Editorial 9.4, April 2007, by Deirdre Helfferich Mud Season Ah, spring! that maddening season before the leaves are out (for you Lower 48ers, that’s known as summer up here in the Frozen North). It’s that time while the ground is making up its mind whether it wants to be a sticky, gloopy mess designed to trap tires, trip up pedestrians, and prepare gardeners for a nice rich bed of earth on their livingroom floor just in time for seed-starting, or become a hard-edged nightmare of weirdly textured terrain frozen from the soupy ground the day before. There’s plenty of light, and now we can all see the incredible layers of cat hair, dirty laundry, and doggy nose- and footprints caking every surface in the house. The houseflies are feeling it, too, buzzing around banging their heads on the windows and providing entertainment for the cats. And all that sunlight gives us northerners a surge of energy and completely irrational cheer, making us do silly things like prance around the yard in t-shirts and bare feet. It’s an energizing, frustrating time, when Alaskans are READY already for summertime activities, spring cleaning, getting OUT and about—but we’re not quite there yet. Just a couple more weeks. Long, long weeks. It’s also an unnerving time; the recent discovery of a corpse in the snow near Play ‘n’ Learn by a few children is not that unusual an event: spring is when the bodies come out. Sometimes those deceased aren’t buried under the snow; a certain Goldstreamer of my virtual acquaintance discovered to her horror that there were ungulate heads nailed up in the trees above where she routinely took the dog on its morning rounds. Apparently, neither she nor the dog ever looked up. (Why the heads are there and who stuck them up there remain unanswered questions.) Now that spring is here, the light and the relative warmth are allowing for both decomposition and a visual inspection of same. Ick. The first sign of spring in Alaska is a slight reddening of the hills: the alders are waking up. To me, the idea of the trees responding to the increase in light as a slow rousing from sleep is both a poetic metaphor and an inspiration. If the trees can wake up, so can I, and in the same way: slowly, gently, quietly. (I really hate waking up alarm-clock style. It just seems terribly unhealthy, rude to the physiology, and disrespectful of the dreaming mind.) Our springs, however, aren’t slow. Mud season seems agonizingly long, but it really only lasts a few weeks before the dust settles in. Leaf-out lasts maybe three days, tops. Most of spring is an interminable waiting, listening for the daily report on KUAC on the number of minutes gained, noting the infinitesimal changes in the clouds as they make their slow transition from winter to summer formations. There are other aspects of spring that are showing up in the less-than-romantic-looking poopscape that is showing through the scabrous snow. When I was a kid, I would run up to the parking lot at first opportunity each spring, stomp about in my mud boots and splash with gusto, inevitably taking my boots off just to feel the squish of the ice-cold mud between my toes. I couldn’t handle the temperature for too long before it started feeling like knife cuts, but oh, it was so wonderful to be able to wear nothing on my feet, if only for a few moments! As soon as I could, I would discard my boots for the summer, only wearing shoes when absolutely forced to (read: when the grownups inSISted). I ran everywhere in bare feet. This, it turns out, was probably good for my immune system. In Alaska, we don’t have nearly the number of parasites to worry about as they do in the Contiguous United States (or didn’t, until things started getting warmer, Don Young’s traditional denials of climate change notwithstanding), so children can run around like that and their parents only have to worry about dog yards and muddy houses. So long as they don’t actually step right in the doggy doo, they’ll improve their health and resistance to future infection or allergy. Yet parts of mud season are beautiful, as evidenced by local photographer Doug Yates’ wonderful studies of bubbles and flotsam trapped in ice. Details of this sometimes-frozen, sometimes-mushy transitional spring world are elegant, sensuous, evocative, and lovely. The air is full of moisture, the pussy willows are starting to bloom, the light is richer. The other night, my husband and I were abruptly reminded of another aspect of early spring: a great horned owl was hooting right outside our back door, in a tree overlooking the yard. It’s courting season for owls, and the owl equivalent of a bouquet of roses is a fresh, tasty snowshoe hare or domestic cat. We made a quick count: four out of five present and whole. After a few nervous minutes of cat-calling and owl-hooting, our missing number finally returned—after the owl decided the humans were wrecking the romantic atmosphere and departed the scene. Ah, spring! | ||
 | | |
