Posts Tagged ‘Alaska’

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

June 30, 2009

Busy days in the garden and greenhouse.  After days of rain clouds, we have blue sky again.  The horses are so bored by rainy weather, they have chewed a post on the pass-through between them nearly through.  At night I hear Mattie chewing at it, rattling the metal fence attached to in in a rhythmic clanging.  Sam eggs her on.

Now it’s back to the garden and back to riding.

Here’s a poem from a few weeks ago:

——-

Visiting Sue Dean’s Garden


Irony is a rock garden:

light filters through petals,

the sky-colored poppy,

the deep pink fireweed,

a rose, an iris, the extravagant

plumes of fern—all glow

in June sun, against the cool

chocolate planes of quarried

rock. You point

here and there, to small plants

growing, tiny flecks of yellow,

or white, or pale blue flowers,

name them and the ones

who gave them to you.

Among them, a pond

that rocks outline lies still.

An insect floats there; algae

spreads. The plants sprawl out:

years of re-blooming, covering

the rough edges of rock.

You dream as you walk,

and speak of dreams.

We could sit here all day,

listening to the hum and buzz

of insects exploring sweet

caves, flowers, letting sun

fall on our arms as we bend

to pull out what we don’t

desire, tuck what we do

into dirt.

We slice fruit, nibble cheese,

turn compost, hope

for more and more to bloom

to rise from what hard things

rocks are, what nourishes

from decay.

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Poetry Challenge 23

June 17, 2009

Solstice

As the days here lengthen to an extreme, each hour of the day has a different kind of light, from the brilliant light of mid-day to the pastel and silver light of the long dusky evenings.

Write a poem starting with some effect of light you notice right now where you are.  Notice how light affects the plants and rocks and clouds.  How does it affect animals, people, you? And what else?

———————————————

Here’s a response from Glow at Beyond Ester:

the mercury light
keeps me awake since May.
Much happens at night that I witness.
All other humans sleep
but the devil light keeps sleep at bay
so I become Witness of What Occurs
cats, drowse all night
dogs snore and twitch
voles slither among the weeds
male moose, pale brown withers
slinks through the willows
mistaken for a grizzly
until his antlers startle recognition.
mama moose and 3 week calf
slumbering among the bluebells
even the dogs missed them
I, alone, witnessed the fidgeting nursing
the aggressive butting of the calf to its mom’s teats
the mercury light warming towards dawn
to leak goldeness on the calf so that she shone
like an angel
raven swooped low to snatch a young squirrel
still living, unaware of impending doom
its tail still curled, but fruitless now
mosquito, after mosquito, after mosquito
snared in the window spider’s web
reduced to dry shells within seconds
after their twitching ends.
Life, birth, death, bones, dust.
Summer light arrives, soon to leave us
aching for more time
aching for less light
fruitless wishes. Predictable humans
with their love of warmth, but
need for the dark.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

June 8, 2009

Late afternoon. I’m on the deck surrounded by packs of petunias, pansies, brachycomes, lobelia, all waiting to be clustered together in pots to bloom through our short summer. I’m sitting in the shade of a market umbrella—the large kind found at outdoor restaurants, and it casts the only shade on the deck till the sun slips behind the hill and behind the house. The dog is stretched out flat on the deck, lying as still as he can, hot even in his recently shorn coat. Sam and Mattie, out in the corral, linger by the water tank, feinting at each other with their noses in a game of water tank keep-away.

The thermometer on the post of the hay barn read 95 degrees today, though the thermometer in the shade under the deck read 75. This is about as hot as it gets here, and it always takes us by surprise. We drag a bit, wait for the cool of evening as the sun dips nearer the horizon, knowing that at this time of year, there will be hours of silvery light to come.

Last night, I couldn’t sleep. The house was quiet, but the sky had the soft luminous quality of near dusk—a rare time elsewhere, romantic, even, in its briefness. Here, this light stretches on into the night, from 10pm till 3 or 4 am, when we’re back to regular daylight again. Here, below the Arctic Circle, the sun dips beneath the horizon for a few hours even at solstice, but it’s only a dimming of the light, like the subtle dimming of light caused by a solar eclipse. The air cools, the trees exhale faint moisture into the evening. The scent of flowers—and gardeners here are crazy for flowers—lingers in the evening, mingling with the smell of barbecue and fish smokers.

This place looks so much different than it did a month ago, right after snow melt and river break up. The trees are thickly leaved—deep green and shiny. The cottonwoods release their fluffy seeds into the air, floating on the breeze like big soft snowflakes. Except for the lack of humidity, it feels s almost tropical. I always feel like we’ve just slipped a bit geographically—as if, for the summer months, Alaska really is in the spot reserved for it on some maps—off the coast of California.

Now, a bit of breeze, the first cool of evening. The ground, though warmer now, enough so that we can grow our gardens, still harbors the remnant coolness of winter. Even the manure pile, which my gardener friends have been carting off for compost and soil amendment, has a wedge of snow or ice at the base of it. So when the sun slips behind the hill or the sky clouds over, we feel the chill in the air, the reminder that we still live in the north and, manic as we are with light right now, we never forget that these days will pass soon.

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The Post of Don Sam Incognito

June 1, 2009

The other day, I met a woman walking her dog and baby stroller along our road. They stopped to let the dog, a curly coated Chesapeake, play with Jeter.

“So you own the white horse?” she asked. “My daughter thinks he’s a magical horse.”

“That’s Sam,” I said, “and he is a magical horse.”

Sam and Mattie came through the winter in fine form and are now sleek coated and getting some muscle definition—at least Sam is. After a long stretch of clicker training, both horses seem to have responded in ways I hoped them to—especially Sam. He hasn’t been head butting—except for the occasional slip up—and he knows the command “stand” and remembers to use his lips, not his teeth to take a treat. Mattie has her ears up more, but she and I need to go back to the clicker now that I’m saddling and mounting—both things she has lots of anxiety about.

Life is great for Sam, however, since he met Casey, who is part of a campus horse club. She’s an experienced rider without a horse and she’s coming out twice a week to work with and ride Sam. It’s great to see him respond to her. He’s bonded with her quickly—I have to remind him that I’m his person, too, sometimes—and he comes up to her and behaves like a gentleman for her, mostly. Because she’s willing to come twice a week to ride him, I can concentrate on solving some long standing issues with Mattie, including mounting and saddling.

It’s summer, summer, summer. The days are warm, the horses gleam in the corral, the garden is slowly getting planted on schedule (today’s our last frost date, so traditional planting day). Except for the earthquakes and tremors we’ve been experiencing the past few days, this is the best time of year here or anywhere.

Need to get back to the greenhouse, now.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

May 21, 2009

Spring? Here in the Interior we leap from winter to summer with a brief period of bleak brown and gray—-the soggy earth and the quickly melting snow—-in between. In the past three days the leaves have gone from tiny newly furled lemon-lime leaflets to shiny dark-green leaves. The woods are full of their flashing, the twittering of birds–not the electronic kind, but electric with the urgency and joy of mating.

After two weeks of Master Gardener class, I’m now ready to put the garden in, and, like every year, I feel three weeks behind, though we’re still a week and a half away from our traditional planting date, June 1. In the greenhouse, the tomato plants are growing sturdy stems and richly green leaves. The peppers are coming along, as are the broccoli, kale, eggplants. It’s yummy to write this, but they are all still tiny green leaves with a long way and much potential for misfortune to come before the yummy time actually comes.

I’m still starting seeds in the greenhouse—-lettuce, beans, things I could plant outside–but I’m trying to cheat the season and the potential for a late frost by planting them under the protection of the fiberglass roof. I also have flower sets I bought from a local grower, so the greenhouse is sweet with the smell of petunias and heliotrope.

This is an energetic time of year, fueled by the intensity of long sunlight. Thinking back to the dreamy slow winter days when I started this blog, it’s clear how the seasons in the Interior affect the psyche. In the winter, I’m introspective, writing in a near dream state, engaged with the senses in an inward way. Now, on the verge of summer, I’m so active—-gardening, riding, dancing—-that I fall asleep exhausted and wake a bit stiff (why I’m sitting and writing right now), then head out to do more digging, raking, brushing, saddling, riding, etc.

Last night, driving home near midnight, I was struck by the silvery light everywhere. I nearly wrote, “in the sky” but, like the light that radiates off the snow in winter, summer evening light seems to come out of the land itself, not from the sky. We are in the best time of year, two full months of these “white nights” when light lingers after the sun has slipped briefly behind the hills. It’s a long twilight that lasts for hours before slowly brightening into morning and sunlight again. On Solstice, the sun will dip below the horizon for three hours, but the light stays strong enough that we have our Midnight Sun baseball game every year from 10pm to whenever with no artificial lights, even when clouds complicate matters. Some years, when it’s a well-matched game going into extra innings, we sit in the stands watching as the sun lifts back up from the hills again, around 2am. We’re tired the next day—-if it’s a work day, everyone drags through it—-but happy to have seen something wonderful.

This time of year, I wouldn’t trade Alaska for any other state I’ve ever lived in—-and they all have their good qualities. But now, in all this sun we feel purged of the discontent that built up like a sludge in our hearts through the winter. The blood thins a bit in the warmth and runs more quickly. The skin absorbs and processes vitamin D—-they say it contributes to contentment. We grow our gardens and eat everything fresh we can get our hands on.

Jeter the dog sleeps by the open door to the deck in his newly shaved summer coat. The warblers call to each other. There’s a flute on the radio—-maybe Mozart—-and a slight breeze plays across the keys of the computer. All’s well here.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

May 7, 2009

Things That Go Fast

This past week, for one. Last Friday, after a dance class taught by my dancer son, Ira, we all sat out on the deck at the Pump House swatting early season mosquitoes and watching the Chena River rush past. There were small ice floes, some just flat sheets of ice, some upended pieces that had once been frozen to river mud, now showing the bottom, tinged with red-orange silt and cratered from air pockets trapped there. A few ice sheets had ice chunks sitting on top of them where they had split off of another ice sheet and been shoved one atop the other when the river ice upstream had broken up. The river had been nearly still just the day before, the water rising where it had backed up from ice jams down river.

“The ice must have gone out in Nenana,” I said. We watched branches and more ice chunks float by fast. Then, upstream, we noticed something black, triangular, bobbing at intervals, and moving more slowly than the rest. From time to time it would rise from the river as if to see where it was going, then sink back to a low profile. As it got closer, we could see that it was the corner of a flat object, possibly a shed roof, floating with the current but trailing some part that created drag—or maybe reached the river bottom—and caused the whole thing to lift up occasionally. We watched it for a long time, a slow, unseasonably warm evening beside a fast river.

When we got home, we discovered that the ice had gone out in Nenana at about that time, freeing the Tanana and its tributary, the Chena and flushing the Interior of ice, dead wood, shed roofs, and other detritus that had ended up near the riverbanks. It’s so unusual for the ice to go out at night that only two people had chosen that time and will split the pot. Other years, dozens of people have split the pot, so this was a good year for the winners.

And the next day, another fast thing, Mine That Bird, an unknown horse who came from the back of the pack where, it turns out, he was just cooling his heels, biding his time, waiting for the cue from jockey Calvin Borel to dash past all the tiring favorites and run away with the race. I watched the race on a grainy screen at the Exhibit Hall in the Center for the Arts where horse people were gathered for a tack swap. Next to me, a 10-year-old girl, who knew all the details of her favorite horse and several others and who sat riveted during the race.

Friends who ask me about my feelings about horse racing expect me to talk about abuse or illegal substances, but I’m a bit goofy about watching Thoroughbreds run. They are lean, fit, high-strung horses–teenagers, really–and they love to run. Young colts in the wild race and play together; horse racing takes advantage of this impulse. And horses are honest—to see them stretched out running so fast just because they can—it makes me smile. The Kentucky Derby is all about potential. These horses are growing so fast at three years old that they will be completely different horses in a couple weeks for the Preakness, and even more different—some of them even taller—by the time the Belmont Stakes rolls around. I like to watch them all. They send me back to Mattie and Sam, determined to work through our stuck places and get them and me fit for the riding season. They remind me that anything is possible and to enjoy the moments of summer (and winter, but that’s another subject) as fully as I possibly can. The excitement of the crowd reminds me that it’s time to crawl out of my winter hole and share these moments with my friends.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

April 29, 2009

Finally warm weather. The snow is mostly gone, though still piled in a ridge where it slid off the roof over the past month, and still spread in shady spots in the woods. The corral is now mostly wet sand, boggy in spots where water is still draining off the hillside above, and pocked with the holes Mattie and Sam’s hooves have made when it was softer. Today I examined what had looked like a big patch of unmelted snow and discovered it was Sam’s white winter coat spread out in a spot where he had been rolling.

The tomatoes are four inches high and in their flats in the greenhouse. Soon I’ll be transplanting them into larger pots, one stage away from their final pots–square kitty litter containers, good for saving space in a small greenhouse. I have lettuce in a pot for the deck and a pot of basil I couldn’t resist planting. The deck is warm, the sky is blue, the geese and cranes are staging for their last push north to the nesting grounds. Spring, really, finally.

For those of you who associate spring and flowers, however, spring here is a grimy pause before the bursting-forth of summer. The ground is still soggy, not quite melted below the surface. The trees are still mere sticks, except for the willow catkins or pussywillows, the first hint of what is to come. The roads are muddy and flooded in spots. Everything is brown and gray without the relief of snow. The migrating birds passing overhead: geese, cranes, swans, ducks-are what we have instead of daffodils and crocuses.

Downriver, the tripod still rests in ice, though there are leads in the river and the ice is too soft to walk out on now. If this warming trend holds till Saturday, the ice will go out in Nenana and someone will win a share in the Nenana Ice Classic.

This year, again, proves that there is no predicting spring here in the Interior. When we bought our Ice Classic tickets April 5, only three weeks ago, we were all complaining about what a cold spring it had been. It seemed foolish to predict breakup before May 1. Now, an early ticket just may be a winner. It could be going out now while I write this.

We’re all waiting. Once the ice is gone, our brief spring will start and go. In another week it will be early summer, with bluebells and wild roses, pasque flowers, robins and thrushes, and all the wonderful work of gardening, conditioning and riding horses, and sitting on the deck with friends into the long pale night.

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The Post of Don Sam Incognito

April 23, 2009

Not much to report on the training scene right now as we wait for the corral to clear of packed ice and snow melt. Sam and Mattie are responding to the clicker training, but I’m not sure I’ve been trained well enough to make it stick at this point. When I click the clicker, Sam arches his neck down, knowing that a treat will follow. But he’s so smart and has been able to push people around for so long, that he eventually tries to get around me to get the treat without the work.

I spent some time on You Tube the other night watching videos of Andalusians doing high school tricks and movements. These were Mexican Andalusians, mostly, broad-backed, high strung, athletic. I watched the passage and piaffe to see what the riders did with their aids and whips. Some of the riders weren’t trying to be subtle, so I could see how they shifted their weight at each step and even cued the horses’ shoulders during the Spanish Walk. One horse crouched down in piaffe to launch into cabriole, leaping up and kicking his hind legs straight behind him.

I watched horses at liberty and under saddle; some were Spanish, some French, some German. Many of them did tricks, as well, bowing, lying down with the rider then getting up again. None of this is usual dressage arena fare, but it gave me some ideas of how Sam may have been trained at one point and why he’s so excitable about being asked to work.

Today, I decided to get back to working with them, despite the moonscape quality of the corral. Both horses are a bit too fat right now, in spite of my care in how much hay they get at each feeding. I’ve decided that the hay–from two different growers–has two different levels of sugar content. I’m feeding mostly from one side of the hay barn now, trying to empty out that bay so I can clean under the pallets and fill it up again with the first cutting of summer. But they’re doing too well on it, and now we need to cut back a bit and step up the exercise a bit.

Which brings me to today. Monday, I was in the corral with Sam trying to scrape some of the manure layer off the packed snow/ice layer. It was a lovely warm afternoon, and Sam wanted to play gelding games with me. I wanted him to be a cuddly horse, one that I could lean against, forehead to forehead, as I had once done with my childhood horse, Bambi. Sam is a trickster, and I knew better, but I was off my guard, and busy with the rake and shovel. He came over and put his face near mine and swung it toward me as I moved, catching me on the mouth. I got a split lip and more determination to follow through with the clicker work. I’ve gotten too casual with it.

Today, I had him on a lead rope, standing in the middle of the corral. I had the clicker and gave the command, “Stand” and clicked and treated only when he stood still with his head straight in front of him and not at my pocket or near my face. He tried backing up–no treat. He tried holding his head sideways the way I taught him to at the command, “Wait”–no treat. Eventually he got it, though it’s still a pose for him.

I managed to get piles of white hair out of his winter coat using the shedding blade and got him to stand untied while I picked his feet–even the hind, which he likes to feint cow-kick when I go to pick them up. After we did this, I tacked him up in longe gear: a nylon surcingle, cavesson, a longeing headstall and bit, sidereins. We’ve gotten a bit stuck in our longeing, something he used to do like a champ. Now he just wants to circle his hindquarters around to face me. I know I’ve done something to give him this idea, but don’t know what.

Instead of longeing, and in spite of being all tacked up, I just walked him around the corral with my hand on his neck, companionable, but maintaining the space between us. When we did this, he seemed relaxed and interested. When I tried backing off and moving him forward with the longe whip, he got the old doubtful look in his eye. So, I put the whip away and walked with him, but a little farther away, marking the space with a pointed finger rather than the longe whip. At one point he was far enough out on the line that he began to trot. He wouldn’t do this to the other side, but I decided that, given the ice and muck in the corral–not good conditions for going faster than a walk–that this was good enough. I ended the session by scratching him on the withers and down the groove in his back over his spine. He stool high headed, twisting his upper lip in pleasure. I don’t remember him liking to be scratched so much, but maybe he’s only now trusting me enough to let me find the spot. He was pretty shut down three years ago when he first came to us.

Then I worked with Mattie on “Ears up” and groomed her and worked with her at liberty–a trust exercise for her and for me. She didn’t trot, but walked well away from me at the pointing of the driving whip. Mattie is less of a puzzle to me because I know what she doesn’t know and she’s very clear–sometimes threateningly so–when she’s confused or worried about what I’m asking. Then I back off a little and try again in another way. In spite of this, she really does trust me and will let me lean against her and will rest her head on me in a way Sam won’t.

Lots of preliminary work, still, before the corral is in good enough shape to ride, but all in all, a good day with horses.

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Poetry Challenge 17

April 22, 2009

Now that spring is on its way here in the Interior, we’re watching for little changes that mean we’re really done with winter. Willow buds puff out into pussywillows; low spots in the road fill with water during the warm parts of the day; geese, cranes, and ducks flock in to feed and rest on Creamer’s Field, then straggle north to breed. The big, unmistakable change will be when the ice goes out on the river in Nenana and we learn who had the best guess–and a little more spending money for summer projects.

So write about the small changes that happen where you are that signify a larger change. It doesn’t have to be about spring, or not just about spring. Focus on the little things and let us read through to the big ones.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

April 20, 2009

Spring progresses here. As I sit at the kitchen table writing this, the sun warms my back. Behind me, by the large window, are four flats of tomato plants in small yogurt cups. Again, this year, I couldn’t resist planting all the seeds in the packet–a small forest of tomatoes.

Yesterday, we spent two hours in the corral, scraping up the manure that fell between snowstorms this winter, now a brown stew on packed and melting ice. Both Mattie and Sam have snow on at least half of each of their sections of corral, packed and grainy. Sam paws at the snow till he’s loosened the surface, then lies down and rolls, flipping from one side to another in his glee at the motion. Mattie rolls, too, then stands, shakes out snow and her shedding hair, then bucks or canters toward the fence to nip at Sam, who nips back, crow hops, clatters the metal fence panels, then trots away. Mostly, though, they doze in the sun, as if saving up its warmth against next winter.

The corral looks like a frozen moonscape–the brown stuff emerging through packed ice. Here and there, sand shows through, saturated with melt water that has nowhere to go till the frozen ground beneath it melts and can drain. In the woods above our house, the ground is still thick with snow, though at the top of the cut bank behind the house, wet loess is emerging. Shasta daisies that I’ve planted there over the years emerge from the snow, leaves already green–I don’t know how–and ready to begin the season. It will be June before they flower, though.

This is breakup in Interior Alaska. The roads are slick with melting snowpack. Where there’s exposed road, puddles form and potholes deepen. The first of the local greenhouses have opened–warm with sun and furnace air, moist with blooming plants. We’re six weeks away from planting time.

The river is still frozen, but getting soft in spots. On our drive toward town, we can see the Tanana arching through its slow bends and oxbows as it heads toward Nenana. Even last week, we could see people walking dogs on its white surface or clustering around a few ice fishing holes. But gray patches are forming–slush ice–and by the end of the week, no one will be walking there as channels of open water carve through the ice.

In Nenana, the tripod, whose movement marks the final moment of breakup for us, is still firmly lodged in ice. After the river clears in Fairbanks and all that swift water, ice, driftwood, and anything else that got left on the ice this winter rushes down stream, it will raise the water level in Nenana where the Tanana joins the Nenana River just above the tripod site set up each year for the Nenana Ice Classic. Each year, the tripod is set up just out from the historic railroad station, a long wire strung from it to a clock by the bank.  The wire will trip the clock, stopping it the moment the tripod moves downstream. We buy tickets with the day, hour, and minute we predict the clock will stop–a 50/50 game, with half going to the village of Nenana and half divided between everyone who has a lucky guess.

But breakup is tricky. Some years a channel forms where the tripod is and moves it just enough to trip the clock, though the rest of the river is iced in. Or the opposite–the river will clear, but the tripod is stuck in the one patch of ice that doesn’t move. One year, the tripod tipped nearly far enough to trip the clock–but not quite–then rested in that position for days. But eventually it all washes downstream and we go about the business of summer.

Here’s the Ice Classic site:  http://www.nenanaakiceclassic.com/

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