If you’re not from Interior Alaska (or even further north), you might not think winter could start so early. But it’s October: time to prep for the next six cold, white, winter months to come!
Last week, deciduous leaves created colored circles around the bases of their grey and white trunks. The thin spruce trees appear tall and stately because their neighbors now stand bare. Today a light snow fell, but did not stick. These silent details, and the crisp, tinny smell in the air, are my hint that winter is on her way. It’s time for me to pack away my summer bike and pull out the long blue extension cord.
An outdoor extension cord?
I don’t own an electric car: the plug dangling from under my front bumper leads to the oil pan heater. To ensure my truck starts on winter mornings, I plug it in a few hours before it’s time to head to work. One -20ºF (-28.8ºC) weekend last winter I stayed indoors and when I tried to start my vehicle on Sunday evening, a tortured moan escaped from the truck. It was not about to do more than that. After I had plugged in for a couple of hours, the truck started, roughly grumbling, but still it started and took me cautiously where I needed to go.
I doubt I’ll need the blue extension cord for another month, but nevertheless I hang it by the front door — inside so that it is pliable when I need it — and check that the switch to the outdoor socket is turned on.
Tomorrow the snow, if it falls — and sticks — the dirt driveway poking out from under the snow will look like powdered sugar at the bottom of a bag of crumbles left from Mexican wedding cakes. If it’s been an agitating workday, a vision of a bag once containing rum balls rolled in white will be more apt.
Tomorrow if snow does stick — and it likely will (as a forecasted high chance of freezing suggests) — I’ll move the much shorter, stay-in-the-truck, blue cord to the floor of the front seat, and it will be within easy reach when I need to plug in to a bollard marking my parking spot at work.
When in the depressive depths of unappreciated work, a sense of hopelessness, nothing does more to fill and rebalance my soul than natural beauty.
Wide Alaskan skies imbue me with peace: the clouds manifest beauty, the colors shine, the clear air refreshes. Even when the wind currents above roil and churn, the clouds still evoke tranquility for me. At times the harmony between sky and sun causes the firmament to shift color, delighting my mind’s eye and marveling my perspective. The sky is ever changing yet always constant. Amid the alterations the sky is unfluctuating. It accepts the changes as part of itself and remains. Endlessly…
For you, a gallery of photos of Alaskan autumn skies. May the views fill you with peace and hopeful prospect.
I inhaled breathlessly at the soft pink and blue of the sky. The colors were crisp behind the dark green silhouettes of the spruce trees. I had to stop and awe at the unusual pastels — and try to capture it with my point-and-shoot camera.
Ten minutes later on my way home, a russet four-legger with a white-tipped tail loped languidly across the road in front of me, expertly far enough away from metal danger. It flowed down the gentle incline and across the still verdant field.
Dusk continued to thicken, turning the landscape into a richer palette of velvety monochrome. The windchime on my porch klingled musically in the autumnal breeze. Mother Nature had soothed my soul once again, and I could sleep calmly, untouched by the worries of the day.
Every time I drive on the road to or from my house, which is only a few minutes off of paved Alaskan highway, I feel like a bobblehead.
When I ride my bike, it’s more like an amusement park ride. Wheew!
What this road needs is some snow. That’ll fill in the potholes and smooth out the surface.
Driving to avoid these potholes creates a line that Billy of “The Family Circus” would be proud of. [A cartoon by Bil (and son Jeff) Keane.]
(Oops. I used the s-word. It’s still August, so most people in the world would not think it mattered. Nevertheless, it’s too soon to the white precipitation of October to use that word lightly… as the chill in the morning air and the occasional plant already starting to brown and golden prove.)
A sound that seemed to come from inside my floorboards drove me outside to see where the source of the scratching (the culprit!) might be.
Said the trapper to the squirrel, “Gotcha!”
Over the last two years I have had problems with squirrels getting inside my house.
1) During one winter the house had shifted so much on its pilings that the underside of my house had dropped onto the board onto which the lightning rod wire is stapled, causing it to punch through the plywood on the bottom of my house. The house rising again, perhaps in combination with the board sinking, too, had created a hole right next to a metal foundational beam — a perfect walkway for a squirrel, which ducked inside and began making itself at home.
I heard it scrabbling around underneath my kitchen floor, found the hole, borrowed a live trap from a coworker, trapped the sciurine beast, and relocated it to a park eight miles away — but not before I had boarded up the hole. I had an imaginative vision of the squirrel somehow making it back to my house before I could pull up in my driveway. Although I doubt a squirrel could run faster than the speed limit, I heard later from a friend that I might not have taken it out of its habitat range after all.
2) The next year, during the spring, I heard the same type of scrabble-scratching outside my bedroom window. Since the room is on the second floor, there was only one place for the rodent to be: inside the overhang porch roof. The edge of the wire blocking the ventilated soffit had been pushed in on the end over the steps, creating a hole just big enough for a narrow-skulled rodent to squeeze through.
I set up a table and chair on the porch deck and sat down for a relaxing read, with the ulterior motive of catching the critter in the act. A couple of quiet days later, I did. I heard the pitter-patter of tiny hard nails moving from one end of the soffit to the other. Stealthily I stood and the gnawing mammal froze when it saw me looking up at it.
We stared at each other, I with narrowed eyes, it with wide black ones. Four toes curled around the wood panel forming the soffit vent. It looked down through the gap above, safe.
“You’d better find someplace else to live,” I whispered menacingly. “I’m going to get you.”
Its tail twitched.
I shot it a dagger glance then retreated inside. Whether the varmint stayed in the roof for a while or climbed headfirst down the supporting post, I do not know. I knew my game plan.
I had purchased a live trap and now set it up on the railing, using sunflower seeds as bait. The next days the seeds were gone, but the trap unsprung.
I used peanut butter to glue more sunflower seeds to the trip plate.
The next day, I heard metal rubbing on wood and went outside just in time to stop the trap from plummeting off the edge of the rail from the movement of the squirrel’s urgent attempt to escape. I checked that the end flaps were secured and looked purse-lipped at the rodent again.
“Gotcha.” I bared my teeth in a smile. “I told you I would.”
The squirrel raced back and forth inside the trap, the trip plate clattering at its each pass.
I set the trap in the back of my truck, snuggly between the closed tailgate and campsite firewood, and the squirrel ceased trying to escape. Even though I did not want it to destroy my house from inside out, I also did not want to cause it undue stress whilst in captivity.
Before driving it to a park (across town this time), I climbed a ladder to block the squirrel-sized gap. The majority of the scrabbling sound had come from the other end of soffit, so I made sure to staple-gun a thicker wire mesh over both ends.
3) This third time I found a potential hole near where the old waterline had entered the house. Even though it looked to have no access to the house itself, still I baited the trap with peanut butter-smeared crackers (chunky peanut butter, of course), and drove to work.
When I returned home, the strangest thing—! The trap was gone! Vanished!
A lump hunkered at the base of my throat. What creature could have stolen it? A squirrel would not have been strong enough. What creature had been brave enough to be so close to my house? Had a squirrel been trapped inside so a predator had carried it off in its quest to break through the cage to the juicy center?
Live trap left by unknown animal, upside down, on game trail.
Had a fox gotten stuck in or injured by the trap? Needing to know, I began a systematic search for evidence of what had happened.
I discovered one metal end flap several yards away. Upside down, several feet down a game trail that led away from the house I found the trap itself. It was not broken, and, thankfully, sported no blood or fur. I guess that the animal had been able to shake off the trap with no injury to itself. I could breathe deeply now.
I put the live trap away, blocked the hole and have not again heard the telltale sound of a squirrel in my house. Would I have wanted to set out the trap again?
I hope if it was a fox that had reached its snout or paw inside the trap to lick up the nut protein and gobble up the crackers that the metal had really not scratched it or injured it in anyway. I truly hope that I have not scared away any vixen or reynard. I love seeing wildlife of all kinds passing through or running about in my yard.
The rain was so thick that my wipers could barely keep up. Sunshine blinded, so I quickly pulled on my shades and squinted up at the blue sky. The rapid beat of plinks and plops delightfully drowned out the radio’s music. Sixteen wheels in the other lane threw up a cloud of spray like from a tumbling river waterfall. Mist washed the raindrops’ sillhouettes from the windshield, then immediately speckled with another shower of rain. Charcoal grey clouds threatened from the northeast, but the sunshine and azure heavens followed me all of the way home.
