So you think you want to live in Alaska? Well, go ahead. But try moving there sometime in January, in Juneau, when the Taku winds scream off the mountain and down Franklin Street at 100-plus miles an hour. I could say how fast they’ve been recorded but you wouldn’t believe it and I don’t either.
    My friend John who owns the Family Shoe Shop tells us the story of the developer who wanted to build a resort hotel above town not far from the massive glacier that extends north toward the Yukon Territory. The city engineers required him to measure the wind on the mountain above town. The gauge got stuck they say, and broke at 180 miles per hour and the project never advanced any further.
    Once the wind gets over 100 and the temperature gauge moves below 20 and keeps moving, you’re not much concerned with those details while trying to move on top of glare ice from point A to point B, or to get from your vehicle to your front door. Anyway, you have no business being outside anyway.
    I remember waking up one January morning in the Glacier View trailer park and our neighbor’s 70-foot mobile home had been blown a dozen feet off its mountings during the night. I could see plumbing lines hanging embarrassingly off into nowhere, water intake and exit lines dangling loose as a tree branch in November. At least the whole structure hadn’t blown over.
    Our son Omar’s seven-year-old friend, Casey Carpenter, lived in the mobile home with his parents. The Taku winds couldn’t care less that Casey’s dad was an elected state legislator from Fairbanks. Something about the scene reminded me of the Mongolian leader Genghis Khan. “Our roots,” he is claimed to have said, “are in the wind.”

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    That spring we move north to Haines. The natives call it Deshu, where the water meets the highway, between Glacier Bay National Monument and the Chilkoot Pass in Skagway.
    One afternoon, with the children in school, Lise and I walk along a little path from the house and sit on the soft, spongy groundcover that springs up so fast after the snow melts. I have the Russian balalaika that I bought in Ketchikan. As I’m practicing the three-stringed instrument and playing a song called “Dark Eyes,” we hear a rustling in the forest. I keep on playing as a young black bear, about 400 pounds, steps out of the forest and onto the path about 20 feet away, between us and the house.
    That wild animal stops for a moment and slowly turns its head toward us. I keep on playing the instrument and try not to miss a beat. I can’t be sure, but I think the creature might have swayed its massive head just slightly back and forth before moving on into the forest. I like to think the bear appreciated the music. In any case, it all happened so quickly, so flowing with the moment, and the bear really did seem to listen.

     Nathan Spooner 2006 ©   Used with permission of the author.

From Chapter 18 "Southeast Alaska Dreaming", Stories from Berkeley; Adventures in the Slow Lane, 2006.

For more on Stories from Berkeley please see: Nathan B. Spooner and Family Publishing

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Contents

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