Reflections from an off-hours commute

At first the idea of commuting from the Knik River Valley to a night job in Anchorage seemed daunting and the first few trips all but interminable. But, over time the world along the highway began to unfold and that drive has now become one of the more enjoyable parts to any day.

Particularly at this time of year with light in both directions, almost every day presents some interesting aspect of nature, highlighting the entire trip. Some mornings it might only be the magpies patrolling the shoulders in their relentless foraging for the previous night's inevitable road kill. On another, it was the mother moose trotting along the bike path next to the Fort Richardson fence leading two calves that couldn't have been more than a few days old. That one was even more intriguing, given the two bicyclists passed heading out of town around a curve from the oncoming moose. No easy stopping point presented itself to afford a view of the impending drama so it unfolded without spectators. Nothing showed up in the next day's news so they must have passed without injury to anyone involved.

For a while this spring Fred the Canada goose greeted drivers on the off ramp to the Old Glenn Highway every morning. They mate for life and maybe his mate had been hit by a car and he was waiting there for her return. Then he disappeared for a few days raising concerns he had met the same fate. Imagine the pleasant surprise when one day he was back, only this time with another adult and a bunch of little ones scurrying around their legs.

Every spring, in late May a bloom of porcupines appears along the Old Glenn, like a hatch of mosquitoes after a rain. Porcupines are slow and apparently dumb. believing their quills will protect them even from oncoming cars, They lumber across the highway or stand on the side watching. Occasionally those magpies find one that didn't make it all the way across the blacktop.

A muskeg pond, maybe a slack slough off the Knik River, entertains swans in the spring and fall, One pair sticks around but disappears deeper into the maze of ponds and sloughs, perhaps to nest and raise a young one or two over the summer. Last fall nine of them waited on the pond for several days anticipating the call to head south.

An eagle often peruses the offerings of the Knik River as it flows past his perch in a dead cottonwood just west of the bridge and terns, nature's perfect fliers, hover over iris-bordered ponds and puddles in the flats north of Eklutna.

One evening the Chugach mountains turned an incredibly dark shade of purple, almost black, alpenglow under a heavily overcast sky. On another night a full moon rose over those same mountains directly above the lighted cross on a church near Peters Creek, creating stirrings from a long suppressed spiritual training.

There is always hope for the exotic, too. No bear has poked its nose out of the roadside brush so far, but one dusky evening, a lynx stood on the shoulder warily watching as cars pass.

Sunday nights Anchorage returns from wherever people have been playing out there in Alaska, sporting their toys of choice: the Subarus with their skis or kayaks and bicycles; pickups towing trailers with snowmachines or four-wheelers and motorcycles, or the occasional boat. Now and then a trailer passes with a machine of some sort and a packed sled or trailer telling you this is someone who does more than simply ride around, but packs in to a remote haven somewhere. About the funniest was the night dawdling in the center lane when two pickups passed. The one on the right towed a trailer with a snowmachine on it. Almost simultaneously one passed on the left with a wave runner on his trailer. Now, where else in the world are you going to see that juxtaposition?

On the last stretch to the house, thick alders encroach into the roadway necessitating a slower speed. The alders present no problem, but the songbirds that nest in them do. They fly blindly out into the roadway without regard for oncoming traffic. It gets even worse when the little ones who fear nothing begin to careen through the brush and across the road. Why can't they stay on one side of the road? Of course the only reasoning critter on the planet has never stayed on one side of the road either.

And then, there is the solitary man. He often stands just inside the tree line in one of the heavily wooded areas along the route, simply watching traffic, or hikes the trail behind the guard rail along the side of the highway. One day he hustled across in front of the car, jumping the guard rail to the safety of the trail, much more nimble than any of those porcupines. Best guess is he lives in those woods. Is he homeless? He probably doesn't think so, simply living his version of the compromise many of us have made between societal demands and desire for the solitude of wilderness.

The drive certainly fails to satisfy that desire, but it does come a whole lot closer than righteously could have been expected. And the fact that the daily journey at least in part satisfies the desire, makes living with the compromise just a little more comfortable.
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