Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on– Joni Mitchell
10 am , Saturday Nov. 25. Chilkat River beach. 39 degrees, “spraying”, SE winds 4 mph. (Calm basically, but the airport weather station recorded the speed.) High tide. Sunrise: 8:20. Sunset 3:18. (Moonrise at 2:18, and it will be full in two days. The nights will be brighter even as the days are duller.) The new weather data from NOAA in Juneau is wonderful. It also notes that the average temperature for today is 29 degrees. The high today is supposed to be 40, that’s 11 degrees above normal.
We have skated on this pond many Thanksgivings in the past.
Our game even made the Chilkat Valley News one year in what I call the old days now. Eliza and Sarah were teenagers. Christian a little boy. I wrote Duly Noted back then and they gave me the black and white print. It’s one of my favorites from our bathroom photo gallery. I see it everyday.
The beach was just as crowded today. As more than one person noted, it’s a lot easier to access when you don’t need snowshoes, and we were all still so full that a good walk felt great.
It wasn’t exactly raining but it was wet. “It’s spraying,” my friend said. My glasses were so misted over that I didn’t recognize my sister and Kate until they passed us. Down at the Carr’s Cove end up on Mud Bay Road, someone was playing salsa music on a stereo in the yard while they did chores. That made us laugh.
The tide washed in seaweed and another spawned salmon. Pearl noticed, but walked away without even considering a roll. The other dogs with us ignored it all together. They are much more interested in the five black tail deer hanging in the garage that Chip brought back from his annual hunt in Elfin Cove. He cut up the biggest buck yesterday and is whistling in the kitchen now as he butchers another one. Stojanka is coming over to help later, and I will vacuum seal it for the freezer. “This is the land of plenty,” Chip says.
Haines is in the process of updating the comprehensive plan, which is a fat guide book for elected leaders and borough staff that describes everything about Haines, from housing and education to demographics and economics. Zoning. Industry. Weather. Recreation, healthcare, wealth. You name it, it’s in there. It is also used to plan ahead. The idea is that we get a clear definition of who we are, the core community values– and use that to create goals for the future.
This doesn’t work as well as it should because we don’t have a lot of consensus, except perhaps that we love this place. It’s the why and how that causes such distress. Most comp plans have answers to satisfy all sides on an issue. Still, it’s better than not having one, and when I was on the assembly and the planning commission especially, I consulted it often, and it helped. There’s a lot of cool stuff in there about us.
The firm from Anchorage collecting the data and writing it up released some preliminary findings from all their surveys last week. They concluded that Haines is a deeply divided tight knit community that comes together and takes care of our own when there is a crisis, large or small. I knew that. We all do. I wish it were otherwise. It would be nice to be simply tight knit, and to come together often just for fun, as well as in bad times. It would be really great not to live in such deeply divided town, or state, or country for that matter. It would be nice if roses didn’t have thorns. I wish it was colder, too. But I love it here.
My favorite take away from the research so far, that I didn’t know, is that the happiest people in Haines are ice skaters, older than 79, live on Mud Bay Road– and I think they said, are female. An 80 year-old grandma on ice skates! That’s who I want to be. All I have to do now is live that long. In the meantime, I need to keep practicing so I don’t lose my balance. Oh, I really hope we get some ice soon. I want to skate on the river at Christmastime.
