DOUGLAS -- To many Americans, Alaska is land of ice and snow, wind and tundra. When I tell people down south where we're from, I begin by dispelling the image of our home as an igloo in a sparse, white landscape.
Granted, we live near Alaska's capital on the edge of a massive ice field. Our 37-square-mile river of ice known as Mendenhall Glacier is visited by thousands every summer. We also live in the largest national forest in the nation.
For my Lower 48 friends and family, I turn my clenched hand outward, fold my middle, ring and pinky fingers under and jut out the thumb and forefinger. I point to the bulk of my hand. "This is Alaska," I say. Then I point to my thumb joint. "We're here, in Southeast Alaska, where it rains more than most places. We live surrounded by spruce and hemlock trees, in the wettest part of the longest continuous coastal forest in the world." That forest starts in Kodiak Island and continues through Southeast Alaska and British Columbia all the way to the California redwoods, where I spent my childhood.
Here on Douglas Island, rain and melted snow flow from mountains through muskeg meadows and under rain forest canopy. The clear water spills over trails and around mossy fallen logs, becomes waterfalls and finally slips into shallow streams that merge with the saltwater of Gastineau Channel. Flocks of seagulls welcome it, feeding on spawned salmon and rising on their own rivers of air, ethereal in golden sunset light.
River or our lives
These days, after the autumnal equinox when we're losing daylight exponentially, I'm drawn to running and hiking along creeks on either side of our house. The sight and sound of the running water affirms I am home, where the river of our lives never stops. All of us, in some way, are riding time, under bridges, over rocks and plummeting falls.
In places, a little beach reveals itself, and we can take a dip. This past summer our nieces and nephew came to visit, and Karl, my husband, showed them the Alaska push-up. You place yourself in push-up position over a shallow swimming hole and quickly submerge your face and body in the water. It's a fast cool-down after a hard run uphill.
My father, David, learned to swim in places like this in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. On a recent visit for his brother Don's memorial gathering, the two of us stood on a bridge over Trout Brook near the homestead where he grew up. The air smells like my late Aunt Lydia's homemade balsam fir sachets. The tallest thing on the horizon is a modest promontory known as Green Hill. The slope is turning autumn orange. Stuttering raindrops fall from a gauzy sky. Dad points to a spot of smooth water under the trees. "That's the first place I remember splashing around," he tells me. "I must've been about 5. Wow, I think, that was 80 summers ago."
My dad was lucky to be raised where he and his siblings could swim, fish, hike, ski and explore the caves along the brook -- at least when they weren't putting up wood for winter, emptying the chamber pot, milking the neighbor's cow, tapping the trees for maple syrup and tending the chickens.
Before their move to the mountains, the family lived in White Plains, N.Y., in what was known as the Latvian ghetto. Their home was foreclosed on during the Depression, and they moved in with my grandmother's aunt on this land, where my father had a largely matriarchal upbringing. My grandmother, Elfrieda, who arrived at Ellis Island from Riga, Latvia, when she was 16, raised seven children, mostly on her own. She had a deep reverence for the vegetables and flowers she grew, spending hours with her hands in the dirt, singing to her creator.
Growing up here, Dad developed a reverence for woods and running water that he passed along to my five siblings and me. On vacations when we were kids in California, he was always on the hunt for the perfect forest campsite, swimming hole or place to slide off smooth granite into deep, cold water.
On the first leg of the Mount Jumbo trail behind our Douglas home, the trail rises up and over roots and rocks. I always stop at a place where, at the top of my line of sight, a stand of tall hemlock trees leans toward me, the light of day beaming through branches. A waterfall flows down the middle, disappears for a bit under ferns and yellowing devil's club, and emerges with greater force before trickling under my feet as I cross to the next section of trail.
Large natural cave
For a moment I am not on Douglas Island but on another of my father's favorite streams along the wooded flanks of Mount Tamalpais near San Francisco, where we took hikes when I was in high school. Sometimes we'd climb along a steep, leafy watercourse named Cataract Creek. Dad would gaze with wonder, always as if he were seeing it for the first time. He'd stop at foliage along the way and announce Cornus stolonifera, and after a few more steps, Oxalis oregan. These and other Latin names he learned in college on his way to becoming a landscape architect.
His first employment was as part of a roadside attraction begun by his older sister and my grandmother. They'd guide visitors from New York City on trails along Trout Brook to what turned out to be the largest natural cave entrance in the Northeast. Natural Stone Bridge and Caves has been in business more than 60 years, since my father and his brother built a huge sign and an arrow pointing to what my family fondly calls "the caves" along Route 9 just south of Schroon Lake.
Back in her college years, our daughter, Kaitlyn, took tourists along Juneau's wooded West Glacier trail to caves of ice that formed hundreds, if not thousands of years ago, where water spouts from melting cave walls. It strikes me that one of her first jobs was not unlike her grandfather's, following the path of relentless water.
Freelance writer Katie Bausler is a devoted resident of the island kingdom of rainy Douglas.