March 2020. This is the strangest time that any of us has ever lived in. There are, of course, the fears of the unknown––pretty much everything about the virus that has gripped us in this pandemic is unknown––but worse than that (for everyone but perhaps the extreme introverts!) is being cut off from one’s family and friends. Some of us are profoundly fortunate to live where we can get outside whenever we want, and even join up with friends at a safe distance outside. But some can’t get out. I think of my friend Maura who at the age of 90 is being so careful not to expose herself to the virus, and this means that she is homebound in her small apartment, only connected to her family and friends by telephone or email. I’m not sure she knows how to use Zoom, which so many of us are now using. How hard to face another month of this isolation! But Maura is ever-cheerful with her lot. She’s happy with her books and limiting her time watching the news, and spending much time on her telephone talking with loved ones.

I am nearly finished reading an amazing novel titled The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. I highly recommend it for escape reading. It is actually more like a game, not using visual images but rather text, to draw the reader into an intricate plot with multiple ending possibilities. Near the end the reader’s avatar, Zachary Ezra Rawlins, stands before multiple doors knowing that he has to choose one, but after a moment, on a hunch, he walks some distance away and finds a door that no one would see unless one had followed a wild hunch and gone looking for it, and that brings him to the ending of the story––perhaps. Perhaps there is no ending. I haven’t finished the book yet, but I suspect the ending will be open, infinitely possible.

I would like to do that with a sequel to Raven, Tell A Story, but I haven’t been able to start yet. I blame the times and my excess of nervous energy preventing me from sitting down for any length of time. But I should get on with it. Meanwhile, I send my thoughts and prayers out to everyone in this world of ours, every one of us facing the same fears and challenges at this moment. May we all be well, and may all be well, and may we unite in this rather than divide.

The bears living in the deep woods around my home in New Hampshire have woken up hungry. Biologists warned us that they would be extra hungry this spring, since they had less food than usual last fall. We suspect that these aren’t just-passing-through bears––they seem like they know us pretty well. First of all, they haven’t even bothered with our bearproof trash barrel (been there, tried that). And last evening just as it was getting dark, our cat freaked out and ran from the entry (where we have a glass door that gives him a sentry’s view) into the living room, looking wildly at the windows. I looked from him to the windows and glimpsed a large black shape moving quickly by on the snowbank right outside our windows, just in time to see the bear leap five feet from one stone retaining wall to the wall on the other side, slip past a bordering cedar tree and run out of our yard. When I went out to look for his tracks, I saw that he had been headed for our front porch, where a bear had been last April, finding what I had thought was a safe place for a big bag of sunflower seed stashed in a tight-lidded tin barrel. The cat had freaked out then, too. In fact the cat was acting––when I got up about a half hour after the 5am raid last April––as if a person had come into the house, and for a moment I almost joined him in freaking out. But then I saw the tin barrel on its side on the front porch and I immediately knew what had happened.

These are black bears, not the huge and terrifying grizzlies of Alaska. But there is something other-worldly about these bears, nevertheless. Our cat is onto that. There is an oddly human quality about them, starting with their wonderful tracks that look like they were left by big bare human feet, big fat toe prints but with long claw prints added on. And these bears are so black that they are almost unbelievable to the eye: nothing on the planet could possibly be so black. Even in the dark you see them, because they are darker than the dark.

Anyway, I have had a wonderful time this past week following their tracks, and the really funny thing is, it is quite apparent that they have been following mine! It all started with them easily bypassing the bungie cords on the tin barrel lashed to the birdfeeder tree in the middle of our meadow (I keep the birdfeeders on this tree, far from the house, because if I put the feeders on the little apple trees in our front yard we are quickly overrun with squirrels, and even rats). About a week ago I got out to the birdfeeder tree to hang up the feeders, which I had been conscientiously bringing in at night, and saw that I needn’t have bothered––the bears had just stretched the bungie cords enough to pull the sunflower see bag out of the barrel and made off with the 25 pound bag that was half full of seed! I am getting that bag back, no matter what it takes, I thought as I saw their tracks leading into the woods. I put on my snowshoes and followed them and found the bag about two hundred yards down my snowshoe trail in the woods. A bear had carried it that far without spilling one seed. I wish I could have seen it! A few handfuls of seed were spilled where the bear dropped the bag, and I left the seed on the ground, pretty sure the bear would return later for it. I took back the bag with the rest of the seed in it, back to my house and kept it in my entryway. Sure enough, next day when I checked, the bear had been back to the seed and I could see long lines in the snow from her claws, where she had raked the seed up. No doubt she was disappointed the bag wasn’t there!

Last evening when I went out to bring in the birdfeeders, I found two sets of bear tracks coming across the snowy field to the tree, and then leaving from the tree to the woods––and while the seed feeders were still hanging from the tree (but one of them was suspiciously empty, and I could just imagine a black bear standing up and sucking the seed out of the cylinder), it was the suet they’d been after. One suet cage had been snapped open and left empty, one was lying in the snow under the tree (I think maybe they’d heard me coming and run away without it), and one suet basket was missing entirely (I will find that, too!). After safely stashing the birdfeeders inside the house, and updating my husband on the bear activity, I looked out the back windows and saw a bear slowly walking along the woods at the edge of our fields, headed back for the birdfeeder tree, like he’d been waiting for me to leave! So I took a new block of suet, but it into 6 chunks, and slipped out the other side of the house, coming into the field from the other end, hoping I would go undetected. He didn’t notice me as I quietly walked over the snow to near the edge of the woods where he’d come into the field. I didn’t dare go any closer, in case he got spooked and decided to run back the way he came––much as I love bears, I don’t want to be face to face with one! So I tossed those small chunks of suet as close to his footprints in the snow as I could. I quickly headed back to the house, and once I was within sight of the birdfeeder tree, I saw the bear running for the woods away from me and knew he’d finally heard me (the breeze had been blowing from him to me, so that’s why he hadn’t noticed me for a while).

This morning when I went out to hang the feeders, I followed the bear tracks in the snow, now frozen solid, beautiful, crisp, pristine tracks. I wanted to see if he’d found the suet I’d left. No, surprisingly 5 of the 6 chunks were still there, mostly buried in the snow. But he had come back after I left––his tracks were all over mine! So I unburied the chunks for him to find later.

I know we’re not supposed to feed bears. The last thing we want is garbage bears, habituated to humans, hanging around until someone decides they are a nuisance or, worse, a danger to the community, and shoots them. But I figure a few chunks of suet left along the line where the woods meets the field, just for a few more days while we still have over a foot of snow on the ground, couldn’t be too bad?

I’m going to invite my grandchildren over after school today to look at the tracks. Can’t wait.

I feel the need to write about earthquakes, having just experienced on Nov. 30th the most significant earthquake in Anchorage since the 1964 earthquake, which I survived as a child (we lived on the bluff above the inlet, on land that subsequently became Earthquake Park, land that liquified in that 9.2 earthquake, and we were one of four families in our neighborhood that had our house shredded as the bluff slid down to the inlet).

Oddly enough I did have a major earthquake (skyscraper windows in Fayerport shattering and falling down to the streets, etc.) in an earlier draft of Raven, Tell A Story. It was a plot device that didn’t work, and I scrapped it. Though I did have a good description through Tessa’s eyes of the earth rolling in waves. I have read many accounts from the 1964 Alaska earthquake and I remember them all, and the earth rolling as if it was the sea is something that I’ll never get out of my mind.

The 7.1 earthquake we just had on Nov. 30th wasn’t anything like the cataclysmic March 27th, 1964 earthquake, but because it was only a few miles from Anchorage and relatively shallow, we all experienced it as quite violent. There was no gentle, rumbling start from the sound waves traveling for miles to reach the ear seconds before the shaking––this one came on right away, with no warning at all, and within a couple of seconds the roaring and sharp jolting made everyone feel as if a giant had reached out and grabbed the building they were in and was shaking it as hard as possible. Up and down, side to side, and then the other side to side. All in all it lasted nearly one long minute in the part of town I was in. When things began crashing off shelves and pictures on walls crashed and shattered onto the floor, I felt the sheer terror of knowing that it’s another big one, this might be THE one… because that’s what earthquakes do––they render you helpless because they have come out of nowhere so suddenly, and you have no idea how big they are going to be, how long they will last. And the bigger the earthquake, the longer it lasts. And all you can think is this might be the one that kills me.

I’ve carried that fear inside me ever since 1964––the fear that there might be another big one that will kill me. And sure enough, we did have a pretty big one, but it didn’t kill anybody, thank God. And maybe now that I’ve experienced another pretty big one, maybe that fear will be slightly lessened. We’ll see. I do know that it won’t keep me from coming back to this, my second home. And my heart goes out again and again to victims of earthquakes in so many parts of our world.

But there is something important to be said for completely being in the place you are in.

I’ve been trying to pay attention to the sights, sounds, smells of where I am. This winter I did a lot of snowshoeing in the woods, and sometimes I took my phone so I could snap a photo, but mostly I didn’t––just so I’d completely be present wherever I was.

Now it’s finally spring where I live. As usual I keep a journal to keep track of the spring arrivals. Not to put down the goldfinches (brightening every day) velcroed to my finch feeders in the front yard, or the industrious and friendly chickadees that we also have all year round, or the clamorous bluejays who’ve taken over the backyard compost pile, or the woodpeckers, nuthatches, mourning doves, owls, crows, ravens, hawks… But it is a miracle every year when the spring birds show up.

4/10 Song sparrows back, purple finches singing, robins in yard (robins had tried to show up in March but driven away by snowstorm), male cardinal singing in our cork tree

4/15 Heard golden crowned sparrow, song sparrows everywhere, white-throated sparrow at finch feeder, pine siskins at finch feeders (elbowing out finches)

4/22 Woodcocks taking flight in twilight in our field!

4/25 Flickers everywhere, heard first hermit thrush in neighbors woods

4/26 Phoebes everywhere, wood frogs clattering in our tiny fountain pool (to the amphibeans in our woods, it’s a vernal pool… most years we have wood frog eggs, salamander eggs, green frog eggs, toad eggs––it’s a veritable hatchery)

4/27 Chipping sparrows everywhere, tons of wood frog eggs in just 24 hours!

I’ve been thinking about the idea of place lately. How places call to us, draw us. Sometimes we can answer the call and actually travel to that place, but usually we can’t and have to make do with traveling there in our minds.

Maybe this is why all my life I have taken photos of places, much more than photos of people. I’ve always envied people who could take photos of people––that gift of being able to connect with someone and put them at ease with having their photo taken, that opening of self that the camera somehow, magically, captures. I’ve never had that. I’ve always felt apologetic and even furtive when trying to photograph people. But places––I’ve always tried to photograph places, I guess so I could try to bring them away with me somehow. Hoping that the photo might be able to evoke the actual place from far away.

Sometimes it can happen. I guess it depends on that moment the shutter clicked––did I get it?––and then later, what we bring to the photograph, doesn’t it?

Drink in the photo with your eyes, and then close them and try to engage every other sense:  hear the distant rush of a waterfall across the valley, a kinglet’s enthusiastic burbling song, the buzz of a bee in a blossom; smell and taste the faint mineral whiff of mountain water, the spicy scent of alders; feel sudden warmth on your face as the sun comes out from behind a cloud, the cool brush of a breeze that’s just breathed off a glacier.

We do our best to get back to the places we love.