[Early season sunset, looking toward Seward]
—
Alaskan light takes getting used to. The summer solstice recently passed, so technically speaking the sun sets at 11:30 PM. But because it doesn’t go down far below the horizon, there are only a few hours that come anywhere close to approaching real dark. Even when I wake up at 2 am to go to the bathroom, I don’t need a headlamp to make it to the bathroom down the road.
The perpetual light can get disorienting. When I’m hanging out around around a fire and the sky’s as bright as it is in the late afternoon, it messes with my head. I think it’s 7 pm and glance down at my watch only to realize that it’s nearly midnight.
I need curtains to sleep and am only slowly adjusting to not using the light to judge when it’s time to hit the sack. It also makes it way more exciting to see a light impression of the moon any time of day. And waking up at 4 am for longer trips feels more natural when I don’t have to beat the sun out of bed. Plus being up that early promises a change of light that feels closer to sunrise. Even if its a more gradual shift than I’m used to, the softness of the light transformed from a daily miracle to a more rare occasion.
—
[Makeshift cabin curtain]
—
Just because we don’t get full dark, that doesn’t mean the sky doesn’t put on a good show on a regular basis. The weather here is shifty. Lots of foggy rain with shadows of mountains poking through the mist. Or dim sheeting rain that blocks all with only the softest, most diffuse light sifting through. Then a sunny weekend will show up out of nowhere and brings out the bright turquoise of the water. I get drunk on the sun. We all do.
—
[View from the watertaxi]
—
There’s a beautiful hike that takes off nearly from my back door. A short trail that follows a shallow ride through the forest before dropping to a beach with a wide alluvial fan with stunning views of Resurrection Bay. A guiding fact I talk about when we take people here in kayaks: the woods here are part of the largest rainforest in the world, extending all the way from Oregon up to here. Per inch, there’s more biomass in this biome than in the Amazon because of the moss—thick, green sphagnum moss everywhere I look, and a rich fuzz of ferns. There’s beautiful clump of them behind my cabin that have been steadily growing ever since the snow melted. I run my fingers through them on the way back from work. So unbelievably soft. Out in the woods, they tremble in time with the wind, casting complicated shadows against each other. On my days off, I’ll walk or run up the trail, then cut off into a clearing and find a seat. The ocean is visible through the trees. The wind and the light start playing against each other and everywhere is green, green, green.
—
[Hike mid-point]
—
Realizing I stole part of that last line from a poem I love, like twisting and pulling a leaf off a branch. Seamus Heaney, I guess, also sometimes got drunk on light:
Postscript
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
—
[A pretty day out on the water]
—
On a park trip the other day with clear skies, full sun and calm water all day, I couldn’t help but talk about what a beautiful day it was all day. “It’s so freaking pretty out!” I found myself saying over and over. It felt like a nervous tic, except the exclamation just kept bubbling up out of happiness. Luckily, my paddling partners seemed to understand the feeling.
The world seemed to be echoing the feeling back to us, too. Just as we were pulling up to our landing beach, we caught sight of a mama humpback and her calf. First just their rounded backs surfaced and then they leaped up out of the water—a full breach, one after the other. She seemed to be teaching her kid how to play. The perfect day to be a little extra, to leap out of the water for the sheer joy of it.
—
[Jumping for joy?]
—
I sometimes do a tug-of-war in my mind when I’m reading human feeling into non-human animals. Projecting my own sense of the world onto life forms that interact with their environment very differently can flatten out some of the magic in difference. But it also feels like limiting what I have in common with the world to say that weather might not creep into another animals mood. All of which is to say, what the hell, maybe the whales were stoked on the sunshine, too.
—
Rainbows seem more frequent here. I don’t know if that’s actually true—because of the water rain the air?—or it just seems that way because I’m spending a far greater percentage of my time outside. I always try to take a picture. It never looks as good. Sometimes scrolling back through my photo albums on my phone I encounter a weird shot. Huh, wonder why I took that one? Then I catch the telltale glint. A magic that can’t be easily captured on screen. It makes it better somehow. An experience you can’t flatten into a currency to be shared. You have to be there to witness the real magic.
—
[Moon jelly and me in guide mode]
—
Thinking about light always makes me think about photography. In high school, I took a photography workshop one summer. We built our own pinhole cameras out of boxes by covering a hole with a piece of electrical tape, pricking that with a needle and then covering the “pinhole” with another piece of tape. I could open the last tape cover to let the light in. We started in the darkest dark of a room sealed against all light to put a special piece of paper inside the box. It was coated in a substance that was sensitive to light, somehow involving silver. Then we closed the box and walked outside.
If you opened the eye of the camera light would trickle into the box and the sensitized aper recorded the pattern of bright and darksr. Close the opening, bring it back into the dark room, dip the paper in the right chemicals and you could fix the light impression there.
I remember my instructor telling me that you could also make a camera that was less about product and more about process. If you built a completely dark room with a tiny opening and stood inside, you could see an image of the world play out on the reverse wall. Like Plato’s cave, but upside down. If that isn’t magic, I don’t know what is.
—
When we’re out on the boats, I love reminding clients is to look down. It’s a special feature of kayaking in a fjord. The water is deep and clear and you are close to it. Along the edge, you can spot undulating ribbon seaweed and shined up sea stars under the water. Like the wind, the movement of the water takes things that seem static and pulls them into movement. On certain rocks, the eddying colors of various seaweeds is incandescent. It’s hard to look away.
—
[Seaweed just under the surface]
—
“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.” (Georgia O’Keefe)
—
At the end of a trip the other day, on a rocky beach with a glacier in the distance, I dove into the water. It’s cold enough that I came right back out, blood pumping, hooting for joy. Then I proceeded to bake myself between the sunshine overhead and the warm rocks below. I didn’t take a picture. A good day.
[Misty light]