A life in weather

(Photo provided by Michelle Bonnet Hale)

By Michelle Bonnet Hale

My mom is 87. She grew up in Petersburg and she said yesterday that she’ll finally stop bragging about how much more snow fell when she was a child.

Our wake-up call to get the roof of our house shoveled this year was the chicken coop collapsing. (Note: No animals used in this essay have suffered harm.) I heard it collapse and the dogs rushed across the deck to be let in. We love these dogs dearly, but they are City dogs and not very courageous.

I jumped up to make sure the birds were OK and to figure out exactly what had happened. We all made hasty repairs to the coop and shoveled the heavy load of snow off the path. 

That same day we asked a crew shoveling snow off a nearby house to put our place on their list. Whew, they did and whew, our roofs are cleared. We can no longer see out our windows, but that is a small price to pay.

Since we are all cooped up, metaphorically, and you can play only so many games of Scrabble, or watch only so many episodes of Shetland or Blue Lights, I got to contemplating other weather events of my life. Never a Juneau snow event like this one, for sure.

Several years back we had a summer of record-breaking rainfall. My birthday is at the end of August and it just so happens that the prior rainfall record had been set in the year of my birth, 1961. I consider that a double whammy: Not only did I come into the world as winter darkness was approaching, I did so at the end of the rainiest summer on record when everyone was already leaning hard into depression. 

I understand myself so much better now.

(Photo provided by Michelle Bonnet Hale)

We moved from Juneau to Prince of Wales Island the day I turned 11. Some winter before then in my child’s timeless memory we had a big snowfall (the biggest I’d ever seen!) in Juneau, snow up to the top of the fence. My brother and sister and I tunneled the front yard, creating passageways and rooms that far surpassed the cardboard box fort we’d been building in the living room. We dressed in our cute little snowsuits with our mittens on strings and dug and packed our amazing snowfort.

The next day Mom was met with howls: ”Mom, Tiger (our magnificent orange long-haired cat) pooped in our snow tunnels! Make him stop!” Tiger owned those tunnels until they collapsed.

In family lore but before I remember, there was a Thanksgiving Day storm that knocked the power out for what turned out to be days. Thanksgiving was at our house that year, but you can’t dine on raw turkey. Finally, my parents packed up turkey and fixings and family and trooped all the way from Goat Hill Road to my grandparents’ house in Douglas. It was a very late Thanksgiving dinner.

Given that the autumn equinox occurs in September, I don’t understand how major storms manage to align so well with Thanksgiving Day. We were living off the West Coast of Prince of Wales Island in the 1970’s during yet another epic Thanksgiving Day storm. The storm surge came up over the floorboards of our buildings on pilings. We rarely turned the generator on for electricity in the winter, so my vivid memories are of us sloshing around in the old cold storage buildings with our flashlights, freaked out that the storm would take the buildings. That time, it didn’t.

My favorite-ever picture of myself as a little tot is one taken by my grandparents of me looking out the window, a reflected spring snowbank sharing the frame. My second favorite is me not much older sloshing around in snow and water at the beach.

I was in my late 20’s when Captain Hazelwood uttered those infamous words, “We’re leaking some oil.” I spent that year in Valdez working on the Spill for the State. Walking over to the mess hall for lunch one day with a colleague, my friend complained about the incessant rain. I hadn’t even noticed it was raining.

My favorite mantra is, “Water dries.”

That winter of 1989-1990 it snowed 540” in Valdez. That is 48’ of snow. I was renting a tiny room from a friend at Mile 0 in Valdez. It had a very long driveway, which I could sometimes navigate with my little 2-wheel drive Toyota pickup. That too was an epic winter. The spillionaires had gone to warm climates, exhausted from the oil spill recovery efforts, and there weren’t enough people in town to keep up with the shoveling. They had to import people from Anchorage to shovel roofs.

So many weather stories. Fishing off the West Coast of Prince of Wales Island in 1990, we and our fellow fisher-folk were holed up in town for an unseasonably fierce summer storm. We were in Craig, glued to the VHF radio as a processor boat was battered on a nearby reef. Over two days we listened as the skipper, talking to the Coast Guard, tried to maneuver the boat off the reef. He would gasp as his ship picked up with a wave and slammed back down on the reef.

Finally, the Coast Guard radioman began asking if the skipper had had any sleep. Not much later, the Coast Guard made the command decision to remove him and crew from the vessel. It was heart-wrenching.

The next year we fished next to the rusting wreck perched on that reef.

But back to the present and our chicken coop collapse. Last summer my partner and I had built a skookum lean-to roof attached to the coop, so the chickens could be dry in their yard when it was raining. We are not carpenters, but we did a good and solid job and we were inordinately proud of that roof. 

Pride cometh before a fall. Sadly, our roof could support the snow, but the coop could not support our roof. It was an engineering failure. We are apparently also not engineers.

After rushing out on the deck and figuring out what had happened, I came back into the house calling to my partner, “The first casualty of the snowstorm! Our roof has collapsed!”

I don’t know what you would think, but my partner thought that the roof of our house had collapsed. Oops.

It’s been a wild end to 2025 and a hard start to 2026. Blessings to all of you, my friends and neighbors. Thanks to our amazing snow removal crews and to all of you for your incredible attitudes and strength as we carry each other into the new year. 

• Michelle Bonnet Hale’s roots go deep in Juneau and Southeast Alaska. She and her partner share their household with various relatives and three dogs. She served for six years on the Juneau Assembly.