxious to trot on ahead.

There's a place along the trail that fills with spring snow-melt every year. This time there was only the highest ridge of left-over trail above the water. I side-stepped across that part, managing to break it down for her to walk across, but she didn't follow me, opting to wade across the icy water that was nearly neck deep for her.

When I went down there again day before yesterday, I left the dog behind. I was planning on trying to find a way around all that water and I knew the walking would be that much more difficult for her. I would likely be going through deeper snow and it wouldn't have been packed before. As it turns out, going around the water wasn't as easy as I'd hoped, so I'm doubly glad I decided to leave her behind.

The river day before yesterday was a surprise. After only two days, the runway was completely gone, leaving behind only a handful of truck-sized chunks of ice stuck along our side of the river right in front, and the water level about two feet lower than it was before. I called the lodge to learn that most of the main ice was still there, so breakup wasn't over yet.

Planning to walk down there again yesterday, I called the lodge for another river update to learn that he already had a boat in the water and had made the drive up to Skwentna. Was breakup over already??? and without the normal water levels rising and lowering three or four feet (if not more) four or five times as jams shoved their way down the river, getting stuck from time to time. Well, okay so I didn't bother to walk down there today. I had dug out a pair of waders to wear and I didn't relish walking in them. I don't get along with waders very well.

So, I headed out this morning wearing only my snow boots, figuring I'd turn around if I couldn't get across that spring run-off spot on our trail. Much to my surprise I could step across where the water was running in one spot and in another spot, I made it across water that was only ankle deep. Surprise, surprise. When I reached the river, it was to see that I had missed another bit of breakup. More ice had been shoved up onto the island out front and some of it was stacked up on other chunks. There was even one spot where a third piece of ice was on top, though I can't imagine how it got there unless it was already on top of it's perch before it all got deposited down here. The water had also gone down another foot or more. Sigh - I can't go anywhere until the water comes back up. Not to mention that the water is so unnaturally low. That is an indication that one or more of the rivers upriver from us has yet to cut loose, but it could also be an indication of just how dry the snow was this year. Who knows; it's still early. I don't NEED to go anywhere (work) for another two or three weeks at least.

A Study in Patience

Walking. I bet you didn't even consider that walking might be a study in patience, did you? Well, it can be, especially this time of year, and more so this year. As the days are warm and the nights aren't so cold, the snow that once was a hard-packed trail, grows soft. Trouble is, they aren't the soft of new snow or even of mushy snow, easy to slosh through. The surface is uncertain; one step might be solid enough but the next one gives way. To preserve the integrity of your back, you need to be patient with every step. You need to be ready for every step to give way. Allow yourself to be pleased if it doesn't but don't trust that it won't until you have completely moved on to the next step - and the whole thing must be done all over again.

The best strategy is to take small steps, nearly heel to toe, not perfectly so but far shorter than a comfortable stride. Those of you ladies who like to sway your hips might find the necessary stiff back hard to accomplish, but it is a necessity. The step that gives way, seldom does so with any warning.

To add to the lesson in patience, and to reinforce the necessity of taking short careful steps, is the fact that the snow is still nearly knee deep. Not very deep, you say, but if your step suddenly plunges down and you are already throwing your weight into the next stride, you run the very real risk of leaving your knee behind stuck up in the hole your boot created while the surrounding solid surface didn't give way for the rest of your leg to move forward.

So, no matter how far you have to go, patience is key to keep your extremities in tact. Soon enough, when the snow is less deep, there will be an added dimension to the patience of walking.  At the moment, the only problem is that you break through and your step goes straight down. Likely by next week, not only will the foot go down at unexpected moments, it just might go sideways too, and any direction is game.

Oh, and I suppose I should mention, whenever I'm going somewhere out there, it's usually to carry something back, so I'm a pound or 3 or 5 or 10 heavier, depending on what I went to get. That means that just because some spots might have held me up on going one direction, doesn't mean that same spot will hold you up on the way back.

So, patience is walking - a necessity. Are you patient enough?

Civilization -Taking it for Granted

Every once in a while I have simply got to rant a little about civilization. There's a reason I live out in the wilderness. Yeah, it's harder to live there in a way. Things aren't quite as convenient as they are in town, but really, it's only hard to get used to at first, it's most assuredly not hard once you've passed that hurdle.

I arrived here in Eagle River Saturday before last and over the last week plus I have been monopolizing my son's time driving me around all over the place to find this and that wherever it may be until I finally got almost everything on my list. It's been so crazy (in a way) I haven't really had much of a chance to just look around.

All in all, Eagle River is a nice little town. My last experience with spending any time in town was when I went up to Fairbanks to get my book published. You can find my spring rant here. I don't know, maybe it's because of all the snow this year. Fresh snow always makes things look prettier. All the yuck generally drifts to the surface as the snow melts.

Speaking of 'all the snow', for some time now, it's been all over the news to the point of even being a point in local politics. There's not enough money to pay the guys that plow the streets and there's nowhere to dump all the snow anyway. I went for a little walk today all by myself and discovered a brand new layer of snow all over everything. Everything except the roads, streets and lanes are all pretty and white again.

Two or three inches of new snow is certainly no obstacle to walk through, but it got me to thinking. In my little half hour jaunt I saw absolutely no one outside on this really nice day shoveling or even sweeping the snow off of any sidewalks. Okay so some of my chosen path was across parking lots or maybe down streets that didn't go in front of any shops, but still. If everyone is so concerned with all the snow or the snow removal, why isn't anyone out there contributing their two cents worth? Once was the day when shop owners were outside keeping the front of their store clean and neat, not to mention chatting with passers by. It was a far more basic concept than keeping the sidewalk clean - friends will go shopping at stores run by people they know and like. Where has that feeling gone? Poof, with the explosion of civilization, this was lost and we didn't even know it was missing.

But I digress. Back to your two cents. If everyone is so concerned with all this snow being hazardous, why isn't anyone out there shoveling off the sidewalks? It wouldn't take much. And not to toss it off onto the street either. Snow from the sidewalks tossed up on the lawn isn't going to hurt it much, whereas they are always spreading salted gravel or some chemical to melt the snow onto the streets. Who knows what that does to the lawn, and I won't even mention getting all that gravel out of the grass once the snow has melted.

The plows will come by and scrape snow and ice off the street onto the sidewalks and then they will go by again and scrape that off further onto the yards. They can get that stuff hauled off from the bigger streets but not everywhere. At least that's what I see everywhere I've been. And since there has been really quite a lot of snow this year, rather large piles of snow has developed in some rather dangerous locations forcing drivers pulling out of some lane or parking lot to edge out a little far in order to see if someone is coming. Yeah, most everyone has been either the person pulling out of the parking lot or the person they're trying to look for, so everyone watches for this, but it's no guarantee. My son just had his car totaled because someone pulled out right into the side of his car and shoved it into a meridian pole. The pole was taken completely out and my son's car was mushed in on both sides. Fortunately, no one was injured. Also fortunately my son had a vehicle to fall back on so he can still get to work.

Ach, I've digressed again. Rants can be that way, you know. The entire point of this is, if everyone contributed their two cents either to creating some emergency fund (and I'm not talking about a tax) to make it possible to pay the over time or hire more guys to plow the streets, or simply get out there and do a little shoveling themselves, especially in bad places like mentioned above (we all know where those places are), wouldn't things be just a little better? Wouldn't everyone who has to slog through a few inches of snow to get to wherever they're going be just a little happier? Ah but I suppose if things were a little more walk-friendly, people would drive less and therefore spend less money on gas, and we can't have that, now, can we. Gas prices are climbing again and yet I do believe I heard somewhere that the price of oil is not going up. Hmmm I better stop. I've made my point for this post. I really shouldn't digress too often. So get out there once in a while and do a little work yourself rather than complain that the other guy isn't doing it good enough or soon enough or often enough. Go for a walk to the store and buy yourself a soda as a reward. Pick up a piece of trash from the street and get it to a trash can. I did. You can do it too. Wave at your neighbor while you're at it; you might discover he's a pretty nice guy.

Magic House

My dog, Gizmo, is convinced our house is magical. She's really pretty good at catching small bits of food such as popcorn tossed at her, but you have to get her attention so she can see the toss. However, if it manages to hit the floor, it didn't fall to the floor, it popped up out of the floor. When the floor pops, she simply has to watch that spot just in case it pops again. Sometimes it does you know, though never in the same spot. She has been known to stare at a certain part of the floor for hours or until she gets bored and falls asleep.

That's not all this house does. Every once in a while it eats me up and surely it spits me outside somewhere, though she has never been successful at finding me out there. I'll go back to the bedroom and disappear into the bed for a nap. She'll then pace the house looking for me in the bedroom and then asking to go outside and look there. Then she'll come back in and look in the bedroom again and then back out. Around and around, whining and worrying until I get up from my nap. Only then will she settle down.

There is of course no way to know what she's actually thinking. Sometimes I wish I could, especially at times like these.

The Sounds of Silence

The Sounds of Silence by Simon & Garfunkel

Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
'Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

"Fools", said I, "You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you"
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed
In the wells of silence

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls"
And whispered in the sounds of silence

You know how sometimes a song just springs up in your brain and sticks there? Well this one did that to me today as I was walking down to the boats to get a can of gas. Though the lyrics don't really fit the circumstances, the title sure does. Silence. The sounds of silence was everywhere. Not a peep. Not a squeak. Not a rustle.

When I go on these walks, I like to stop and just listen and look around from time to time. I do, after all, like my life and my surroundings. Most times there's the chitter of little birds as they fluttered from tree to tree in search of seed pods waiting to drop next summer, or those that didn't drop last summer.

The only sound I heard was the far-away hum of some sort of motor. It might have been a snowmachine, or a generator; it was too far away to tell - almost too far away to hear at all. I might not have noticed at all if it weren't so quiet otherwise.

Though I didn't see or hear anything, I did see a few tracks. A martin came down from the rough vicinity of the guest cabin, ran along the trail for a few yards and then was off further east. Then I saw moose tracks. Sometime yesterday or last night, he came up the trail and then circled around the edge of our yard, eating the small tree branches and whatever brush tips he could find, before wondering on, also in an easterly direction. Who knows how long either of them kept to that direction. Down at the boats, an ermine made lacy loops along the bank in search of a route down onto the river. It looked rather comical; I wish I could have seen him.

I do love my walks and taking in my world, but I do wish it would warm up a little. Or maybe I should say, I wish it would warm up a little more. I woke up to -28F (-34C). It was -11F (-24C) when I went for my walk and that was the heat of the day. For us to get a runway packed, it would be really nice if it would warm up above 0F for a few days. If this is Global Warming, I think someone needs to go back to the drawing board.