There are signs. The fireweed is in bloom. The morning sky is gray and pink. It begins to rain.
Red sky in morning -
It works like this: when the purple blossoms start at the bottom of the fireweed stalk, denizens of the north know summer is still in full swing. When the tips of the fireweed turn deep purple. Everything prepares for change.
The salmon are running. Having spawned they're zombies, literally decaying while they swim. They're no good to eat unless you're a bear. Then you reach into a stream, pull one out, take a couple bites, and toss it aside. The riverbanks smell like garbage dumps. They're thick with decaying fish.
The humpbacks are bubble-net fishing. They swim circles around schools of herring, surrounding the fish in a cylinder of cavitation that traps them as surely as a seine net. Then they take turns rising up through the bubble tube, mouths open, swallowing fish by the hundreds.
The sun rises at five AM now. It sets by nine.
The air smells like ice.
But if you ride a bike back there for a couple hours you'll be passed by automobiles and hikers. Lots of other bikers. It's rare to spend more than an hour there without seeing someone. You're really not alone.
It took me a couple years mountain biking back there before I became entirely comfortable in that relatively desolate space. It took a long time for me to become comfortable not hearing anything except the occasional sound of a passing plane, crickets, and birds. Coming from the city, my security blanket was the ready availability of stuff: electric power, internal combustion engines, internet storefronts, 7-Eleven clerks for whom English was a fourth language.
Then I moved to Alaska. It's easy to be close to the earth here. Lots of times there's nobody around but you and the planet.
I bicycled up a trail this weekend. The hill wasn't nearly as steep as my familiar hill in Los Gatos, but it was muddy and full of obstacles. Roots and rocks. When I got to the top after four miles of what would hardly be called a climb in California, I turned to look from where I had come.
There was nobody there. Only the ocean. The ice. A couple thousand miles of air between me and a tiny place called Okmok, which is still not as far as you can go and still be in Alaska, but so far from anywhere the department of tourism has to highlight the lichen-watching season among the primary reasons for visiting.
I remembered California, then. I remembered Starbucks and sunshine and my house in the suburbs. Traffic jams and radio stations across the dial.
I remembered my children.
It occurred to me that we are so alone in space, and so close in heart.
We walk through one. But we should always live in the other.
I have to live in the other.
You can be anywhere, and never be alone.
"Well," said my native co-worker, "In Juneau it's rude to get involved with someone else's business. And if you stole the car, it's not like you could actually drive it anywhere."
He was referring to the fact that you could drive the entire length of every road in the Juneau area and hardly put 80 miles on your car, even accounting for doubling back to get out of dead ends.
When I got home that night I mentioned to my landlord that it was so different from California, this unabashed trusting in humanity to leave a car running while you bolt into the grocery for a gallon of milk.
She said, "Cars do get stolen here. Usually, it's kids, though."
"Kids?"
"Just kids. They usually drive into something or get stuck in the mud. The owner almost always gets his car back."
I got the same response from a friend when I mentioned that nobody locks anything in Juneau. Not their car doors (God forbid, they'd never get back into them to shut them off), not their homes, not their garages or sheds. One suspects there's no need for a vault at the bank.
"Oh, there's no theft," he said. "Only time something will get stolen is when school's out. It's kids."
"Kids. Like stealing your car stereo, or maybe your laptop."
"Yeah. But they always catch them."
In California, most theft is caused by people of the age we'd say branded them as "kids". Only in California, we also call them hoodlums or criminals or miscreants. We lock our homes, install alarms, buy and feed vicious guard dogs to protect our stuff from kids. An MSNBC special I saw yesterday said most murders are committed by people under the age of twenty.
The office manager at the place I consult has had his truck stolen. It was taken on a joyride and dumped in the Gasteaneau Channel. They fished it out with a crane and declared it totalled. He'd had his briefcase inside at the time. Lost his laptop and all of his paperwork.
"It was just kids," he said. There was no anger. No need for retribution. He doesn't know if they ever caught the ones who took his truck. Doesn't care.
For all anyone would care to know, there's no crime in Juneau. No reports of grand-theft auto. No street gang violence. No jail overcrowding. Read the police blotter: cat in tree. Husband arguing with wife, throws bric-a-brac cabinet out the back door. Man cited for public drunkenness on Broad Street. Taken to the tank to dry out. Man shoots at bear within city limits. Given ticket. Couple caught fishing without license. Cited and fined.
Car stolen by juveniles, recovered.
"How come nobody cares about the church?"
"Why do you say that?"
"Well, why isn't the guy all over the newspaper and television so we can revile him as the slime-eating jellyfish-spined cur he is?"
"Wait. Are we talking about the same thing? I think he got drunk, or something."
See, in Alaska there's a long history of people getting liquored up and burning down irreplacable monuments. And anyway, it was only a 100-year old church.
Or something.
"Well, I'm from California but I'm in Juneau, now."
"Juneau. Ohmygawd."
"Uh oh. Something I should know about Juneau?"
"Well, it's just the weather. I was in Juneau once. I had to get out. The rain drove me crazy."
I said, "Let me get this straight: you live in a place where if you leave your dog out too long it will either die of hypoxia, heat stroke, hypothermia, or blood loss, and you think rain is a problem?"
No. Actually, I didn't say that.
Because I intend to get paid by my employer I said, "Well, heh. Yes, we do get a bit of rain."
I wonder if they have any trouble with their kids up there.