Powerline run

The snow returned today. Geoff and I headed behind the house to get a few runs on our snowboards. We found a powerline run that was short but sweet; however, that did not change the fact that beneath five inches of fresh power was a rain-drenched layer of glare ice. On the way home a couple of kids called out to us from the hill. When we looked up, we saw them beckoning us toward a jump they were building, with the crest approaching the tops of their heads and an instant drop-off into a steep gully. It looked like a blast and would have been tempting if not for the whole certain death aspect. And my family thinks I'm not going to live through the winter.

This evening I took a backstage tour of the tallest building in Homer ... the Mariner Theatre at the high school. The production manager of our hometown Nutcracker ballet led me up the twisting staircase to the "deck," a full seven stories above the stage. Already a bit dizzy and disoriented from climbing those stairs, I stepped onto the cross-linked metal platform and, of course, looked down. I'm one of those vertigo people that tends to see long drops rush up at me ala, well, Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo." So I just froze in place, absolutely exposed with no hand railing on a bottomless, dangling floor. I must have looked absolutely stricken because the production manager said "I like to bring the little kids up here. They think they'll turn to Jello and slip through," he said. "It gives 'em a good scare." As I struggled to find my center of balance, I felt exactly like Jello, but I didn't say anything. Although the rest of the tour was a bit hazy after that, walking around on those narrow catwalks with my heart in my head and vice versa. And my family thinks I'm not going to live through the winter.

B4ITMELTS

Geoff and I went to a global warming presentation today. There was no earth-shattering information. Well, not in the metaphorical sense, anyway. Just the simple facts ... Alaska’s melting. The ranger from Kenai Fjords National Park didn’t want to get political at all. He just wanted to show us cool overlapped photos of glaciers that were there ... and then gone. While the guy’s speech tended to veer toward the glossy confusion of fifth-grade science, the graphics were intriguing: one hundred-foot walls of ice that just vanished into lush, green valleys. A continent’s worth of polar ice, melted into the sea. Thunderstorms and tornadoes in interior Alaska. The most interesting part was the time-lapse. Thirty years. That’s it. I’m starting the understand a tourism campaign that parodies Alaska’s license plate pitch: See Alaska, B4ITMELTS.

Maybe the presentation was more effective because it’s been raining continuously for two days. That’s not an anomaly in coastal Alaska in November, I’m told, but still. I grew up in the decade of CFC-free hair spray and Toyota Tercels, but despite taking and entire college course on global warming, I never thought I’d see any effects of it in my lifetime. But as long as I stay in Alaska, I may not have a choice.

'til November

It's mid-November, and the weather reflects it. A steady drizzle of rain hits the snow like acid, burrowing into the pockmarks and emerging in gray streams of slush on the city streets. Evening's coming and everything's gray, monotone, shadowless, as you're driving toward the Spit with a camera that only has one shot left on it. You're heading due south on the narrow strip of land, so you scarcely notice the sun slipping below the cloudline into the thin sliver of clear sky to the west. You don't have time to notice because the change is instantaneous anyway - as sudden as a camera flash, the distant shoreline erupts in a magnetic shade of turquoise you never even imagined existed in nature. It startles you so much that you pull over that second, like one of those finger-waving tourists that just spotted a the hindside of a bear, and you get out of your car, and take that one picture. Then, when you look at the image reflected on the tiny camera screen, washed of all its color and surprise, it almost breaks your heart, but not quite.