Normally I resist the modernization of Alaska, all those improvements meant to make this place like every other place. I was willing to put up with two-week tape delays of football games because it fed the frontier spirit. Once in a while there is an improvement however that does make it better. The road i drive every night is six, then four lanes with brush close on both sides for most of the 30 miles of the drive. That means cars going 65+ and moose crossing perpendicularly. There has been very little lighting along the road and even less the farther you go north from Anchorage. For the past couple of months crews have been erecting high lights along the darker parts of the route, something a friend of mine complained about citing basically the same reasons I have for resisting. When I pointed out she drives the road maybe two or three times a month and I drive it five nights a week and the lights would make the road incredibly safer, she didn't really take it all that kindly.
As if to emphasize the point, tonight in the hour before the work shift ended, twice the police radio reported vehicle collisions with moose on the very road I would be traveling in just a few minutes. One was a motorcycle. There were injuries but they weren't detailed on the radio beyond calling paramedics.
Within an hour I was driving that same road, having been warned to watch for moose by what coworkers are left in the newsroom these days at that time of night. I wondered if the whole moose biomass wasn't on the move. Within about five miles I came upon two pickup trucks parked on the shoulder facing each other with their headlights on. I slowed and as I passed, I saw the skinned carcass of a moose and the guys apparently had started butchering. There is a list of charities police call when a moose is down and the meat is harvested to feed the hungry and homeless through one outlet or another. Hoping some of those folks have a good, hot meal tomorrow. I knew about where the other moose had been hit so I watched the road but it was the one area where you can't see across all four lanes so either I missed it or it had already happened.
All of it heightened my awareness and slowed me down a little. I had seen those new lights being tested earlier in the day but the first area I had hoped they'd be illuminating was as dark as ever. Fortunately with very little traffic the bright lights on the car were useful.
Just about the time I had to dim them, I came around a curve and, whoa. the road was lighted like a Chicago Parkway. What a difference. Right there I decided this was one improvement I could get behind, thinking ahead to the nine months of nights before next equinox. For once a modernization was welcome and will be for a long time. And some folks tomorrow who need it will be eating well. Of course those two moose were hit in areas that have been lighted all along so new lights don't mean no moose collisions, just that you can see them before you hit them.
THE PHOTO: For those who know the road that is an iPhone image of the Glenn Highway looking north from the Eklutna on-ramp, one of the areas that was darkest before the lights, and an area where I have seen several moose killed over the years.
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