The Greenness of Green
And then, Southeast Alaska was green beyond all green.
Tennis-ball green. Green like the glow of bioluminescence trailing a kayak blade in the Florida Keys. Honeydew green. After weeks of grizzle skies flocked with mist and rain, summer's sudden saturation startles.
The sun crowns the fjord in Klondike gold and, with it, comes a regional heat advisory, though the temperature barely tops 65.
Locals comb the beaches for ingredients for "beach green burritos." Along the Chilkat, they're harvesting spruce tips for beer. The neon-green shoots grow heavy as they ripen, pulling the boughs downward.
A young couple plays with their infant in the intertidal zone. The mud shimmers and ravens circle. The boy sheds his clothes, throws back his head, and screams.
"He was born in winter," they explain, almost sheepishly. "Today's the first time he's ever seen the sun."
A woman with snow-streaked hair walks her dog along the beach, her pants rolled to expose calves the color of cod. Here, comments about the weather carry the weight of intimate conversation rather than pleasantries. Last summer, they say, there were only three days without rain. So much sun, so early in the season, feels almost overwhelming.
"The ache that always lives in my bones," she says, turning toward me, "it's finally gone."
Life in Alaska has a short window in which to get everything done: be born, grow fat, find a mate, raise young, and prepare for winter. It is a meticulously choreographed performance in which all who hurry to the stage know their roles, and nothing hesitates.
The green acts as a scrim to the grand reveals: the brown bears, who I learn are serial monogamists. The oldest female bear recorded in Alaska lived to 39; the oldest male, 38. If I were a brown bear, I'd already be dead.
The only bear we've seen on our lake tours so far is a small black one, romping through the Jurassic skunk cabbage that soars its yellow between plunging cascades. Each day, the sun siphons more snow from the mountaintops, and the water rushes thicker, louder.
On the lake's east side, enormous beaver chips litter the shoreline. They punctuate the green creeping up the mountainside like ivy. The beavers are turning poplars into toothpicks. We never see them attempting the impossible, but if we're lucky, we catch sight of river otters sliding down the banks and disappearing into the water.
One afternoon, we return from a tour to find a dozen tourists spilled from a bus, telescopic lenses trained on the far bank of the river. A cow moose is shepherding her calf through the shallows. The calf's spindly legs wobble as it picks its way around the eddies while its mother pauses, alert and watchful.
Everyone is watching them: the tourists, the guides, the river itself. Eagles peer down from the Sitka spruce. The forest is like a restless audience, holding its breath.
A few days later, I'm tying up kayaks when a veteran guide comes down to the boat ramp. Unlike the green twenty-somethings, who post up for the season in their beater cars with bandanas tied around their foreheads, he’s all brown. This soft-spoken Oberon has eyes like a bear in the forest and wears a weathered khaki jacket. He asks if we've been seeing any bears.
I tell him about the little black bear on the eastern shore.
"Well," Oberon says, glancing toward the river, "they found that baby moose right there on the rocks by the boat ramp yesterday. I reckon that little black bear got it. Lots of scat on the road, too. That's a bad sign. Means they're hungry and coming into town."
He pauses.
"But they got the weir in. Sockeye should be here any day now."
No sign of the mother. They cut back the brush to better see the bears coming.
A group of young guides—the boys shirtless and the girls in bikinis, all of them in Xtratufs—smoke old-fashioned cigarettes on the dock on a sun-spilled day when, for now, no cruise ship is anchored in Haines harbor.
"Smoking is actually good for you because it teaches your lungs to clean themselves," I hear one girl say.
They load cases of beer where they normally load overstimulated tourists into their fourteen-person voyager canoe. The motor roars to life and they bounce toward the back of the lake, slicing through a glassy reflection of mountains collapsed into sky. Their laughter is soon swallowed by the waterfalls.
Like the bears, the otters, the skunk cabbage, and the moose, they are part of summer's great performance. They emerge from the green like the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night's Dream: overconfident Nick Bottom turning the color of a boiled Dungeness crab while refusing sunscreen; Peter Quince directing traffic on the dock; would-be Thisbes in tie-dye overalls; Robin Starveling, the mushrooms already kicking in, convinced she's Moonshine.
Merrily they stumble onward, performing their play within a play. There is something beautiful about it—the recklessness, the costumes, the certainty that summer will last forever. On one of nature's grandest stages, far from the critics of the cities, a riot of green.
The last performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream I saw was a decade ago in Central Park. I spent the day waiting for tickets—less standing than picnicking with friends and inching slowly forward, nursing a bottle of rosé.
As the four young lovers ran through the enchanted forest in witless confusion, rain began to fall over midtown. People drifted away, but I stayed. The show went on.
Somewhere as the spell loosened and the lovers found their rightful partners, I realized the play was not really about fairies or magic at all. It was about youth—its certainty, its foolishness, its conviction that every feeling is permanent.
The moose calf had been born like a prop presented to an audience. Dozens of cruise ship tourists stood along the riverbank photographing its uncertain first steps. By now those images are scattered across phones and social media accounts, tiny souvenirs of a life that lasted less than a week.
Most of those people will never think of it again.
But I find myself wondering about the mother. Do moose mourn? Is she still searching the riverbanks? Or has the forest already folded her loss back into itself?
The salmon are coming, Oberon had said.
Summer is short.