In Another Life

Echos of Tienanmen Square.

This postcard's photo was taken by Michelle Barnes-Ness and printed by Alaskan Postcard Classics on environmentally friendly inks and paper. The card was a gift along with 24 other cards from friends Jan and Rick. They are serious garage sale folks and found the cards at an ongoing garage sale in Fairbanks.

The caption on the reverse side said this particular moose charged, kicked the locomotive, then jumped off the tracks. Fortunately for this moose the train was not moving. Usually their orneriness earns them a trip to oblivion.

This year more than 300 moose will be hit by trains in Alaska. That is not so much a prediction but a figure based on average strikes for the past 25 years. If the snow is heavy, more will die. Even though moose can weight up to 1,600 pounds, a freight train with several thousand tons of mass moving at 40 miles per hour with a steel cattle guard easily wins the battle of nature verses machine. It takes a fully loaded freight train nearly a mile to stop. Moose use the tracks to avoid floundering in the deep snow -- which in some areas can be eight feet deep. One year a train on a 712-mile round trip collided with 24 moose. The only good to come of this carnage is that some of the moose killed by trains are savaged for local food banks.

Plowing into the new year

Printed on the back of the card:
Rotary snow plow in action at Moraine, Mile post 7.1 on the Whittier Branch of the Alaska Railroad. In this area, 100-mile-an-hour winds are frequent, causing heavy drifting of snow.
Published by Ellis Post Card Co., Arlington, Washington

This year I'm thinking of New Years a little differently. I can't help but think that some sober meditation is in order. This train slogging its way through drifts of snow is an appropiate image of what the new year has in store for most of us. The proverbial tracks we run are not always clear but we will get through what seems like insurmountable obstacles by persistence and determination.

Each year the Alaska Railroad publishes an art print commemorating the work and beauty of Alaskan trains. For 2009, Alaskan artist Taffina Katkus won the print competition with her work "Clearing the Way." See an image of the print at her blog Post Cards from Alaska. She used as her subject a rotary plow very similar to the one shown on this post card, photographed several decades earlier in Whittier, Alaska.

The best to you and yours in the New Year!