Northland News
May 2000
Dear Friends and Colleagues:
Yesterday I drove to Kenai for a meeting, stopping on the way back in Hope to visit a friend -- about 400 miles added to my odometer. Yeah, you'd think driving all the way up the Alaska Highway last month to get here from California would have been enough; but, for me, there's something meditative about driving and taking in so much natural beauty.
Wildlife
On the way out of Anchorage at about 6:30 a.m., I had to slow down to let a cow moose cross the road (right across the street from where my younger brother went to high school). I noted two things about her: she looked awfully "fat," so I figured she was pregnant, and she had some unusual markings on her back and side, apparently scars from an old run-in with something.
During the drive, I also saw a flock of young Dall sheep munching the new grasses right along the Seward Highway, which goes along the coast of Turnagain Arm at the base of the Chugach Mountains. Later, I had to slow again for a yearling moose crossing the highway, and two more yearlings showed up at the side of the highway on the return trip, as did a bristly porcupine.
When I was driving back through Anchorage at 11:30 p.m. on my way toward Eagle River and home, I got the biggest wildlife "charge" of the day: at almost the same place on Northern Lights Boulevard that I had seen the pregnant cow moose on the way out of town that morning, I saw the same (identified by the markings on her back) cow moose, but now accompanied by two, still-wobbly reddish-brown calves. Needless to say, none of the four cars stopped at the signal light rushed to get through the intersection when the light turned green; we were too busy gawking at the new mom and her babies.
I wonder if the other drivers got the same sort of "lump-in-the-throat" feeling I did. God, I hope I never become complacent about the miracles of nature and the new births that come with every spring.
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