For many years I’ve lived on a bluff with a wilderness in my backyard. However, I don’t live in some remote area but in Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city. For some Alaskans, the city with its busy streets and modern infrastructure is a stark contrast to the vast, untouched wilderness that characterises most of Alaska. They reject it with the claim that “Anchorage is not the real Alaska, although you can see it from there.”
I don’t share that sentiment. Yes, Anchorage resembles many nondescript, cookie-cutter American cities, with shopping malls and Starbucks, but it also contains the raw and wild essence of the place it once was. It lies between the Chugach mountains on the east and the Knik and Turnagain Arms of the Cook Inlet on the west and south. Large swaths of the original forest that once covered the area remain within its boundaries.
My backyard overlooks the Turnagain Arm of the Cook Inlet, where Captain James Cook visited on his final voyage while searching for the Northwest Passage. He anchored his ship near a small island visible from my house. Cook thought one of the bodies of water before him was the long-sought route and dispatched a crew to explore it. When his men tried to take a boat up the arm I live by, its powerful tides thwarted them. They turned back. Hence the name, Turnagain.
To enter my house is to shut the front door on the city with its roads, traffic, buildings, lawns, and people. The world at the back of my house is a vista of an unspoiled landscape of forest, mountains, and water, shaped by glaciers, earthquakes, and volcanoes. It is a place where I observe more wildlife —moose, bear, fox, bald eagles, birds — than humans.
For years, a dense barrier of towering spruces, quaking aspens, slender birches, and sturdy cottonwood in our backyard blocked the light and hid the view. My husband and I caught only glimpses of what lay behind that palisade.
Although cutting any trees felt cruel, we liked the open space and the extra light that flooded into the house after the deciduous trees shed their leaves in autumn. It also made it easy to spot animals and watch the tide move in and out of Turnagain Arm. As winter waned and the foliage grew thick, we missed that openness and felt hemmed in. Finally, we gave in and had an arborist remove selected trees.
It felt as if we had opened a long-closed window. That was many years ago, but I still remember my joy at the sublime beauty of nature the clearing revealed. Since then, not a day has passed when I do not feel a sense of awe, delight, and surprise at the infinite variety my little patch of earth offers. It changes almost minute by minute as the light shifts, or the clouds roll in, or the tide churns in and out of the arm.
Each of us has a duty to explore our surroundings and discover the place where we end up living. Despite the pressures of time and the demands of daily life, I carve out time to examine my environs and uncover the beauty and nuances of my immediate world.
A daily ritual — almost like a prayer for me — is to stand at a window and take in the sweeping, undisturbed panorama of trees, marsh grasses, wetlands, mudflats, ocean, and mountains that define my world. I take time throughout the day to marvel at the gift of nature spread before me, and I give thanks for it.
If someone asked about my ritual, I would tell them I start my day by looking toward our heavily wooded, hundred-foot-high bluff, which plunges sharply to the coastal flats. On windy days, the wind susurrating through the trees is calming, and their bending trunks remind me of supplicants worshipping in a temple. I like all my trees, but my favourite is quaking aspens, for it is a pleasure to watch the grace and rhythm of their fluttering leaves, like the wings of butterflies.
The trees also comfort me. We live in an area prone to earthquakes, and their presence reassures me that the land is solid. Our trees withstood Alaska’s devastating earthquake in 1964, which registered 9.2 on the Richter Scale. While parts of the bluff to the north fell away that day, ours stood firm. Many trees on our property soar to ninety feet and are over eighty or ninety years of age, with roots firmly anchored into soil that does not slough away whenever the earth shakes. I feel reassured knowing we are safe from the next tremor.
The appearance of trees changes as my eyes wander toward the flats below, where the poor, boggy soil holds only a few tall and sturdy trees. There are more short and thin black spruce and shrubs like willows, balsam poplar, and alders, which provide shelter and food for the numerous moose in the area.
Further out, towards the ocean, lies a marsh, out of which rise the spectral remains of the dead and grey trees of the “ghost forest”, a daily reminder of the power of the 1964 tremblor that killed them. I imagine the scrub forest once stretching farther out, covering more of the land. When the earth shook that day, saltwater rushed in, and the land subsided. Many of the trees died, leaving only a ghostly presence behind.
In spring and autumn, the marsh rings with the clamour of migrating birds. Sandhill cranes, snow geese, and Canada geese stop to rest and feed before journeying to summer nesting grounds farther north. During their stay, the air vibrates with the trumpeting calls of cranes and the honking cries of geese, sounding like musicians practising for a performance. Most of the lively visitors are transient, but a few stay all summer and leave in autumn. Their loud morning conversations are my wake-up call to start the day.
Past the marsh, mudflats meld into the Turnagain Arm, where the tide might be rushing in or out, or it might be the lull between tides. Most days, the water in the arm looks like molten pewter from the silt of glacial streams flowing into its headwaters. But on some cloudless days, the water appears azure, and the face of the bluffs beyond the water gleams white like the chalk cliffs of Dover.
During high tide, I watch for beluga whales, regular visitors to Turnagain Arm, as they chase fish migrating to home streams. It is always a thrill to spot their distinctive curved grey backs and the jet of water shooting out of their blowholes.
My journey ends at the mountains. Most are ten miles across the water from me, while one special peak is a hundred miles away. The closer ones are not high, averaging about four thousand feet, but born out of the earth’s tectonic shifting, and being geologically young, they present a jagged aspect. Snow covers their flanks half the year; in summer, an abundance of trees turns their lower reaches green. The mountains, part of the Kenai peninsula to the south, flatten to a point that juts into waters where the Turnagain Arm joins the Cook Inlet. In 1778, Captain Cook’s officers went ashore at the point. As the land’s occupants looked on, they planted the British flag, claimed the land for the British sovereign, and renamed it Point Possession.
Before my morning ritual ends and I turn my attention to the awaiting day, I search for the last piece of the natural world I behold — Mount Redoubt. This active but elusive volcano, always sheathed in snow, stands a hundred miles across the flats of the Kenai Peninsula and the breadth of Cook Inlet beyond it. It is not always visible, often shrouded in fog or veiled by clouds, and when it deigns to show its face, it looks formidable, especially when it vents steam. During its last eruption in 2009, the sky darkened as a dark cloud rushed toward Anchorage, raining ash.
My scanning stops at Mount Redoubt, and the mundane rituals of daily life commence. I know the landscape is there whenever I want to look out, and it will never disappoint. I will see things that make me smile, and that is enough to get on with the day.
