Cool Things

This photo is actually a very poor rendering of what I actually saw - a few days ago, just as I arrived at the summit of Haystack, I looked up at the antenna array and saw the sun shining through the fog and backlighting two eagles. You can just make out the sun; it looks like the moon does during the day sometimes. My camera didn't know what to make of the light situation and this was the best I got out of several pictures I took, and it really doesn't do the scene justice at all.

That got me thinking about things I've seen lately where I didn't have a camera handy, where the image remains only in my mind. Boat traffic is always a joy - with the channel only maybe 100 yards away, seeing big freighters and fishing boats is always fun. One just passed by as I was writing this, and if you've watched Deadliest Catch you know how big these boats are and what a presence they have on the water. About 20 minutes earlier I was emailing Zack and had to stop for a bit and watch the porpoises jumping in the channel - something cool is always happening out the window.

We were beach combing for seaglass tonight and I found an old rusty knife with a jury-rigged leather handle where someone had wrapped leather around the knife tang tightly and then screwed wood screws in to hold it all together - what stories that knife could probably tell before it washed up on the beach in Unalaska.

The very coolest thing in the last few days I saw was a steady stream of tiny polluck scales running across the dock and into the ocean in the bright sunshine - from the second story of the plant it looked like a braided river of liquid silver, ever changing. Amazing!