Anchorage Daily News

HAINES -- My friend Joanne called Saturday night to ask if I saw what she saw in the sky. I was at the table, just finishing a moose stew dinner with the family and listening to the play-by-play on KHNS of the girls' high school basketball game down in Craig, on Prince of Wales Island. I hadn't been outside since an afternoon ski along the beach around Jones Point to the set tracks on the golf course and back. Then, the sun had been shining on white snow and it felt like spring, especially with the wind at my back. Now, I took the phone out on the back porch and looked up.

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"See it?" Joanne said.

"No," I replied.

"You've got to, it's the brightest thing out there," she said. Then I went back in and got a coat and my glasses and binoculars. With the phone in one hand and the binocs in the other, I had Joanne direct me south down the inlet, toward Sullivan Island and low on the horizon, across from Rainbow Glacier. Sure enough, there among all the other stars was an extra-bright orb with flashing red, green and blue lights. It was low enough that my view was partially blocked by the neighbor's spruce trees.

With Joanne still on the line, explaining that she had been walking her cocker spaniel Harry when she saw whatever it was, I took the stairs up to the top of our house two at a time and focused the binoculars on the strange object in outer space from my bedroom window. The double-paned energy-saving glass distorts things, so I opened the window to get a clear look.

"Have you called Hertz?" I asked Joanne, watching the thing twirl. "He has seen a UFO, so he'd know."

"Really? I didn't know that," she said, and decided to call the science teacher. "Fontenot will know," she said.

I asked her to share what she learned.

My husband and daughter weren't interested in the UFO. He said it was probably a satellite. She was busy ironing the squares of paper she had cut out of old grocery bags, crumpled, soaked in water and then hung to dry on two lines tied across our living room. She is student teaching in the first grade and the bags, she explained, would become covers for the children's make-believe, but educational, African adventure journals.

Joanne called back after talking to Fontenot. That's what we call Mark; some people have last names for first names in Haines. Hertz does too; his name is Irwin, but everyone, even the priest at his church, calls him Hertz. He is also an electrician, which figures. With a name like Hertz what else would he be? Certainly not a dentist.

Back to the light in the sky. Joanne said that Fontenot said it might be the International Space Station. "It was just a guess, though." He was finishing up a late supper too.

All the extra daylight and the sunshine that has come with it have kept a lot of us outside longer. Last Sunday, my husband and I went all the way up the Chilkat River to Turtle Rock and back on snowmachines. The weather and snow conditions were so nice that our party ran into half a dozen friends along the remote route, all of them smiling broadly and exclaiming about the great day.

After Joanne and I finished talking, I checked on the Internet and learned that the International Space Station was only visible in the early morning sky and that the comet Lulin was a possibility, except it seemed that we were four days too late to see it so clearly and it didn't look like our UFO.

It snowed the next night, and it is still snowing, so I haven't seen it again. I did see Hertz in the market on Monday, though. He hadn't looked in the sky on Saturday night. But he said that an old-timer, who is long gone, had once seen a hovering flying saucer out at Ten Mile about this time of year.

The one Hertz saw was in Montana, on the family farm when he was a kid. It appeared silent as snow, right above his shoulder, and was, he said, "big as a football field."

There's so much we can't explain. This morning a snowflake landed on the dark sleeve of my coat. It was perfect, like a crystal Christmas ornament.

How did something so fragile and so tiny fall all the way from heaven to Earth without breaking? They say that no two are alike, but how can anyone know that for sure?

I'm sure there's a good explanation for our flashing light and for the miracle of snowflakes. But a big part of me would rather not hear it, at least not at the end of long winter. I prefer to imagine a divine player is out there in the great beyond, spinning electric tops among the stars and gently shaking the last, perfect snowflakes of the season gently down on us.

Heather Lende lives and writes in Haines.

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