Specimens, Days

We live in Bettles now, with no phone & very limited access to internet. Drop me a line at PO Box 26046, Bettles Field, AK, 99726 & I promise I'll write you back. In the meantime, here are a few things I've thought about since arriving. Hope you all three are well & sending my love.  * All morning, the snow fell thick & wet, clumping & carpeting the roofs. Blue sky pokes through now in the afternoon heat, & drip edges shed curtains of melt. The skies here are epics written in slow time, their characters clashing across tableaus of unimaginable distance. The Yukon Flats & Kanuti form an arrow that points a few dozen miles north of here, & to the west, north & east, the mountains hem the arrow in, crested white, gauzy across the country. In Bettles, the old gravel pit is a swollen lake & the migratory ducks & shorebirds whittle away their time. Godwits & kittiwakes flit overhead while snipes out by the float pond stutter along end

The cedar waxwings have moved along. The cormorants still flock in the gloaming, pointed west, with their numbers reducing by the day. Herons seem to bunch together, weaving in & out of one another’s company in the spring, displaying perhaps a bit less timidity when the kids rush to the windows or porch railings to point in wonder. & lately, the hummingbirds have returned. They hover at the windows, looking at the drawings of monsters Ada did to deter the prior passerine crowd from running into the glass. They seem genuinely interested, spending a moment at each drawing before moving politely to the next. & all the birds compassed north have flown but us, but we go about the business of packing, unburdening ourselves of more things, selling off the car, trying to organize what we can in the face of so many variables & unknowns.  The spring in Texas has been windy, almost without exception or cease. Yellow pollen coats every surface, but the flowers erupt in kaleidoscopi

I have been watching war movies. For a while there, I sought the fantastical, the strong current of fictions begging greater leaps of disbelief than I’d ever sought before. Escape is fine, I suppose, but then at some point you recognize the beehive is still humming, the noise ceaseless & demanding. The wound will bleed until you dress it, even if its dressing takes years. & so, without thinking about it until now, I seem to have tightened my aperture on moments wherein death underwrites life, provides starkly its backdrop, soundtracks it. It doesn’t really matter if the movies are based on true stories or not-- it is the existential limn I want, the protracted praxis of life’s defense. How tightening your grip on the world is actionable, necessary & clarifying.  The thing about clarification when grief can still render you nearly catatonic is that it proves opaque at best, an oasis seen from a distance, such that you know it exists but between the present & the moment o

Another peculiarity is the notion that one ought to return to normal after, well, anything, but especially a death or a failure or a trauma or the like. There is inherent in it the presupposition that such a thing exists in the first place, a sort of enduring gestalt that boulders along unflinching, accruing experience & shaping it into its extant mold. Time becomes the instrument of assumed balance, & the stunning evenethood of all things then comes prefaced already. I know that at the epistemological level, this is getting into some of Gadamer’s business & before him Hegel, but I just mean that when you’re pushed off a ledge, why the fuck would you climb & clamor back up to the same precipice? Why the fuck would you want to?  Everywhere is echoed the same sentiment that this will pass, that in time, things will normalize & life will go on as it was. Talk about his death is carefully & strategically avoided, & when it spills out it is swept away in fear. Th

What is perhaps most truly odd is the peculiar & myopic requirement that someone we love die in order for us to most fully consider the implications of dying at all. Our lives seem delineated by deaths, as all lives are, with only eventual reprieve from its immediacy permitting our days to banner & hang catenary from one obituary to the next. We pivot from immersion in all of death’s details back to our own lives & weigh them anew & wonder how best to recalibrate, to impose new bearings. My own life here a sort of waiting in tow with our compass already set, the days reduced to logistical tinkering & finger-tapping & imagining again through the landscape I so dearly miss.  We have oscillated regarding how best to position the kids in the world. We tried Montana in hopes that we could abide what sacrifices we sought in ourselves in a kind of exchange for the possibility of more cultural exposure for them. & then every weekend we fled into the mountains, as fa

I will have two springs this year-- this one underway in Texas & the next in the Arctic. On our walks, Ada looks for pink Indian paintbrush in the meadow & Whitman dances from flower to flower, showering them with exhortations of one sort or another in indiscernible, bright syllables. The wind sculpts columnar clouds reft by the last of the migrating birds. The cormorants amassed last week in a days-long volley to the west, weeks after the robins passed through. Now, the cedar waxwings alight on the boughs of the tall cedars & live oaks, watching the waves of the lake lap against the stone of the shore. The thunderstorms sneak in at dusk & explode in the smallest hours of the night, cacophonous symphonies of light & long-sustained sound, a kind of echo chamber of rumble & roil. In the morning the sun dapples the wet grass & the street is lined with runnels choked with battered leaves. On those mornings I can walk in the wind without falling prey to the polle