By the way, the name of this Blog, "Solid Mud Wannabe," um, ya. I'm not sure how long it is going to take for me to get Solid Mud published. So, I'll go ahead and put in a little exerpt to hold you over and give you an idea of what will be coming soon. Enjoy:
AUTUMN IN ALASKA
Super Turtle, Eddie, Double O, and I drove to the edge of Anchorage where the sun rotated around the sky and shone behind us. The sun lit the Chugach Mountains in a perfect, cloudless way. Being late October, most of the leaves had fallen out of their trees by then. Snow was clinging to ground further and further down the mountainside each day the autumn progressed towards winter. The dead oranges were amazing. The fresh white of the descending termination dust was telltale of coming winter.
Further down the Seward Highway, looking out the window of the back seat, I could see that Cook Inlet’s tide was coming in at full force.
“Just checking up on you,” I said quietly to the tide.
We took a break from the road at Beluga Point, that miniature headland, that enormously meaningful set of rocks that had endeared themselves so much in so many ways to my three friends and myself. The four of us climbed the rock formations up above the mud flats below.
A sign read: Dangerous water and mud flats.
Naturally, we got down as close to the rushing water as we could! I'll never get over the way the white water tide roller-coasters its way up and down as if gravity falls asleep once in awhile. It’s almost as if the inlet, that hidden part of the Pacific Ocean, chooses to behave like the Colorado River while Mommy’s back is turned. Just amazing!
We had fun with the pockets of mud that had been trapped on the rocks above the water line after the last tide had gone down. At first touch, the surface was solid, dry and clumpy, but when shaken up, it turned into slimy and gritty custard. (The kind you would never serve your children on New Years Eve.) We stood firmly on top and initiated earthquakes with shaking feet. Our feet were then firmly embraced in a distinctively sticky surface tension which covered the soupy-flavored mud underneath. When I tried to lift my feet free from the ‘solid mud grip’, I felt dislocation knocking at the joints of my knees. A moment later: POP! my shoes came out clean…leaving behind only tread formations.
That littoral mud is comprised of salt water, dead animals, and volcanic ash. Salt water doesn't freeze at the same temperature as fresh water does and it was below freezing for the rest of the world. Our hands quickly became numb playing with the hard slime, but we simply couldn’t resist the solid mud.
We moved on down the road bound for Girdwood but didn’t get far. We stopped 200 feet down the highway, got out of the car again, and walked up to a new trail that had been opened up above the Inlet. The trail occupied land that the old Seward Highway used to claim.
Facing the Turnagain Arm of the Cook Inlet atop an oceanfront cliff, we commented once again on the forcefulness of the incoming tide that was coming back to reclaim the mud it left behind six hours earlier. The mud flats on the other side of the New Seward Highway slowly disappeared under the twelve-hour high tide with a liveliness we likened to a toddler’s meddlesome ambition.
“The tide is like a little kid; gets into everything,” I told everyone.
We left the new trail, returned to Eddie’s truck, and finally found Girdwood, AlAskA. In accordance with reverent tradition, we all found a bottle of our special soda and an ice cream snack of some fashion or another. We stood outside a store just a stone’s throw away from the highway.
“You know guys, we’re lucky to see AlAskA like this.”
“There’s no telling what it will look like in fifty years.”
“Imagine, when our grandparents were born, the land we’re standing on now was Russia.”
“All that construction, the dynamite, the flaggers in the construction zones. It all happens so fast.”
“Ya, but those flaggers are cute.”
“Hard to be mad at traffic delays when it’s a beautiful girl waving at you.”
“True, but still, it’s too fast. That’s what I think.”
“Keep AlAskA like it was.”
“Here here!”
“Cheers, guys.”
After enjoying our rituals at Girdwood, we drove to a mountain access road at the edge of Anchorage. We drove up to the parking lot below Flat Top Mountain and played in freshly fallen snow. It was cold on the mountain, but the early sunset we were lucky enough to enjoy made every inch of frost bitten skin worth it.
The sky above us was clear, but when the sun hit the stratosphere-level clouds on the horizon, light was cast in the entire yellow-red spectrum all about us. It was impossible to imagine that the power of our sky could not travel the world over. We stood high above everyone in Anchorage, watching the sun set over the city’s populous. We were satisfied to live without them that night.
