Today, I had to unlearn everything I know about snow globes.
The saving grace about this part of Alaska is that it is so infrequently windy. The lack of strong wind keeps the tree branches laden with snow weeks after a snowfall (which is beautiful), and also slows the rate at which I am (surely, most definitely, eventually) perishing of hypothermia. Sometimes, breezes blow around sunset (or, what would be recognizable as breezes were they 50ยบ warmer), but strong gales I seldom see.
This morning, I heard a deep, swooping murmur outside my window. This window rests directly behind the head of my bed; it is the only one in my bedroom, and it is a window I fear and respect. This thin sliver of glass protects me, just barely, from the harsh and cruel Alaskan midwinter that rages ravenously outside the walls of this house like a churning sea lapping hungrily at the porthole of a rickety ship. I keep my drapes closed at all times, because if they are open even a crack, the ghost of winter slithers invisibly through the transparent glass and haunts me with chilly goosebumps. When I heard the sound this morning, it came to me without a picture. It sounded like a cloudburst. It sounded like the rumble of sudden rainfall as I often knew it in Portland, when the house sounds like it's bracing itself against the storm. I parted the drapes, peeked outside... and saw wind! Treetops were bouncing against each other as armfuls of snow were swooped off their branches. Gusts swept along the eaves of the house, sucking powder off the roof. The wind whisked the icy crystals into the air, and against the pure, thin winter sun, flurries of glittering confetti cartwheeled up and down and side-to-side in the frantic wind. The backyard looked exactly like a shaken snow globe.
Alaska continues to prove itself an alternate reality.
Last Sunday, I went for the first time to the Eagle River Nature Center. Before Sunday, I thought I had a pretty good grasp on "nature centers." Nature centers are pleasant but tame. Nature centers ask you to stay on the path and not harm the native flora. Nature centers are where non-outdoorsy types go to "hike."
Clearly, I had never been to a nature center in Alaska.
The Eagle River Nature Center has many paths that are maintained to various degrees. It contains a portion of the original Iditarod dogsled race trail. Its network of trails go through forest and meadow, through marsh and stream and hill and valley. Visitors are not required to stay on the trail. Visitors are not required to do much but survive, not be idiots, and not eat the berries when they're in season. Hell, there are yurts-for-rent by the river where signs essentially say, "You want firewood? Go gather it yourself in the woods." The Eagle River Nature Center is a vast, frolic-at-your-own-risk playground, and it's my new favorite place in the whole greater Anchorage area. Californians, picture Joshua Tree, but smaller and in Middle Earth. It's like that.
The drive TO the nature center is cartoonishly flawless enough...
...But then the view from the trail hits like a snow globe to the face.
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| Bam. |
There are delicate birch and aspen branches, frosted with snow, forming a canopy over the trail.
There is a partially frozen river flowing intrepidly through a crystalline marshland; leaning over the boardwalk to stare into the glass-clear water at the river bottom, I saw hardy tufts of green, growing vegetation with fronds waving gently in the current of the arctic water.
I saw what was clearly a set piece for an elaborate production of The Nutcracker Ballet; I can't be expected to believe that this exists in nature.
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| Waltz of the Snowflakes |
I found a new winter dwelling to live in with my godson.
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| It's feasible. |
And when I got back to the car, I saw a whole bunch of something I had hoped not to see for another 20 years:
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| No makeup, no mercy |
*James Bond is the second most beautiful killer of them all.
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