News night

Quite a night in Alaska. First of all, it was the first time since way last spring I drove home in darkness the whole way. Temperature in the 40s, too, so it is coming. Lots of news, and the kind where something actually happened rather than somebody’s lip flap. First of all you couldn’t fly into or out of Alaska tonight because a huge volcanic ash cloud drifted over the main routes between us and the Lower 48. There are three volcanoes erupting out in the Aleutians these days. The Coast Guard was up in the Arctic trying to figure out what they can do now that there isn’t much ice and ships can navigate the ocean there. They have a whole new ocean to patrol. A while back a cruise ship from Germany showed up off Barrow (the northernmost town in the United States) and dumped 400 tourists on the unsuspecting village of around 4,000 souls. It had come through the Northwest Passage from the Atlantic. Then a guy in Anchorage hit a bridge while he was trying to avoid a moose in the road. Both are OK, but the car didn’t do so well. In that Anchorage park, state Fish and Game people are now loaded for bear, literally. They are planning to dispatch the grizzly blamed for mauling two people and menacing a bunch more, but now they can’t find it. It’s been a bad year for that sort of thing, four serious attacks and a bunch more threats. Maybe the bears don’t like the cold summer either. Then, in Beijing, an Alaska kid who grew up shooting at tin cans and squirrels in a place called Chickaloon won a bronze medal in trapshooting at the Olympics. The only American woman and the youngest in the field, she had to shoot an extra round (called a shoot-off, not a shoot-out, which raises some interesting interpretations) against three others to settle the third place on the podium.