Sitkoh Bay & Lake Eva
Rainforest schmainforest – another bluebird day in green coastal Alaska, and though we know it rains here or is supposed to rain here and has probably rained in the past and will again in the future, somebody turned a valve or pulled the plug and sent the dour gray clouds down to Seattle to leave us anointed with sunshine and warmth, the spokes of ethereal light filtering through a great canopy of spruce and hemlock as we ambled, sashayed, moseyed, trundled and otherwise made our way along another trail flanked by mosses and ferns and a thousand designs in nature, the greatest show on Earth. Some among us walked quickly to get exercise. Others spent as much time on our hands and knees as on our feet, making photographs, for that’s what we do now, we make photos rather than take them, given the instruction we’ve received and the distance we’ve traveled down the “road of creativity” and the “art of seeing.”
We watched a young brown bear swim across Florence Bay, then watched a humpback whale breach more than a dozen times, then made a final landing to walk the new Lake Eva Trail before taking our red and yellow kayaks for a final spin in a lagoon and up a river where salmon darted below and eagles perched above in their shoreline ramparts.
Are we supposed to go home now? Supposed to return to who we used to be? Impossible. Alaska has charmed and corrupted us with its tonic of wildness and geography of hope, its sword in the stone, our hands fitted to it and unable to fully let go. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in 1851, the same year Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was published as an indictment of modern man treating the world’s oceans like bottomless baskets. How refreshing to see people today coming to see wild nature not as a commodity to harvest but as a treasure to celebrate and save so others tomorrow will see it as we have, and be the beneficiaries of the same magic and gifts, the same sunshine, hope and rain, if indeed it does rain here. We’ve heard that it does. Maybe tomorrow.
