Biking For Veggies Gets Me Into Police Blockade

 It's Thursday.  The Refugee Assistance and Immigration Service of the Catholic Social Services in Anchorage has a farm - Grow North Farm - where I subscribe for weekly veggie pickups over the summer.  It's about 7.4 km or or a bit over 9 miles round trip.  I can do much of it on wooded bike paths.  But eventually I get to a quiet residential street in Airport Heights.  

My first hint was a police car a block to the east.  But then as I headed down the street there were more police cars.  Lots of them.  My first reaction was a bad crash, but I'm on a bike and I can go around on the sidewalk if necessary.  But then I got within about 20 feet of the cars and police behind them, yelling at someone I couldn't see.  But I could see that at least one officer had a gun pointed over the car.  As regular readers of this blog probably know, guns are not a fascination of mine.  But one of the benefits of blogging is that I learn new things.  Here's an image of shotguns I got when I googled 'police guns'.  What I saw most resembled one of the circled guns, probably the bottom one, because he was holding it and I saw that box magazine as well.  (Based on the pictures and interactive description from here.)  Of course, I'm just guessing from my brief look and googling now.  

I realized quickly that if the police had guns pointing further down the street, over their cars, that there was someone down there who might start shooting toward the police, near where I was.  (There are fairly regular reports in the newspaper of Anchorage police involved in a shoot out.)  Rather than pull out my camera and try to catch this dramatic scene, I turned my bike around and headed back, turned the corner and tried the next street over, which got me to DeBarr.  From DeBarr and Airport Heights, I took this picture while waiting for the light to change.  I never heard any shots fired.

I originally encountered one set of police coming from the south.  Now I'm looking south from two blocks to the north.  So there were police on both ends of the street.  

I carried on toward Grow North Farm.  It seemed bizarre that cars and people were carrying on normally so close to this dramatic scene, without even knowing that something was happening.  

On my way back everything on that block was back to normal.  Not a sign that anything had happened.  It was like a movie set had packed up and gone home. (I grew up in LA where there were movie shoots all over.)  But I don't know that a movie set would have cleaned up as well.  

At home I unloaded the veggie haul.  Today's selection was:

• Rainbow Chard/ Collard Greens

• Mizuna

• Cilantro

• And a choose-two grab bag of: Kohlrabi, Cucumbers, Zucchini, Salad Mix, Hot Peppers, Tarragon, and Oregano

From the grab-bag, I chose Kohlrabi and Cucumbers.

I played around a bit with the Curves on my photo program to offer you this somewhat alien looking kohlrabi.

As a bonus, we got to pick out a peony.  This one made it in pretty good shape sticking out of my backpack on the ride home.