[Hayes talks about her time as Alaska State Writer Laureate and what comes next]<\/a><\/ins><\/p>\nNear one pond, I get down on my knees. My reflection is broken in the pond’s surface. The landscape appears like a miniature world with frozen trees, which are really blades of grass growing from the ice. All around, Labrador tea plants with their frosty hats dance at a fairy ball. How can there be so much life in the muskeg with its perpetual state of decay? I had expected that the muskeg in winter to be frozen in stasis, with everything just waiting for spring. But now I realize the muskeg reminds me we’re a part of a great big organic story about living and dying. Winter, a season we often associate with aging, and death, is truly beautiful.<\/p>\n
The bullpine are covered in frost and I take photo after photo. I love bullpine. These grandparent trees are very old, some live to over 300 years old. These old trees listen to us walk in the muskeg. They’ve listened to our story, seen our breath cloud up and float across that lone frost-crusted leaf hanging on the alder branch. These trees will outlive my dad, who’s in his winter of life. He’ll be 79 this year. They will outlive me, too. Winter is beautiful but a bit melancholy, too.<\/p>\n
We get back into the four-wheeler and drive further. After a few minutes, my dad slows down and then stops. He opens the cab door and looks down at the snow. “Moose tracks,” he says. I jump out of my side and run around to look down. Oscar follows me sniffing the tracks. Sure enough, they are. My dad is a good tracker. I take photos and get back into the four-wheeler and we take off again, but after a mile or so the road is impassable and we decide to turn around.<\/p>\n
We stop at the truck but before we load up the four-wheeler we decide to eat the sandwiches and sliced apples I’ve brought in the truck. Afterward, we load up the four-wheeler and head back.<\/p>\n
I like hanging out with my dad in the wilderness because I’m always gifted a story. Sometimes it’s one I’ve heard dozens of times. Other times it’s a story I haven’t heard before.<\/p>\n
“My dad, your grandfather, was out fishing in his troller, the Mercedes, and Ed Loftus, his fishing partner was out in his troller. They were down back channel and anchored up on the mainland shore for the night. When they woke up in the morning, the whole back channel had frozen during the night. They were stuck. They went to the beach and cut down two spruce trees. They tied them on each side of the Mercedes. They tied them up at the waterline and brought the tips forward to the front to make a plow. The Mercedes broke the ice for Ed and his boat, who followed my dad back home. The Mercedes was an icebreaker!”<\/p>\n
I laugh at the image in my mind, the Mercedes breaking ice, another troller close behind in it’s ice-free wake.<\/p>\n
We load Huckleberry onto the trailer and turn around and head back to town. Wintertime is for remembering and also for making new stories. Along the way a story unfreezes and crystalizes in the truck cab: The city used to run out of water when it got really cold. They’d take a pump out to Pat Creek, fill tanks and large wood tierces, and deliver water. The town sold out of plastic garbage cans. The city would come to your house and pump water into your can for you.<\/p>\n
As my dad tells the story, I look out the window and consider this is my dad’s winter story — wandering through forests and muskegs, driving the logging roads, a winter picnic, ancient bullpines covered in frost, moose tracks and a dangling alder cone glinting with ice crystals.<\/p>\n
\n\u2022 Wrangell writer and artist Vivian Faith Prescott writes \u201cPlanet Alaska: Sharing our Stories\u201d with her daughter, Vivian Mork Y\u00e9ilk\u2019.<\/b><\/p>\n
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