HERE IS A SAMPLING OF SHORT ESSAYS THAT BILL SHERWONIT HAS WRITTEN ABOUT HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH WILD ALASKA

LISTENING TO OWL

It’s a Wednesday night in late winter, which in our part of Anchorage means take-out-the-garbage night. Shortly after 10 p.m. I put on bathrobe, gloves, and boots, and prepare to haul our green plastic trash can to the edge of the driveway for Thursday’s early morning pick-up. First, though, I take a broom and head out the front door to clear three inches of fresh snow from the porch. I’ve just begun sweeping the soft, fluffy powder when a voice calls out from the darkness.

Hoo. Hooo-hoo. Hoo. Hoo.

I lift my head in surprise, my heartbeat quickening at this familiar yet uncommon call. Uncommon, at least, in my neighborhood. I’ve been told that dozens of great horns are scattered throughout the city, most often heard -- and occasionally seen -- in large, wooded areas like Kincaid and Hillside parks. Yet in 7 1/2 years on Anchorage’s Hillside, only once before have I heard a great horned owl while standing in my yard. Not that I spend lots of winter nights outdoors. Except for occasional hot tubbing, snow clearing, or aurora gazing, my forays into the yard are brief: to and from the car for meetings, classes, basketball. To and from the road, hauling trash.

The owl hoots again. And again. It seems to be calling from the wooded lot beside our next-door neighbors, the Nelsons. I wonder if they’ve heard the owl. Unlikely, unless they too have by chance gone outside.
Then, off in the distance, a faint response. Hoo. Hooo-hoo. Hoo. Hoo. It could be a competitor responding. But when told of the back-and-forth hooting, local birder Bob Dittrick thinks it more likely that two mates are “talking” to each other on this night. Great-horned owls hoot year round, he adds, but they’re most vocal from late winter through early summer, during courtship, nesting, and fledging of young.

Ears still tuned to the hooting, I finish sweeping, then grab the trash can and carry it to the road. Along the way I cross hare tracks, freshly imprinted into today’s snow. I follow the tracks, hoping to glimpse their maker, but lose them where they cross the newly plowed road. Snowshoe hares, like great horned owls, are mostly nocturnal animals. They’re also one of the owl’s favorite foods, along with other rodents and birds. Trying to imagine the hare’s response when it first heard the owl tonight, I suppose it instinctively froze in place, depending on a snowy white coat to avoid detection. Perhaps now the camouflaged hare is watching me while listening for owl, long ears rotating this way and that.

I’m feeling lucky. If not for my garbage-hauling duties, I wouldn’t have noticed either owl or hare. They provide a glimpse of mostly hidden lives, a reminder of nightly dramas played right outside my door, yet so rarely noticed. A few flakes of snow drift groundward. The 20-degree air is still, the night unusually quiet. The fresh snow that covers the ground and drapes trees helps to muffle noises. No other sound but owl until a jet briefly passes through the night sky, mechanical roar muted, on the approach to Anchorage’s airport. Then, once more, marvelous silence except for the owls’ periodic hoots.

Returned to the porch, I simply stand and listen, relishing the owl’s hoo, hooo-hoo . . . I consider waking Dulcy, who went to bed early, exhausted by her work with the local school district. No, she needs her sleep. I’ll hope the owl returns this weekend. And, come morning, I’ll ask my wife if she’d prefer to be roused when owl is calling, as she’s requested when the northern lights are especially magical.

There’s no doubt the owl is working some magic on me. The hooting has an eerie, haunting quality, but that’s not entirely it. The call, like the wails of loons and the howls of wolves, speaks of wildness and mystery. The lives of owls are secrets, rarely revealed. Tonight, I briefly glimpse a sliver of one owl’s life through the darkness. Its repeated hoots send messages to my brain and create images: I picture the great horned owl perched in a nearby spruce, head swiveling, claws gripping branch, eyes wide open, calling into the night.

I’m reminded of another winter night, six years past. Can it already be so long ago? Camped with two friends in the Alaska Range foothills, I heard the rapid hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo of a boreal owl. The rapture of that night’s campfire, sub-zero cold, forest stillness, ink-black sky, wildly flashing stars, and owl calls are forever imprinted on my brain and heart.

The hooting also reminds me how much I love my life here in Alaska, here on Anchorage’s Hillside. To be part of a world that includes this owl’s voice is a gift indeed. I wonder if any others in the neighborhood are standing outside their houses, temporarily pulled away from familial responsibilities or the technological distractions of TVs, CDs, videos, computers.

The calls stop. I wait a few minutes to be sure, then turn towards the door. Still under owl’s spell, I know that six years from now, even 20, I will remember this take-out-the-garbage night. I’ll remember the fresh snow, tracks of hare, and hushed stillness of the air. I’ll remember standing alone on the front porch, no rush to go inside, listening, listening. I’ll remember my heart beating wildly and my mind growing calm, serenaded by owl.

SEEKING CARIBOU, TOUCHING THE ARCTIC REFUGE'S COASTAL PLAIN

Standing on a rocky, windblown perch at the edge of Alaska’s northernmost mountain range, I look north across a vast green, undulating plain, hoping -- half expecting -- to see caribou. Five others join me in the search, binoculars pressed tightly against their eyes. Time passes and one by one the binoculars drop, as my friends wander off to discover other Arctic delights and mysteries: golden poppies, bleached bones, wolf tracks, golden eagles soaring against a cerulean sky. I stubbornly linger atop the unnamed marble mountain that rises, like a giant inverted cone, from the Achilik River Valley.

This north-south trending drainage is one of the corridors used by members of the Porcupine Caribou Herd as they migrate through the Brooks Range to and from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain. We’d come hoping to intercept caribou on their way to southern wintering grounds. We know that most of the herd’s 130,000 caribou are already far to the south and east, but dreams die hard, so a few of us keep imagining that thousands -- or at least hundreds -- of late-departing migrants will suddenly surge into our valley and pass beside our tents in a thunder of bodies.

Though we miss the animals, their signs are everywhere, of every kind imaginable. Hoofed tracks mark the ground wherever it is soft. Clumps and tufts of brown and white hair hang from willow branches. Sun-bleached bones and antlers lie scattered on gravel bars, tundra wetlands, and craggy limestone ridges. Hundreds of deep, rutted trails crisscross the lowlands and hills. Even in the caribou’s absence, the sense of their presence, their spirit, is overwhelming. As Glenn, visiting from California, suggests, “It’s a little like being in someone else’s house when they’re not at home.”

I’d come to the refuge also expecting to spend a day, maybe more, exploring the Arctic Refuge’s coastal plain: calving ground for the Porcupine Caribou Herd and political battleground between those who want to probe its hidden depths for oil and gas and others, like me, who wish to keep this landscape preserved forever as wilderness. Listen to Alaska’s politicians and you get the sense that only “outsiders” want to “lock up” the coastal plain. Another instance of environmental extremists spreading lies, and Lower 48 special-interest groups -- not to mention the federal government -- meddling in local affairs, or so the argument goes. In fact some polls have shown that nearly half of Alaska’s residents want the area to remain wilderness.

As it turns out, I spend most of my time in the mountains, where hiking is easier, the scenery more spectacular and diverse, and the mosquitoes less ferocious. Our group of six ventures onto the coastal plain only once. Most stay a half-hour or less before retreating to camp. Glenn and I stay a bit longer. Still, we hike no more than a mile or two beyond the Brooks Range foothills before chased back by swarming mosquitoes and wet feet.

The coastal plain isn’t a pleasant place to explore by foot (which is probably why float trips are so popular here). Tundra walking is made difficult, if not torturous, by biting bugs, abundant marshlands, and sedge tussocks -- unstable, mushroom-shaped mounds of plants. Tussocks can be avoided by hiking along the large, braided stream channels that dissect the plain, but there’s no escaping mosquitoes. Or soaked feet. And the meandering network of river channels makes stream crossings -- or tundra detours -- inevitable.

Stumbling through wetlands and harassed by mosquitoes, with no caribou, grizzlies, or other animals in sight, I can understand why some people so easily dismiss this landscape as desolate or barren. From a narrowly human perspective, the coastal plain is a remote, flat, monotonous, harsh, and expensive-to-reach place that few people would ever hope, or wish, to visit. In winter, it’s draped in darkness and sub-zero cold, wracked by blizzards; in summer, it’s bug-infested swampland.

Yet even in my discomfort, I notice wolf tracks pressed into the sandbars, the buzzing trill of a savannah sparrow hidden in the knee-high grasses. They are reminders that the coastal plain’s true importance has nothing to do with humans. These lands and waters are breeding, nesting, spawning, calving, feeding, and denning grounds for polar bears, muskoxen, wolves, voles, loons, ducks, shorebirds, snowy owls, arctic grayling -- dozens of species in all.

Crossing back to the foothills, I stop for a moment and once more imagine the pounding of hooves: the beating of the refuge’s biological heart, a place throbbing with life during the short Arctic summer. Barren and inhospitable to our kind, perhaps, the coastal plain is a homeland to our wild northern kin. Those of us who venture here would do well to show gentle manners and respect, as when we step into someone else’s house -- even if they are not at home.

COUNTING LOSSES

Nearing the end of an evening walk along Anchorage’s Coastal Trail, I hear a familiar, pleasing voice. Somewhere across Northern Lights Boulevard, wood frogs are singing. It’s the first time I’ve heard them this year, so I ask Dulcy, my wife, if she would accompany me across the road and listen a few minutes.

In between the passing of cars and the landing of jets at the nearby international airport, we hear their curious quack-like, hiccupy calls, another sure sign that spring has arrived in Southcentral Alaska. Standing there beside the wetland puddles and listening to the frogs’ love songs, I’m reminded of a nearby pond, one that I’ve been meaning to visit. It’s late and we’re both tired. But Dulcy graciously agrees to make a detour and head to the pond, one of my local favorites.

We’re driving down the road, getting close, when I sense something is different. Something is wrong. When we get to the spot, my gut clenches and my spirit sinks. “Oh, no,” I loudly moan. “I can’t believe they did this.” The pond is gone. It’s been plowed over by sand and gravel, part of the airport’s expansion.

I do a U-turn and park the car. Everything is gone: the water, the sedges and reeds, the mud, the frogs, the nesting ducks, the surrounding meadow. If I didn’t know a pond had once been here, I would never guess it now. Understanding my sadness, Dulcy says she’s sorry for the loss. Then we sit in silence a few moments before leaving.

On the drive home I keep thinking about the pond’s destruction, which in turn stirs thoughts of other local losses. In recent years, as I’ve made it my mission to learn more about Anchorage’s urban wildness, I’ve discovered places that I never before noticed, or even imagined -- ordinary places with their own bit of magic. This airport pond was one. Anchorage’s coastal flats and the city’s wooded Bicentennial Park are others. Yet a number of discoveries have soon been followed by upsetting losses.

Near a trail that I now walk regularly, 25 forested acres of Bicentennial Park are going to be cleared and converted into Little League fields. And two of the already few access points to Anchorage’s Coastal Wildlife Refuge are being eliminated, as builders put up new houses. A small, open space atop a bluff, one of those lots has been an outstanding place to get sweeping views of the coastal flats and its annual springtime gathering of cranes, geese, shorebirds, and raptors. I only began going there last year; now it’s about to become someone’s yard, closed off to the public.

Anchorage remains blessed with parks and greenbelts and wetlands and creeks where salmon still spawn, but the losses keep adding up. It’s only natural, I suppose, that the more I get to know the city’s landscape, the more I notice what’s disappearing. With each new loss, I’ve felt sadness and disappointment, sometimes mixed with anger at the choices our community has made. But the pond’s destruction hit me especially -- surprisingly -- hard.

By most standards, it’s a small loss, easy to overlook. I’d guess that many people who drive Point Woronzof Road haven’t noticed -- or at least don’t care -- that the pond is gone. Only sixty paces long and 15 across, the pond hadn’t been much more than an oversized puddle, nestled between the road and a barbed-wire-topped, chain-link fence with airport no-trespassing signs. It may even have been a man-made wetland, formed years ago during road construction. Yet since I first visited it five years ago, I found this urban, roadside pond and surrounding meadow to be a place of unexpected vitality and diversity.

Every summer, a pair of ducks would nest among its shoreline grasses and sedges. Moose would come now and then to drink and dunk their heads while feeding on pond plants. Songbirds -- robins, juncos, sparrows, and swallows -- perched on the airport fence, foraged in the meadow, and swooped through the air, feasting on insects hatched from the pond. Some, I suspect, nested in the area’s thick grasses and its willow and alder bushes, all now gone. Yellow-brown dragonflies and loudly buzzing bumblebees darted along the pond’s edge, while iridescent blue damselflies -- as kids, my friends and I called them “sewing needles” -- hovered delicately and prettily on gossamer wings.

But the water itself and its inhabitants most grabbed my attention on visits to what I named “Airport Pond.” There were the frogs, of course, and their pollywog offspring. This is where I first heard, or noticed, the hiccupy late-night mating songs of male wood frogs. It seemed so wonderfully strange to hear singing frogs in Alaska of all places.

Frogs and tadpoles shared the pond with a remarkably strange, yet familiar, assemblage of aquatic insects; I’d encountered many of these same life forms decades ago, while exploring a neighborhood swamp in Connecticut. Long-legged pond skaters -- also known as water striders -- streaked lightly and swiftly across the pond’s surface and shiny black whirligig beetles danced in wildy gyrating groups.

Beneath the surface were all sorts of beetles and other aquatic bugs, including one type named water boatmen for their long, oar-like back legs, and another called backswimmers that do indeed swim on their backs. One bright summer afternoon, I came to the pond armed with a fine-mesh strainer I’d borrowed from the kitchen. Stepping into the shallows with my hip boots, I squatted and squinted and dipped my strainer. For the next couple hours I caught, studied and released bug after bug, while drawn into the tiny underwater world of tadpoles, backswimmers, and even more alien larval forms.

As I wrote then and recall now, this Anchorage pond, as small and ordinary and urban as it was, held its own minute mysteries. It reminded me that wildness and magic can be found in the most unexpected places, while luring me back, again and again. Along the way it became one of the spots I would visit to celebrate the arrival of spring and the passage of summer. In other words, it became a special place, filled with memories and small delights. So now I mourn its passing, the loss of habitat and life, however small. And my loss, too.

WONDERS OF THE NIGHT SKY

“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the rememberance of the city of God!”
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Late evening in the Peters Hills. The September sun has been swallowed by the Alaska Range, and only a thin, faint purplish glow now marks its passing. As day gives way to night, I stand on a northwest-facing ridge and search the landscape for lights. In the distance are a few scattered cabins and a mining camp, barely visible in the deepening dark. But no points of light.

Higher on this ridgeline, I could look east and see the Parks Highway, with its lights of cars and lodges. Or, turning south, I would see the faraway urban glow of Anchorage. But where I’m camped, the surrounding hills shield me from highway and city. Here, in the far western corner of Denali State Park, I’ve serendipitously chosen a site where artifical lights won’t disturb my wilderness nights.

Above me, wispy clouds have moved in from the southwest, and no stars are visible as I crawl into my tent. Several hours later, feeling chilled, I awake; it’s much colder than my first night in these hills. I add another layer of clothes and then, sensing that the temperature drop reflects clearing skies, I open the tent door -- and am greeted by the universe. Never have I seen such an Alaskan sky. No moon, no aurora and no city glare. Thousands of brilliant stars sparkling in deep blackness. How to describe such an unexpected and overpowering sight?

I’m reminded of a wonderful story I read many years ago, the 1941 science-fiction classic Nightfall. Using the Emerson quote to begin his tale, Isaac Asimov explored how humans might react if they experienced darkness and stars only once every 2,000 years. Would we experience spiritual rhapsody? Or go insane? On this September night, the heavens hold promise, not danger. Lured skyward, I’m pulled from my drowsiness and out of the tent. Still in my sleeping bag -- and no longer chilled -- I lay my head on the frosted tundra and face the night sky. So many stars. Such immense, unfathomable distances. A taste of infinity, an escape from ego.

In Anchorage, I seldom gaze for long at Alaska’s nighttime sky, except to watch sunset afterglows, northern lights, meteor showers, or, perhaps, a full moon hanging low over the mountains. Hidden by clouds and summer’s late-night sun, or dimmed in winter by urban glare, the stars hold little allure. Not enough, certainly, to draw me out of the house and into the cold.

Tonight is different. I wander in a dreamlike trance among the Milky Way, the Big and Little dippers, the Gemini twins and the seven sisters of the Pleiades. I wish I recognized more constellations. I want to know their ancient names, their legends, their origins. What is the story of Orion, the giant hunter? Or Taurus, the bull? And where are they hiding? So many stars fill the sky, that I have difficulty seeing shapes and forms. Perhaps if I’m patient enough, ancient patterns will reveal themselves. As author and human ecologist Paul Shepherd once explained it, “the spectacle of stars seems at first formless and chaotic. But it is far too large a part of the world to accept as randomly structured. . . . We discern or make there organic figures.”

More than anything, humans have used animal forms to shape their universe and give it meaning. I like the idea of mythic creatures inhabiting the sky above this wilderness landscape. The constellation I know best is the Big Dipper. Yet it is part of a much grander figure, one I wasn’t taught to recognize as a boy: Ursa Major, the Great Bear. In Secrets of the Night Sky, stargazer Bob Berman suggests “It’s odd, to say the least, that so many ancient civilizations discerned the shape of a bear in this region of the sky. . . . . A bear is stretching it, and yet that is exactly what Native Americans, ancient Greeks, the Germanic tribes of middle Europe, and others saw in this formation. Why such disparate civilizations should all project the same unlikely bruin onto these northern stars remains a mystery.”

I like that too: the fact that modern scientists can’t figure out why several cultures, widely separated by time or distance, identified essentially the same Great Bear in the heavens. What could they see -- or imagine -- that we can’t now? The myths explaining the origins of Ursa Major vary greatly, yet those of many North American Native groups are similar in that bear is “born” in the heavens and later becames an envoy connecting the physical and spiritual worlds. It seems the perfect story for a magical night spent in grizzly country.

While most cultures have reveled in the images, stories and meaning apparent in the night sky, ours has largely blocked it out with city lights and, consequently, learned to ignore it. This seems a paradox, given our nation’s great interest in space exploration and odysses. While the masses watch Star Trek and Star Wars, the heavens themselves have become the domain of astronomers, physicists and other scientists who, with their high-tech instruments, probe, dissect, and analyze the universe as they “figure out” the universe’s mysteries. In the process, something has been lost. As with so many things nowadays, there’s too much science and analysis, too little myth and magic. Too much arrogance, too little humility. Too much separation from the rest of creation, too little connection.

Here in the Peters Hills, on a starry Alaskan night like no other I’ve known, I reconnect with the wonder I felt as a boy, while gazing at Connecticut skies. I shrink in size to an insignificant speck, yet I’m part of the glorious enormity that this extraordinary spectacle reveals. My imagination stirs, takes flight among faraway blazing suns and the power they reveal. Gradually I realize it was no accident I chose this place to camp.

I have no idea how long I’m caught up in this reverie. Maybe 10 minutes, maybe an hour. When I finally check my watch it’s nearly 4 a.m. Already, the stars’ brightness has begun to fade, and a pale glow lights the eastern horizon. I drift back to sleep, my spirit cleansed by starlight.