Dusk Through Narrow Streets

No, I’m totally serious. I actually wrote it a few years ago, back before I had a car and took the bus way too much, but the idea is the same. The season described here is really just spring in name only, though; it’s actually breakup, like I described in my previous entry.

As I said, though, it’s much nicer now–well, today was gray and kind of windy, and there’s a huge difference between cloudy 40° and sunny 40°, but there’s still clean pavement and the grass isn’t greening up yet but we can see it again, and the temperatures should be edging into the fifties in the next week or so. I might actually be able to wear a skirt soon without freezing! Would have done that Tuesday if I’d known the weather would be that way. The best part is that even though all the grass is all still dead and brown, now and then you can still smell something that–well, I suppose it’s actually, I don’t even know, suddenly uncovered rotting grass and leaves or something else nasty, but it smells like life, like green and growing things.

Anyway, poem, which I’m sharing because I can and also because it was already published a couple years ago in Understory, my uni’s little literary magazine.

Continue Reading »

Spring here isn’t like spring everywhere else–around when other parts of the US are seeing the snow melt, we’re hitting breakup, and when my friend in Pennsylvania is talking about warm weather edging into the 70s and 80s, I’m thrilled to get a blue-sky day in the 40s.

Yeah, you’re all laughing at me now. This is spring in Anchorage: generally speaking, I’d say the latter half of March and first half of April tend to be breakup, which…I’m not sure if I’d define breakup as a fifth season, or a subseason of winter and spring, or what, but it’s a very common term here, and it’s that period between genuine winter, when it’s cold and snow covers everything, and genuine spring, when the vast majority of the snow has melted, the roads are dry, and the grass…well, the grass and trees aren’t green again, but they’re getting there. Breakup is the between-time, when all the ice breaks up (get it now?)  and the temperature settles above freezing and the snow starts to melt.

And it’s disgusting. Do not ever visit Alaska during that time of year. You won’t want to come back. Half the streets are flooded with giant dirty puddles, and the rest are covered in brown slush and mud. It’s too warm for winter boots but too dirty for normal shoes, and unless your shoes are waterproof (none of mine are), you’re pretty much guaranteed to get your feet soaked just walking to class. (Granted, that was true on all the rainy days in Norwich too.) Parking lots turn into giant muddy, slushy messes, some nearly impossible to drive in because the ice and hard-packed snow built up all winter melts unevenly. Park in a bad place and you’ll step into an ankle-deep, ice-cold puddle that probably surrounds your entire car.

If you couldn’t figure it out by now, breakup is one of my least favorite times of year.

Sometime around last week, though, I’d say we finally transitioned into spring. Everything’s still kind of dirty–during the winter, dirt is spread on the streets for traction, so when the snow melts, the dirt stays–and we haven’t had any rain, so there’s still a lot of dust and ash, and of course the melting snow reveals just how much litter everyone chucked out their car windows over the winter. Streetsweeper trucks sort of clean the dirt off the streets, although then it just gets in the grass and kind of stays there, so…I don’t know how helpful that is. But the vast majority of the snow is gone, and–this is the real mark of spring beginning for my purposes–almost all the roads, sidewalks, and various paths at UAA are clean and dry. Seriously, when breakup finally starts to leave because there’s not much left to melt, the most beautiful thing in the world is clean, dry pavement, and while I’m getting my feet soaked trying to get to my next class because everything is wet and slushy, I tend to think pretty longingly about places like Florida with sunbaked pavement that’s cracked from the heat, not potholed from freeze-thaw cycles.

Not very romantic, is it? But for me, spring means dry pavement. The first beautiful spring day meant clear skies, sun, temperatures above 40°, and the ability to walk outside without looking like a loon because I’m gingerly stepping from semi-dry spot to semi-dry spot. I wore my Converses outside again for the first time last week because they’re even less waterproof than my other shoes, which was kind of awesome.

Now I just need to get the studded tires taken off my car, and won’t that be fun…

Yet again, lame blogger is lame, because I should have talked about this a long time ago–but in light of recent events (and plenty more eruptions since), it bears mentioning.

In his official Republican response to President Barack Obama’s speech to the nation [on Feb. 24. Shut up], Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said repeatedly that “Americans can do anything!”

With one exception, apparently. We don’t need to keep an eye on simmering volcanoes.

Jindal singled out “volcano monitoring” as an unnecessary frill that Democrats stuck in the recently adopted stimulus package.

“Their legislation is larded with wasteful spending,” Jindal said. “It includes … $140 million for something called ‘volcano monitoring.’ Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.”

Jindal’s comments provoked an eruption of their own. Alaska politicians, liberal bloggers and some scientists began pointing out how useful it is to let people know when a volcano in their neighborhood is about to explode.

Read the rest of the article: Alaskans fume over Jindal volcano-monitoring gripe.

Yeah, it’s old news. But considering that not long after Jindal said this, Redoubt started going off? It hasn’t caused tremendous damage by any means, and even though I’ve been amused by the fact that a number of Google searches leading people to my blog have been something like”has redoubt killed anyone” (it hasn’t), the danger is real. It’s especially dangerous for airplanes–why do you think flights keep getting canceled because of the volcano?–and it’s only our ability to monitor the situation that keeps everyone out of trouble. I mean, let’s say we couldn’t monitor Redoubt and other Alaskan volcanoes by anything except whether we can see it actually erupting. Say we also know that it’s a Really Bad Idea to fly an airplane through an ash cloud. So even assuming that doesn’t happen, what do we do? Shut down the airport every time we get some seismic activity or a little plume of steam? I mean, you can imagine what that would do to the economy here, right? And again, that’s assuming something worse didn’t happen.

So, yeah. We kind of need our volcano-monitoring.

I should also mention that we’ve had some ashfall and semi-regular eruptions of varying magnitudes, and I almost got stuck in Juneau or Fairbanks (horrors) because of one, but it’s time for bed. So I leave you with an awesome link I got off Twitter: a whole bunch of insanely awesome volcano-eruption photographs. These shots are truly amazing. Some are unlabeled, but I think this one is probably from Hawaii (although I thought that about several that were labeled and was wrong on each one), and judging by what I can see of the mountain’s shape and by the trees, I’m guessing this one is from Redoubt’s 1989 eruption. But I could easily be wrong.