It felt as though we were trekking through a partially spring-defrosted paradise as my wife and I escorted our mini mutt round the outer perimeter of the Homer boat harbor last weekend.
The bay was a near-placid mirror with small ensembles of wind pixies aimlessly dancing along its surface as a small raft of snoring otters drifted beyond the docile surf.
Any Alaskan with an intellectual capability of a frozen fish stick knows that when such conditions pop up later in March, the best thing to do is to haul in more firewood and check to make sure the lug nuts on your studded tires are still tight.
The Weather Witch had been simmering on mid nuclear for most of the month and became so ill-tempered the week prior to our walk that she shut down the annual Winter King fishing derby just because she could.
I don’t know why her latest weather hysterics maxed me out on the Grouch Scale but it did.
There were others who were wickedly honked off of course, such as the multitude of trolling warriors who got a bit riled at her cantankerous @$$ after she slapped them off water just a day before the tourney. So, I’ll hold my grumblings to a minimum especially, since other citizens around our Great Land were walloped with over 2 feet of fresh snow accompanied by wind gusts of 50-plus mph relocating their free-range chickens to the outskirts of Seattle.
Our hamlet’s weather prior to the shutdown was just flat nasty.
One afternoon, as sleet blasted across the yard, my bride discovered me mumbling exotic profanities into an old tackle box. I was searching to find a lure that hadn’t morphed into a hook-accented sculpture honoring rust. Noting my mood, she felt honor bound to remind me that I shouldn’t be playing around with semi-sharp objects while perilously peeved about the erratic weather changes. Plus, my current tetanus protection status was as effective as a Kleenex bulletproof vest.
I assured her that I was not that disturbed and that getting “perilously peeved” is having a close encounter with dip-sticks driving through the Safeway parking lot like they were conducting drive-byes in East L.A. Or, nearly getting bumper harpooned by Play-Doh intellects blowing through red lights and stop signs while exhibiting the IQs of a suppository.
I gently asked if she might be harboring her own pocket full of peeves.
“Come to think of it, I do,” she murmured. “One of my principal gripes is when a person asks me a question then never pays attention to my answer.”
“Huh?”
“Are you kidding me?”
Moving right along.
This slowly succumbing winter has been a back-breaker for many folks so I’ll chill with the whine. To be frank, I’ve been more than satisfied just to make it to the truck with a minimum of seriously inelegant ice pirouettes and unseemly headers into random snow berms.
March has always been unpredictable and it doesn’t make sense for me to get all cheesed off just because we get hit with stretches of schizoid weather. I might as well start a snowball fight with a blizzard. I’m not only going to lose but look like an idiot doing it.
So, for now, it’s back to mining my tackle box for rare workable lures while keeping an eye for spindrifting off the mountains across the bay and dark sea lines in the inlet.
I’m certain that the miserable sorceress of storms is lurking beyond the horizon waiting for us to become complacent with visions of spring. That’s when she’ll slam us with one last sloppy goodbye kiss of wet winds and slush from the clouds to mix up a landscape sheet cake of mud festooned with mammoth, overflowing potholes so radical they require tsunami warning buoys in case of local quakes.
Take for example, Kachemak Drive right now. That thing looks like a series of duck ponds and there’s rumors of two overdue state gravel trucks last seen approaching the area to commence repairs.
What’s next?
Maybe I’ll just wait and see what the local weather oracles foresee during their Saturday predictions and reverse it. It will be the first of April after all and whose gonna fall for that B.S.?
Nick can be reached at ncvarney@gmail.com if he isn’t busy bog bopping along what used to be his access road in what’s left of his truck.
