It’s 5 a.m. on a crisp, early July morning and I’m driving on the Sterling Highway south of Kasilof on the Kenai Peninsula. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent most of the weekend on the waters of Cook Inlet but the landscape looks strangely submarine. A dense fog is hugging the ground with bright sunlight filtering through it in shimmering shafts. Here and there the light strikes a stand of black spruce casting weird shadows onto the swirling fog. Still south of Soldotna, the car breaks out of the vaporous mass and into bright sun. The brief glimpse at the low land surround the hill reveals a sea of fog, broken only by treetop archipelagos. Then the road drops and the car are again submerged in the ocean of mist.
A few hundred yards ahead, something breaks away from a treelike shadow and darts across the road. A moose, one big enough to do serious damage to my car and myself if we collided, so I tap the brakes and try to be more diligent.
I’ve seen pictures taken in kelp forests and this mottled atmosphere reminds me of that with frolicking seals are replaced by trotting moose. A couple of miles on another moose darts across the highway, this one close enough to force me to brake hard to avoid impact.
An impatient driver pulls around and passes me engine whining, and races ahead. After giving him an ample lead, I accelerated a little, figuring he’ll run interference for me. I see neither taillights nor moose for another five miles and then the fog thins and dissipates under clear blue skies.
I’ve driven the road between Kasilof and Anchorage scores of times over the last 30 years and I’ve become somewhat jaded about it. Volcanoes, snowy peaks, bears, moose, I’ve seen it all along that roadway, or more accurately I’ve glanced at it all as I raced toward my destination. This morning I passed through a landscape I’d never seen before, no less real than the one composed of mountain and forest, but insubstantial and fleeting. I’m glad I got to see it because that combination of sun, fog and shadow will never occur exactly that way again.