Working a silver mine story near Juneau, Alaska, I was overwhelmed by how routine man’s co-existence with nature was there. Ah. So Eden has not been lost after all. Here the human footprint has not squished aside nature as if only mud around a boot. The mine itself was on an island hosting the world’s densest concentration of brown bears. Deer lined up along the road to watch our bus come back down to the ferry. I saw glaciers, seals, whales, eagles, and spawning salmon.
But most impressed upon my memory are the trees.
Juneau is surrounded by the United States’ largest protected woodland, the Tongass National Forest. I had known, of course, spruce grew that tall. But it was secondhand, cognitive fact. To be standing at the base of one of those evergreens looking up to the clouds through its limbs, nearly falling over backward to look for its top, is so much more than fact. And the density of that forest! Mendenhall Valley residents do not have yards: they insert a cabin or house beneath the trees that remains hidden until you are abreast its driveway.
In Juneau, skyscraper spruce look down upon lowly buildings six and seven stories tall. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder as mothers in a nursery, they protect its infants from low and heavy clouds bulging round them, monstrous gray caricatures crowding close, taunted by humanity’s bumptious intrusion. These moving colors and unsettled sounds baying in sacrilegious contrast to the silent, prehistoric backdrop of moss-laden, ragged branches hanging heavy and tired, dark green against dark green till eternity. Above them the stern gray clouds of Juneau frown dissatisfaction, demanding reverence.
Reluctantly I left Juneau, as I found it, beneath its moist grey shroud and its legendary promise of a glimpse inside the treasure chest to any who’ll wait for the sun.
