Land and Sand

LAND. Unlike other American towns we've lived in, Kenai does not appear to have any Christmas trees for sale. No Rotarians, smiling and waving from within their sawhorse compounds. No light bulb-lined parking lots, tree branches slowly unfurling from their blankets of mesh. Apparently, we have enough wild trees that everyone just goes out and chops down their own. Being particularly law abiding citizens (stop your chuckling), we actually looked up the rules and found that national forest land, wildlife refuge land and state park land all allow a single tree to be cut per family, as long as it is cut 150 feet from a road, trail or waterway. Got it.

Success!

And from J's school newsletter:

NURSE'S CORNER

Winter is here! Please make sure
your children have hats, gloves,
boots, coats and snow pants
with them each day. Students
will go out for recess daily
unless the temperature reaches

below –10.

FYI, today was indoor recess. One other recess thing of note is that every school on the Kenai Peninsula has sculpted their playground land to include a mellow but large sledding hill, and all the kids park their sleds (with Sharpie marker names boldly written on the top) outside their classroom doors. J says the kiddos don't make a peep about the cold - they just play up a storm (on the "warm enough" days, that is). For the record, J doesn't make much of a peep either, continuing to ride his trike everyday (-10 be damned) in the December darkness. He almost biked into a moose in our neighborhood last week, but escaped unscathed. Ahhh, the Alaska Adventure.

SAND. No more fish, no more bones... just icebergs. I've read all about spring "breakup" when ice on the Alaska waterways begins to move downstream, but I didn't think through the freezing end of the story in the fall and winter. Well our Kenai River is slowly becoming a chunky white highway complete with epically loud smashing and crashing as football field-sized sheets of ice smash into others and the river's edge, ultimately spitting out at the mouth and sloshing up onto our beach. Doubtless this will only go on for another few days or weeks before the river is so frozen solid that stillness reigns until the thaw. So Indigo and I decided to go on an iceberg hunt. (Grandparents: stop reading here.) We went down to the beach and starting climbing on the stranded bergs along the frozen sand. After we got pretty familiar with the scene, I suggested that we climb on the biggest one around, right near the edge of the water. After several minutes pretending to be penguins and polar bears and dancing about, I noticed that the water had surrounded the iceberg and it was going to be a very adventurous exit. Several wet boots and one air born child later, we were safe back on the beach. We sat on a frozen driftwood log, sipped our thermos of hot cocoa and watched as "our" iceberg drifted back out to sea. Whoops. Forget about mauling, brown bears, it's the adventurous parents you have to look out for in Alaska.

The beach these days.

This is fun!

Washed up 'bergs.

What, were you CRAZY?!?!