attended, and every spring a large part of the population turns out to make a celebration of harvesting the litter that sprouts from beneath the receding winter snow, volunteering their time to clean the limited grid of roads that stitch Juneau to the surrounding landscape. This effort, community spirited and admirable as it is, is really no more than window dressing, an effort to impose a sense of order on what is otherwise a notably disorderly corner of the world. A small, isolated place, Juneau is composed of fewer than thirty thousand souls perched precariously amid a jumble of glaciers, ice fields, and mountains that sprawl endlessly in every direction. To seaward, a narrow archipelago of equally wild islands separates the city from the Gulf of Alaska, where files of towering gray waves throw themselves ceaselessly against the shore. The clean streets and neatly painted houses provide no more than a diaphanous, even illusory, membrane of safety between the clinging pocket of humanity and the enveloping wilderness, one penetrated at will by nature’s whim. During spring and summer the police column in the daily newspaper is as likely to report