Specimens, Days

As of January 7...

2012-01-10T07:42:00.001-09:00

January 2

2012-01-02T09:30:00.002-09:00

We read our respective blogs from the beginning of last year to measure their breadth, to see how the year began & think about where it ended. Suffice it to say, our happiness & our rootedness have both continued in their exponential increases, & this New Year’s Day finds my heart at brimming, my enthusiasms all engaged, my life in general pitched at a ludicrously & wonderfully fine height that I would scarcely believe but for the fact of its daily living. It happens with considerable regularity that I will of a sudden take stock of our endeavors here, or our love, or our property & its plans, or a team of dogs, or the painted alpenglow on Pyramid Mountain, & I am left breathless at where I’ve ended up & who I’ve become in the process. There is novelty in each slow dawn, richness in the most mundane of things. I love viscerally here. What a thing.

I brought in the new year with a twelve mile run on the 31st in -10, windy Palmer, along the Knik River. I followed it with 16 miles yesterday from home while it was hovering between -30 & -40, depending on where I was. My run took me around the Intertie, along hills & trails, sliding down a long slope after the moose pond, & most dramatically through the two hours of gloaming wherein the light fought brilliantly against its waning. I stopped at one point along the Intertie, turning from Carlo to Panorama, across the Nenana & then northwards, to the Healy Ridge that will play such a monolithic role in our coming years, over to Musher’s Monument, toward Fellows, to Pyramid, & all of them awash in a fulgent pink glow that dulled just so as I kept along, muting, muting, until the soft gray dusk enveloped it entire. I have been running so much in the dark that those hours of stunning beauty compelled me pleasantly through those frosty miles, obscured though they were with the ice gathering in clumps on my eyelashes. & with the Little Su coming up, this weekend’s runs were a tremendous boon to my confidence. Sometimes I forget that if nothing else, running plain old lets me adventure & explore in places I’d never otherwise see. It’s what I love about mountain running, & what distance provides in the winter when mountains are less capably accessed. Next week my long runs will take me past Harold’s Cabin, where local lore demands that users keep the stock of atomic fireballs replenished. They’ll show me the backside approach to Panorama, show me new lakes & meadows, read me narratives of caribou bedding down, or wolves along a creek, or coyotes in uniform single file. They’ll tell me where dog teams have ventured, where the traplines run, where a fine stand of aspen might be. & all the while that long yawning silence of the wilderness here. How better to know your place.

& in the dog team arena, we took the pups out for another successful run a few days back. I was honored to have Salem as the lead in my team. Salem, for reference, has won the Iditarod as a trusted leader & takes commands & intuits a driver’s needs better than any dog I’ve ever witnessed, hands down. What a privilege for our young ones to learn from such a seasoned & passionate veteran. Littlehead was in Kristin’s team & pulled like an old pro, relentless & focused. Kabob did the same for me, steady & smart. T-bone did well to begin & then decided he preferred to lull melodramatically in the deep snow & cast woe-is-me glances back at me. He ran the remaining miles loose, between our teams or behind us. & for me, another chance to get on the runners, which feels so goddamn good it’s frightening. Now that Hey Moose! Kennels boasts a racing veteran, our shared level of impatient thrill has skyrocketed. One day, one day.

& so, likely I will be looking back at this post in 364 days. To that future me, I say this: you started the year happier than ever you’ve been before. Delight in its memory, but delight more in what grows from it yet.

Happy New Year.

December 22

2011-12-22T13:27:00.002-09:00

The manufacture of all dreams goes forward unabated still, in spite of the long silence. We are back from the Sheep Mountain 150, in which Kristin ran happy, healthy dogs through 150 miles of winding, altitude-laden, blizzard-touched trails down off the Glenn. I was her handler, along with Jess O, which meant helping get everything prepared, dropping dogs the night prior, axing meat into snacks, lining out the team, laying underneath the stars with K after her first run, watching the dogs while she slept inside, standing on the break at the appropriate times & generally worrying a bunch while she was on trail. I suppose that what it really meant was getting to witness something absolutely beautiful & awesome & ridiculously wonderful, which was K fulfilling a dream. & like any good dream, it meandered from stunned terror to mild confidence to intransigent doubt & again to a kind of joy that I think could rightly be called incandescent, or exuberant at the very least. It was a wild kind of dog joy when she crossed the finish line anyway, for all of us. I’m not sure I’ve been prouder of anyone. & then add in my pride at the dogs & Jeff’s victory & the general happy cohesion of our team of folks & you have a picture perfect beginning to a sled dog racing career. I am simply amazed with Knight & those dogs.

Hard to cull other strands from beneath that flame, brightly as it still shines. The rest is good, is lovely, is wintery & hushed. It was solstice yesterday & no sun licked the snow—just the same grey smudge we usually see in those few hours of pseudo-light. The dogs all laze in the cabin, or bite at each other’s necks playfully, or look bewildered at our pups when they are brought in for hour-long stretches. We bought a dog sled, some harnesses, some old mushing gear from a Cantwellian who has retired from it entirely. We’re thinking of building another, a smaller one so I can harness up the pups & kick around my home trails. We look at cabin costs for the property. We look at other races, think of what it would be like to run them, dog or foot or both. & always, that compass seems to point to places seemingly unattainable—places upon which, over & again, our lives find steady anchorage.

October 25

2011-10-25T07:44:00.001-08:00

October this year already appareled in white, after weeks upon weeks of peaking autumnal pyrotechnics. We are finally installed in the new cabin at Skeeter Creek, with thirty-seven dogs of the highest caliber outside our back window. I went out with Kristin a few days ago during ATV training around the Inter-tie, & it was nothing short of amazing to see these dogs work—heads steady, gaits set on smooth repeat, focus palpable in each of them. Twelve miles an hour & one or two among them still in a steady trot, which is ludicrous. & Kristin is back in the throes of dog ecstasy again, looking anxiously at the clouds as if to will them into rupturing forth in billows of snow. It’s a wonderful thing.

I went around the Inter-tie two days ago in the same speed as the dogs, which was curious & informative, since it means I’m apparently running quite a bit faster than I thought. I have officially signed up for the Little Susitna 50K down in Big Lake this February, to be run along snowy trails beside bikers & skiers & heartier souls trekking a full 100 miles as well. I’m laying out training tables for myself now, calibrating my running for winter, nerding out on all things distance-related.

& otherwise with winter comes winter community again. The summer’s relentless pace & exhausting activity tend to drag you away from seeing your closest friends in any environment not also populated by seemingly dozens of strangers. So the restfulness & settling & comfort of quieter visits is something we look forward to throughout the summer & fall. It’s hard to describe—something like a collective hunkering down against the cold, a kind of lovely, aggregate reconnect.

& in the woods the winter has begun its work, which is a fine thing. The tracks in snow along the trails tell you what company you keep, the bears have mostly hit the high country for their good sleep, & it’s too early for the peeling whine of snowmachines, so the space is empty & still & hushed. In that peculiar Alaskan way, it is entirely your own & at the same time entirely apathetic to your presence, & in that odd space I find perhaps the most distinctly compelling version of meaning-making. Something about humility & awe, I’m sure, in equal measure, but something that fills me full to brimming.

September 22

2011-09-22T09:51:00.002-08:00

There are two things lodged in my mind now between other thoughts-- the first is the Eliot line about the "negative wisdom of humility," & the second is 5:13:57, my finishing time in the Equinox Marathon up in Fairbanks last week. Its completion means the world to me, & there is, as I anticipated, a renewed sense of self in me now. But very clearly buttressing that is a renewed sense of where I erred, where I didn't offer ample respect to the endeavor, where I thought my ego might possibly fill in where my training was lacking. & so I imagine it was my ego, coupled with the thrill of a race & the odd presence of other people at all during a run (I never run with others & rarely if ever see runners on these mountains), pushing me to a quick start. At the nine-mile mark my time was at a respectable-but-ludicrously-fast-&-in-no-way-tenable-for-me 65 minutes. I came out gunning with 7:22 miles, hanging with the first quarter of runners for some reason. & then after mile nine, it started to fade in me, my legs firmed up & had no spring, & the hills undid me. I'm usually not deterred by hills-- if anything, I crave them & seek them out & prefer them to flatland any day of the week. I don't guess I have much option in that regard around here, so it's just as well. But I had used up so much of my energy on the first nine I had very little to apply to the grade of Esther Dome. & then come mile sixteen or so I pulled my groin, so the slowing down turned into a fairly comical search for a functional gait that might allow me to keep going. By mile twenty it was clear to me that running wasn't really going to happen, so I sort of shuffled along with a hobbled limp, with my knees kind of buckling & then my ankle chiming in for good measure. By the time I crossed the finish line I was a sort of sideways, broken gyroscope flown off track & scuttling to a very slow end, the accruing discomfort & awkwardness of the gait & the fatigue of the distance very clearly on display.
But goddamn it, crossing that line felt truly fucking wonderful. Really, I am recognizing more & more that there is something absolutely ineffable about running-- which is I suspect why I like it. A kind of communion you have wherein nothing is in evidence upon its completion. It is a purely phenomenal endeavor & its presence never translates into ample recounting. & so capping that with a distance goal like a marathon, pushing myself toward some slightly more distant line & then literally crossing it, no matter how slowly (11:59 miles), speaks to something in me that I wasn't sure I possessed, something I can't name, but something I am absolutely proud & overjoyed to discover.
& in the meantime, I recognize the need for a much higher weekly base mileage before the next push. Now that I know I can do it, it's a matter of doing it better-prepared, with an eye on tightening goals & broadening my distances.
So, between now & February 18, I have quite a few miles to run before the Little Susitna 50K. & goddamn if I won't respect that process fully & humbly.
Also, as a sidenote, the six of you reading this have all been incredibly supportive & generous about it, & that gives me a ridiculous amount of pride & happiness & gratitude, so thank you very sincerely.

September 9

2011-09-09T20:44:00.001-08:00

As of tomorrow morning, I will be counting down seven days to the Equinox Marathon in Fairbanks, wherein I will at long last consummate my long-standing courtship with long distance running. Each morning now I glance out the window at the thermometer & past where it hangs to take in the distant tableau of mountains either bathed in alpenglow or cloaked completely in roiling grey cloud. Each day in running I feel for anomalies in my feet, I survey the trails for jutting roots, I yell my hey bears the louder the closer I get to the date of the race & the more berry-dense shits I see scattered along the way. & in spite of my chosen terrain, I’ve been incredibly fortunate thusfar— tripping & falling three or four times with no lasting issues (a comical shitshow with all three dogs attached), seeing a couple bears with no negative consequence, trying new shoes with no resulting hot spots. So I feel this odd cautious optimism. Last time I tried to this I was hamstrung with peroneal tendonitis, but then last time I tried to do this I was probably hamstrung with a great deal more as well. It doesn’t seem, anymore, such a distant dream, lodged ever on some horizon beyond my grasping. But then nothing that I want does, which is maybe the point. So strange, after all these years, to see budding in me some belief in my own abilities again. I haven’t really said it out loud to anyone but Kristin, but finishing this marathon will mean more to me than I will even begin to intimate, & I suspect that it will take root in some internal flourish to which I won’t necessarily lend voice. It seems fitting that it should crescendo as quietly as it builds, & shape what it will with that selfsame care. But it will be a kind of wellspring in me for some time after.

The other half of it, beyond the personal satisfactions I derive from it & from alpine running in general, is that once achieved, I can begin to understand training for longer distances. Next year the goal will include several races that my schedule prohibited this time around, & among them there will assuredly be a much longer course. But as we get nearer our understanding of & fraternity with sled dogs, I want to get closer to empathizing with their distances as well. I’m curious about where those two kinds of training can overlap, & what advantage there might be in that. If nothing else, some day I can slip off the runners in a race & join in the effort myself, for as many miles as may be necessary. I don’t generally like asking of others what I’m incapable of myself, & so I’d like it to be with dogs.

It’s interesting to me to find some kind of categorical correlative for what I’ve done out of a very simple drive all this time. Maybe we know better than we think we do after all.

September 3

2011-09-04T06:48:00.001-08:00

The fledgling signs of winter’s approach now over the painted hills & mountains, snow line down lower along Healy Ridge & down south over Panorama. & all the fireweed gone red. Running twenty miles yesterday, the leaves underfoot along the trail vermillion & crimson & gashing gold, rain-slick or lazing unhurried from white bough to black dirt. & a few days ago, running on a sheep trail on top of Sugarloaf, a gargantuan hyperphagic griz sauntering about in the berry patches just below, so that to reroute I had to sidehill a steep scree-field for a mile. & here it is September, already. The moose in rut, temperatures to thirty overnight, the autumnal crispness attending the mornings or carried in the breeze. & the colors in this place pyrotechnic & endlessly beautiful again.

On the property we’ve been stalled by busy-ness & marathon training. I hauled the concrete piers out a few days ago in five trips totaling somewhere around 700 pounds. Didn’t get them up the hill yet, but at least in the meantime, they’re out of the truck & on our land. These next days off I hope to get the platform started & get the batter boards up for the main cabin site. Got to beat freeze-up. But until then I like seeing how seasons can rotate around one steadfast plan or two, like a time-lapse video almost. It seems to put idea & practice both in conversation with other elements, to subject them to something closer to natural fact (which is an especially effective antidote to tangential thinking). Like all of this arises out of an agreement between ourselves & the land & the plans, each of the three serving an organic function in moving forward. I’ve come to kindly depend on that conversation.

In the meantime, Kristin is out along a ridgeline at Moonlight Creek on a fifty mile patrol, in the middle of all of that variegated splendor. The dogs & I stick closer to home, & on walks they’ll weave in & out of the willows & collect yellow & red leaves on their heads & backs unawares & look up smiling & then pull harder, thinking about the snow to come. Amen.

August 8

2011-08-07T06:26:00.002-08:00

Ready for post holes.

July 25

2011-07-25T07:26:00.002-08:00

Maximus rests under the feathered shade of a spruce bough with his paws tucked under his body & his chestnut eyes following each swing of the mattock. Intermittently, we hear the rising sound of Wils & Moose crashing through the willows, seeing the bush-tops jerk in rapid succession before they both burst out onto the clearing with great wide smiles, tongues wagging & eyes bright. I’ll pull at the tundra, around the swath I’ve axed out, & use the pick to pull the heavy duff & soil to the brush pile. & look over & see Kristin cursing a root buried deep under the top-layer while she brings the pulaski down over & again. & look past her to see Healy ridge off to the south, dusted with vestigial snow from the cold snap last week, bathed in a uniformly crisp light. Past it, the ridgelines we finally found up past Sugarloaf, a kind of alpine running paradise. To the East, Dora & Jumbo & Walker Domes, & the endless strip of tundra yawning out past Ferry. & to the west, accessible from our property, the mushing trail heading off Stampede & out along the northern boundary of the park as long as you please.

We are realizing after several days’ worth of clearing with hand tools that we are just beginning to have a taste of the extraordinary amount of work we have ahead of us. Clear & pull back sod & duff, & tamp & level, & dig through permafrost for the posts, & construct batting boards & string the whole site & square it, & haul the concrete out a half mile with no motorized assistance over bog tundra. Get our post & pier set-up in by fall, with an adjacent clearing for a walltent platform, & build said platform so we have a warming hut come winter (& ideally, we’d use green-cut logs halved on the property for that purpose). & then haul timber by snowmachine or dogteam over the snow so as to protect the fragile ground. Stockpile every item we can from the Gransfors Bruks catalogue, learn all that we can about woodworking & cabin building, watch Dick Proenneke documentary repeatedly, find ourselves an Alaskan sawmill attachment for the chainsaw, & then come spring, well, go build ourselves a handhewn cabin with our own hands. This, friends & family, is what it looks like to literally materialize & construct your most enduring & beloved dream. I go to bed at night kissing the blisters on my hands.

& it’s no secret in the meantime that my carpentry skills are at absolute best completely suspect, if not altogether absent entirely. Studying poems seems an odd preparation for building a cabin off the grid, but then, maybe there’s something to the shared process of deliberate construction, of slow navigation, that will reveal itself in time. Being me, I don’t think I can hope to avoid metaphorizing the building of this place. But praxis for metaphor is a salve, & renders it meaningful in a way it usually isn’t. You can’t argue with the notch-fit of a log about its metaphysics, really, if you want to be warm come first snowfall. But you can extrapolate all that you wish once you’re safely installed under its shelter. I don’t know. Maybe this is a caution that as this progresses, I’ll likely be rambling tangentially about the days’ work, but in any case, that work will have been done, & slowly, bit by bit, we’ll have something extraordinary to show for it. Hell, it’s already one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen.

June 27

2011-06-27T17:38:00.001-08:00

I’ve run up the game trail on Antler Creek before, through the brush & along the scree falling off the ridge, up toward the point where you have to cross-hill to attain the saddle that lets you get to the peak, but I’d turned around before crossing over to see the other side. Earlier this week, ground-pounding for a search & rescue that ended favorably, I finally eased over the cusp & saw a great swath of unbroken tundra spreading easy & rolling toward Savage River. & just south of it, the complete opposite: an interconnected network of narrow ridges that gave out on a steep bowl criss-crossed with sheep trails winding down to the headwaters of Dry Creek, tucked in where the sun can’t find ample purchase to melt off the mazarine shelves of ice lingering on well past their season. & though I’d hiked up at a brisk pace under grave enough auspices, I still marveled at it & couldn’t help but eye routes for longer runs. It’s astonishing to me how this landscape opens up, how you think yourself adequately acquainted with a place & then of a sudden you take one more step & in so doing unveil endless miles you could never have imagined. A topo line a scant millimeter from its parallel on the map opens into a granite tor jutting out of the alpine tundra with shale & basalt flaking off & marmots jutting out of sunken holes & wind-weathered boulders carpeted over in sphagnum moss & endless sky & cloud.

& it would seem that my life entire works this way. Look at a map & walk among its vermicular lines, & then lift your eyes to an unfathomable vastness & richness. Come out of hermitage & open yourself to love & then suddenly you step over its known cusp & there it is, bountiful & giving & greater in reach than you knew possible, & beautifully unadorned, blessedly free of any dissembling, easy, even. & so with the rest—where there was the blind embrace of uncertainty, there is now a sure foot in a place I can’t imagine leaving for any considerable length of time. Where one life’s goal sputtered & grew quiet, another stepped into its place from the wildest corners of my childhood imaginings. Those dimly adumbrated yearnings rise like a sliding note to find union with the life I am living, day in & day out. It’s just plain lovely is all, & it makes me say the same things over & again, I know, but really, their repetition sounds pitch perfect to me.

Gates of the Arctic

2011-06-11T09:26:00.001-08:00

More will come on this, but in the enduring absence of text, those few curious among you can see some things here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/apinalaska/.

April 30

2011-04-30T10:38:00.001-08:00

Spring break-up now, the snow soft & thinning into a rhizomatic patchwork of puddle & brown runnel, & the tundra scrub peaking through the black dirt, tired & distended with water. & then come those waning hours of darkness, the stars become fugitive already, the windows covered over in the hope of some small night’s sleep. The bears already roaming at every altitude, the throngs of people already doing the same, & that perfect quiet of our winter opening again unto life & busyness & externality in all of its incarnations. It starts like that, a little bird-call, isolated that way, & then turns to the madrigal & the chorus & then that becomes the familiar ringing in your ear summerlong.
There is that attendant hesitation to participate, that part of me that doesn’t want to loosen my grasp on winter & all of its insular comforts. But we are animals, after all, & hibernation gives way to the pulse of things around us. & once the rotten snow recedes, I will have the dirt underfoot on runs, & that sweet, fecund smell of newly budding flora, & that strange familiar feeling of warm wind on my skin. & the dogs will forage & explore & tangle about one another as we go, & test the blueberries the season through until they are ripe (yes, our dogs have developed an absurd addiction to blueberry picking). & all around us, that enduring, thrumming sense of life & wakefulness, even while we try after sleeping, such that to lie with my eyes closed for a little while, with K’s hand on my chest, is as good as sleep.

You feel the life of things with a kind of wild desperation here, advertently or not; it tendrils & finds root room in you & clamors & tremors & takes hold of you until autumn has swept it over & it gives up the ghost again. The season is fully alive, itself constantly hyperphagic, ravenous in its unending appetite. I have never before encountered that particular sense of being predicated by living in a place with such sharply contrasted seasons—it’s difficult to describe the kinetic, lambent energy that seems to appertain in summer, & how boldly & relentlessly it declares itself at all hours compared to the slow whisper of our beloved winter. Plenty of folks prefer one to the other; I think I prefer to take the whole year as a discrete, book-ended unit, to think of it as a day itself in which we go about our diurnal patterns, wakeful under the light, hunkered down under the canopy of stars. It seems to make better sense up here.

& so to rise, wakeful, & step into it.

April 16

2011-04-16T08:58:00.001-08:00

I think I could live a dozen lifetimes & not scratch the surface of what I want to do in this state. Looking over pictures of Bering Land Bridge & Kobuk Valley has spurred in me a new yearning to head north & west, toward those unfathomable sweeps of tundra valley & those rolling, languid rivers. & all of it, all of it unpeopled. I see the patchwork of vermillion & blazing gold, the heavy cerulean sky with its spires of slow cloud, the maars at Devil Mountain, & I want to start walking. Or I see the undulating hills that conjure to my thinking a hugely amplified facsimile of western Iowa, covered entire in thick, wind-driven snow, back-dropped by looming ranges in the distance, & I want to harness a dog team & mush into it instead. & the more I think about the purpose of preserving wilderness (the more I talk to Kristin about it & the more I steal an education in it from her), the more I think a place like Kobuk or BELA would feel like home. & the more the road winding through the park here comes to seem a kind of open scar across the landscape (a scar that pays my salary, but still). As a species we’ve done a fairly astonishing job of fucking up everything we’ve touched, most of it quite literally beyond recognition. We are compelled, it seems, by the precarious semblance of balance that Reason provides; in it we procure all the necessary justifications, & from those we cull our delusions. We end up caring vehemently about things the absolute meaninglessness of which we are well aware. We are buttressed this way, fortified by a kind of gestural architecture that we take to be solid when it is composed of air. (& by we, I mean me). & I don’t intend this as echo to some well-rehearsed manifesto or something, not in the least. & lord knows I love me some Netflix & Starbucks & a hundred other creature comforts besides. But I guess from time to time in accounting for myself I wonder after those cultural entanglements, or the excuses I furnish when confronted with disparities well within my ability to alleviate. I think it peculiar that I have always married perception with evaluation, if even inadvertently—as if there is some hierarchy underwriting things, calling one way of living better than the next, calling one profession more sensible than the other, when in fact the significance of what we do seems entirely self-generated. If it matters to the doer, than it irrefutably matters, period.

The thing I’ve been attuned to in me lately, to my utter, childish delight, is where that meaning finds purchase. Where wanting something & getting it instills an enduring, deep satisfaction predicated on the patient appraisal leading up to it & the humility in its face to give it the gratitude it merits. In other words, very deliberately making my choices based only on what I want viscerally, what I yearn after, rather than what I can simply justify wanting. & then sharing that richly abiding desire with another. It’s something, seeing how much more rewarding & accommodating my life can be when I steer it toward its underlying passions. & it’s endlessly curious to me that when I was a kid, when I was fucking ten years old, I was so clearly keyed into it, wanting after the life that I am building now, dreaming of some unattainable vision of the far-off wilds of Alaska, a then-unimaginable landscape yawning magnificently all around me. & in that dream I was always outdoors, doing the chores that survival requires in places farther afield, or retiring to the cabin to sit in a rocking chair & read & smoke Cavendish tobacco from a corncob pipe. & in the dreaming I could feel the textures of that life, the carving firn wind dropping down the valley, that deeply intoned smell rising off a river in the morning, the grain of the wooden maul handle as it slid down to split a round of birch, the swishing tail of my dog nearby. & absent the Cavendish, here I am. Now that I’ve dreamt a bit & found it so enormously gratifying, I think I’ll look at the sand dunes up in Kobuk, or the lazy arm of the Noatak, or the granite tors jutting out above Serpentine & see what else I can fathom, knowing it somehow curiously, thankfully within my reach.

April 9

2011-04-09T08:51:00.001-08:00

It’s a swift work time does, & then there’s our inclination toward epochism hanging over it, begging its taxonomies. Call it an ocean when it’s a multitude of wave & current. Call it a river when it’s eddies & silt & braided channels & fluxing limns of shore. I think of the last decade that way, thinking it through its recognizable consistencies, as if they speak to some breed of continuity, or as if they need to. Somehow that sense that we tame the past in the discovery of its patterns, that we stitch a quilt of its disparate parts & are somehow contented to pull it over us in sleep. It’s an odd inclination, tamping things down when at their base there’s really only disparity. (Even comparison actively calls attention to fundamental separation, even as it yokes together). It makes you wonder.

This morning, it makes me wonder at how we revise experience, & how those revisions alter over time. What clings to them, what falls away, & what within us finds ground to speak again. I awakened thinking for some reason about walking down the dirt road in Salem to the old graveyard, canopied in by weeping willows & black oaks, unkempt, its grasses high & swaying with that motion particular to flora in abandoned places, with that same susurration amplified by virtue of being the only discernible sound. It was after my brother’s divorce, after my grandmother’s death. I remember how the tombstones fell into worse & worse repair the further back you walk, tilting over slumped ground, heaved over, weather-worn, with fine tendrils of black fractures snaking through the slate grey. In the rear, there were only bricks, tiny slabs half-swallowed by moss & lichen, the letters of the names taken entire by wind & rain, or, stranger still, barely intimated on the pale surfaces, as if the tombstones themselves were already haunted by the spectered syllables of names. & I remember the crumbled black walnuts scattered around. Thinking I had a friend who made ink out of them once. Thinking this is what we do, this is how we celebrate the life in us, by coming to its precipice & looking over its edge, wandering quiet among its dilapidating grubstakes. & my brother, alone, his back to the rest of us, along the western edge of the plot. That attendant silence. & the thing that strikes me in the recollection is the pure sensory wonder of it, the song of wind-rustled willows, the humidity in the air, the smell of fertile soil in the nostrils. That, & the way my heart swelled in me, swells in me still, with simple, ineffable love, for my family, for that place, for that breath in me. A kind of mellow, leaden exultation, that. & my compulsion, in remembrance, is toward exegetic comprehension, predictable narrative, comfort & order. & it spurs me to wonder if the act of recollection isn’t almost always purposive, teleological in some way; if there isn’t some kindred feeling or sense or sympathy that we don’t want to cull each time we remember. Which in turn makes me wonder how we negotiate phenomena atavistically, or if we can, really, in an entirely honest way. Honest, sure, but if recollection always performs some violence on memory, then aren’t we altering our past every time we conjure it up, & aren’t we constantly reshaping our sense of our own narratives? & if so, aren’t we always already fluxing, too, ourselves?

That’s no revelation, I know, but even the most banal things cast a spark time to time. It’s interesting, too, to be actively shaping a course for things, to be implementing goals, building intently, & all of it under an auspice of love & positivity, all of it active rather than reactive, all of it ex nihilo instead of shaped from some pile of ash or ember. I’ve not shared that, truly, in the past, that sense of untainted, graspable dreaming. & what one discovers in sharing these things is that a fundamental openness to phenomena can in fact be coeval with an intention. Hope, fragile thing, is not so ruinous as I once thought it to be. Under that cover of over-arching linearity, the sheer wonder of our daily-ness.

March 12

2011-03-12T10:51:00.001-09:00

I reckon it’s likely a function of age, of arriving at a certain point in the trajectory when you do some accounting & take the measure of the currents running around you, the loose ends you’ve ignored, the errant sinuous goals & projects left undone, the gravid light of newer dreams just beginning to blossom. & so I weigh these things against each other, let my grip loosen around some, clutch others the tighter for it, let the entire thing shift how it wants to, how I want it to. & lately, the object is to open a space wherein my actual desires can take root & flourish, where I can cultivate them & work towards them in tangible ways, make them my goals, & adhere to the plans that will bring those goals to fruition. All to say those goals seem to be solidifying these days, around a few specific things, or persons, or dogs.

It’s odd, my enthusiasm for life has worn a curious garb these many years. It seems to me I’ve used certain goals to justify the absence of others, plugged in academic ends to free me of the responsibility of determining what else my heart was after. In school, goals are readymade & overt, & it doesn’t behoove one to stray & wander, but stray & wander I have, & now those goals seem less important to me. I have been in Alaska for two years, & now I will finish my degree, & then, a few years down the line, I will run the Iditarod. One of these means a great deal more to me than the other, & I bet it’s not too terribly difficult to discern which.

Here’s the thing: I have a visceral connection to my life up here that I’ve not felt before. Maybe studying theory wrestles that away from you, & leaves you always stuck in an unbroken circle of hermeneutics that promises no respite from the preoccupations of thought. Maybe not. Either way, what I sieved through my head I now don’t sieve at all, & I feel the effect of that keenly. That kind of devotion to thinking acts as an accidental devotion to a certain kind of distance by default, it seems—I found myself constantly reconstituting experience as it was occurring, shaping it into a narrative, extrapolating from it, representing rather than engaging with what was presented. Thought during those peak academic years was a kind of buffer that hedged me against everything else, including, likely, that looming question of what else I might want to do with myself. I don’t guess that’s particular to me—that’s how careers are constructed, as I understand it, wrought of a single-mindedness & devotion to purpose that is predicated on exclusion to some degree. But of a sudden now I’m getting to a point where I’d like to just go ahead & do what I love to do for a living. I just have to patiently figure out how best to achieve that. & what it is. I loved teaching, but I have to say, its best moments were always the ones wherein the organization collapsed & I found myself just having a passionate conversation with my students on equal footing. I don’t imagine I could ever take myself seriously as an expert in anything anymore, & that would present a formidable hurdle if I were to suddenly rekindle any academic spark. Conversely, everything that I do & love here requires familiarity & humility in equal measure. You don’t go outside when it’s forty below without preparing yourself, but neither do you go outside when it’s forty below with the intention of conquering the winter. You are always at the mercy of what is external to you, & it seems so far that the best moments here interweave openness to the prevailing ambiguities of circumstance with conscientious preparation. & I am fortunate to have an incredibly competent & humble teacher in these matters, who I also happen to love dearly, & with whom I share all of these passions, every single one. Move away from all that you know, work in a fish processing operation & then go be homeless for a little & bathe in a river, & then head to over six million acres of wilderness, endure a slowly collapsing engagement, live with a troll & then on the other side of a dark winter, lo & behold, you find quite by chance someone who loves all the things you love & dislikes all the things you dislike, who happens to be wonderful & happens to love you back. After all that reducing, all of that stripping bare, all of that self-reckoning, to turn & find these newfound enthusiasms mirrored & augmented so beautifully? Jesus Christ, how could I go back to a city & teach business & technical writing?

So, there’s some future-wrangling going on here, some sounding the depths, some loose plans being shifted around & put into place. & here is the absolute best part: there is no compromise involved whatsoever, nor settling, nor resignation. It seems a fine & ongoing addition of dream on to dream, over & again. How it will take shape I’m not entirely certain, but I’m not too terribly impatient about that. Drafting up possibilities that are in fact possible in spite of how extraordinary they seem is quite enough for the time being.

February 26

2011-02-26T10:34:00.001-09:00

Ree Nancarrow gave a slide show presentation last night about life in Denali over the last forty-five years. When she came to the country, there were no actual roads, & local travel required a good dog team or an airplane or a great deal of patience with the ongoing tendency of Alaska to brutalize an automobile. Her cabin was built by hand, as were all of the outlying structures on the property. When the snow fell heavy decades ago, her husband built a bridge over it. When they decided to dig a basement, he did it by hand, with a shovel & a wheelbarrow. In permafrost. & when they ordered groceries, initially the order was placed through mail to Seattle. In the absence of an electric grid, they built their own generator. & in the absence of a well, they melted snow enough to water themselves & their dogs every day. At that time, the entire Denali fleet consisted of seven trucks, one snowgo & twenty-eight dogs. Rangers (the two of them that were here) spent the entire winter with the dogs along the boundaries, building & repairing & patrolling around the cabins that dot the trail, spaced one day’s journey by dog team from one another.

Right now, Kristin is hunkered down outside of one of those cabins, in an arctic oven because the freight-hauler & concessionaire are inside the small space (an arctic oven, for reference, is a tent with a tiny woodstove in it). She & Jess have been breaking trail through three new feet of snow, windblown & iced over, out ahead of hitched-up teams on snowshoes, for almost a week now, during two separate storms involving said three feet of snow, fifty mile per hour gusts & subsequent white-out conditions. Safe to say that I love a bad-ass. But also safe to say that in spite of that weather, I’m absolutely certain that she is loving every minute of it. She is enacting a familiar dream, building around that atavistic vision of how we ought to lead our lives. Here I am in front of four computer monitors, bathed in white light, while she’s out there tackling a grueling project in the sub-arctic winter. & I’m jealous.

I think of all of the half-finished projects I have left in my personal wake, things I meant to do, things I finished half-assed, things I dreamt up & promptly forgot. & often, probably the majority of the time, that’s just fine. I’ve done plenty of things without a full investment that have turned out commendably by some standards, & I’ve derived no small satisfaction from seeing some of my more notably indolent efforts met with praise & satisfaction. But lately I am thinking that I have no further use for smug self-satisfaction & vague compromise. I am thinking that after years in academia, years of wandering around, years of trial & error, I finally followed an old dream & moved myself up to fucking Alaska, & I have carved out an incredibly fecund & meaningful & joyous existence here so far, & there is no part of me that wants to leave it at that. Which is to say I am thinking about the Nancarrows, & I am thinking about how to relate to your sense of place, & how to make it mean such that you feel the blood in your veins. & I am thinking about dog teams & wilderness & quiet. & I am thinking about how best in years to come to flesh out the dream that I came here to pursue. & I like this line of thought.

February 6

2011-02-06T07:01:00.002-09:00

Woke up thinking about Thales, who famously fell into a pit as he was walking with his eyes upturned to the stars. Last night the auroras were snaking & fluxing, a limn of purple along the bottom of the green band, & then those vertical tears that shimmer & fade above the long arc below. To the south, meanwhile, the Milky Way like a bucket of soap water cast out over asphalt, the stars bright punctures in the ever-dark sky. It’s been some time since I stood slack-jawed staring at the firmament.

Driving home last night, we passed the metal sculpture of a team of dogs that lines the top of a gateway just next to my pull-out, silhouetted black against the surging green behind. It’s a structure like you see at the beginning of ranch roads, two huge spruce posts & one cross-beam, & in this case, it signifies passage into the Kingdom (all the land once or presently owned by now retired musher Jeff King). There was some small tug in me though, seeing it, knowing that everything in that tableau said home & home & home. The black spruce tops in relief, the swirling colors, the deep swatch of stars, & even the shapes of the dogs & the sled. As each new entry here seems to betray, I am caught off-guard almost daily by the richness & beauty of my surroundings. It plays, I know, like a tired old record you’ve heard too often, but I can’t say that it will stop any time soon. I wouldn’t will it so, anyway.

& dogs. It is Super Bowl Sunday, & I find myself captivated instead by the standings in the Yukon Quest. Maybe it’s that miniscule intimation of empathy, of knowing in some fraction of a way what it’s like to be on the runners. My time as a middle school football player for the esteemed Johnston Dragons was short-lived, to be sure, & absent any success (my one stand-out memory is being plowed over by an opposing team’s running back & finding myself unable to either breathe or get up of my own volition afterward). But my time as a musher is beginning, growing exponentially by the day. & though I’ve not run the team in almost two weeks now (which is sort of killing me), every day finds some new education, most of it second-hand, talking to Kristin about her trips & what she’s learned. & every day finds me thinking about the trail, rehearsing the next run. It would seem that there are only people who don’t really care about sled dogs & then people who are rabidly, voraciously, passionately fanatical. So it goes.

Thales maybe eschewed what was underfoot for what was overhead. I suppose I’ll have both, if it’s all the same.

January 30

2011-01-30T13:47:00.001-09:00

I had two strange memories flood over me this week while I thought to notice myself rooting down here. The first was the recollection of seeing the Dick Proenneke PBS special for the first time years ago, its images interspersed with a lulling quiet. I recalled specifically two things: the fact that he fashioned his own tools & tool handles on site (recalled mostly because that takes a committed bad-ass), & the sound of his oars in the glass-smooth water of the lake. Resourcefulness lending itself to recreation, that sort of thing. & then the second memory involves meeting some random friend of a contemptible peer at DU who was visiting & discussing plans to make a film featuring Alaska. At the time, I was reading a history of the state & so came to the conversation academically. Which, really, is entirely implausible. The guy, it turned out, was every bit as much an insufferable ass as his friend, but what strikes me now is the absence of the senses from that brief conversation. His fingernails were clean, for instance, & his framing for his project was theoretical & constellated around things that had nothing to do with place at all. I was thrilled that he had simply been to the state before, but it’s curious in retrospect to think now of what I’ve done since then. How all of these small cues seemed to point me here. Passing a man in the dog park at Chatfield who wore a Salty Dog sweatshirt. Seeing a drunk at a bar on Broadway with a Humpy’s hat. Reading histories of places I never thought I’d see, or watching rapt the simple process of planning a felled spruce on some special I stumbled upon on public television. How all of my academic thinking was geared towards making complex, obscuring, yoking into relation all of these disparate threads in some futile stand against entropy. & then how so many of the things I tend to here require a simplifying eye. & then there’s my fingernails.

All to say I guess that I still can’t fathom of leaving this place. I think about it every now & again, if only because that’s how I learned to be in the world, itinerant. I try to think of any place in the world that calls more clearly, & I permit myself to absolve those tangible restrictions that would hold me here tp aid my thinking (if money were no issue, if the dogs could come with us, etc.). & in no case do I find a place more akin to my present self, or kinder to my present heart, or more consistently capable of conjuring awe than my home here, & my love here, & my self here.

A few days ago, I reread a kind of journal I kept during the dissolution of my engagement. K had read it on accident & her comments had a kind of hesitation in them, so I wanted to revisit it to find what might spur such a thing. & after reading through the exhausted chronology, through the pity & the deference & the grappling after meaning, I came upon a later bit from a few months into my relationship with K. It wondered yet if I would be able to fully love again, if my heart would allow for it, if in fact I even had the desire to do so. The prognosis was not positive. As I wrote it, Willa was on her way north to us, my family was staging their visit last June, & the season was well underway. From the first, I was enchanted by K, so it’s so odd now, from this distance, to read that cold sterility of tone & to know it for the feeble gesture at self-preservation that it was. Of course I was terrified, marred, unwilling to admit of Possibility, even when it literally stood before me, patient & wonderful.

& so I think of what time can do to us, & how we can end up after some circuitous wandering in the place we always wanted to be. & how warring & fractious fear can be, & how willfully we would reign over even those traits in us that elude reason. & how there is such grace in being, in being where one simply is. & how we can commit to our hesitations as if they were fact, when they too come to dissolve & fade from us & leave us with the first terms of enduring wonder in their absence. How I can have such a full heart, after all, & cannot now imagine it otherwise. I know it reads a little better when one explicates it & draws it out & shows the evidence, but in the end, all of this just to say that I love it here, & I love Kristin, & I love our dogs, & my life is generally surprisingly wonderful. & so, here I am.

January 21

2011-01-21T07:46:00.001-09:00

Odd how standing in the cabin, feeling the sun pour down over me for the first time in months, there awake the quietest intimations of spring already. It is twenty-seven below, with a dusting of new snow, but in that bath of light there is a kind of stirring. Your eyes note the chickadee instead of the raven or the magpie. You note that the gloaming comes later & lingers a bit past the late afternoon before the moon crests above the range blood-orange or silver-white. & all at once, I clutch the more tightly to the winter & lean into the thought of warmth. So many miles yet to mush, & at the same time, I feel a bodily need for sunlight again. Before the winter came, we all told ourselves that in its frigid months we would have time to slow down, reacquaint ourselves with ourselves, work on projects & the like. & now, halfway through it, I am no less busy, only more quietly so. My busy-ness does not involve hundreds of calls & blips & beeps at work, & when I recreate, it doesn’t involve throngs of wondering tourists. It is that muted tone of the winter landscape, that broad brush of real isolation. The panting of the dogs or the soft crunch of the snow underfoot. The wind’s stubborn song uninterrupted by passing buses or planes or the sounds of neighbors outside. Only that precious silence in which you stand as the sole & only fortunate audience time to time, your ear attuned & your eyes closed against a gale, thinking over & again, how lucky.

January 16

2011-01-16T11:58:00.001-09:00

So much of the park I’ve seen in the last ten days, on the back of a snowgo or from the runners of the dogsled. Out in the gloaming mornings on the tundra before the trail narrows in to the Sushana, with the sky a muted pink & the Alaska Range stirring into focus, the great cleft wedge of the mountain rising gargantuan from the dark. The yawning cornices windblown & hanging delicate over the rolling hills above the river. The tussocks with spiny copper-wire willows bare & twisting under. The river-ice of the East Fork River, a quarter mile across it seemed, steaming over sinkholes, stepping over fissures or giving in to overflow & slush. The sound the ice makes, those quiet, travelling strings of cracking that spread vermicular underfoot in sudden spells of lightning terror. Seeing your sled slide parallel beside you when it ought to be pulled behind. & then the warmth of the wood stove, the pots boiling down the snow, the dogs curled with noses under tails, the auroras gentle in their sway & the sky so vast & clear & cold one can scarcely hope to describe it.

On the overland trail from East fork to Sushana, along the northern boundary, there is a swath of tundra so wide it conjures the feel of a massive caldera, the ridges distinct off in the distance, the mountain seeming so close in its formidable vertical rise. & in that vast valley a herd of caribou out along a drainage, a single male bucking in a swath of snow. A ribbon of spruce where the roots will find purchase against the winds. & knowing, knowing that you are the only human out there. Fucking extraordinary, beyond all measure. One simply cannot imagine that scope, the way we can’t grasp infinity or the like. It is perhaps the most beautiful place I have ever been.

Four days of snowmachining, then back to work for three, then two days of running a seven-dog team out to Sanctuary Cabin & back. I think myself irrevocably changed.

January 4

2011-01-04T07:53:00.000-09:00

A new year, & with it, the strange effects of the Chinook casting warm temperatures & gale-force winds & clouds roiling in violent torsion through the sky. Each day now a little longer, measurable for us by the line of the sun on the ridge to the north of the cabin, which each day gets closer to draping over the valley on Stampede. Not yet, not yet, but closer.

Tomorrow I join the kennels folks & a ranger & head out from Stampede to the Lower Toklat, with night stops at Sushana & East Fork along the way. If you look at a map, you’ll see that after the Tek we still have a ways to go. That thumb in the park boundary gives way to a gaping landscape, the topography of which pushes us down to the East fork before ridging over to the Toklat. North of the Wyoming Hills. A part of the park I’ve never seen in any season. I’ll be starting out on snowgo, alternating from time to time with the three mushers I hope, taking the teams along a circuitous route that isn’t often traveled. I’ll of course hope for my favorite among the sled dogs, Lava & Aurora. The trail is in to Sushana, past the site of McCandless’s bus, but beyond that we’ll be navigating & breaking trail that hasn’t been put in for some time, in snow that saw forty degree days & 50 mph gusts, drifted & now settling, dense & wet, to ice over. & then overnighting in tiny patrol cabins with five of us.

I recall writing last year about the gentleman who trekked in to Wonder Lake by himself. Imagining what it must be like to experience that vastness so unpeopled & empty & quiet. & every time Kristin returns from her patrols, it is that same feeling that stirs in me—not jealousy, but a wonder begging after empathy, a keen & palpable desire to feel that largeness of the world, that smallness of the self, & to know that you found your way across dozens of miles of Alaskan wilderness in the winter to feel just such a thing. I am always amazed at what K can do, how well-acquainted she is with wilderness & its demands, & after so many years of dedicated passion, I suppose it makes sense. That she returns every time rejuvenated & awed & so fully herself is nothing short of beautiful. & it’s odd this time to be the one heading out, leaving her with the dogs here, in familiar country, in our familiar routines. She’s earned the backcountry, time & time again, & I do sometimes feel like a tourist in it, but then I remember that I was asked to do this patrol because I can offer mushing experience that no other ranger in our division has, & though I know that to be a fledgling, inchoate thing, I still can’t quite articulate the kind of pride it conjures in me. Not strictly pride in the sense of self-aggrandizement, but in the sense that I am keenly aware of how lucky I am to have that experience, of how extraordinary it is. That association with the dogs, with their fraternity, is rather something for which I am enduringly grateful. It is an association that betters me in countless ways.

To the Toklat then.

December 7

2010-12-07T08:38:00.000-09:00

The temperatures now plummeting well below zero & the snow consistent, with solstice approaching & the low-slung arc of light that passes for day painting the mountains in alpenglow. I think of rosy-fingered dawn when I, long awake, see that roseate hue bathe the sloping angles. & the closer to solstice, the less that light changes, such that the day entire (all five hours of it) is appareled in that same coloration. & then one’s days seem like a wandering about in a dreamscape the magnitude of which only further confounds it—the only thing calling you back to its fundamental, mineral reality the cold.

I’ll be bound here for the holidays after all, & won’t be seeing the flatlands & the cornfields & the palpable heft of the Midwestern grey sky spread thick above the prairies. Instead, it will be the quiet Alaskan winter, the dogs, the trails, & the plunging mercury. It’s hard to describe how winter here makes you feel, physically, mentally—how the darkness & the cold seem to spur such richness & an almost tactile sense of self-awareness. The heat of the woodstove or the draft from the window, the ice in your beard after only walking to the truck to start it. There is kind of physicality to everything, tempered by extremity or shelter from it. This likely has some significant metaphorical weight to it, should one care to extrapolate a metaphysics, but I don’t think I’m much inclined in that direction at present. & maybe that’s fitting—that the phenomena trump the taxonomies that hover auratic around our every breath. A fine reminder to keep undivided my attentions on the present.

& the present, anyway, still wears the sheen of some gift given. Though I balk at one or two daily details, I find it hard to do so convincingly. My cabin will be sold & razed, which puts me in a rhapsodic mode of nostalgia after what I’ve been through within its walls. But again, it seems fitting enough to literally dismantle the place that palpably wears those marks. & we’ll be able to settle into wherever we move, & share our space & lives, & build anew. Fare forward, wrote Eliot. Fare forward indeed.

Ken

2010-12-06T11:52:00.000-09:00

http://badrecordingcompany.com/ken/

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Project-Ken/111434965593279

Ken.

November 20

2010-11-20T10:05:00.003-09:00

A weekend spent outdoors, mushing two days from the yard on Stampede & then skiing a seven-mile loop from my front door in the Village. & in the meantime, playing music with good friends, cooking some fine meals, & generally finding myself fulfilled from one moment to the next. I’ll be brief in saying so, but given the pending holiday & my pending trip down to Texas for a week, I’ll say only that I am unspeakably grateful to be alive & to inhabit this life among all the others I could have lived. Happy Thanksgiving, friends & family alike. Whether or not I ever find time to articulate it, those that I love are a constant company to my thinking & living & being.

Also, a few new flickr pictures & the mushing blog goes forward too.

November 7

2010-11-07T10:47:00.000-09:00

I am looking at this curious photograph of a 94-year old great-grandmother holding an eleven pound premature baby who spent the first four months of his life in the hospital & who still requires quarantine due to the fragility of his lungs. & though I know the child’s parents, he is a stranger to me, as is the frail old woman. & her eyes regard the child with a tenderness that seems to speak in years, while his own fawn over distances making shapes & conjuring the world into the familiar. What life will he lead? & then, towards its end, palsied, fragile all over again, what child will he hold in his shaking hands? & where, I wonder, always, where does that living go, that meaning that seems to call from us with such blazing intensity? All of these days fugitive & irretrievable, & then as we age our fingers seem to clutch tighter those things that intimate our own mortality. A child’s eye full of vitality. The wild countenance of a threatened moose bucking its forelegs at a passing truck. A sunrise in which the trees articulate the horizon in labyrinthine silhouetted line. & the curious thing of it is to know in earnest that the entire enterprise is nothing short of miraculous, even while we have no idea why. I will die one day & my body will be put to flame & I will cease to be.

I think often of the graveyard just past the farm in Salem, with its slumbering tombstones swallowed in their various angles of disrepair by the wild, untended blades of grass & prairie weeds. The engraving on some of them is so weather-worn that even in running your finger across the illegible scroll, nothing sensible returns to the faculty of reason. As if the name were written in chalk. & then others have crumbled into several pieces, or have fallen flat & been covered by creeping lichens & moss. & the swelling ground is unkept. You hear the swish-swish of the willows, the soft thud of the occasional black walnut on the dark soil, where it, too, will burgeon with rain & desiccate under the sun & find no purchase in that forgotten place. You want to hear more, sense more, feel some ghost at your side, but there it is, instead, the natural silence of forgetfulness.

The farm is instructive in that regard. Those battered frames of the old cars half-buried by now in an ancient dirt, leaves wind-drifted in heaving wet piles on the seats, the wiring splaying out & rusted, the windows long since shattered. Or the out-buildings all sagging & struggling yet to stand, & within their doors nothing to shelter over but stray two-by-fours & stale rags & hardened dog shit & leaves, always leaves. Or the obsolesced farm equipment scattered about, as if abandoned suddenly & without further consideration, mid-plow, mid-augur. Even the old Massy Ferguson, with its white pillow on the red seat rain-bloated & tired, that corduroy blue heart quilted on so many years ago faded & denimed with sun & neglect.

& yet for all of that, it is the life of the place that recalls itself, even in the consideration of what has irrevocably passed from it. If I think on grandfather’s funeral, I recall standing around the burn bin with my uncle & my brothers. Or I think of getting bleary-eyed drunk with my cousins, raising our cans of beer in salute not with the feckless abandon of our youth, but with the reverence due the occasion. I think of my dad’s crowsfeet, my brother in thick glasses, my quidnuk aunts in a tempest around the house while yet it stood. & all of that life, all of that meaning, takes on precisely the same pallor as its recognition of what is past. How striking the sympathies between past-grief & the cherishing of the present, between loss & fullness. I can find myself overwhelmed with love for my life, for its cast of characters past & present, & that gratitude can pierce my chest & feel identical to that sweet melancholy that recollection affords us. We grieve, when we do, out of love, I suppose, which makes a fair amount of sense. & then when we love, we recognize inherent in it always a pending grief, maybe, a looming farewell. One that spells out the years & awaits what cannot be avoided. & our grief & our love both some swift monument, some demarcation that substantiates us, however briefly, before we, too, absent the world that we clutched all the while so tightly to our breast.

Which is to say that the context of our lives likely holds neither coherence nor design nor lingering comfort, but what we carry along in our own remembrance & haunted continuum does, insofar as these elemental congruities reveal themselves whether or not we would conjure them. & they do, they seem to, with astonishing frequency. My heart can ache for things I did or didn’t do twenty years ago & I can find that ache twinned in looking past the window today. Not that I want to file both under the same category, but that ache can recall itself beyond our rational faculties, & then of a sudden, when I thought I was just standing with my forehead to the cold pane of glass looking over the tundra suddenly I am also holding a handful of grey stones, readying myself to cast them through the glass of some old jalopy while acres away my grandfolks sit inside by the too-warm fire.

October 29

2010-10-29T14:36:00.000-08:00

& now the snow, falling in a frenzy through the night & dissipating into slow, meandering flakes now, turning in the discernible breeze against the languid grey of the sky. Enough that it clusters & holds in odd patterns about the burls in the birches, or tendrils out along the spruce-boughs to where they cluster in cone. & that smell it brings, a kind of metallic, airy cleanliness borne aloft in the fine gusts. & now we watch it & gauge its accumulation & look at the dogs & beyond at the gaping miles of wild untended & we wait for it to hurry along.

I’ve decided to document this first year of trying to learn how to mush. It seems too singular an enthusiasm to disperse among the rest, or maybe too dominant a one to let determine the general hue of things. I have this for you, my four beloved readers:

www.amushingeducation.wordpress.com

Or I have it for myself, in any case. There is little there just yet, but over time, I hope it proves one of the instructive artifacts of a past recalled. Or some sounding board for the present clamor in me, anyway.

& otherwise, little else, but thinking mostly how curious to live a life that I so routinely interrupt with effusions of unprovoked gratitude.

October 14

2010-10-14T18:06:00.001-08:00

Winter like a fledgling, the first tenuous flakes of snow sheening us here, the first intimations of real chill. & already, those last vestiges of autumn covered over, subsumed in the gloaming. Winterlight. Winterdusk. Winterdawn. They are their own things entire, & inexplicably, profoundly beautiful up here.

& an odd time for me personally, stepping into the season that so drastically came to alter me last year. I feel the visceral memory in me yet, the quiet, the patience. & then look up to see my heart content this time around, joyful, present. All of those months last year when in the yawning silence it was only my own feeble whisper I could hear. & startled, then, at the sound of it, the little, fragile thing. A bird’s tiny bone. I think on what endures, on what is yet extant from that long season, & suppose what remains somehow sacred & central. From that beehive that murmured once & then fell resoundingly quiet, the small flame at the center batting off shadow. A me in me to recognize, to foster as a familiar. How curious, this life. How curious that I am here, here at all.

My life, whatever it will entail, will owe a debt to last winter’s sea changes. Pupil before a loneliness & a kenning heartache, I learned in a winter what I could not the lifetime prior, & my gratitude for it is ineffable. So slowed, attenuated to something dear. Well, to the snow, then.

October 2

2010-10-02T09:08:00.002-08:00

There was a run I did last year along the rim of three lakes during which a golden eagle flew directly over my head the entire time. He never forged ahead or lagged behind, & when I would stop to regard him he would perch on the bough of a spruce & regard me back & then wing along when I would run again.

& last winter it happened several times that along my runs in the snow I’d properly packed I would stop short twenty feet from a wolf, & we would stand there for a moment & look at one another, eye to yellow eye, & then we would continue along, the wolf into the copse of willow, & I along my path.

One of those winter runs I heard a plaintive bleating from across the way & looked in time to see three wolves bringing down a young caribou. I saw their dark forms silhouetted there against the pale snow in the hushed light of the morning, just inside the tree line, writhing in a violent torsion.

& I have come upon grizzlies that were magnanimous or apathetic or scared shitless, any one. Twenty feet from a full adult who didn’t care at all that I was that close. & then two hundred feet away from a sub-adult who sprinted down a mountain to avoid me.

I read that when a crow electrocuted itself on a power line in Fairbanks & its lifeless body fell to the earth below, it was a matter of minutes before hundreds of other crows gathered around & seemed to literally observe a minute of funereal silence prior to again dispersing to the four winds. All of them encircling that one expired bird, a kind of quiet black cloud. I’ve heard magpies are the same way. That they mourn. A behavior characteristic of the corvidae.

The wolf researcher up here who died last year wrote a bit about how wolves reacted to grief. He observed several members of a lupine family walk off into solitude after a pack member’s death in order to pine & keen independently overnight before returning to the others. They had no other occasion to isolate themselves in that heartbreak before or after.

Earlier this year, during the first intimations of spring, I had a dream that I came upon seven owls hovering over a dwarf alder, luminescent, emanating a warm light. When I awakened in the morning I stepped outside & where I stood, an owl looked down at me from the tree above & let out a gentle hoot. How I felt the spine in me.

& then dogs, always dogs, in their honest joy.

Maybe just to say the nature of these things takes over in time, supplanting another kind of human reason, & how grateful I am for that most days. I know so much about a world that doesn’t exist, not really, & so little about the one that does. It’s been a slow education.

September 20

2010-09-20T16:13:00.001-08:00

Several days now successive of bluebird skies & sharp light & the underbreath of winter through the scattering yellow leaves. That auratic sense that only autumn can provide, of the soil smell, & the swaths of crimson, & the cranes flocking south & everywhere, everywhere, the crisp sun. Season of mist & mellow fruitfulness, for Keats. & for me always that attending sense of crepuscular gratitude, if that quite makes sense. How full its fleeting moments, simply because so urgently fleeting, & into & out of such a rich kind of beauty.

Maybe it’s how time seems to lay itself bare for autumn, & how the heart clamors across that landscape. Or maybe I’m doing some temporal accounting anyway. But I feel my childhood bodily come autumn, feel its fugitive joys & its small ruptures in all of their original tenderness. & I feel the scraping wind, & the sunlight settling over the plains, cut in crooked, palsied shapes by the boughs of the oaks & elms & buckeyes. See the long shadows yawning over the stubbled aureate ground. I feel the dry skein of a cornhusk overlong in the heat. Think of the farm, the woodpile against the cold grey stones, the bifurcate branch of peach tree in my hands over the old well, the black jalopies with rock-shattered glass. Or the creek in the valley in Ohio, where we’d cross slow through the water. Or nights falling asleep in the back of the van driving down to Missouri, staring out at the passing night, supine & comfortable. Trees overhanging the lake in Minnesota, & the starshine cleanly reflected at night, such that to swim in the water seemed akin to swimming in the darkling, light-punctured sky. Which is all to say maybe what I love so about autumn is its nostalgia, its collision of urgency & careful recollection. What we were & who we were across those braided strands of our having-been, & how fondly & deeply & dearly we can engage in remembrance even as we notice how irrevocably far we’ve come from those beginnings, how vast that unbridgeable gap between our old selves & our new. Which is everything at once, I think—lovely & stabbing & comforting & celebratory & plain old sad. & how we emerge from our pasts into the violent wonder of the present, over & over again, & find ourselves somehow continually surprised, continuingly overwhelmed by beauty. What a thing, that.

September 3

2010-09-03T11:00:00.001-08:00

Here the autumn sweeps in again in its dappled vermilions & russets & blazing golds, & the crisp light sieving the world in fine shadow. The frosts beginning in the morning, temperatures hovering around freezing & rising only slow & languid through the waning daylight. & autumn here absurdly beautiful. I walk slack-jawed & awed by it. Yesterday, we walked towards Carlo Ridge, forgetting moose hunting season began on the first. The trail splays out, ten feet wide, rutted with horseshoe prints indented where the mud gives & pulls their legs down. We turned & headed back to what may be the most plentiful patch of blueberries I’ve found. The dogs, after observing us picking, have taken to berry eating, & slowly, methodically, plod bush to bush nibbling carefully to avoid the dun leaves. Willa’s paws show streaks of stained purple. Moose, I think, may well have swiftly developed a keen addiction, given his particular vigor & voracity among the berries. But there is something to it, pausing, kneeling down in that quiet, hearing the soft sound of the dogs leisurely in their eating, smelling the sweetness of the loam & tundra. Raise your eye from that scene & wonder how ever you could leave it. I am tendriling into the ground here.

& otherwise, it’s the thought of mushing now occupies the bulk of my thinking. I look for snowclouds, I hope for cold. I spend more time with the dogs in the yard, talk to them about the winter, about my thrill at the thought of it. We’re all ready for the shift, for that blanketing quiet to fall over us, for summer’s dizzying pace to slow & abruptly halt. I am worn down, decidedly, & I am turning my eye to the Labor Day flush, when the boards go up over the windows & the buses disappear & with them the hordes of visitors. & then it’s just the wide open empty park, & the snow, & the sound of the wind, & the long & lovely yawn of winter.

August 14

2010-08-14T12:09:00.001-08:00

That trip to the glacier a kind of repositioning for me. You feel subtle shifts, time to time, or tremors, or intimations of something in the throes of change. & then there are precise instances wherein you seem reaffirmed significantly, or redefined, or something akin to either. How you are, & how you are in relation to the world—how much a part of it. How the novelty of going into an untrailed wilderness for the first time in any extended capacity seemed to dissolve into an utter familiarity, a kinship almost. & how in so doing, these details that confound the intentions of our days fall from us, absolutely unable to find purchase or sympathetic ear. Which I sort of love, really—that transformation of daily pressures from their gathered urgency into not only a kind of circumstantial impotence, but a complete inability to mean, fundamentally. & in their dissolution, as rehearsed as it may sound, I find myself closer to myself, living without context. & I think I sort of love that. I think I sort of need that.

The trip itself took us south from the East Fork bridge, seven miles across river bar & easy tundra. We skirted an island in the drainage where a sow & two cubs seemed intent over a kill site. & in our passing, we saw three, four caribou, & then five or six more, until a herd revealed itself near an alluvial fan behind which we were to set up camp. & the herd would grace us twice daily—towards the toe of the glacier in the morning, back out to the tundra to forage in the evening, twenty or thirty strong, & we would regard them from beside the tent twenty yards away, the scree slope behind us angling upcanyon.

A day hiking onto the glacier, the heaving moraine a study in slow, violent torsion.

& on the way out, gaining a ridgeline, I came upon a subadult bear tucked into a concave swath of tundra about 200 feet away. When he caught my scent, he fled at full speed down-mountain, his sudden fear somehow greater than my own.

Along the same ridge a few miles down, a pack of seven wolves fanning out in hunt, falling in to line, again & again, their running like water flowing around out-jutting boulders midstream.

(& yes, sitting under that rock with the two rainbows yawning overhead, with the rain trailing us in windblown coma, calling that expanse what it was, naming that expanse within)

& returned now with the appetite for more. Here at work circumstance & detail appertain & choke & coil all about me, & their stresses run in tendrils fine & twining until they speak through me & I don’t know the voice I hear. But how they fall from me sometimes, & I need only a handful of words. & how I’d have them fall again & again.

July 23

2010-07-23T08:40:00.001-08:00

Wordsworth noted how recollection is always a form of reanimation—a breathing-into that conjures into dance the ghosts of the past. The idea was to direct one’s contemplative focus in an effort to recreate whatever circumstances seemed redolent with meaning, & to conjoin the present mind with the newly animate whilom feeling in a coeval creative effort. & so a childhood excursion across a meadow of tall grass, a leaf’s spine stuck in the sedge of the Thames, or a visit to France, or the death of a friend years ago, or the faintly lingering acrid sweetness of a flower pedal long since turned under in the loam & soil. & it would seem that he earnestly believed that the two could come together without compromise, or without enough distortion to merit fundamental suspicion. & maybe as a matter of forging a poem, forging his poems, that can make sense—if that particular faith in the sameness of what is past was what lent his better work its spark, it’s a trifle to dissect it. After all, wonder inhered, word to word, & the bygone world sparked to life in the better poems retains still some of its distance, of its irretrievability, which seems somehow the important thing. But still the thought of that continuity grates at me. That assumption of totality, of life as a narrative strung catenary from identifiable cause to quantifiable effect. & meanwhile, the ghosts in us will do what they will do. Our memories will rearrange, dissolve, & the categorical hold in which they are harbored, too, does something very much the same. & the past apparels itself in varied hue under the shifting gaze of the present, such that it is, it would seem, entirely reconstituted with each experience. (Thus Eliot in “Tradition & the Individual Talent”). & so how odd, then, to see the chasm widen between what was felt enduringly in the presence of another & what is felt now. How surreal to witness that slow growth, & to find its old stories unfurled, its old pages weathered & yellowed, thick with swelling rain. A becoming or a having-been, & maybe it’s not that we choose so much as that we listen more acutely, or learn to, or hope to learn to. That we read our pasts differently from our shifting vantage, & find that in the absence of that particular vitality that we only feel in the actual experience of things, our relationships with what has passed become less eschatological in their induction. & with that halo relieved, we seem them plain & plaintive, closer, perhaps, to what they were underneath the burning design of our desires. & we breath & breath, but find no ghost with arms akimbo, no tableau suddenly reanimate, no unbroken chord in protracted resonant harmony. We don’t want to believe the ruptures of our past are finite. What we retain in memory we believe is dually retained in the actual world. But it is not our world to tend, & it is no mirror to us besides. & its song is neither elegy nor dirge nor crafted thing at all but the same slow quiet of something passing beyond our grasp. & we can gain its access, but only just so, only for a moment, only as an inaudible gasp in millions of miles of untended wilderness. & where, then, our fictions?

July 17

2010-07-17T09:38:00.005-08:00

It’s a fine point, the prior comment. There was roughly a year of my childhood during which time I was so thoroughly convinced that I was in fact a dog that I abstained from speaking the king’s English & opted instead for barks, grunts & whines. & my food in a bowl. & as I understand it, much to my parents’ credit, they did little to discourage the delusion. Certainly, my brothers would have done everything in their power to foster my canine sensibilities. What spurred my transfiguration back into the human fold I do not know—only that I sort of resent it. Dogs achieve a kind of perfection, utterly given to phenomena, utterly incapable of dissemblance. A dog’s joy dwarves the moderated human’s. Maybe in childhood or in moments of unparalleled exultation in which the will folds in upon itself & ipseity gives out completely. Otherwise, we are bridled, reined in, filtered even when we perhaps ought to let an emotion unfurl in us to its fullest conceivable degree. The ratiocentric mind wants what it wants, a semblance of order, a scaffolding by which to build the narrative of our days & weave each one with the next into some seamless whole. & so where does rich joy fit into that, or play, or sudden, graceless rest? This sounds increasingly like a greeting card with a glossy picture of a drooling lab on it, I know. But all to say that I have the utmost pride for thinking myself a dog for such a long while. What an extraordinary accomplishment, out of all that I have done & seen.
There was one trail run in New Mexico, Rio en Medio, where Wils & I bolted beneath the looming ponderosa pines, their fallen needles soft underfoot, the swelter of the creek parallel & that endless azure sky filtered through the boughs overhead. That smell of sun in the ground, the pinon, the muted footfall. At our turnaround a few miles in, when she was in front of me & I called her name, I could have sworn it was her spirit I saw, so complete was her joy. She was literally aglow with contentedness, & if I were less wary of sounding like some Santa Fe pseudo-metaphysician on a Castaneda trip, I’d tell you that just then, briefly, she seemed transcendent, auratic almost. & that smile she wore has never left me. Running back to the trailhead, we wove in & out of one another’s path, our steps rhymed, counting off the same cadence. There was a fluidity of motion that seemed to dissolve our distance. & that seems the particular talent of a dog—to erase instantaneously & completely the associative detritus we bring to them & to pierce directly that part of us wanting after earnestness & sincerity & simple joy. & I can safely say that I relied on dogs to usher me through the now-done darkness of the winter. Piper, Autumn, Maximus & Moose, & especially Cinder-pup, who seemed to have that peculiar well-pool of quiet wisdom & frenetic puppiness in his eyes. All of them told me to wait, to wait. & then Willa come home to me, & every evening I hear her sighs & snores & think it the highest companionable grace. Humans are alright, after all, but I’d not trade that year as a dog for anything.

Cindie--

Wils--

July 11

2010-07-11T15:46:00.000-08:00

There is something to it. Even raindense, or wrested behind some window or heavy door, that light filtering through the marled cloud. The seagreen tufts of wet needle clustered under the boughs of spruce, or the windblown white of the one we named dogflower, or just the sound of the rain over the corrugated roof, the felt curtain blown just so. Or in the sun, dappled willow, the sibilance of the aspens. & I can do nothing & find its grace—ask nothing of it, expect nothing, & still, its gift.
You grow up thinking on other lives like books unread on a shelf. & suddenly you are living some old tale, some familiar trope that has been your steady carriage the years through. & your imaginings are such brittle things, & the wind is very real. The x-ray & the light. What you regarded once in some other’s telling & colored in hues presently unavailable. Which is to say, I think, inhabiting a dream from childhood clothes you again in childhood’s robes. Or that childhood dreams through you when you enact its old longing. Or that we can grow towards a simplicity. Or none of the above; I don’t rightly know. I think of Gide’s Narcissus, or of the Prelude in its entirety, of a river flowing backwards, toward its origin, wherein every reflection is borne in regress, fled. & so our time is only to give, witting or no, & our every breath already fugitive. & each word always another’s. & it isn’t that I think some atavistic Eden awaits us—this is how ideals work, after all—but nonetheless I regard the absence of logical architectures with a particular reverence. We delimit to hem in, “murder to dissect.” & while struthiously denying the absence of any & all complexities is no better answer, I think maybe under the right contexts we can at least sieve all of that through some filter that lets us wonder yet. I am pressed by daily exigencies even if they are not mine, but I know better than to believe them rooted. Every narrative unthreads eventually. But in that a kind of freedom.
Which is all maybe only to say I that I am thinking about how I live my life now in comparison to how I’ve lived it in the past, & that comparison finds me grateful, in the end.

July 4

2010-07-04T09:17:00.000-08:00

After the family leaves, the sudden cognizance of distances, of miles untended. & the house’s new quiet, tempered by the having-been. The floorboards I didn’t hear in their creaking, the wind in its rustling, Willa sighing & looking towards the door. My remoteness less a conceptual thing now, more tangible in me. The lines on the map sinews stretched taut, arteries ushering blood from me & sending it away, away, some gift unbidden. & with that, the textured memory of how I came to be where I am. Something about seeing my family conjures my life entire & seems to flush my heart with some longing after irrecuperable years. I think on childhood in no particular way, am ghosted by remembering & feel that fell, that odd confluence of loss & warmth & sentiment that demarcates for me the passage of time, causes a swelling in my breast, underquiets each word. As if some rend in the familiar continuum through which that wake must run, from which the mind & heart can eddy unto a calmer shore. & it’s not that recollection is anything but beautiful—it is, always, whatever its shifting focus—just that somehow there is yet that child in me that wonders desperately at time’s erosions every time I see them anew, & can find in that wondering no sufficient logic to explain what tolls time exacts. With my family I still seem to myself something other than this adult I am. I am newly perplexed with myself, more so than usual, & find only slow reprieve from that renewed befuddlement. & how curious a thing, that.

So back into the texture of dailiness, with that love lingering around me yet. The house a warmer place for it, though, ever.

June 12

2010-06-12T12:03:00.001-08:00

That’s the thing of it there. My brother just wrote about how we err in historicizing, either by reanimating some epochal trait in some sort of grotesque charade that can only draw caricatures where portraits would hang, or by letting temporal gaps close up like scars over old cuts so we regard the mark & forget its cause. Either way, seems to me, there is a kind of valuation that goes forth, advertently or no. That act of separation, of differentiating either by the guffawing condescension of the present or, well, by its graver counterpart performing the same exact function. In any case, the past is set apart, fetishized, exposed ostensibly as a wake of obsolescence falling out behind us like the coma of a comet. The present gets privileged, in all the wrong ways. & the difficulty here is not that the past is passed; invariably, in the mere act of being, our recollections will perforce enact those reanimations & set those ghosts to dancing. Maybe the problem is that in thinking those ghosts external to ourselves, we forget that their vicissitudes are our own, that their reorientation resets our compasses, rewrites our pasts, restores our foundations. Like the old time travel caution against sparking some chain reaction that will wreak havoc on the eventual present (see: Marty’s hand disappearing). But when we re-collect, we do just that, & our inventory comes up altered in every instance. Maybe our accounting changes—certainly, no act of remembrance carries with it all the rhapsody of its initial phenomenon—but we aren’t so squarely ruptured from ourselves that we can’t find some breath in it. A wistful one, maybe, or winsome, or elegiac in some necessary way, but somehow it seems to me that elegy keens so when it finds its echo ongoing. I do not think for a moment, for instance, that my grandfather is still alive, but I can smell his flannel shirt & hear his gruff voice making its curt demands, & maybe in that small way his memory is alive in me. Which has nothing to do with his consciousness, mind you, & I don’t for a moment think that we remain discretely individuated (if ever we were) beyond our passing. Just that while I am alive, in my consciousness, there is an animate version of the man, of an other, & a sense memory that can conjure past present without hesitation, however diminished, however faded.

Maybe all to say that none of our alterities, temporal or spatial, seem to fall from us completely, but settle instead in the hollow concavities of our thinking & our bodies & our deeds, no matter how self-consciously modern or novel we would think ourselves.

May 30

2010-05-30T13:52:00.001-08:00

Note to self: sleep more.

May 14

2010-05-14T20:53:00.003-08:00

But then that, too, a kind of sounding, an architectonics all its own. A sort of script. A preface. & there’s the thing of it—how we surrender ourselves to experience but cannot let go the thought of the thing, the conscious presentiment, that dim intimation of structure. & so a moment in which we feel ourselves perfectly conjoined with phenomena holds its rusted anchor yet, & the wave washes it over, & still are we tethered, bank-chained, rooted in that grey-blue alluvion that we allow ourselves to consider at rest & ample for the root-room. Bed down, then, silt & shifting pebble. Bed down & begin a constellation.

Which is to say that there are no daemons but in our faiths, no rubric of order but we would draft its design in the first. No news here.

& this, too, an echo. There is in Keats’s odes a gradual unclenching of the fists, a slow & ponderous relinquishment that seems to me always somehow relevant. It is how thought works on the world, I think (or the obverse). The first odes are presentations, & then they begin an erosion & fall swiftly into deeper & deeper chasms. & the fingers clutch the cusp of reason, bend its compass, hang upon its sickled needle. We read the dissipation of that nameless faith, see that clamoring after efficacy reduce itself to the mournful dirge of the gnats over the river sallows. We see proclamation shift into question & fall into interrogation before finally reason seems to despair of itself & withdraws completely in the autumn ode. & then it is a silence ringing a try at a truth, or a human silence anyway, absent the hemming & hawing, absent completely those companionable daemons that concepts provided Keats early along. Nothing is insinuation of an alterity. Or everything is, entire. It is a stubble field, or a swallow, or the haunting smell of the cider press. & the hand withdraws, lets it be, posits a space empty of human utterance. & oddly, it is Keats at his most perfect.

Which is not to say that our utterance does not matter. It does, I think. It merely does not matter beyond ourselves, not really, not enduringly. Or if it does, it means like a ghost means, like a small flame throws heat, like a constellation can conjure a wolf, or an archer, or a bear. An imagined taste that cannot touch the tongue but sits restive in the thinking. & so we gather our faiths like tools & build worlds that we can fathom, & all the while the unfathomable, just there, just where we let our faithing cease.

May 1

2010-05-01T09:54:00.001-08:00

This morning a fine, almost particulate snow, a spring snow, a dust feathering the air against the blue-white whorls of cloud & sky, & the sun meantime casting the falling flakes against its rays. These kinds of mornings. The peaks of the mountains enshrouded in newfallen snow, falling still, while down at elevation the ground breathes & swells just above freezing. & where the snow has receded, the colors seem to shock even in their tired, faded hues. The vermillion at the willow’s stem. That first pallid green. The puzzled landscape.

The last few days I’ve felt a kind of tremoring incredulity at the simplest things. Words falling into line, the hand reaching from plate to mouth, the slow whir of the truck’s engine. In the minutiae this strange & bewildering ontic fact reflected: I don’t understand being at all. The heart in us, the yearning, that indefatigable longing. I don’t understand the beauty around me or my want to embrace it. I don’t understand the passage of time. I don’t understand how we are compelled to do these curious things we do, to rehearse them, to abide by their scripts. I don’t understand our faculty for ideas—their efficacy, their value. Why we are taken or overcome or possessed by some vague notion. & how we measure one against the other, as if an enduring fascination with social systems, say, is somehow more valuable than a similar regard for orioles, or television programs, or the spines of leaves. I don’t understand how so many things came to be, so many things that I employ daily. Where words took shape & crawled trembling from some old shadow. Where they adhered. & why anymore it is not widely encouraged that one invents words, or worlds entire. I am thinking of late that our reason is a flawed reason, that our logic is some thin veil to our fear, that our lives are things fully attenuated to faith. & a faith that has nothing to do with a god, but instead the trembling & heart-bright assurance that we are doing something right (& not right in the sense of good or bad, but in the sense of being not completely devoid of meaning). We measure action against sense, I imagine. Against our underlying faith in the abstract capacity of our environment to confer upon our endeavors a kind of satisfactory response. & where there is dissonance we seek some alteration. We look for balance, we can say. We call one thing by another’s name, & neither of them flesh what we feel into substance. & I understand that these systems provide us with a scaffolding, an architecture for the dailiness of our lives. I understand their necessity. But lately they impress me more with their elaborate ornamentation of malleable nonsense than with their solid & convincing inflexibility. We build the girders, after all, don’t we, & then we gawk at the rubble.

I think I’ve had this same thought all of my life. Which is why, I’m sure, this all sounds more like the ramblings of a four year-old than an adult. But maybe adult questions are tiresome just now. Maybe they sort of hover over the sheen of the world without really ever touching it. Maybe they don’t empty you out like they should, anyway. Or like I think they should. But then, what matter really? I will not care for my author-ity tomorrow, I don’t suspect. But for now, it is today yet, isn’t it. So that’s something.

April 23

2010-04-23T18:05:00.001-08:00

& now come spring, & absent of exigencies. The same calm breath, the light lingering to wane later & later, & the dawn daily more impatient to rise. & I still seem to myself a part of some ebbing current, almost other, almost witness to the passage of this own slow time. It’s not from distrusting happiness so much as participating in its inchoate shaping. Maybe it’s that the idea of contentment seems enervating, ultimately—some means of acquiescing to a feeling rather than finding its harmony in you. Contentment makes an assumption about time that I’d rather not make. It is enough, for now, to merely be. & in a day, maybe it’s the falling feather from the owl in the white spruce, or the opening brown-black gap of a puddle, the gentle wheeze of the pass, the scurrying tap of the magpies alighting on the corrugated roof. The eye makes its appeals in a language beyond our own, beyond the gymnastics of our thinking. Which seems the riddle.

Odd to think that time antagonizes us, or that we would play hostage to its passage, measure it out for what it thieves from us. Though we do, almost invariably. I think the will an extraordinary fiction sometimes. To consider ourselves as anything but permeable, utterly vulnerable, always already intertwined with alterities that branch & tendril well beyond the scope of our vision. It is tired, I know, to wonder after the boundaries of the self. But it is this Herculean project of weaving strands of disparate, shattered meanings into cohesion that bewilders me. This obstinate refusal to allow for ambiguities, even as the manufacture of the vagaries that seem most often to compel us goes forward at all hours unimpeded. This warp a severed thing, without origin. This weft of borrowed cloth strung.

Why I am preoccupied of late with meaning-making is beyond me. It would be tiresome to another I’m sure. Perhaps it is this landscape, in which scope renders self-significance utterly & immediately negligible. Or the way I am carried along by time, writing my name in a cresting wave that will bring it to dissolution some day upon a shore I cannot yet imagine. & there, clotted sand & mica-speckled pebble, the slow erosions, the liminal fluxing, our inevitable erasures. A goodbye.

But here, here, it is only the sound of that water, its gentle song, the brittle leaves caught in the currents, the stubborn boulders strewn haphazard & cleaving twain the tide, & I some buoy ferried along, some wind-fanned reed, some brief reflected arc of light.

April 13

2010-04-13T19:53:00.001-08:00

I am thinking about how cleanly divergent thought & feeling can be—two ghosts with no cognizance of one another, haunting the same tired house. & how powerlessness can sting me so, crop up from some long-dormant regret to stab & swiftly withdraw. how in thinking about the irrecuperable past it is our nature to rhapsodize over conditionals, over conjectures of what could have been, when in any case here we are, our palms upturned, our hearts in some heavy wake, or some spirited discovery, or lulled instead by the soft, plain music of the ordinary. that none of it effectively matters. & that it could not matter more.

maybe, maybe those twinned ghosts can have names, & one of them can be the nihilist & the other the solipsist. & both can drag their spectral forms through the relief of shadow thirsting after some bright light that will never come, & both can feel the blue-black umbra of the moon, the color of a raven’s wing catching a silver arc of refracted star. & both can pace the floorboards & hum & flicker, & any eye that beholds either can widen, relay the fear to the heart, let the heart relay the fear to the fingertips, which rise, rise to the whitened face. & so passes the night. & then the roseate dawn, & the specters fade, & time, time seems to open out from itself again & to permit our obliviousness its daily trespass. & suddenly the memory of the ghosts, too, thins & dissolves, form into smoke, whisper into susurrus, until it comes to cusp teetering where our recollections are swallowed whole by their erasure, & the breeze comes just so, say, & it is fled from us too, with its wake of exhausted fear. another irretrievable thing.

& so. where now those ghosts? & how changed the ground beneath me? the snow upon the soil. I cannot believe that I mean anything in this world. & I cannot believe otherwise.

& so we cull our recollection for what is reft from us. Pound, he was wrong, after all. what thou lovest well. & our remembering is a reanimating, & those ghosts move now differently than they did then. it is an act we will them to perform, isn’t it, to accord with our shifting want. but they are never there, never really there, though we look & look & look.

March 27

2010-03-27T12:20:00.001-08:00

A year now since we severed, since I compassed north & let the floor fall from beneath me, diving headlong into something entirely unfathomable, some gift given purely in the phenomena of the daily. & how momentous that swift rupture. How our hearts clamored against it & knew it for its necessity at once, somewhere limning resolve & unspeakable remorse, the white fingers clutching the steering wheel & the body borne along while the mind wondered & that heft of grief enwreathed the heart. Laid bare, this new way of being, this new way of carving out a day. Some faith in uncertainty, some awareness that under the foundational intricacies of any given plan, a chasm of yawning, quiet chaos tendrils & vines its way slow about the footholds. What we would hold.

& so the border crossing, the surreal stays in yellowed hotel beds, the soot-grey snow mounting in walls lining the highway, the recognizable signs of human life dwindling as I found myself further & further north. BC. The Yukon Territory. The border again. Jesus, to think of it now. Such a tenuous, frangible time, my heart a thinnest bird’s slivered bone & my will this soldiering, trudging thing carrying me beyond the scope of a word. & in me that odd confluence of opposites shored against one another & elbowing for room—a gasping sadness & a surging exultation to reify an old, half-forgotten dream; the unspoken commerce between the familiar & the entirely new. What selves in me then, what selving, going forward unbidden.

Homer. Denali. A visit or two, a final flailing cry, speaking those words across thousands of miles. I am going to say I love you & then I am going to say goodbye. & all the while, here in the quotidian, in the daily coming & going, was revealed something previously only dimly adumbrated—a me among my days. In protracted hermitage, or in this wilderness, or among friends, this firmer sense of my being, of my being here. & each day this gratitude the richness of which I cannot describe. I hold this life, delicate thing, with a care & wonder to make me weep. To love a thing so. Find its beauty, its darkness, its light, & know its breadth, know how it flashes, briefest buoy against an unremitting tide of circumstance. That I am here at all. There are no such things, I do not think anymore, as small dreams.

December 13

2009-12-13T13:44:00.001-09:00

Returned, now, out of some sense of necessity, some compulsion in me to unself, to push through an external sieve & return me again to myself, to cull, to see what drops from my clutching fingers & what remains rooted in my palm. Since October, winter has swallowed me whole. If it was desolate here in the warmth of summer or the first breath of fall, now it is a kind of barrenness the mind can hardly conceive; not my own, which thinks in it, through it, by way of it. Temperatures down to forty below. Howling gales ripping through passes at hurricane force. One suspended incident of an empty fuel-oil drum & a cabin frozen to ten degrees at best, me huddled there by the woodstove, layered & buried in blanket (consequence of poor preparation, like most calamity). & the roads slick with black ice, the truck on several occasions now careening to glide, bald-tired, towards some interrupted fate. & the sun muting the horizon & painting it darker in swift succession, itself not even visible anymore, intimated instead. I am trying to forge into it, daily, to find homeostasis. I am trying. Some days find me more feeble, others stoking some ember.

Meantime architectures brittle & break, & we wonder.

October 4

2009-10-04T17:20:00.003-08:00

As you have likely noticed, I have been neglecting this site for some time. Upon its conception, my intention was to write for one year, with full accountability & candor, about the texture of my days, that my recollections could find evidence, my heart sympathies in casting back over these catenary hours strung slipshod Denver to Alaska. Clearly, a year ago I could not fathom the path that led me here. I could not have imagined that swift flame of Orcas, the rending pain of its forfeit in our decision to take a break. The wilderness of this place, the solitude it has bred, the growth it has fostered-- even still, these are barely comprehensible to me, but as I say, at least I have now record of those vicissitudes in their ebb & flow. A year of such rich torsion, such gentle violence, rupture & connect. A year of wonderment.

& so I have decided now to turn my attentions to other endeavors, to let the mundane translate itself beyond this one stuttering voice into something new. I may return to posting here, if only out of habitual sway. In the meantime, there are a few new pictures up at flickr. To those four or five of you who have been reading, I thank you sincerely for so doing; my erstwhile loneliness thanks you too for company. Be in touch.

September 5, 8

2009-09-08T21:25:00.002-08:00

Been looking at cabins outside the park for my vaguely continuing tenure here. I would shift one roommate to the next in a couple weeks were I to stay in C-Camp, & at this point I well can grasp the dent in my productivity imposed by sharing a small space with another stranger. & besides, these places I am seeing are phenomenal to my eye (though likely horrid to many others); all of them tucked into spruce forest on acreage, maybe next to a beaver bond that freezes over come winter, wood stoves with Toyo backups, dry every one, modest without excuse, simple without pretense. How I want to live at present, quietly, undisturbed, with this landscape sprawling uninterrupted from my window.

& the last couple days a contract drawn between the last dying rage of summer & the stayed & patient hand of autumn, whose fingers have curled to touch off their fires of color already. Still, cloudless, deep azure skies with heavy sun over the blazing leaves. Already the thirties at night, already snow in gossamer corollas around the rings of the peaks, but this last gift of warmth & ineffable beauty. Days like these make me wonder if I can leave Alaska. Wait for winter to see what I will say of it then. Tonight, the auroral forecast is as high as its been since spring.
& here I am describing within what I ought to be enjoying without. To run, then.

***

An almost ineluctable pull to the outdoors the last week, the weather so finely moderate, so blissfully autumnal, sun enough daily. A nine mile run with 8000 feet of elevation change. A three hour hike off the Triple Lakes trail. Any number of slow meanderings through the blueberry & bearberry bushes. A lovely time to be alive.

I am thinking of the past a great deal lately, no less for the exigencies of the present than for its insistent echo down the corridors of daily life. Names I’ve not recalled in some time, voices I’ve not heard in countless years. The people near to my heart who have muted over time, not through any intentional abnegation, not through any selection in the least, but merely the way that people do, borne along over the years, names culled to the fore in slow revolution, or unspooled into littered letters that again fight into form. Today spoke first with a Swedish exchange student I was friends with in high school & next with a dear friend from my undergraduate days with whom I had sadly lost touch. All of this in the span of four hours. How the past comes crashing back, semblance from slow fracture, the sheen regaining itself over the ruptured watercourse, its reflections pooling piecemeal until the gestalt insinuates itself nearly fully formed, ample intimation. These are the vicissitudes. There was a time I would feel the compulsion towards apology in speaking with one long absent in my life; but then, that absence is to be expected I think. We operate daily with what information we have in front of us, & though the heart’s affections gain stubborn hold, they do not sound a clarion call at matins nor offer themselves in clean litany day to day. It is not from conjuring, either, that those ghosts find flesh, but from a foraging into an openness whereby we allow ourselves to be surprised by their utter familiarity anew. The empathies of an instant.

I have wondered often if I have been a poor friend, too absent & too quiet from my barely articulated distances. My tendency, herein amplified with stunning clarity, of burrowing into presence without due deference to past. But it is respect for those distances that defines friendship to begin, I suppose. Perhaps I tell it such to assuage something in me; I do not know. Only, the past revisits the way a wave does; always separate, always the same, always crushingly profound, & always too quickly withdrawn. & the gaze we send over the sand always a kind of prayer.

September 4

2009-09-05T00:18:00.000-08:00

All's well. Put up new pictures at flickr.com/photos/apinalaska, including the Thorofare Cabin, one of my favorite places in the world entire.

August 31

2009-09-01T10:24:00.001-08:00

A year to the day since we emptied the house on Cherokee. A year ago at this hour I was driving west along the interstate for Georgetown, for a month in the mountains, well beyond the hazed brown fog clinging to the huddled buildings in Denver. A year ago, the stopper loosed, the shift from that familiar life to this, its curious facsimile, meandering, wayward, or even-coursed. & this document, now, celebrating, too, its anniversary. Of all of my years perhaps no one more precipitous, no one more daunting in its recollection, more generative in its violent torsions, more fully striated with deep-felt sorrows & swift jubilations. A milestone, now, to sit here & write of it with an unfractured consciousness, a stable enough fulcrum of self to permit of a brief glance behind. No Orphic loss in it anymore.

I think of the logic that compelled us to these farflung points, the compulsion towards self-discovery, towards an earnest evaluation of the first-terms of my own living. That leaning initially towards a thrumming dream, the verdant pastoral of the northwest, that island horseshoed in the tumbling sea. Of Orcas I recall now most clearly its unflagging gift of simple beauty, between us, between ourselves & the land, between ourselves & our burgeoning notions of how we wanted to live. There was dissolution there, perhaps, but wrought of the finest & most insightfully honest circumstances I’ve yet abided. These separate lives a gift given.

That stunned & ghosting drive up the Alcan, fifteen hour days in the truck, the snow mounting, the sense of isolation the more palpable by the second. & then Alaska. That auroral welcome east of Tok in the crisp winter night. Homer. My cabin. My beach along the bay. Good god, a lifetime ago already.

The details I harbor silent within, the ebb & flow of my well-being, the recursions of grief & wonder in balanced presentation. But I am here, in the simple dream of my youth, my heart in me yet, my breath billowing the air my lungs have sought since my earliest remembrance. I am alive to behold it all, to grasp after it or let its beauty settle & lay how it will. No small wonder.

August 30

2009-08-30T13:39:00.002-08:00

Awakened at noon today, my circadian rhythms well-fractured by an odd schedule imposed by working emergencies. The day after the search & rescue I was detained at work until just after six in the morning, assisting with a UTV accident that, I am told, has resulted in a brain surgery for the patient flown to Fairbanks. The sun, muted by rain at my elevation & a thick & viscous mixture of snow & fog above five thousand feet, implied itself on my cold walk home. I don’t recall ever in my life awakening at two in the afternoon until yesterday. & again this morning, a constant, rolling rain, seeming usher to autumn as around me the russets & golds & yellows tendril quick across the landscape over the sated deep greens that prior lay wiry & tangled in the long absence of precipitation. Among the most overtly stunning transformations, the way season spells itself in the slow change of the fireweed, which now is tinted a vermillion in its leaves, the white stem protruding molting into brown like a spring ptarmigan. Meantime, wanting urgently to surround myself in these varied hues & textures, I await a response from the kennels manager who controls the schedule of the backcountry cabins, & will hopefully get the green light to stay again either in Thorofare or out in Kantishna at the Busia cabin on Moose Creek.

One usually sees autumn manifest in these brief pyrotechnics, framed in by the faultlines of roads or towns or civilization. Never has my eye followed such refulgence to find it doubled, tripled, endlessly replicating itself for as far as the eye can see. As always, it is the scale of this place that lends it a stunning beauty that I can’t begin to articulate. There was a bit in McPhee about witnessing a grizzly that comes to mind. “What mattered was not so much the bear himself as what the bear implied. He was the predominant thing in that country, and for him to be in it at all meant that there had to be more country like it in every direction and more of the same kind of country all around that. He implied a world.” & that’s just it. A male griz prefers to have a sixty-mile radius to himself. This park has upwards of four hundred grizzlies on the north side of the Alaska range alone, not counting black bears, & the population does not suffer any hint of claustrophobia. I take a picture, & the moment it is hemmed in by four lines it becomes an absurd, tinny echo, a whispered & misremembered melody that would conjure a symphony entire. Scope & scale, breadth & vastness—none of this grandeur can fit in a word, such a fragile vessel. & me, a believer in the efficacy of the word, as these often tiresome redundancies suggest.

Maybe the word isn’t the word at all, but the reach of our capacity to intake experience without loosing it to awe. & the word the bird-bone thin architecture through which it blows, firn wind, heavy gust. We do the constellating that we may walk among the constellations, know them named, know them ordered. But yet the wind blows, & if our eyes upturn, our ears attune, it is the wash of random starlight cast & scattered voluminous & random, it is the wind’s constant song through the reedy bones.

August 28

2009-08-28T13:21:00.000-08:00

Participated directly in my first search & rescue last night, my shift in the communications center parlaying nicely into a three & a half hour hike that took us past midnight. Two women from Israel lost on the bank of a river with no clue how they ended up there, & since the incident commander operates from my office, I was able to force my way into helping, joining two others on a route from the south trailhead of the Triple Lakes trail up towards Riley Creek. Privileged to witness the winnowing towards their errant center, questions about the color of the water, the rocks along the creek-bed, the slope of the land, the vegetation. All of these things & they ended up almost precisely where it was conjectured they might be. From the beginning, we firmly suspected one of the other teams would locate them, but nonetheless we set out headlights blazing past the lakes & into the brush, along a game trail towards the creek a piece, a solid hour & a half before we were told they’d been found. I have hiked Alaska at midnight before, but closer to summer solstice when the sun still lay dull over a landscape that, though shadowed & muted in its recesses, nonetheless stood out fully formed to the eye. Cutting through the oil-dark night at that hour was new to me. Owls in their quiet reedy songs. Shadows blooming into full dark. & light scraping the willow-tops to plunge into sink-holes where foot-slips pull you down in silted muddy water. It was not easy hiking, but it was exhilarating nonetheless. & the search successful, & the sleep after a long day punctuated with a hasty hike fine.

This morning, the yawning grey that seems to greet me daily anymore, the sun & I on opposite schedules. When I am working, weather breaks & clears & permits of a crisp autumnal beauty. & when I am not the rain & the slate sky conspire. So a quiet day in, some laundry, some cleaning, some writing, guitar playing. & then to work again. Day to day, there arise these quiet surprises, rifts along a riverine path.

August 23, 24

2009-08-25T09:30:00.000-08:00

Ran the Mt. Healy Challenge earlier this afternoon, up Bison Gulch in the pouring rain, thirty-seven degrees out. Two thousand feet of vertical gain in a mile & a half, which is usually my bread & butter. Usually. From the base you couldn’t see the top for the hovering billow of cloud & fog—what is termed “pea soup” to those familiar with such parlance. From the start, my legs failed me, leaden & heavy, rubbery stumps swinging under me with only the greatest of effort. & even as I pushed along running I was passed by others choosing to hike, their bodies leaning against the contrary grade. So it went, trudging upwards slow & with no reserve to conjure, & ambling back down soaked & shaking with cold. & coming down, that dawning weight in me, & then me thinking only I would get depressed about a poor performance in an unofficial novelty race. A hot shower, a warm meal, & now restored, off to work with my rattling cough in tow, constant companion anymore. Already, I slate another run along the trail, my own, my own consolation, reckoning or recovery.

The rain meanwhile hinting at comfort, at warmth, at those things that ought likely to inhere in the very thought of home. My eye fixed now on conjuring such a place manifest after the brittle architecture of the cabin here blows down. Until then. Home. The very word.

***

& rain still tireless against the fogging glass, the spruce-tops swaying in brief winds, the clouds molting white to grey, corollas of soft mist ringing the mountains & staying their summits from view. & through a wet black soil the fireweed bleeding violet, the ground-scrub taking a russet hue, the berries thick in the tangled copper wire-patches of the tundra. & a dull yellow now hastens to flame gold, maroon to split vermillion in swathing gashes across the broad green valleys. & the raindrops appertaining, clutching pine needle or quivering on an aspen leaf flickering against the muted breeze, just so, before thudding soundless to the dirt. A sense of the pending in it. Look south where the clouds cleave & leave Cantwell white with snow. It’s coming, sooner than later. Every day, someone is packing a car & saying a round of goodbyes, everyone’s days in camp numbered, however obscure their mathematics.

Inside, Roy is beginning to root through his artifacts to organize them prior to his own departure. Polished boots sit on the kitchen table on papers bleeding with scrawled ink. Trinkets from Thailand fill blue speckled ceramic mugs with ursine forms engraved on them. Cigars half-smoked & rolled in Ziploc bags. Notes on gold mine strikes burgeoning from a black & white composition notebook. These curiosities on display. & there are, in my stowed places, curiosities of my own to ponder. Today, there is no judgment in observation. Life accrues its heft in such artifacts—its ponderous weight, its root room, its sprite airiness. One wonders at them as one might puzzle over evidence of one gone missing, the narrative they suggest, their essential human-ness where human fingers touched them & left them still, spiraling labyrinthine prints hardly discernible. What is jacketed in a film of dust. What wears a bright sheen yet. “There are things we live among, & to know them is to know ourselves.” Anymore it is the peculiar refulgence of any given object, how it metaphorizes the fugitive desires surrounding it, center of that pulsing constellation. What stories they tell, & how heartbreakingly those stories mumble into a silence that will not hear them out, will not bare the weight of the words. How the words, then, seem to drop brittle upon the unyielding floor, how they shatter, & how over time it is the shards we recover that constitute a past. What gives a word a glow, every one a ghost, & in every ghost the dullest spark of having-been. A whisper. The part of dreaming that will not convey itself to the light of consciousness. The remembrance not of the content of the irrecuperable dream, but only of its having unfurled during the long hours of dark, a banner unfolding in a hieroglyph the eye cannot read, though it strains to try.

How could the past be anything but a fiction? Itself some slivered clip of a vast & looming arc. Fraction in fraction. But room there for belief, for the faith inhering in form. “My words echo / Thus, in your mind. // But to what purpose / Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves / I do not know.” How we cling savage to beauty.

August 22

2009-08-22T01:42:00.001-08:00

just a couple more new photos on www.flickr.com/photos/apinalaska. have to wait until september 1 to post more, but at least now the mountain is well represented.

Aug. 18, 19, 20

2009-08-21T09:12:00.000-08:00

What but the rain to fall, the rain to fall. What but lulling words, & all the tide to stem. Thinking today of this unwitting sentinel role, guardian of a maelstrom, the way I’ve remained exposed all this while to the literal toxicity around me. How stunningly clear its basic counterproductivity is presenting itself to me. Fled to all the quiet in the world, six million acres of wild alterity, & here caved up with a reeking lipoid viper in a closet-sized cabin. Where now that calm I craved? How I sought in Alaska self-refuge, time in a dear space, a chance at discovering beneath the exigencies of dailiness that rudimentary architecture of desire & necessity that would skeleton me, underwrite me, if even in some strange syllabary. & here I cast it forfeit into another’s jaws. I will need, moving forward, my own space clean & clear, absent of other, absent of what I find by the ticking second more & more viscerally repugnant, less & less tolerable, until it finally comes to resemble an offense I perpetrate against myself in staying, a disease I will not eradicate though I hold its antidote in my own hand. What I am & what I am deserving. That no door will open of another’s hand. It becomes a matter of that simplest grace: I must care for myself. Cherish my progress. & all of my gathered darkness, I know, not even my own, some borrowed thing I’ve corralled in turning from the contrary. How I have daily surrendered to it. This slow cough in me where a word should have raged long ago. The me I’ve swallowed down in a treacle of feigned kindness, dutiful, dutiful, soldiering along with no medal to show. This, the thetic turn. I am my own.

***

Here, always the risk of exposure. A few beers at a bar to avoid my home, a few more since arriving in order to soften the blow of palaver. Tonight’s unlikely subject of roomie repertoire: karaoke in Burma & Thailand. That & that quirky way that the Europeans & the Americans seem to differ on the definition of football; have you ever noticed? He is like an autistic Andy Rooney half the time. Sample of the monologue: “There was this Swede I knew, Ing or Eng or something or other. Anyways, this Swede & I, hell, he’s a stubborn guy, I can be pretty stubborn. We start talkin’ ‘bout football & he says soccer is football, & I say hell no, the NFL is football. He says that’s ‘merican football, I says the hell it is, I played it in ‘merica & we plumb called it football. Ing, he says soccer is football, me, I say nope, no deal, football is football. Hell, we go back & forth. Ing he keeps saying soccer is football over & over again, & me, I say Ing, the fucking NFL, Ing!” Repeat this four times & you have some basic understanding of how every single story that he tells is passed along, in endless, unfruitful repetition. & to top it off, right now he is blasting a reggae version of the Gilligan’s Isle theme song apparently recorded on a Casio by some dead guy from Hawaii. But now it fades to some recitation of famous Japanese people. He is singing along, husky-voiced, literally punctuating the lines with flatulence. My life, my life, Oh dear God, my life. This viper’s nest. What was it I wrote? I am my own. This is precisely why I must honor those fundaments that I need manifest. This, precisely.

***

Thinking through winter. Through wintering. How to tailor the coming months that they serve to allow me not only to abide, but to thrive, to hit upon purpose & drive it through to the me in it. Enfolded in this snow, long milk-white arm shivering around, a wing’s eider-down, a gesture towards a flame. & already, the mountaintops capped in white, black veins of thick foliage cracking through, valleys unblasted yet by drive-of-wind. They are there, looming, a confident preface my eyes spy in running, & that snow under footfall running a ridge already, that sharpness in the lungs, a burning blade calling winter, winter, winter. It is this state’s ineluctable axis, & the days spin swiftly toward their center, & I, doe-eyed, seem in them to spin as well.

August 17

2009-08-18T16:31:00.001-08:00

First sustained sunlight in some time this morning. When I cusp on days off there is always a blankness to fill, always this sense of crawling from a wake bleary-eyed & tender-brained. Giving the hours time to decompress & normalize. I had decided against fishing Brushkana, the forecast all grey & raining, but I may reconsider. Or a ridge to ridge run that would take the better part of a day, some hitching to or from & some scrambling one ridge to the next. A good day, at any rate, to flee the cabin; a shared day off. I am almost past complaint, not for absence of fodder but for its uselessness alone. Maybe another month in his company & then free of it. These exaggerated versions of home that I slip into, one place to the next, shades of increasing absurdity, almost at this point farcical. How they push me towards a nesting, towards a burning for my own dear space indeterminate before me. It is perhaps always this way, hedging toward what we want by winnowing out the dross, stumbling upon clarity like some buried thing the fingers flick against in a separate rooting altogether. How constellation cuts the drear of night, an ossified light cast against imponderable darkness. The way the word ‘relief’ bifurcates from a shared stem; how compare finds purchase for proximity, & proximity, in turn, for contentment. I imagine moonbright eyes scanning stars for shape, those initial inchoate figures insinuating themselves just briefly before flaming out into oblivion again. The namer of constellations, taut-fingered, mouth agape. This will be the scabbard hanging luminescent from the belt of Orion. This will be the clustered sisters. & those, those uncountable flames, they do not fall gracefully into named shape, do not suggest some gravid form inhering, dehiscent through the boundless black, must remain unconstellate. What is named, what provides naming’s relief. Backwater stars. Slough stars. Daphne’s arms tangled into branch while the root lays buried in a black dirt. & then all form blazing into fiery light, & the relief a chiaroscuro gloaming into yawning oblivion.

August 14, 15

2009-08-16T12:15:00.001-08:00

Back in C-Camp, conjuring unwitting the sense memory of the breeze blown over the willows & onto the porch at Thorofare, that broad expanse stretching endless before me. The smell of the air, sweet with rosehip & blueberry, streaked with current-cold gusts off the watercourse below. The rough-hewn logs in tidy array. This was the dream I dreamt, when a child yet. That cabin clawed & shaded in aspen tucked against a rolling hill under white peaks roseate in their alpenglow. A dream I cannot forfeit; I feel something inextricable grown between Alaska & myself, some promise we’ve silently vowed, calling return if we are to one day part. It is not all of me, but it is a substantial part of me that yearns for this place. & so. A wild covenant. A sometime home, more than any geography I’ve known.

***

Rain or hint of rain, swirling eddies of cloud, patterning the last few days. Thin & scattered snowflakes on my walk home at two this morning, autumn closing in & swiftly. This morning, after talking about handguns for some time with Roy over coffee (me) & beer (him), the dripping rain tilting off the corrugate roof with its massive grey patches, I retreat to my closet of a room to chart the hours ahead. I grow claustrophobic at work, that dark cave & silence to sustain me those long hours, the shifting glow of the computer screen. I feel my body build anxiety, feel it compelled to thrash about in off hours, that it can abide the idleness of work. A run, then, in the rain & cold, to recall my blood to vein. & otherwise what is it in me? Some bite of anxiety taken out, some calm settled in, a softer music, & not so lugubrious in its soundings, not so self-satisfied. I am thinking about life as a life, a finite landscape coupling its own choosing & its warp & weft of fate bestowed (& fate besides perhaps only the willingness to accept the consequences of one’s choices). Where abstraction hovered, some halo to enwreath the thought in its thinking, of late there is just that same blank backwater stillness. How a hand cleaves water & its wake so quickly subsides. The thing was not the wake nor the water, but the sensate hand coupling to cold, the hum of life in it. & as soon forgotten. I dream small dreams that do not collide with the world. It is enough—it is more than enough—to merely be, after all. To plumb the stream for scale against the ocean. Find some rosary of small syllables to roll finger to finger, to mutter & repeat. Lay in some small patch of grass. Outstretch even once a small hand to receive another in yours. Small things, yes, but a world sung through them, a life entire.

August 12

2009-08-13T08:51:00.001-08:00

Thorofare cabin, a mile in from the road along a meandering path clearing low berry bushes & dwarf willows, a beaver pond flanking momentarily the south side. The cabin sits almost hidden against a hill bluffing over the Thorofare River, under a pitch of quaking aspen & otherwise engulfed by dwarf willow & birch & low brush. To the south, the range builds higher as it crops west to crescendo in Denali’s looming 20,320 feet; peaks that earlier today shone crisp now buried in heavy lenticular cloud. The porch of the cabin looks down at the confluence of a trickling creek with the river—three hundred yards downstream the Muldrow Glacier comes to its abrupt end, an ice cliff a hundred feet tall spewing rock & ice-boulders in its calving into the silty water. One, from here, can climb its toe where it is yet vegetated & hike steadily until only ice & rock reveal themselves, a barren arrow pointing directly to the north slope of Denali. The cabin serves primarily as a winter patrol stop for kennels—two or three mushers will break trail from headquarters to Wonder Lake, stopping here to sleep with their teams of dogs outside. Two bunks, a desk, a fine woodstove, a cabinet full of kitchenware. In the corner an axe, a maul, a coping saw. Two lanterns, two Coleman stoves. On the porch & along the side of the cabin spruce felled, cut & stacked high in anticipation of colder months ahead. On the north side of the cabin sharply cleft grooves & deep gouges, the mud below pocked with prints where a grizzly used the wood to sharpen his claws. Along the trail to the river, too, deep grizzly paw impressions in the mud from a day or two ago. The riverside dense with soapberries, the hillock behind the cabin thick with blueberry, & these Denali bears almost vegetarian.

***

Close to nine, a long shadow extended now for hours over the thin sliver of valley, I stoke the woodstove & light a lantern, hanging it above the desk from a nail plunged into the log crossbeam. Autumn beginning its blaze, the air claycold & crisp. Patches of red & gold flaming across the tundra, that particular quality of the air in fall, almost gravid with pending sorrow & its last push of vernal joy, the funereal attending the blithely mineral present, the landscape touched, & just so, hint of hurry, of refulgence, whispers of coming snow.

The crackle & slow burr of the woodstove among the most precious things, so dear to my heart, that song the barn on Orcas sang daily. That little flame we hovered around to hear, our hands supplicant like paupers while we asked questions that seemed to consume us & talked of distances even while we held one another close. What was it ferried me here? What stuttering pulse in vein, what rupture in the filament? I can scarcely tell anymore, & would now sit before that stove with its maple tree emblazoned bold on the door, with my dog curled nearby in contented slumber, with my love beside me, a hand outstretched.

***

Awakened this morning from a pleasant night’s sleep by a sub-adult grizzly using the porch as a backscratch. Quietly approached the window to regard him—just as he quietly stepped his forepaws on the porch to regard me, huffing for scent, peering through the glass & directly into my eyes from four feet away. A moment later he stood, briefly, turned, & was gone through the willows, fine hairs left caught in the splintering wood of the post.

***

Since then a renewed sense of ursine fear—began a hike towards the Muldrow, stopping at the river where its moraine walls calve rock & ice with splintering cracks that resound in echo along the river corridor. Climbed atop one such glacial face, covered at this lower altitude with the same sprawling tundra-cover as the rest. & seemed to freeze there, suddenly again afeared of a bear; though my better judgment urges me on, I cannot seem to shake that visage of hours ago, those dark eyes locked with mine over such short distance, that magnificent creature blazing in my eyelids against their closing. & so I retreated to the cabin, where I’ve hugged the perimeter, reading, writing, whittling my pencil tip, picking blueberries & glancing cautious around me every minute. an extraordinary thing to witness, but some time I suppose in its processing

August 10

2009-08-10T10:01:00.003-08:00

Heading 75 miles into park to stay in an old ranger patrol cabin on the Thorofare River alone for a few days. Until then.

August 7

2009-08-10T10:01:00.001-08:00

The rain all day, dinner crumbling into prolonged conversation with Roy about the Kennicott murders of 1982 & the finer points of drive-ins in Odessa, TX. & me looking out the screen-door at the rivulets skirting the porch, the willow-leaves dappled & sprung with the falling rain. The way you can carry in you a gravid feeling that doesn’t come to bear any change, & how it flees from you, vanishing, a wisp of breath expired. How you can wait for some nameless joy in promenade, watch out the window for some passing sign of life, even when you know full well that it will not come. It is how we navigate loneliness, I suppose. By believing in fictions we know to be fictions.

I have come a long way in my acquaintance with solitude. It does not thunder around me how it did initially, crushingly, deafeningly, almost. Nor does it spur in me a subdued panic, a feeling of restlessness without remedy. I greet it now like an old friend one is stuck with, a charge more than an enduring affection. It would be foolish to bar it entry, to lock the door against it, to feign that I do not hear it knocking; it is always knocking, & always with my own knuckles against my own door, the same slow rapping. Like my ghost in me calling my own name. Odysseus lashed to the mast, beeswax huddled against his eardrums, his heart writhing against its skin.

It rings of complaint, & I, too, weary of it, even as it spills from me. But at times one can catch one’s feeling as a curiosity rather than an event. One can pin it to a felt like a butterfly for examination, draw the glass over & adumbrate its erstwhile reason for being, run one’s fingers over its contours, feel its shuddering cold. & then one knows the world the better for it, just as the entymologist knows the world better for his study. Perhaps one is inured to sadness this way. Perhaps it loses its strange thrill when it is swallowed in daily silence, when there is no telos to which its cure can clutch. But it is just life, after all. Just some fugitive wonder. Some firefly sparking into starless dusk.

August 6

2009-08-06T13:26:00.001-08:00

In Fairbanks, cutting through thick & rolling smoke to find it was raining ash. Again. Unlike the fine silicate powder of the volcanic eruption down in Homer, this was just floating specks of ember, just discernible through the haze. Fairbanks eerily night-black at ten o’clock. Maybe a hundred feet of visibility, fires on every side breathing smoke down into the valley where I had intended to camp & fish, testing a new fly or two. There was a health advisory issued involving a carbon monoxide warning. I had noticed already a sore throat, some discomfort in my eyes, a suggestion of wheeze. Got my groceries & turned back towards Denali, arriving back at one thirty this morning instead, where it has been steadily raining ever since, the air clay-cold, the fireweeds blazing autumnal & the lupine giving out in frail whitening pedals against the lowering temperatures. All of this change, & me in it, some fetch stick floating untended down a silty river. There are times you claw & kick against your fate, rail against it in a rage. There are times you feel its blessing in your marrow, when you bid it stay & welcome. & there are times you tire & weary of wrestling with it & stand gasping for awe, no word to clothe it. It is not enough, but sometimes it is all one can do.

August 4

2009-08-04T18:00:00.000-08:00

Putting together a trip to Fairbanks tomorrow after resisting the impulse to flee again today. What I build I build of balsam, of hay, of sand or air itself. & watch it blow away. How many ways I have tried to cover the hole in me, tried for passage to its other side, when ever it seems I fall, & around me clapping dust where I settle, shard & splinter, palimpsests of echoed words, the grass & lichen singing you again, you again. An odd progress that would tether you to your beginning & call you swiftly back, dressing your wounds, picking at your scabs. Here, step forward, that in stepping the wind will carry the form from you, the brittle architecture of dried leaves, & that you may pause, & well note you’ve come undone. Well note the ground follows you beneath your stepping. Well note how in your heart it feels like some old prayers clink around in a dusty gloaming. & how if your present consumed you you would not even become a ghost, so implausibly empty your hours, so complete your distances, so remote the call-note of your fugitive joys. & it is neither remembrance nor hope nor openness that does you good, though you can’t yet discern what would. & so. Stare down the moment & it will pass, & a new moment will step into your leaden-eyed gaze. You are muttering some soft syllables. Your tail in your mouth.

August 2

2009-08-02T21:52:00.001-08:00

& a nod to a curious seven year anniversary, the frame & compass to my day & beyond.

August 2

2009-08-02T13:42:00.000-08:00

How curious the way the body seems encircled by conjectures, a nucleus spun round with a frenetic wreath of electrons. The instant of our being ensnared in its apperceptions, its steep & fathomed levels of compare, its absent attenuations or taut binds to the gravid expectations of the past. How we are never, can never be fully & singly here, can never utter a word of now being. Where perhaps in youth growing older resembled a coming-in-to-order, a woven thing, loomed & purposive, instead I see each thread individuated, frayed, laid out for my examination, & my fingers that would yoke them into some delicate pattern, braid them into a strength beyond themselves, they seem instead in some paralysis at my side, some quieted palsy, locked in an ongoing obsolescence. & so the quiet morning thrums with its inhering repetition of every other quiet morning. The humming in my head, the offbeating heart both doubled & multiplied with their selfsame recollections, conscious or not, harmonious or grating. How we half-remember, conjure forms of our past just into their recognizability, like an orange backgrounded in a Cezanne painting, striped in blue-green shadow, lineated, none of the vermicular pocking along the rind, more a suggestion than a thing. The imprecision of memory, the ghost-making of it, how it proceeds in faith on penumbra & clipped light, a slivered pulsing alphabet to spell out some small sense, wavering against oblivion like a far-off flower swallowed in ground-heat & barely discernible for the blur. But then, how it suffices as such, how it permits of reanimation, how we can temper it anew. & every day we do. Play with ghosts, call upon the dead, close our endless distances with the swiftest of yearnings. How desire is a recognition of distance, a measurement of gaping, empty space. A recollection of breath.

August 1

2009-08-01T12:10:00.002-08:00

In a curious dream that seemed to span the night entire I stood upon a footbridge with my sister-in-law Dawn (glad I explained who she was to you five who know her already) & between her questions & my answers we covered the entirety of my relationship of the last seven years. Our mission, it seemed, was to walk through it step by step & gauge each moment’s emotional resonance; how it was in recollection, how it must have been at the moment of its cresting passage, how it has transmuted as hostage to time & circumstance. & small details that I do not daily recall—house-sitting a week here in Santa Fe, standing upon some bluff in eastern Utah surveying the riverbed beneath. I awakened stunned, first at how comprehensive it was, & second at how simple a suggestion it offers. Too often I am finding the mineral core of things obscurely adumbrated by fluctuating phenomenal presentation. The riverbed beneath the river, & how swiftly our eye steals away upon the rippling tide to forsake what urges it this way or the other. How one can approach what one loves either with equal love or with the swirling attendant emotions that constellate it & presume some overlaying form—the hurt in us, or the confusion of endless yawning miles, or the angers that surge & subside. Here a sinuous sudden bend, there a slack pool behind a boulder, & further still the flushing whitewater of the rapids. & beneath each & all, the foundation rests in a relative fixity. We alter the current in earnest when we reach below & contact the riverbed. Cleaving through the vicissitudes of mere dailiness, in all of their thinly dissembled costume. How gravely the unconscious day can pass. How the untended field lays fecund yet for flora strange to the eye. Not that this constant handling seems solution—but that we must balance our wilderness & our cultivation in equal measure when attending the heart. & simply. & ever simply in our soundings.

July 31

2009-07-31T11:23:00.001-08:00

Had some success on the Brushkana my second day. Snodgrass was beautiful; a sizable lake tucked at the bottom of sloping mountains, a three mile hike in through willow & low blueberry bushes cusping on ripeness (almost time to harvest & freeze). Without waders, though, I couldn’t do much but awe at my surroundings until rain bade me go. Camped somewhere not far off the gravel highway stretching Cantwell to Paxson. & Brushkana was an idyll almost, a picture perfect creek cutting through clustered taiga, rivulets branching & tendriling around sandbars & cleft islands thick with gnawed birch & soapberry, the river’s depth at its most severe maybe three feet. & plenty of grayling biting.

& then returned & walked in the door & immediately had to leave, a tightness in my chest. Went running & smelled along the trail a bear that must have just moved along—their scents distinctive & powerful. Come to find out while I was gone they’ve began to frequent headquarters. Returned to shower & leave again. A burger & a beer for dinner. Stopped over at Michael & Amy’s for a beer afterwards too & ended up meeting the general ranger who has worked out at Wonder Lake for several years & who will be vacating his position next summer. Gives a man ideas. Will likely head out his way & stay in an old trapper cabin next week. & last night after work headed to see my co-worker’s bluegrass band with a goodbye party entourage bidding Michael safe journeys to Palmer. Good to exercise the conversational faculties after another bout of protracted silence.

My first night down the Denali Highway, after rain began to pepper Snodgrass & usher me along, drove up an old mining road a ways & found a pull-out in a stand of blueberries, cresting over the Sustina River below & the broad valley beyond its western banks. There is a hundred-mile wide flat tundra laid out somehow between the cuspate ridges of the Alaska Range. & finally there began to reckon with myself. How I almost cast myself aside to find myself again. Self-exile to a wilderness where there is no hope of opacity, where those finely tied threads of sophomoric denouement & just-adumbrated delusion fall from your grip & unravel & rightly so. It is not a masochism but an accountability I think, one to which I am too far committed to let absent my days anymore. & myself this labyrinth I walk, corner & dead-end, false start & progress of no particular design. & everywhere a silence. & I thought once one occupied silence, as one might swim in a lake, dwell in a house. But anymore I think silence occupies you, & you hear it flushing your marrow, hear it gliding your sinews, muting your blood. & it is just that—silent.

July 28

2009-07-28T13:55:00.000-08:00

Packed up to go fishing & camping alone, either along the Denali Highway around Snodgrass Lake or down the Parks Highway around mile 166 on the Chulitna. Gone for at least one night, maybe two, depending both on how the notion of returning home strikes me & how the fish are biting. I’ve grown so accustomed to people filing backcountry itineraries I feel compelled here to do the same. So. Now you know, dear reader. Wish me luck.

July 27

2009-07-28T09:39:00.000-08:00

Surreal day, waking late, day-blurred, the ripping wind & slate-grey sky patched with pauper blue & salmon-ridged clouds roiling over the ridge. My mind stubborn against wakefulness, catatonic all afternoon. My body’s torpor today a kind of falling apart—throat sore, voice barely here, back nearly out, enervated completely, my weight stubborn & severe against the mattress. A stumbling day, recuperative against these vague agents of exhaustion that constellate me, mind & heart, day into night & night into day. & worst, no exercise, no escape from the cabin, no reprieve from cabin’s company tonight other than withdrawing into my room for long hours of tenuous & stunted alone punctuated & intersticed with throat-clearing hacks & protracted bouts of flatulence just discernibly muted through the sheer plywood wall, wails from some distant, tortured place. Where is there rest from it. Where is there peace from life in life. For a moment, I seemed to have a handle on it, a kind of agreement that scaffolded the days, propped them up, some buttress of sense barely tenable but grounded yet. & now the ropes loosen & slide & the architecture collapses, some house of cards erected in a whirlwind. What can appertain but the recycling present? I build on shale, on scree, on sand & of sand, & cannot stay the breeze. & so. Here I am. & again, here.

July 24, 26

2009-07-27T13:03:00.003-08:00

I had resolved, however loosely, to be gentler on Roy, to not target him & lade him with the heft of my ancillary problems, make a scapegoat of him. There was a kind of guilt enwreathing my will, calling into suspicion any proclivity towards kindness in me. Who am I, I asked myself, to cast a stone? I have since decided that I am in fact the one who nearly regurgitates each time he enters his own front door. I am the one who spends literally hours each week cleaning up the speckled grease cast akimbo from his fry baby, plucking his used paper towels up from their haphazard repose on the floor, clearing the table of his detritus—all of it cloaked in the dusted fur that attends exposed grease—in order to sit down for a meal. Who listens with astonishment to his ceaseless flatulence. Who hears him clear his throat literally hundreds of times a day. Whose cilia may well be singed beyond use from the sweat-panted hygienic trainwreck that is my roommate. The full reach of this living arrangement has only recently dawned on me—how insidious the feeling of loathing one’s home can truly be. I do not exaggerate in writing that I have had to forcibly suppress my gag reflex upon entering the cabin on several occasions. This is something beyond the reach of simple kindness. I forgive myself my enduring disgust. My supervisor is making some calls to prospect another arrangement; I can't wait around for him to leave by any accord.

Beyond that I fill my time away from the cabin as fully as I can. Yesterday ran Bison Gulch again, achieving the summit ridgeline in winds that either slowed me nearly to stopping or conversely pushed me into unwilling sprints. This is the trail that ascends 4000 feet in less than two miles, so finding that kind of wind after that kind of exertion was somehow fitting. Talked to two military guys on the summit who were astonished I’d run the whole way, & then to a family on the way down that said they’d enjoyed watching me continue up & up. One doesn’t usually have an audience when trail running. Afterwards cleaned & headed in for a quiet night’s work. Had an email from the Fairbanksian who is organizing the August Bison Gulch race asking if I might want to aid in prospecting a longer route down towards Antler Creek from the ridgeline. & today feeling slow & wilted a bit; could not sleep past nine this morning, though I went to bed at three. Awakened with a deep & resonant cough. Roy blundering from bed to beeline to the bathroom & then straight back to snoring until noon, hungover from a bottle of whiskey he drank alone last night, apparently in some sloppy, lumbering tilt, judging by the disarray in which I found the kitchen upon returning home at two this morning. Switched to a post office box since my general delivery limit has expired. Thought a good deal without conclusion.

I begin to feel a kinship with Alaska, a profound dialogue with its landscape & its prevalent energies. Less of an interloper, more fully ingrained somehow. For my many hesitancies, I’ve at least not refrained from the land itself—its mountains, graveled & braided riverbeds, boreal forests in craggy & thick disorder. Its possibilities. While I was perched halfway down Cathedral I saw through binoculars two year-old grizzly cubs wrestling at play, now on their hind legs jawing one another’s throats, now rolling on the lichened tundra floor. I regarded them from a safe distance for maybe five full minutes, all of their captive joy, before the sow came to upbraid them & bid them follow, herself likely 600 pounds. They fell into line & trotted off, at first in perfect order, then rupturing into brief bouts of playfulness as they went, running towards one another, nipping the nape before retreating. It was, I think, perhaps the most moving thing I’ve seen in the wild. Not because of an anthropomorphic sympathy, but because it was an exhibition of ordinary wonder. What a thing to see. What a thing to be, to see it.

& incidentally, the PO Box is 688, still in Denali National Park, AK, 99755, for those who might wonder.

***

Slept in after a busy night at work riddled with bears advancing on dumpsters left open at the visitor center. Had a call from an employee who could not leave the bathroom, pinned in by a territorial grizzly. Found the morning a swirling eddy of greysky & sloping spruce. Went for breakfast in Healy with Michael & came back to find Roy gone. All morning my voice has slowly been leaving me, even as my cough seems to be improving. Curious how the body intervenes, what it says in doing so. To speak or not to speak, & now there can be almost no question.

July 20-22

2009-07-24T09:01:00.001-08:00

At Igloo, seven clustered sites along the creek, a wolf closure across the water where bipeds are barred passage. Arrived & set up camp before hiking a mile each direction from camp to spy possible routes for tomorrow. Camped between the steeper face of Igloo Mountain & the sloping green hedging to the lofted red vaulted rock atop Cathedral—bushwacked towards the former & found the going slow (though I did see a sizable dall sheep in repose above a copse of dwarf willow). Following a game trail towards the latter I saw a more accessible point of entry along the east side, where a sinuous ridge insinuates itself gently from the broad basal slope & follows serpentine towards the summit. Tonight, then, I’ll stay in & get to sleep early after reading some Emerson & consciously reveling in the open air, the susurration of the creek. I will haunt the loneliness that haunts me, give myself to it entire—heart in me, there is yet some ghost indomitable, some captive spark cradled in my cupped hand, little flame I carry place to place, fragile light to fend from me the fell of darkness that would come—

***

On top of Cathedral, gusts of fifty mph on exposed ridgelines, but otherwise the sun bathes the Teklanika valley to the east & the jutting tip of Denali cutting through attendant clouds to the west, white & crisp with (always) newfallen snow.

Had to hurry down, a dark & foreboding thundercloud creeping towards the where I stood. Opted to descend the way I’d intended to come up, sort of, though was barred passage to the gentle line I’d spied & found myself scurrying & scrambling down screefields & talus, where rockslides laid the granite at severe angles that shifted precariously with each footfall. The way up I chose to cross a much steeper chute on an ungulate path, which I ought likely not to have done. Pleased to be here to tell of it—the actual climbing involved much more technical than I was prepared for, at times frightfully so. The summit justified the trouble, & justified too the blind plummet through thick stands of dwarf willow & birch afterwards, the soggy give of the lichened tundra often ten inches under each bootstep.

After Cathedral, ate a sandwich & started walking west, making nearly three more miles before a bus came by to flag down. Went out to Eielson & found the mountain stunningly visible still, clothed at its periphery in cloud as if caught in dishabille shunting off some gossamer gown, fending raindrops light & rippling from its visage. Walked down to the McKinley Bar, such as it is that far east, spying along ridgelines & gullies, looking up gulch & valley to see where sourced, how minted.

On the bus back saw a man backhand his teenage son in the face at a rest area for failing to properly clean the window. There briefly, I thought perhaps it is enough in this life merely to refrain from being despicable. A German tourist stood in the parked bus & shouted “that man is hitting that child” & sprinted to intervene. Thought perhaps there was some extant sense in us yet, some little nobility intact. Ended up talking to a couple my age from Kenny Lake outside Valdez, where they built a cabin & self-subsist, leaving each winter for India, for Mexico, for parts removed. He is a carpenter & fishes Bristol Bay one month a year; she is a yoga teacher on trade—vegetables, housework, homebrew, etc. They tell me a lot of people our age are finding such a lifestyle feasible & rewarding in Alaska. They give me their contact information & encourage me to be in touch should I find myself near Valdez. Likely I will, & likely I’ll call. Alaska strikes me as one small town so often, spread thin across all these miles.

At camp, ate soup & a roll & washed my face & hands in the creek after filtering water for the night. The sky portends rain, clotted gray on gray, no streak of blue. I have Emerson for company again tonight, & a little mason jar with a sip or two of bourbon. My thermarest sprung a leak & the gravel bruises my hipbones in sleeping, so I’ll need it.

Curious, this whole trip. The hike this morning the best I’ve felt in some time—

***

Tramping around Igloo waiting for the bus—followed game trail dotted with bear print north along the creek & found it opened into a valley by which northwest access to the mountain behind Igloo would be a fine possibility for a future hike—perhaps the south side of Igloo itself reveals a gentler approach than the north side, itself all crag & channels of steep rockslide chute punctuated by myalite bluffs & tufts of awkward spruce leaning naked against the elements. The south ridge looks both higher & more traversable, once achieved. This plotting that surrounds wilderness hiking grows on me.

It has been a beautiful morning, sun bathing the landscape, absent of substantial cloud. Washed up a bit in Igloo Creek, its water profoundly clear & cold, its riparian song over rockbed & cleaving boulder gentle & constant. Packed up camp, which puts a surfeit of weight on my daypack & makes for especially difficult passage in tundra—I will need to pack in an overnight bag next time, or simply pack lighter. & so I head back to my daily life, my speaking life. Generally a few nights of sleeping on gravel conjure covetous visions of mattress & roof, but even with bruises on my hips & sits bone the thought of returning to my life with Roy presents itself clearly as a matter of necessity rather than desire. I have weighed more considerably the option of living in a tent for the remainder of the summer & don’t find it at all lacking in compare.

& beyond that I have let my thoughts remain undercurrents, trying not to conjure them from their quiet, trying instead to focus again on tasks at hand, on the dappling sun, the vermillion granite bluffs, the water of the creek parting & merging again around my outstretched hand; I have tried to shoo sadness from me, refocus my heart’s gaze, find in me those extant spaces where a solitary beauty yet breathes individuated & plainly unadorned. My smallness under shadow of a mountain & still, the eyeblink some forging mathematic of a life lived, the breath its careful balance, buoy in a tempest. Perhaps I am too much alone. Perhaps not enough alone.

***

As I transcribe this, Roy pauses in his snoring to engage in a several minutes of pyrotechnic flatulence before rolling over & snoring again. Welcome home.

July 19

2009-07-19T14:17:00.000-08:00

Rolling dreary-eyed & blurred from bed at eleven, the wind cussing in through teeth of spruce, teeth of willow, the clouds roiling & bruising the pigeon-grey sky. Listened to Roy’s report on Kantishna briefly over cereal. Cleaned up my closet of a room, hung a map on the wall, an old postcard. Looked over my last chapter & found less in its to admonish than I recalled. It is a curious purgatorial way to spend a few hours, caught between waking & working so soon after; I will need to train myself to rise earlier, sleep less, accomplish the day prior to working. & spent a goodly while whittling away a plan for the next couple days, drawing up lists, weighing possibilities. Rather than enter immediately the backcountry alone I’ve opted to stay at a seven-site walk-in campground at mile 34 on Igloo Creek. I’ll set up camp & then take hikes in compass directions, up Igloo Mountain first to take in the lay of the land. Along the rocky creekbed, shouting hey-bears & hand-clapping. & there is in it perhaps a shadow of the anchorite, cusping now on that pending conversation, stumbling as I have been through my thinking & feeling like some pauper poor of vision through a cobwebbed darkling catacomb. It’s been a taut stretch, I might say. Divorcing myself from this cabin, from work’s steady traffic, from routines of diversion witting or otherwise, will be a boon. I weary of my shying from the root. I recall in first heading north the distinct thrill of diving headlong into some ominous misted landscape of fear. Just under those overcurrents of sadness & sudden shock there sang faintly a tinny song, a thin melody heard like a stranger’s singing miles away. To turn & wrap a shaking arm around the grey robes of fear & step forward. & there it was, my muted footfall, the scratching, advancing horizon—one can survive in the midst of one’s fears; one, in fact, does it every day aware or no, in city or in utter seclusion, always some wilderness of heart to trespass, always some daemon to guide that passage, some Charon clutching an oar. I think of that initial fear, of those frayed & fraught lines of reason that brought me here in the first, how they swelled in me, how they beclotted my heart & mind like ink spilled in colorless water, & how they diffused, & settled, & took up enduring residence in me. I am thinking of those first weeks in Alaska because I am wondering what progress I have made, how the fears in me now differ, how the cry that continues to pierce me has altered in tenor, if it finds me some changeling, some homologue of my prior self. I am wondering about these things because I seem still fixed in some crescendo that will not quiet. I am caught unawares by tears the more violent each day, sudden paroxysms. I don’t want pity, nor explanation, nor tender care nor helping hand, but I say it here because it is a vexing & urgent curiosity to me that my initial grief, so profoundly felt, was only inchoate, gravid of a greater heft I could not imagine, a child-grief, an infant-sorrow. I wonder what I have done wrong that I am visited this way. I wonder what I ought to be doing with myself. I listen & sound the silence for retort, but there seems no discernible word in all that shudders through me. Only that same echo, that sharp & panicked cadence over & again, saying I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.

July 18

2009-07-19T11:54:00.000-08:00

Morning after my first night shift. The two proactive rangers worked through to one in the morning, so I was kept fairly busy, but managed between calls to get a good deal of reading done. It is strangely offputting for me to awaken so late, accustomed as I have become to rising before five. Rolling out of bed hesitant to do so at ten thirty seems some cruel atavistic resurgence of a teenage self in me. Just what I need, the revenant inchoate & bumbling all the more than already I do.

Roy took the bus in to Kantishna today, a twelve hour trip, & so the windows open & the hazy light suffusing the blanched oil-speckled curtains, I have the cabin to myself. Roy. The thing about Roy is that I am almost certain that he means well; leastwise, there are glimpses of heart, of sympathy, of a kind of fundamental frailty. That they are swiftly defiled by untoward comments or besmirched by some malingering filth on his person is no indicator of his intention. I ought to be easier on him, if only in verbiage. Perhaps I ought to be easier on the whole thing. I have been reading about sourdoughs, about old-timers wintering here in this tundra, fifty consecutive nights outdoors in a cold that did not warm past fifty below, etc. Placer miners dug into riverbanks. Wearied legs stampeding through paths unconscionable to part the frigid water & eye for specks of color. & here the eye trains—past the current, past the dissolved periphery, past the orindariness of our own hands cupped as if in alms. What is forfeit in the singular gaze. The metaphor, here, accrues some heft—an aureate flake the size of a clipped nail when these miles innumerable stretch past all reckoning. For Stevens, it went like this:

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made a slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

But for me, it looks slightly different, engaged as I am in this ceaseless & taxing examination, this tiresome whinnying, guttural & protracted piss & moan. Like thin bleached bird bones between my fingertips, wondering after the vestigal nubs, the beakless skull, wondering after song & flight while around me sing thrush & sparrow, robin & chickadee. I am wanting after a little reprieve, I guess, but I can’t seem to will it, even by physically restraining myself from encountering myself here on this page. If it is not a word written it is one spoken into a wind & carried aloft that way. I am willing nothing. Only the waking & the falling of to sleep, & every moment between some hung point on a cuspidate horizon that fails my grasp at every lunge. & so by the day I try after only the day itself. My domain a surrender, a kind of wordless faith underneath a river of words.

July 18

2009-07-17T15:23:00.000-08:00

Ran up Bison Gulch this morning—four thousand feet of vertical gain in two miles. Just about fucking killed me, but I heard there is going to be a race up the same trail come August & wanted to prospect it. The remainder of the day cooking & reading, preparing for my run of three night shifts starting at four this afternoon. My legs already in revolt, rubbery & flaccid. I thought briefly about fishing Otto Lake today, since my permit stretched into this afternoon before expiring, but thought better to wait & try a river running with salmon instead of grayling. A lot of them, preferably, that I might actually catch something. I had my quick fly fishing tutorial at the Chatanika north of Fairbanks while camping with my ranger couple friends. We found a spot past a recreation area, parking our trucks just up the bank of the small river at a hole they’d fished weeks prior. & all around, just the braided river, its rocky banks, patches of dwarf willows & then forest sloping up hills. Bear prints along the opposite shore, dusted over, a few days old. Casting with a fly rod is a kind of meditation, it turns out, & one of which I am fonder than I thought I might be. The thrumming river, its clear scents, the breeze gentle & singing through the trees, the silhouetted line hovering quiet over the water & the entrancing whoosh of line & lead. I am not bothered in the least that I failed to catch a thing. After fishing for some time the first day we drank whiskey, ate curried chicken, talked about the ranger division & so on. Showed me their firearms. Chased their two dogs around. Built a fire from downed logs & a palate someone had left behind. The next day awakened to a steady rain, & when it cleared, we headed to a stocked pond for another futile try at lining a grayling. Ate blueberries from the bush while I fished. & then to the farmers market in Fairbanks before we split company & I did the rest of my errands before eventually driving home through the blanketing smoke of the Minto Flats & Bear Creek fires that have several hundred thousand acres alight between the park & town. It was sweet reprieve to take that time in the company of others. They move to Palmer in two weeks, so the timing is perhaps poor, but one travels in this state, to be sure, & I’ve likely not camped or fished my last with them.

& so to prepare for the long haul at work now. Planning a two-night solo camping venture for early next week, & the lulling quiet hours of work will, I hope, allow me time for those particulars. Away, then.

July 17

2009-07-17T14:57:00.002-08:00

Back home late tonight from a bluegrass show at a bar down the Parks Highway—the band in which my co-worker plays guitar & sings. & all through the evening, the dim lights showering the worn wooden floor, the filtered half-assed gloaming feathering in through the milky windows, the too-drunk dance partner lumbering his weight into the frail frame of a woman while she forced a conciliatory grin, the clusters of friends clapping & stomping, all of it some spinning maelstrom of gaiety, & it absolutely & unequivocally suffocated me. I downed my beer & could not leave quickly enough, even though the music was warm & the atmosphere relaxed & inviting. I am balking at joy now, intermittently. My being alone will sometimes terrify me. I have this sorrow in me growing by the day, by the hour, palpably, twining its barb, wiring querulous & metallic through my every vein. Each night it seems I die a little, & I try conjuring some viable angle of reprieve, but there seems no ready balm. My heart is my weight entire. Set me to scale & it touches ground alone. Here is a bit of vanity for you: I thought this evening while I waited in line to urinate how I must look at least a fraction of the depressed that I am. In the bathroom I took a picture of myself & looked at it & saw immediately something bitterly sad. I have made practice of regarding myself when mirrors are available, looking into my selfsame eyes & repeating my name a few times. Invariably I leave off swiftly, some sharp “what the fuck” spilling from my lips unbidden. Looking at this picture only reified further what I had only dimly suspected. I look the wreck I feel. The shipwreck of the singular. & so.

The thing about it is this: all of the beauty & joy & sorrow & heartbreak & all of those idiosyncrasies that make you burn with a sense of what it feels to be human were there. I witness anymore, other to these abstractions. There, the over-zealous girl showing a tattoo of a star between her gaunt shoulderblades to a group of flannel-clad drunkards. There, the chisel-face self-conscious & doe-eyed with an upturned leather collar & an old cap who sidles & leans against the bar like some cut-out of James Dean. There, the girl next to him, running her small hand through her briar-patch hair & fidgeting her fingers on her elbow, trying to draw his eye. There, the couple locked in a dance more embrace than anything else, the world in its dizzied perambulations fading dim & distant into some periphery, exiled a priori by raw & unmitigated presence. & there, the aping face of the mohawked bartender acting out his role in front of the dozen or so craven strangers who surround the bar with bouquets of dollar bills clutched in their white fingers & the same rehearsed vacant countenance, each & all. All of us here, our irises brightly jittering like water mosquitoes, darting haphazard through the room, looking for some small grace on which to alight. Anymore, I am satisfied merely to lean back & gaze upon some square of space, the way it gets filled, its tensions, its pressures, its taut silences or its vigorous animations. & I could watch strangers dance all night, if I weren’t suddenly ghosted by some agoraphobic itch to run back to my solitude. I love & am utterly heartbroken by the humanness in us, our vulnerabilities, how they refuse concealment, how they clamor against the calm. Our frailties. Our thin passions straining against some music overloud. How everything is built & destroyed in an unwitting eyeblink. How we falter under banners of our progress. How we are, sad & pining after some fugitive joy. The heart in us.

July 14

2009-07-14T10:40:00.002-08:00

Heading north of Fairbanks to camp & fish one night with a ranger couple here & then to camp another alone. Two nights away from the cabin, away from its ordurous troll. Will report dutifully on the other side of life outside the park.

July 12

2009-07-13T05:19:00.000-08:00

A day off. Headed up Mt. Healy this morning, ditching my backpack at tree-line to run the ridge up to the summit & through the scree & talus, a thin smoke-haze hovering initially over the Nenana valley & spreading west along the park road below, clearing up gradually as I progressed. Took a faulty step & went down, snagging a dwarf willow by the trunk to stay me from scrambling down a brief but likely painful descent. Cracked a toenail & cut my wrist somehow in the process. & upon nearing the trailhead had a call from a ranger asking if I was up for taking his atvs along Dry Creek outside of Healy. My first time on an atv. The paths we took led to a looming sandstone mountain cut with hoodoos; an Athabascan site a sharp ochre against an endless backdrop of boreal forest. His Newfoundland & Alaskan Eskimo joined us, their jaws dripping thick slobber under the hot sun. Fair to say access to such remote locations here has its advantages—the view west and south the paled blue articulation of the range, the broad lowlands stretching between vividly colored with fireweed & lupine & the verdure of the willows. That bear-dense taiga. & the cirrose strands of smoke-cloud like strung white veins afloat in that blue sky. & afterwards home to the cabin emptied of other until the wee hours, & me here sunshot & pleasantly drowsy already, all the evening yawning before me.

July 9, 10, 11

2009-07-11T10:07:00.001-08:00

A day off, Roy out of the house until nine, & I find myself almost wholly unwilling to leave just because this silence & space is my own to fill. Playing guitar, baking cookies, crying over photographs, cleaning, etc.—it is my time alone & I almost luxuriate in it, even in this tiny space.

***

A perfect morning, 70 & clear, with a slightly chilly northern breeze rippling through the quaking aspen leaves. Went for a long run past Meadow View, past Taiga, & back up the Rock Creek Trail, bear bell in hand, & that entire time passed only one couple. I suppose most have ventured further in on a day like this, the mountain doubtless illuminated & crisp against the cloudless chinablue sky. & then post-run trapped into playing audience to a prolonged monologue on the progress of gold mining north of Fairbanks & on the particular merits of the Fort Knox concern. Roy, to add another bee to his bonnet, first came to Alaska to prospect for gold in 1980. He tried placer mining for a brief time with a few friends before deciding to go back to welding. I recognize full-well that these are entertainments, curiosities the likes of which I would not find elsewhere (excepting most barflies perched in roadside taverns in any given Alaskan town), but even still, I hear it all with a filter of thin animosity, see it through a lens obscured by a filth I cannot seem to scrub away. Enough, though, of that.

Talking last night with my old friend of eighteen years, we touched on the practice of examining one’s life, on how it can become over-much, overwrought, excessive. It has been an odd lesson of my solitude, that I turn to its exegesis over & again as if checking in with some therapist. & so something minor escalates rather quickly when vehicled in purple prose, when cast in the melodramas I put on here under varied names. Perhaps one ought not spend so much time in the head, filtering hours even before they are fully fled. It is a kind of ghost-making, a kind of blind séance of the ratiocentric, some obstinate shaking of a thing in hopes of extracting one last strand of sense. My foot sore already from kicking the blanched bones of a horse too many times. & maybe there is evidence in this, but I find myself now thinking about that; about, in so many words, whether or not I think too much about my everyday, if I ought to go easier through the hours. This compulsion towards sense-making reared as a kind of backlash from dropping my familiars & relying on my own resources. Maybe I am justifying my every move, trying in some sense to obscure transparency in favor of a kindred narrative. Or maybe this is, in the end, merely what I would do with my time if it were all mine to dole out. I refrain herein from falsities, but I, of course, refrain from a great deal more than that. If I should write of my heart what can it mean to you? That I withhold a name, that I do not detail my small hours, what would it change? & so this scaffolding appears, this quick architecture is raised upon a scrolling blueprint, that my eye might again one day retrieve from its bleated generalities its relevant, its enduring particulars. I have committed, leastwise, to a year entire of this same, that I may shore the last few falling leaf-words of autumn against those that sprung up last winter & measure for echo, sound for progress. If nothing else, I am accountable unto myself.

***

This morning that ire in me swells that seems always churning these days, some lulling backwater bred of frustrated patience. I could spell its name but it would be no surprise to you. That lumbering wraith pawing around the refrigerator to drink my beer at two in the morning without comment. After spending ten hours in a closed room with his suffocating flatulence. & his first rotund foot on the floor, how he is already talking about ridiculous things because he has an audience that cannot escape. I notice the depression in the floor where the leg of his chair pivots, the paint flaked, the plywood bruised & distorted. He is telling me about the recreational land program the state government overseas, about land in Kantishna buyable on the cheap. I am regarding his mitt around his coffee cup, some off-white mug sporting a logo from Talkeetna of some place he’s likely never been. He is a too-proud collector of Alaskan merits for a profoundly practiced sitter-on-his-ass. He is informing me that one would need a riverboat to access plots on the plaid that sit on the Kantishna River proper, that one would need to motor upriver to get there if one were not a float-plane pilot. In between words he sputters & coughs & hacks & spits into a paper towel, some consumptive whose blood comes out mucus instead. I note a small hole in his shirt, the shirt he has not changed out of for three days, the shirt that trails a malodorous cloud the way a comet trails a gaseous tail. One could not motor, I suggest, through a fucking national wilderness wherein patrols are still routinely executed via sled-dog. He balks. What he speaks is hardly audible to me anymore. I pretend to have to take a piss, just to buy a moment’s air, a swift exit. & today all over again, home to work, where he will sit & fart & hack all night & shade instantly discombobulated each time the phone rings or the radio cackles. Fuuuuck. Tomorrow I have off, so I will hike until he goes into work. Tuesday & Wednesday, too, I don’t work in preparation for my switch to night shifts, so I plan a trip to Fairbanks for groceries & a night of camping unfettered of this cabin that I cannot seem to scrub clean enough. Until then, I try to breath in calm & breath out calmer. I try.

July 8

2009-07-09T10:07:00.001-08:00

A beesnest at work, humming & cackling, strand & cross-strand of livewire & static. & afterwards took a long run while hulking black thunderclouds gathered roiling behind Mt. Healy. Felt good to find the purchase of shade along the path, the black spruce & the bending aspens, top-heavy & curling leeward. Every pedestrian I come upon jumps as if I am a bear. Every squirrel that moves in the underbrush makes me jump as if it were a bear. & then just as quickly as I’d finished running fell the rain, thick & rapid, littered with fine hail. & then came the sun again, light suffusing an air now ten degrees cooler. It feels indescribably good after a night spent tossing in a sickly humid bed, with cigar smoke singing the air. Too, finally recovering today more fully from Monday night’s hourslong bout of drinking whiskey & eating Copper River salmon dip-netted the day before (holy living shit) with two of the rodeo-type law enforcement rangers, followed by yesterday’s protracted but relatively quiet emotional melt-down. Peeling myself from underfoot, scraping splinter from skin. There is more lightness in me today, at least, & I must cling to that. Or permit it, maybe, at the very least. How stubbornly I can clutch hold of a sadness & bury it to grow in me, find it root-room in some furrowed plot dark in a corner. & so flows the blood, & washes that soil, & carries it along to command. I do not intend, hardly ever, to so overtly wallow in it, contrary to the conveyance of every word herein. I intend always though to recognize & explore faithfully what rises in me, or what falls, what whimpers or would sing. & so in me as in everyone. I am in a position to pay ludicrously close attention, ear to my own chest, & so I indulge myself, luxuriate in the sweetness of crushing sadness when I can, or submit to it with no earnest pleasure when its tenor is more fierce, more frightfully articulate. & so with joy, with brief & fugitive wonder, with my hand trembling under the hail, my jaw slackened before the mountain, those moments more frequent of natural sympathy. “I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you, / And you must not be abased to the other” reads a clip of Whitman. But as long as I plumbing lines, I will force a poem entire on you, this one Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas,” which for its few flaws (inclusion of the word “silly” chief among them) feels still exactly how literature should feel:

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

& maybe what I like about it is how it exposes both the hollowness & the violent power of the word & world both. How there is dissolution in it & then recovery, how beneath the faculties of rhetoric (i.e. a saturnine diary of one’s days in Alaska, say) there is yet something vital, however simple, however irretrievable. How it is an annunciation that sounds always something past, sacrificial ever of its origin. But how it weighs so much—not the word, not the line, not even the mineral world, but that ineluctable draw in it, that ghost’s blurred movement, the quick rapture of time passing & passed that sings through every syllable, however ordinary, however plainspoken. That we are. & that there is a wordless music always sounding under our breath, whether we stumble upon its frequency or not. & that its notes find their rhapsody not in the making monument of time, but in the affirmed celebration of its ceaseless & ceasing gift. Our simple carriage. Our burden. Our cherished thing. That which lends us, perhaps or after all, all that we can know of beauty.

July 7

2009-07-08T05:14:00.000-08:00

Stef's birthday, & me here dumb to it, a malamute under bright clip of moon, wrought with some disfigured baying that produces no sound. & maybe fitting, to so contort the body in its craven expression & to hear only hollow silence in return. Where I have put myself. Where I have hung my catenary of days, strung flaccid from hope to reconstructed hope. & so I am deflated today, & my heart is playing a music my mouth can’t shape, & I am thinking how odd, like standing on a bridge watching a flaming barge pass under with no shirt to tug, no one to confide in witness. & fires are burning around me here, sky occluded in thick smoke-haze, that sudden gun-metal cold of dusk evicted, this muggy lingering heat seeping in the cabin, smoldering around Roy’s artifacts, his cigar stubs flaking in brown ash, his crumpled paper towels cast aside after pawing sweat from his neck, the suffocating smoke from his fry-baby, rings of coffee stain where he hoists his mug in the morning, cups half-shared by country time lemonade & beer, bottlecaps scattered around the trash can on the soggy plywood floor. & his stench everywhere, the massive slug-wake he leaves in passing, the slime & detritus of a beaching sea-lion rolling fat in some drying stagnant tide-pool. On my towel when I dry after showering. In my clothes. In my fucking hair. I am in no position to tolerate this. & today, compassed for my letting-in of the day’s thinking, he rears in that kitchen seat with that same magazine he has been reading for a month & a half & that same brow like a knot in a child’s shoelace suddenly untied. Such vitriol he makes me spew. & here all I want is to breath a quiet thought, untwine me that words will fall from it, that I recognize all the beauty & heartbreak & strangeness & celebration in the day. Or the being in it, the years falling around us, the stark remnant architectures of our living, vestigal & plain. & the sudden illuminations in the interstices, lub-dub of the heart, its ache, its thirst, its singing through the blanched ribs, the taut sinews, skin & skein, until some faint little note falls into the bolt-blue sky, & is carried, & is heard like a thrush is heard, all wrong but gracefully so, backgrounded but insidious, a whistle issued unwitting at some later date. It is rupture makes me tremble, & I’ve little bearings to sound. & so I shake instead. & see what falls from me.

July 7

2009-07-07T16:48:00.001-08:00

Happy birthday, Steffie Lea.

July 5

2009-07-05T15:38:00.001-08:00

Hiked the Triple Lake trail down off of Parks Highway, the smoke thicker today from the two proximate fires—a subtly beautiful hike (subtle by Alaska standards, I should say) rimming, unsurprisingly, three lakes tucked behind the Nenana River. Afterwards, went to Glitter Gulch for a few groceries, trying to linger to reduce the amount of time I have to spend in Roy’s presence today. I am on edge always around him anymore. & on edge anyway. As is my habit during hikes, I talked to the air as I progressed, & found myself turning a knife in a selfsame wound over & over, wondering at the way we’ve cloven this rend between us, how we’ve struck the maul ourselves & balked at the splitting, some after-fright at its violence, some haunting by its echo. & how I tire anymore of writing these same things ad infinitum, turning, it seems, to the same sickly bough to name its few pendant leaves time & again, trying out the same languid syllables on my tongue, spitting them in a pitch already overburdened with the same. What shock in it? What efficacy in weighing my heart when I know its weight already? Only, I am full of distances. Heard in a song last night “I’ve got a long way to go, I’m getting further away,” & thought it kindred. How I fear, sometimes, that distance, or that willingness to distance. No specter of intimacy here, nor strand of connect, nor overlap, nor wired word. & even here, this cabin I avoid, this job where my voice rings radio-clear in a curt monotone, a bone banging down a staircase. I wait for comfort to find me & it does not come. I wait for some small surety to arise in me & it will not appear. I am fraying all over again. I think tomorrow but find the thinking slow. & so. This, now, the worst of it. & likely, then, the most generative. Leastwise I hope so.

Noticed this is the 100th post. Apologies.

July 4

2009-07-04T11:28:00.000-08:00

Independence Day, a little haze blown from the Kantishna fire to the west, but otherwise another in a series of beautiful days stacked one atop the other, the sky absent of cloud, blue behind the faint gossamer smoke, the snow on the peaks sharp & sun-soaked. Awakening today feeling disoriented, jarred a bit just as I had prior to California. Maybe endemic to the cabin, maybe local to my slow cruxing. Walked for four hours to post office & back yesterday before working to eleven, & maybe just thrown from that, but there is an odd familiarity in this heaviness, a kind of consanguinity with the worst of it over these last months. The in-fighting, selves in violent combat somewhere in me where words cannot reach. Amazing what remains obscure in you, what refuses clarity, what wages on obstinate against every inquiry into disposition. & I have grown so accustomed to this leaden weight in my chest, this awful sadness enwreathing my heart, that it seems a miracle simply to breath. The physical sensation of it unrelenting, poised just on the cusp of some brimming over, meniscus of the manageable. & a little panic here & there a self-yeast, catalyst to its eruption. & then I breath more, & settle, & it lodges back where it started. But this is progress, I suppose.

& in the meantime wondering if I might be driven to wit’s end by Roy, whose idiosyncrasies are impossible to describe, & whose slovenliness would almost be impressive in its rounded commitment if I didn’t have to cohabitate with it. At home, it is as if he perches at the table doing nothing, admiring the kitchen he’s ransacked & dirtied, waiting until I appear so he can repeat his stories over & again, slowly & in excruciating detail. & so it is at home. & at work, between calls he continues the same stories over & again, & then fumbles at every radio contact, every telephone call. & never a shower. I have seen him use the restroom only four times since I arrived. This is a mystery to me. How he is in the world is a mystery to me. Every day I lose more patience, find myself less tolerant, sharper-tongued, quicker to escape. By the summer’s end I may be living outside in a pitched tent just to avoid further contact.

Well. What a life. Now off to bake halibut before heading from home (with Roy) to work (with Roy). & swiftly & such & so on go the days.

July 2

2009-07-03T07:02:00.001-08:00

A storm rattling in over the canyon, the leaves on the dwarf birches & willows outside the window blown taut & rippling, the clouds rumble & roil, a sudden shock of clay-cold air after a warm day. To hear a thunder storm roll in one of the finer pleasures, to be sure. A reward for cleaning up after Roy when I got home, leaving him still at work. & now the evening, & me here, in some little quiet, waiting on some rain to fall. & all day the body thinks without thought, the mind in its mute perambulations, & then, come the later hours, I pause to find myself exhausted from a thinking I didn’t know I was doing, from a pulse I couldn’t feel upon my wrist. & not merely that I have lived & have not properly accounted for the hours, but that I live here in this suspended animation, this shock of being. This morning, quarter to six, walking past Rock Creek on my way to work, I felt the heft of this absurdity. It hits me that way, sudden, without warning, completely. We act out this charade, I suppose, & feel it no less sincerely, but time & again it strikes me just so. How a dark puddle reveals its reflection only briefly between disturbances. How you can look yourself in the eyes in the mirror only so long before you fall apart, like a word repeated too many times, untwined, loosed unto slapdash syllable & hollow intonation. How to remember here, when here falls from me into alluvion at my feet. Carving a statue until you realize you have carved the last splinter & there, where Daphne’s form should have emerged from the laurel, those fine wood shavings peeled off the blade & piled in the dust. Which is to say I feel far from myself. Which is to say I am tired of trying. Which is to say I am always trying. & will be, blood in me, bone & breath. & when comes the worm to my last flake of ash, it, too, will struggle against its fate. It is our nature in us, or mine in me, gale-force, refusing constellation. I will tattoo myself in stars & maybe, then, stay myself.

July 1

2009-07-02T05:21:00.001-08:00

A full day live on radio at work, & fodder for a humming head, with a car versus moose promptly at 6:00 this morning & a search & rescue upon leaving at 4:30 this afternoon. & afterwards, a run clapping through the bear-dense woods on a gravel trail & then up the hill roadside a couple steep miles. Pasta. Baked a small batch of coconut & chocolate chip cookies. Talked shop with Roy. I am always talking shop with Roy.

I am adjusting slowly to a schedule that permits a 4:30 am alarm without either shock or violent anger as its immediate response. That it is always light out helps convince me in the morning, when a fine chill lingers in the air, but it’s difficult turning in to sleep at nine when the sun blazes still above the trees, when its light casts the mountain in daylight rather than alpenglow. A strange place to take a troubled heart, the always-light. But then, where else.

To June 30

2009-07-01T05:18:00.000-08:00

Morning in San Francisco. Each day I awaken there is the attendant heaviness, that obscuring garb I step into as I rise, even here, surrounded by family, the sky shock-blue & unclouded. The space that uncertainty occupies inside a body so much more pronounced somehow than the weight of any particular regret, any particular decision. There is an insidiousness in that which remains obdurately unclear, a creeping evasiveness to it that spreads like a black smoke until you find it in the oddest of places. & what word would usher it out? Ferry it past the heart, past the confounded head, & issue it clear & capable into the world? Is there such a word?

***

Unpacked in Denali, Roy grunting along in the kitchen after we caught up for a half an hour or so. The cabin almost disgustingly filthy with dirty dishes & crumpled paper towels on every counter, onion skins along the floor, a streak of coffee grounds along the front door. & every window closed & curtained, the malodorous funk of whatever it is he does in the kitchen malingering like a fog. Slept in a Walmart parking lot last night just south of Wasilla for a few hours before heading up the rest of the way today. Finally in a position to establish a routine of some sort, which has its appeal right now, tossed about & exhausted as I am after a healthy ten days in California. Wonderful to see my family, to wed Jason & Dawn, to find such generosity everywhere around me & such love & warmth. & while in California made another decision to prolong an absence of contact with Stef, which, however excruciatingly painful right now, I think is the right call. We never know. & still I look for her everywhere. & my little Wils.

Returning to Alaska presents an odd sensation—one entirely mixed & amplified doubtless by what I left in California & what I returned to here. It was no small chore keeping a semblance of calm every day, & grace that my pleasures could trump however momentarily some of my griefs these last weeks. Here I wear no façade, need no artifice save that which permits my cohabitation. What would I do presently, I ask myself, if I lived alone? Sleep, & likely cry a bit, & let settle these days passed. Find again that kernel in me, that moored part, that keel eager to split the water. I feel now more lost, more afloat, more wildly isolated than perhaps ever before, & even still, I hear myself asking the world what it is I am doing here, thousands of miles away, tucked in this paper-thin cabin, whittling time into this quiet, quiet life. How I pulled over to sob along the route. I am tired, I know, but still I wonder after my small dreams, little shadow-bright things in a dark that swallows their forms. Which is to say thrill is in me forestalled just now, sleeping bird. What passions I presume I presume dormant; hoping, anyway, that they still endure in me. It is tiredness, I know. But I can wonder at it all the same, this absence of overlap, this little space I inhabit here with no little love to tender, no little dog to walk, no idea of anchor or compass. & I am in it, somewhere—somewhere, I am. But honest, I know not where.

***

Strange, rending oneself from that wealth of a heart’s warmth so utterly & entirely. These long miles. This yawning, protracted quiet. I see lately the struggle of it, the battle in me, over me, the heart rustling thoughts branded in quick defense, or vice versa. I am wondering more often today what part of me balks at Alaska—recalling that in Homer, too, there were a few days in which I was entirely convinced I’d made a foolish & unguarded mistake in heading north. & now, further afield, it isn’t a sense of error or regret I feel—I know, this time, the germ compressed beneath this heft—but a kind of preternatural awareness of process. I know no result, & can expect nonesuch. I know only the going, this odd march to some distant, muffled cadence. & ridiculous as it sounds I appear before myself costumed so variously: a soldier now wild-eyed at war, a hermit straining to hear the hummingbird lighting upon the bough, a child looking for firm foothold, a pining lover. I blush to write it, absurd as it is. But there it is, all the same. This vague notion that I am at once discerning the very core of my own being & simultaneously as far from myself as I can ever recall feeling. Those Russian dolls, only every face a stranger’s, every robe a different color, & no pithy center. These are, I am well aware, frighteningly specious things to divulge; I almost think I might find my journals as a teenager more efficacious. But one is thrown, & one panics for footing for only so long before realizing he will not, he can not, seem to land. & so. He swims, he seems to float, unmoored, some paper scraping sharp against the asphalt, some pine needle spindling in a gale. Some flaming eye. & the world, waiting to be seen.

June 17

2009-06-19T09:23:00.000-08:00

A cusp-day, limning thing, drawn taut over its hours, the heart in me pierced & pounding heavy. Did little sleeping last night, up at 4:30 for work, my head & heart now muting after their screeching all afternoon. Slumping now.

***

At the airport in Anchorage five hours early; had to leave buffer time for the drive down from Denali just in case. Things tend to take a yawning bit of time along the roads up here, & I felt better about a solid window. Here, though, in this maelstrom of activity, coming & going, I wonder if I ought to have trusted the truck & sat longer in that silence. Slept, again, about four hours before getting up at 4:30, & this string of sleep-hollow days pits a growing weight in me, a feather-light sway, fragile to the touch. A complement I suppose to the essential surreality of everything still.

Everyone around me in this airport speaks with a southern accent. I find this imminently curious.

Almost midnight. Doing the math, I’ve slept a total of about ten hours over the last three nights. Tonight I board at 1:15 AK time & land at 7:30 PST, which doesn’t offer too substantial an addition to the tally. I find myself shuddering, the way you do when exhausted. Standing over the urinal nodding off. My bearings have completely slipped, trembled, let loose, & I seem now a part of the world but a part entirely other. I had my first panic attack in nine years yesterday, chest-heavy, doubled over, straining to breath while my head whirled heedless of reason. & afterwards I played Denali again in that little yellow cabin. I simply have no grasp on anything at this point, a kind of spiraling that I’ve seen hints of but never fully experienced; I can as soon collapse into tears as buckle over in sudden laughter. I believe I do not know myself at all anymore. Have lost the frequencies of heart & head. Have ruptured contact. & seem still to wake & walk it through & see this face in the mirror early in the morning & late at night, its heavy black bags, its vacant look, vaguely ghostly. I think in the end I am now utterly exhausted, all of these miles trampling over me & leaving me in this quiet that my voice alone cannot seem to fill. & just lately, I flounder. & so I take this with me to California, to my family, & put my heart on a table & ask aid in its mending. Stay me from falling apart.

June 13

2009-06-13T13:58:00.000-08:00

Morning, the sky again threatening rain, though idly, quietly, with none of the rumble rumble of other skies. Another full night of sleep, in a bed, with walls around me, however paper thin. Now, at the kitchen table, I hear Roy’s intermittent snores through the sheer folding door between us. Or earlier at two a.m., when he got home from work, the successive clicks of the beer cans opened & downed in a matter of minutes. We will know each other’s habits well, I suppose.

Yesterday afternoon took one of the government bicycles from our white tent up to Headquarters to obtain a pass on one of the tour buses for tomorrow. Rode down to the Wilderness Access Center afterwards, near the entrance, to translate it to a ticket for a ride tomorrow to Eielson almost sixty miles into the park (no vehicles other than tour buses are allowed past mile fifteen). Half of me balks at voluntarily committing to more time in a vehicle, but the other half recognizes where I am again & spurs me convincingly. I’ll better know the lay of the land from that drive, anyway.

So today I’ve not decided yet between the Mt. Healy overlook trail or heading down to Savage River at mile 15 & just heading into all of that untrailed wilderness. From the top of Mt. Healy, if you look north, you see the dip towards the Stampede Trail & the Teklateena River, where McCandless made his entrance those years ago. Sean, my boss here, resents the film born of the book, since now countless devotees make pilgrimage to the bus twenty-five miles in; & since it follows a notch of land outside the park, ATVs & Jeeps are permitted to take in tours. People want to see now where Emile Hirsch ate breakfast, where Sean Penn hunkered over a camera. Celebrity’s magnetism. Where it used to be the odd hiker with a backpack & a wilderness permit, a paperback stuffed into a back pocket, now it’s a group of fan page bloggers. This, at any rate, is Sean’s complaint. He worked as a safety manager on the set & had little positive to say about either Penn or Krakauer. Me, I liked the movie & the book. I might have to hike at least a leg of the Stampede, if I get a gun first.

So. Arise & walk. I’ll let my coffee do its work now.

***

Opted for the Mt. Healy overlook trail, which I’ll describe in due time, but first, I still shake a little from coming upon a grizzly a quarter mile from finishing up the hike. I had been clapping & whistling every 200 yards for the majority of the hike but had fallen into thinking & lapsed in awareness. I heard a rustle off the path, paused, & perhaps twenty feet away I saw the ass of a grizzly. I wondered, this path meandering through boreal forest, if this might not be a black bear or some ungulate in disguise, maybe a mottled sheep or a particularly hefty moose with abnormally short legs. It’s too early in the season, though, for a black bear to be that large, & its fur had the grey patches that lend the grizzly its name. Upon realizing what it was, I was surprised at my reaction, which did not involve panic or sudden incontinence. I put my hands up, I murmured low that I was a human & only passing by, & I took slow & steady steps past it. Because of its angle, continuing along the path made the most sense. After ten yards I began to walk normally, keeping an eye over my shoulder, the adrenaline coursing my veins. I was inordinately lucky in that the bear simply could not be bothered a jot. It went on foraging without so much as a glance my way. I continued along to the trailhead, my blood buzzing in me.

Prior to the bear, it had been an uninterruptedly beautiful hike, with 2500 feet of elevation gain over about two miles. Boreal forest giving way to scree giving way to a ridgeline trail that fell over towards the Healy valley on one side & out over Denali’s sprawling wilderness on the other. A mist clung to the mountaintops—a cloud really, that turned & started pouring a steady rain on me as soon as I reached the summit. Up top, the little peaks rose like haystacks from a water, or those long, thin mountains one sees in photographs of China. & all along, this one thin path winding the ridge. Just before the rain came, I chanced on a wolverine perched on top of a boulder & got a few photographs. A mottled ptarmigan screeched in & started following me for a bit, looking for some handout. I was pleased to have seen the wolverine—itself a highly secretive animal that one doesn’t frequently come across. An eventful hike. Along the way down the flow of people upward looked familiar—the Brits with tweed hats, the father & son with matching crew-cuts & army t-shirts, the family with docile teens with ear-buds snaking down to ipods in their pockets. Vacationing. Which, I suppose, I am doing all summer.

At the end I told a couple on their way up to make a good deal of noise a quarter mile along. I told them there was a bear, though he or she had probably ambled along by then. Grizzlies usually will stay in flatter land, in the tundra, but they’ll follow calving moose without hesitation for a sure meal. They don’t, so far as I know, prefer to dilly-dally in such places.

What a thing. What grace to witness. I can’t say really that it was a face-to-face encounter. I didn’t see the dish-shaped face of the bear, its brown eyes, its snout or its teeth. I suppose it was a face-to-ass encounter, even though that rings a bit less & invites the comical. There was a runner on the North Fork Road in Homer who was mauled by a grizzly he startled, & in an interview afterwards he said that in that briefest exchange before the violent swing of the claw, he regarded the bear & thought not of his safety or of what was happening in any urgent way, but only, calmly, how beautiful this creature, how breath-takingly beautiful. For me, walking away from that, my heart pounding, a kind of energetic thrumming all through my body, I thought, how simple, really. There are things we can know, after all—

June 12

2009-06-12T15:38:00.000-08:00

A slow grey pallor creeping slow over the quick bluffs East of here & falling in, between the peaks gradually growing in severity the further one looks to the West (this includes you, Robert Plant, & the feeling you get). Slept in until nine this morning—the first hard night’s sleep I’ve had in a solid week. Ate breakfast with Roy, who was in the mood for a “real Alaskan meal” & thus cooked up potatoes, bacon, eggs & biscuits all in heaping mounds. Afterwards, took a hike along the Rock Creek trail, which circles around C-Camp (where I live) & ends up running along the road a bit. Aside from one pile of fresh bear scat on the trail, nothing to note beyond, of course, the beauty everywhere around me on a scale I could not hope to justly represent. From the fine pedals of the lupine & cowslip, through the dense taiga of spruce & aspen & then on past, where broad meadows give out to views of the Alaskan Range snow-tipped in the figured distance. I can’t see Denali itself from here, though I sense it the way one senses being watched by a stranger. Tomorrow I may pack for a long hike or ride & head to Savage River & hope for the best, knowing full well it’s visible only 40% of the time on a good year.

Worked ten hours yesterday, trying to keep a clear head while channel after channel blasts through in analog static. The building in which I work is unassuming from without, a long, skinny log cabin tucked under a copse of spruce that looks hewn from CCC hands, a few windows, nothing out of the ordinary but for the surveillance cameras on either side & the coded entry. Inside, it’s a technophile’s dreamscape: consoles, four screens per desk, radios, cords snaking around the feet of the desks, blips & beeps bursting regularly & periodically through the room as if in an echo chamber. We track all flights, route all emergency calls, respond to all LE ranger needs, run vehicle & license checks, & act in general as the primary regional dispatch for the state, park or no park. No small task, it turns out, & the challenge will be I think maintaining clarity & sense of purpose while being inundated by every kind of conceivable emergency. Luckily, I’ve grown accustomed to just this sort of responsiveness (see prior post re: sleeping in company of either bears or freakish amusement parks). Anymore, it’s the notion of stability that makes my hair rise, that sends shivers down my spine, that seems some ludicrously imagined thing—a gorgon, a chimera, a leviathan. & so it is, one moment giving way to the next, the world still turning, etc. Maybe it’s a good line of work for me after all. Maybe not. Maybe it’s too early to tell—in any case, now I have three days off in which to familiarize myself more fully with my immediate surroundings.

I wonder if there is appoint when the fundamental surreality of my life will wear off a bit, seem perhaps a trifle less severe, make root-room for some sense of comfort or enduring presence. As it is, still, my consciousness appertains to my living like a tail to a comet, borne along, never given a full moment’s pause to merely breath & be. I am living now the way I envisioned living when I was a teenager reading Kerouac & dreaming of backpacking around by myself. All around me in this camp, kids live out this same dream, twenty-year olds in pajamas living like they’re in a dorm or at summer camp. To come around to this lifestyle at this juncture is curious indeed—these neighbors of mine could have been in my classrooms. It’s not that I am old, but that I am old enough to know how these things fall into memory, how they bargain with the heart, how they sidle by the reasoning mind, & how they negotiate with oblivion. I am old enough to heed the sense rather than the reference, to navigate those auratic, liminal spaces with the appropriate respect. Maybe more importantly for me at this juncture, I’m old enough to recognize that I am living my life rather than acting as a character in a novel. Here are no fictions but the stark & silent truths of sheer dailiness—the blank & yawning walls, the gaping wilderness, the roommate & his fondness for conversation & antipathy of cleaning, my daily shock at being in the world, alive, capable of witness. For as much as I don’t know, as intimately familiar as I’ve grown with the uncertain, I feel assured, at least, in my capacity now to inhabit my own skin. For me, this is no small feat.

June 10

2009-06-11T17:25:00.000-08:00

Arrived in Denali this afternoon, unpacked, talked with my roommate Roy (who I can’t help but think of as a 60 year old mix of Meatloaf & Stef’s uncle Ronnie) over some halibut & fries, showered in the shower-house, & here now in bed. In an actual bed. Legally. Two mornings ago I awakened at a pull-off in Yukon & within twenty yards of driving came across two healthy grizzlies grazing roadside. This morning, I awakened in the back of my truck outside of the surreal wooden gates of Pioneer Park, a historically themed amusement park in Fairbanks. I had fallen asleep, sort of, to thumping bass & teenage chatter, all the attendent sounds of people who aren’t aware someone is occupying, supine, a small sliver of space in the back of that adjacent truck. Who can blame them? The blacktop lot around me by morning had emptied but for two or three RVs at diagonals nearby. I brushed my teeth & spat into a garbage can. I walked past the whalegrey caboose in which president Harding made his voyage to Fairbanks a hundred years ago, past the looming white riverboat that half a century past drifted the Tanana, past a cabin restored from the infamous red light district, & into the bathroom where the night before I had been surprised while poised at the urinal to hear a woman’s voice apologize for its presence in the stall, followed by the sound of her violent vomiting. I had not washed my hands. At the truck again, having conspicuously warmed my water for coffee with the propane Coleman & sitting calmly with some yogurt & granola, I began to wonder at my life. This happens often. Drove to the visitor center for internet access while waiting for the coffee to steep. Wondered what precisely does happen to lost or misplaced urine samples. Then, after running along the Chena river, & after a brainstorming session about the best way to clean myself (sprinklers in front of the community center, a spigot behind a gas station, etc.), I decided simply to jump in. Glacial river-water flowing just south of the Arctic Circle is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a bit nippy. Only after submerging did I really take note that I was near an overpass. This was, I thought, as close to the feeling of actual homelessness as you have ever been. Afterwards, ate a pbj at a park with a sprawling meadow filled with sandhill cranes in their migration. Looked at a campsite. Went to a bookstore. Finally, got the call from my boss here informing me that my urine had been recovered & tested & approved, & here I am.

All of this regarding today, & not a whisper of the past week. Not a syllable about those 3000 miles, those unspeakably wonderful hours ripe with quick & nerve & heart & tear passed in Ft. Nelson, that hideous & tormenting feeling ripping through my heart & pith upon leaving, my seats empty, my dear fiancé driving south with my dear little girl in tow. What is left to beat in my own chest? How I was already in the habit of talking to her, & now how I turn to talk to Willa too & find an empty space. How I awaken & look for her curled beside me & find instead a half-completed crossword puzzle & a pen from some hotel I’ve never been to. How alone, I wonder, can I make myself. & just to answer, I move to a wilderness the size of Massachusetts. & as I write this, as if on cue, the baying of distant wolves cleaves the calm air. Where am I, that I am here? Who am I, that I am I? & where, where, where are you, my heart?

My fingers draw taut together over my eyes to stay the light. To sleep.

June 9

2009-06-10T09:00:00.000-08:00

In Fairbanks at the visitor center, posting to affirm for all six of you that I am still in fact alive. Curiously so. Much else to say, but for now, after sneaking a sleep in the back of the truck outside of a history-themed amusement park, coffee seems somehow more important. Down to Denali today, hopefully, though the NPS lost my urine sample & failed to inform me I needed to supply fingerprints, so who knows if that can or will actually start tomorrow as planned. If not, I will be at a total loss, having quit a job, skipped a lease, driven 3000 miles at no small emotional peril, awakened once to a couple grizzlies, & spent my little money in getting here when I was told to. Cross your fingers. Until I know, what exactly can I do?

On a side note, this is the first time I've looked at this on a different computer, & I apologize for how glaringly & brightly terrible the green borders are. I have certain other priorities in life right now, but rest assured, it will soon change.

up to May 28 I think

2009-05-31T10:13:00.000-08:00

Sixty & sunny today & perfect weather for our morning low-tide run—the first since my back went out last, the return to it a kind of clarity, cutting in its motion. Stopped afterwards to refill waters & buy a loaf of bread & came home to clean up the cabin & start in on laundry. Got the call from NPS to set up my drug test, though they suggested I head to Puyallup down in WA & apparently have to take great pains now to figure out where in Homer, town of one hospital, I ought to go at this juncture. Once that settles, a clearer picture of the weeks ahead will hopefully emerge & I can plan accordingly. Until then, I remain tentatively Homerian, my few things yet unpacked, my focus now on achieving what I aim to here prior to departure—certain hikes, another fishing trip, an eventual beer at the Salty Dawg, etc. The minutiae of living in this small town. & around the house, too, tying loose ends—dug the four-foot hole through layers of permafrost & icy clay for an outhouse here yesterday, swinging the mattock again, & afterwards applied an undercoat to the cabin to pitch in by way of thanks to Greg. Here cusping on flux again, I relax into a spell of quiet time. Eliot awaits me still, though I’ve little drive to write while I whittle towards leaving again. & I read up on Denali daily, books checked out from the library—its history, its flora & fauna, mountaineers & sourdoughs & so on. It remains some vague insinuation of itself now, as it must, some imagined thing fabricated off that one rough glimpse of a distant range I had from Anchorage north. I find in myself an odd hesitation about it, a kind of skirting, timorous apprehension. Locking myself into a commitment that draws out to the end of September, given the particulars of my being here, touches some rare nerve in me. Four months a permanent sentence by my standards. I apply to faith in this—that, carried along, I will continue to emerge from myself, molt, shake from me the dross that appertains yet. If only to find confident footing. Come October I hear already the cold wind swept across the tundra, snow-blown, spruce-shook, a lonely scraping in that muted expanse. This, strangely, the moment that most lucidly presents itself—the moment of my departure from Denali, my final gaze over its endless visage. Only that glance, & never where it turns. The burning question in me that I hope finds its clear answer by then, this wondering where then to wander, under what auspice, what compass. & all the world blazing open. Where then, heart—

***

The storm hovering here, the sky a sallow bruise that will not break, will not rupture to rain more than pin-prick drizzle. Hiked past Roger’s Loop, the wind off the bluff pulling the gnawed willows & rustling the ash from the grass-blades, the cleft puddles & moose-prints filled with quivering brown water, the sky’s mercurial, argent reflection specked with dirt or feather. & the black spruce thick & unyielding against the gusts. Here in the cabin now, the birch out the window blown sideways, the clouds darkling over the ridge, though still, still no steady rain will come. Over the bay a pinkish halo before the wall-clouds. That muted grey everywhere in evidence. & me, no account. A day, is all. Dislodged, imminently displaced, hovering still over a keyboard or loaned book from the library, neither advancing. & the guitar sounding too loud. & my own voice too thin. & Willa’s breathe in sleep too serene now to disturb. Waking a facsimile of dream today, an ethered thing, slow & languid, like fine hair swaying underwater. Odd, though, that the darkness, however slight, however thinly veiled, seems a comfort after sleeping & waking to light alike so many days in counting. To not feel light’s charge, to drop heavy & bid indolence in, let torpor creep over me just these brief hours. Always alright for me here, in this place, to quiet over & let sleep the world. Come, then, rain, where there was ember & ash. Let lay the light that seems always to shine, a shook foil.

***

Stepping out for a ten o’clock walk, the world quiet & dulled in nearer darkness, the clouds roiling silvered globes. In the meadow, in which downed spruces are covered over with dried grasses & deep puddles cut a mosaic of sedge & bog across the heaving permafrost, we quietly walked directly & unintentionally upon a bedded moose. She rose when Willa was ten feet away, slowly, disturbed from a slumber that kept her well-hidden from us. & her countenance weary but unalarmed, a kind of tired “really?” in her glance. So we turned, & walked away. So many times lately we are deterred or detoured by a moose—in walking, in running, in merely leaving by the front door.

Across the highway & down Bonnie Lane then, those mountains above Halibut Cove a silver daguerreotype with the only color in the glacial shelves, those sheer cutting cliffs showing seaglass-blue, that purest hue, tinged with deep green, rich & profoundly piercing, even from these distant miles, even now at dusk under graying skies. Homer. I will, without doubt, miss this place & its quiet, magnificent beauty.

May 21, 22

2009-05-23T10:12:00.001-08:00

The sky during protracted dusk swirled with cloud, fugitive glimpses of salmon-pink sun filtered along the edge of the ridge, the red lights of the harbor softened in a layer of thin mist hung over the Spit. From here, the fog lays like a blanket over the bay—I look down over it at nightfall, or in the morning, & gauge the gloaming or the dawn. Eos, rosy-fingered. A tired day, again, every part of me heavy while I wait for my back to return to normalcy, while I wait to run. Took a long hike past Diamond Ridge, a preserve home to moose & black & brown bear & lynx & god knows what else, winding trails of barely maintained grass, heaves of permafrost, ankle-deep puddles or rivulets in constant criss-cross. Every forest has its feel—those Tolkienesque firs in Washington shadowed & soft, the verdure & lushness of the redwoods, the scrub-brush & ponderosa pine down in New Mexico—& here it is a cragginess to the trees themselves, a rugged torsion of bark & twisted bough, a dense chaos of alder & ocean spray tangling labyrinthine, felled spruce greyed over like a corpse in ash. & the tall grass, the fireweed, the lichen & tundra moss everywhere. You couldn’t see five feet ahead if a path weren’t cut, a swath mowed, a series of planks laid down. I carry formidable respect & fear into the wilderness every time I enter it, but here I feel something more distinctly than anywhere else—this sense of interloping, of being noticeably other, vulnerable because outside of the prevailing natural sympathy. It isn’t fear exactly, but a kind of self-awareness. How the natural world here has fought tooth & nail, struggled through extremity & severity & unthinkable torsion merely to be. There is a kind of subtle, careless ferocity to the woods here sometimes, arising no doubt from sheer animal population, its bustle & flow. Not a darkness, not an ominous energy—just the animal, simple as that, writ large. Everywhere here—Willa & I have been turned in our tracks on walks & runs by the presence of a moose in the middle of our path or road. We came upon bear scat in the meadow behind the house. Or I read about eagles ravaging sandhill cranes. There is a world behind our world, & it cares nothing for our own. I think about it lately, knowing I am to move from one of the most dense bear populations to one of the wildest tracts of land left on the planet (six million acres)—I could not find surprise in any natural encounter. Fisherman drop net ten yards from grizzlies on the Kenai or Kasiloff, a kind of mutual understanding there. A child walking home from school paused & yelled “moose” to me while I walked Willa yesterday so I wouldn’t provoke the sow nibbling the reeds just off the road. It is ordinary. “There are things we live among, & to know them is to know ourselves.” Maritain in Oppen. I think often, too, about the notion of alethic thinking, of rising to ourselves as we rise to our environs, a synchrony between perception & mere being. Apophansis. What is it, then, to shift a context? To rise at once to myself & to this utter wilderness? Myself & Denali? What will filter through me there, in the vast shadow of that peak?

***

"That which thou lovest well shall never be reft from thee.” That line always, always returns to me, even in paraphrase. Tonight it ghosts me, & with it a briefest passage somewhere in a Faulkner short story—I don’t remember which one—in which the simplest of human moments unfolds into a panoramic sweeping history of humanity itself, the minute experience the optics for the grand sweeping gesture of life itself. A shaking of a hand, or the shiver of a branch, or a sparked flame to tinder, or something equally mundane, equally absent of idiosyncrasy, & he unfurls that banner tailing back even unto Eden. I like sometimes to think that way—that the instant of being in which we find ourselves continually transacting does in fact under every circumstance bear the weight of the world. & just so because, simply enough, it does. Strip life bare of belief, of faith, if the accoutrements of acute consciousness, & this is our world: a pulsing immediacy, blurring beyond the scope of mineral vision, fading into conjecture. This, then, the world. & we, arbiters & agents arbitrated both. That a fleck of sand was hewn over millennia—its quiet drama. How every detail arborizes in a kind of infinite regression until circling back upon itself, snake’s tail in snake’s own mouth. So a world poised upon its axis.

***

Awakened to Willa leaping on my chest, a cow moose feet outside the window & grazing. Then low tide this morning at the beach, the sun restrained, a wall of obdurate cloud crowning the mountains across the water, light shafting through small fissures & falling slant over the rippled sand & standing tide-pools. The little dug holes where crows beak after some left thing, scratch of their talons. Then work, then halibut & red chard for dinner, a pause while the moose again passed right when we would walk, a walk, & now the same fog falling in the same coronal across the bay, the slivered pink alpenglow a kind of secret blushed to tell. Thought about Denali all day today, in a general, removed, odd sort of way—the pros & cons of it, the probably imminent separation from Willa, that version of life I’ll be leading soon. Impossible to do, really, to prefigure an existence the details of which are absurdly foreign to you. In the past, I could picture her, or Willa at least, or even the familiar minutiae—what brand of pasta sauce I’d be eating, the artifacts of our old day-to-day, the carriage in me pulled in wake. & these days I have trouble enough picturing tomorrow for my self-same strangeness, this wisp-of-me in me yet, emptied cavern, echoed voice, lone light flashed across that capacious dark. If I am to ask myself what my life will be like I would ask first what I will be like, what I will be, & I do not know. The self dies into each day regardless, a threshing, slipping dissemblance that leaves a skeleton adorned in little hopes, small dreams. Fever the dream & let walk those bones & what a rattle to wonder after. & that cordate thing lub-dubbing in the ribs, crimson-hung where white arm stretches to hold. & that little ghosted voice. There was a book we read as kids called Funnybones where the skeleton family goes out at night to scare one another while the world sleeps—one of them, I think the dog in a clamorous game of fetch, is shattered & the ensuing pages depict these inchoate suggestions of form, sort of recognizable but for their random inversions: the tail where the head should be, the hind leg where the forepaw would fall. I’ve not thought of that book in at least a decade, but of a sudden it glares at me from its remembrance. What was that Berryman line in the Dream Songs? But it can’t be taken from its source—

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) “Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.” I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

It was that last bit in my head, though you see the necessity of its place, of what precedes it. & here spill continuously my plights & gripes, & here so often I read myself bobbing in some wake to forget my hand upon the helm. All to say it was a sad day, & nothing more.

Up to May 20

2009-05-21T14:35:00.000-08:00

My back growing worse today than it was yesterday, starting the morning with the illusion of progress & finding it now evening utterly & irreparably fucked. Every time it slips, it worsens, lays me out, intensifies in pain & tightness to the point where I literally dread putting on shoes or walking Willa for the tugging at the leash. Too, it makes for a deeply absurd kind of day, half-spent grimacing, half-spent supine & immobile, artifacts of industry gathered around me as if they might magically spring into use of their own accord—a phone that will not ring, a chapter that will not write itself, a book that just annoys me the further it unfolds, a guitar that I can’t sit straight to strum. & if I’m on time-out anyway, I’d prefer a painkiller that works, a muscle relaxant, anything to alleviate this to some small degree. I am taking this personally, taking offense to my spine. Goddamnit. As if my hours weren’t fraught enough. As if I didn’t quarter myself enough already.

***

I am thinking about movies with alarming frequency lately, on an aesthetic level, in terms of what potential they carry, what wonder they can articulate. My Life as a Dog, or Small Change. Where poems conjure image they seem to only usher it into insinuation; the clarity they possess is the onus of the line itself, the particular word. Time exists differently in a poem than it does in life, even if Pound would have it differently (image, for him, being “the emotional and intellectual complex in an instant of time”). A poem is a kind of intimation towards something imagined simultaneously by heart & head alike, true, an opening, an illuminated rupture, an invitation. Then I think of movies as this sort of heavy artillery of tools: language, visual language, empathic humanity, music, presence, time outside of its imagining. A film is capable of so much, of so much beauty & tenderness & care for the actual as it actually is. If I write a poem about standing in a field, it could well be striking—it could describe the sallow bend of a dried stalk of wheat, or the swaying grain-tops rippled with wave like a sea, or the sussuration of it, the wind sung through brittle stalk while cicadas muted & soft bleat under sounding gales. I could write about the cerulean sky, its dimpled cloud, its pale sliver of early moon arced against that vastness. The soft give of the soil underfoot. Or the simplicity of it, the field & the sky, the horizon line right there, cut swath between that yawning shock of blue & the sepia grain-tops, almost graspable, almost at hand. But then I could also show it to you while I described it in whatever voice I could fathom, play an etude of Satie, let the camera linger over a hand running slow over the wheat-berries, & let it all unfold in a demarcated time—shackle it to the ordinary, to the actual. I know nothing about movies in any practical sense, though I’ve watched more of them than I can remember. Lately, though, I wonder if I might want to learn.

***

& isn’t it odd how the simplest lessons seem to take the longest in learning? How, for example, we know the fiction of tomorrow, how we are well-rehearsed in its delusions, & how we find self-satisfaction when it comes, bearing a semblance to our imaginings. Or how we cull the patterns of our pasts for transposition, bring them to bear on a contextual puzzle entirely other. We make clichés of extraordinarily profound insights so that we don’t have to heed them head-on. Say, there is only the data of the present, only the promise of your immediate life. Say, you cannot wait for what you want to come knocking on your door. Say whatever you like, & then let it linger, & settle, & come to flesh & mean. & right now it is forty-five degrees in my cabin & my breath is spiring before me. My fingers waving over the keyboard. Willa’s fine hairs adhering to everything. The condensation on the windows. The radiant pain from the middle of my back. But here it all is, fully realized, the world’s articulations in this briefest of dramas. & here I’ve been goading myself, wracking & wringing, when really it is sufficient merely to be. It is enough living, I wrote once, it is enough life. No more happiness than pain, no more pain than ambivalence, no more ambivalence than ecstasy, no more ecstasy than dullness, & so on. How we must make room for them all, listen to them all, heed them all even when they splay us sickle-backed on the floor. Something is always being communicated, most often from ourselves to ourselves, & I rarely grasp after my body’s vocabularies, but I begin to over time. A self-optics. A pre-original empathy. Then speak to lull, disc & vertebrae, & spoken, hush down.

Two bits of Oppen: “Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful / thing in the world, / A limited, limiting clarity // I have not and never did have any motive of poetry / But to achieve clarity,” & then prior to that but more illuminating: “Clarity // In the sense of transparence, / I don’t mean that much can be explained. // Clarity in the sense of silence.”

That one can clarify without conclusion, hew without complicating. It is complicated enough, after all.
***

Interviewing tomorrow for a dispatch position at Denali. Worked thirty more hours in three days, my back slowly struggling out of its torsions, sending still radiant pulses of pain like shivers from time to time to remind me I’ve no unguent for what ails it. Been hovering around my approach to the chapter on Eliot, volleying, retreating, batting about its access like a horse hooving a starting line. Found & escorted well beyond the threshold of my door a brown recluse, that milkwhite cross blazing upon its back. & then all the regulars, loosing & wefting, tying & untying, tallying days, weighing their carriage, wondering at this version of my life even still, finding it sort of removed & quaint & alternately marvelous or frustrating in its simplicities. I spill out, a single syllable. But then there are no webs to tend cornered in flushed dark, no lines taut with pull & bid, no tassel, no tether. I greet myself in my selfsame recognitions—if it is anger welling, I bid it welcome, or sorrow all the same, or a brief eruption of joy. To tell it true, if it isn’t joy it isn’t sorrow either that mainlines & directs me, compass to my wandering. There is a steady hum & it comes unadorned & what the day assumes, it too assumes with neither judgment nor hesitation. My mood knows no palimpsest, no encomium, no stern disavowal. I am breezed, galed, gusted, & find myself almost uttering my name without an enclitic shadow from which it must struggle to emerge. It is given just so, how hands can cup together & hold some miniscule thing to the heavens—a leaf, or a grasshopper, or a blade of grass—& how that obeisance is somehow invariably & heart-rendingly humbling. Say your name & the air parts to receive it, & it is taken from you, & you are there still, asking the air who am I—

***

& so I will be packing again & moving up to Denali, where I was moments ago hired on as a seasonal dispatcher in the communications office. Must have been the clear cutting baritone of my voice that convinced them. I’ll need to do a urine test & clear a criminal background check first, which means maybe two weeks before I head up. A part of me is loathe to leave Homer, because of its familiarity at this point, its inchoate connections—but then I remember where I am to go & my jaw begins to drop anew. Denali. I’ll be living literally at the base of the highest peak in North America, during months in which the sun rarely absents the sky, at a latitude amenable to the auroras when it does. That peak is a kind of Mecca, jutting well past twenty thousand feet & cutting out of the Alaska Range’s sprawling, jagged skyline. I imagine now the energetics of the place & find myself reeling in that imagining. All of this, though there is a sore spot in it too—Willa cannot live in the government housing. Either we live outside the park or she goes to live with Stef in Oregon. Heartbreaking to think of it, time away from her, but she is Stef’s dog too, & I wouldn’t want to compromise a decision directly informing my felicity in this life because I wasn’t willing to entertain what would be best for both myself & my dog. She would be thrilled, I’m sure, to spend time with her ma. Clearly, I have grown ludicrously close with old Wils. That part & that part alone gives me pause. I came here, among other reasons, to see Alaska. Working at Denali seems a fairly decent way to continue along that particular road.

May 10-16, in that order

2009-05-16T11:17:00.000-08:00

Here in this yawning time, this time split & spilled open, this yaw, wrung sudden from that line I had drawn, I am finding my mind drifting unbidden over the strange & synchronous landscapes of a past I’d almost forgotten. Or that I’d not conjured in as long as I can remember. As if faced with this skeleton-of-self, this small & quiet breath suspired remote & removed, I subconsciously cull memory for evidence of having been. I’ll sit reading & suddenly notice I’ve been in fact staring out the window for several minutes, recollecting such fugitive & frayed fragments of my life. Punching Kent Baker in the eye in third grade, Diane Dutka’s girl scout uniform, smoking pot at Saylorville Resorvoir after singing with Bill Hoover, this endless procession of encounters that swayed & steeled me, riveted me to me. & the sense of it: always that smell in the mud-room at the farm, or of the pine needles layered thick & blending sweet with pinon at Rio en Medio, or the feel of the outcropping rock beneath my knee when I proposed, warm where the sun poured over it, miniscule pebbles & blasted grains of sand indented in my skin. How a proposal looks like a prayer, its bending supplication, its life-meaning hope. I am thinking about that day oftener now than perhaps ever before. How my car threatened to overheat the entire drive down & I could not surpass 60 mph, pulling over every thirty miles to call Jon for help. Those ten hours of relative silence, the radio defunct. How I stole glances at the ring & breathed unevenly. & then Atalaya, that place so dear to me even still. & she & Willa running that steep graveled mountain to meet me, there on the outcropping. Maybe the only secret I was ever able to keep from her. & my asking & her answering. & the sudden gale, the sudden bulkhead of cloud run grey the moment, the very moment she said yes, even as we were embracing. I am devastated thinking about this, over & again, & it keeps replaying. It remains one of the most singularly beautiful moments of my life. But here I am. But here I am. What is troubling me always is reconciling this distance; if not from her, than from everything else I have lived, every person I’ve met, every person I’ve been, every breath I’ve taken from infancy to the moment I crossed the border. It is nothing new. It is nothing singular, nothing special. It is how we are in the world, wave of conscious thought sweeping ineluctably through our shifting contexts, trying to grab hold of meaning along the way, trying to grasp after something to bring along, some dear carriage to tow. & we are built this way, as wave is built of a wind blown from some distant place & a forgotten disturbance in calm water & a current & inertia. Wave as it is signifies only how it is composite, result, consequence. & even still, it is borne along, bending into its progress, almost heaving, violent struggle, almost fighting to lay down its will & admit of its fragility, to crash upon some shore & open, finally, into its beautiful vulnerability, its dark heart, its having-been. Tending to memory, shepherding these undercurrents. Tend as in tender. & memory as in hours, years, a life, a wave. I am cusp here, & tumbled thing. I thought I wore some stone upon my knee, & here, it’s ocean all around.

***

Haven’t written a word today, nor flipped a page, nor even thought constructively about any of my work. Ran over an hour at minus tide. Spoke with Ma. Filled in my usual five or so answers on the crossword. Spoke with Stef. Ate coconut rice & mango. Blank reportage, this, but true enough. Some days the heart grows tired & wearied & wants after a little rest. Some days benumbed. Some days calling for evening, for waning light, for sleep & sleep alone. A bone-dry beehive absent of bee; brittle cone & dust & air. Birdsnest empty of bird. Branch bereft of leaf. Just, tired, is all. A moon in its arc, & roseate dawn. Then come buzz & chirp & budding, & then—

***

Working nine to ten hour days at Coal Point, receiving & shipping fish, doing the office work surrounding the process. I am the only man who doesn’t work on the line, or boxing, or canning, etc. Four days a week, at least nine hours a day, out there on the Spit, with the water on either side, the eagles & gulls perched about the property, the fog when it breathes across an afternoon. We’ll see.

***

Keeping an eye to the east today, where a downed power line sparked a fire that over the last three days gradually spread to over 1000 acres, with its initial spark & epicenter at 17-mile, the road closed off at 14-mile, & me here in the smoke at 9.2-mile. Evacuations are underway miles up the road, & the blaze has skipped from the south (bayside) to the north side of the road, flaring over beetle kill spruce & the swaying grass already dusted thick with ash. & the wind a frenzied thing today, a firn wind blown across the bay, a tunnel made along the inlet, under the bluffs, to stoke & push it, away from me at any rate. Went from forty to ten percent contained over the last six hours. A turn in the wind & it may be the homeless life for me again after all.

& beyond that it was Coal Point ten hours a day the last three days. I work the office, which means I do all the figuring & tallying when clients bring in fish to be filleted, vacuum-packed, frozen & shipped. Being the slow beginning, I do intake, weighing the fish, tagging them out in totes, etc. I am learning that Coal Point is an institution in Homer, a kind of rite of passage. The structure itself has sort of crowsnest cabins lining the top of it, bare bones perches of unstained wood with just space enough for a bunk & a bag, where many of the seasonal employees stay. Others will live in their tents either on the property or down the spit on the beach. People show up fresh from the ferry with just backpacks on their backs, their hair in disarray, bags under their eyes & dirt caked along their nails, asking for work on the cutting line or the docks. & then skippers gather in at the close of day on their way to the Salty Dawg, their voices Marlboro baritones, faces wind-ravaged. & it is a kind of chaos there, & a surprisingly effective one in terms of its aim. & so go my days. Alaska grows by the day more familiar in feel.

Now, the helicopters ranging a couple miles away, the smoke falling like a fog over the town, I exhale in the cabin, taking stock & weight. I am exhausted today, physically, emotionally & otherwise. Running earlier in that relentless wind—more a prolonged gale—did little to help settle me. I’ve not cusped on breakdown for a little while, with ample distraction, & here the distraction is pulled to reveal those same severed quicks, soldered nerve-ends with some swift splice unfraying. It is still me, after all. I have to believe I am carried towards some clarity; for the moment, though, it seems the strangest of fictions.

***

Went fishing yesterday with Greg & threw my back out again reeling in the second halibut. At least I reached my quota. The seas were rough & tumble, cut by unrelenting wind, peppered in rain, with whitecaps at four feet minimum, so the boat in its sway & bang demanded every muscle taut, & me, sickle-back, weak-of-spine, I spent the last two hours in the cabin holding myself erect with my arms on the table, fixing my gaze on the horizon so I wouldn’t get seasick. When the back is out, I am thrown, & thrown besides. Not the Heideggerian thrown-into-Being kind, in which one searches for & finds avenues of attachment & connectivity with the world, but that other, darker, gloaming kind in which I am rendered utterly & absurdly useless to myself, in which hours unspool into hours in a kind of monotonous addition, an algebra of boredom & loathing & exhaustion, in which I watch myself with contemptuous scrutiny. I don’t foster this behavior, but it comes upon me from time to time. There is something of sublimation there, I’m sure—how my confusion translates itself, how that pain in me turns & wants after some precise aim, & here I am, target alone, to hear my barbing voice barb my own. A maelstrom to shiver the spine. & so.

Progress such a fragile thing, thin-boned & unsure of step, a foal thrashing to find its footing. How it will slip, how it will rap its jaw on a stone, how it will buckle & bend, caul-trailed, wonder-eyed, & hide its every growth.

May 14

2009-05-14T12:02:00.001-08:00

Been working a lot. Will update soon--

May 9

2009-05-09T14:19:00.001-08:00

Got a job today, down at Coal Point on the Spit, the fish processing/flash freezing/shipping/gift store that deals most directly with charter skippers & their clients, adjacent the harbor, its docks stretched like taut fingers over the greening water. Owned by a family renowned now for its two sons operating a crabbing boat called the Time Bandit on “World’s Deadliest Catch.” My compeers. I begin Monday & will be cross-trained in clerical, office & fish processing duties. Rubber boots are the only requirement. In the meantime, a beautiful Saturday & the usual saturnine heart trying to sing through it. Leaden weight. Off shortly for a new hike, past the bluff, towards the old Russian village, bear spray in tow, to see if that rich communion can ferry me from myself, from this sustained & thrumming chord strummed what seems already so long ago. & yet I hear it, waxing & waning, returning to me crystalline & clear, then taking wing to become some other birdcall buried in a dell, then again piercing in its cutting return to ache in me & ache in me. & so. I walk an anchor in me & a sliver of severed twine. I have left no wake. Here, as I am, to myself displayed, displaced, a quiet kind of living, un-intoned of grandeur, bereft time being of surge & swell. That I pattern footstep & echo footfall, even in a thick & viscous mud that swallows under in a rain, even in a patted sand that wave subsumes, even on a trod blade of grass that windblown springs again erect. I have been, promise to myself. & promise I will be.

May 8 in fact

2009-05-08T14:30:00.000-08:00

Finished my Hopkins chapter this morning & now on a briefest pause to reread Eliot. Celebrated with a run. The beach thick with attendees of the Shorebird Festival, clod all in Extra Tuffs new off the shelf, in wide-brimmed hats, hand-holding, children gazing into tide pools while sandhill cranes stalk the limning water, & finally the weather cooperative. Had to run a mile off before Willa could roam loose, but at low tide, the roaming is good, & we took an hour in it today, marooning ourselves in a distance. Still, the evident happiness of others is no salve, but barb & gall. The pith in me heavy yet. I know I can’t shake from me this inborn ache, but I try, flailing against sun & wind. & I breathe into it the better this way. Now Willa curls in a patch of sun at my pillow, pleasantly tired, & I ready to make my rounds in town, overflowing as it is with weekenders and “peeps,” as the birders call themselves. There are, perhaps, worse people to move among. I harbor an empathy for them anyway; how I have spent unfettered moments of witness, noting the scratch & scurry of a bird, its quick neck, fluttered wings, gaze almost pensive. Or heard a song to stop me squarely in my motions. Or wanted to fly far from here.

May 8

2009-05-07T13:28:00.000-08:00

Long run from Bishop’s Beach at high tide, running along the fluxing limn, frothed white wave-lap in its endless advance & retreat—an hour before a storm broke, the heaving crests four feet & taller breaking over the rocks & pulling them ineluctably back with a magnificent & effortless violence, the sound like a building being razed, ominous enough to keep Willa close at my heels. At one point pinned with three feet between water & cliff—an unusually high tide. & now the rain constant, the sky grey & occluded, the range across the bay a dull insinuation of itself at root, peakless where summit drifts into clouded mist. There was a run I did once, up Mount Sanitas in Boulder, maybe a year ago, where the summit was swallowed whole in thick & heavy fog. Slivers intimated human shape & you heard a voice & looked & saw the rended seam of white closing up & nothing else. I sat a moment, then, & watched what few figures there were come & go, & thought it some rare & fine glimpse at something beyond itself, something beyond our living, beyond our numbered days. & though it was my body there in its torsions, my knees absorbing the blows, my eyes fixated on coming steps, there was nothing of the corporeal thereafter—it was a dream, an ether. & maybe it’s that way with fog, or with obfuscation or penumbra—maybe when our optics blur & smoke over there is a different kind of world we must abide. This time here. This heart in me. This awareness that I am, beyond my comprehension, beyond my fledgling soundings, irrevocably changed, even already. How we approach the swirling umbra, & whether we run headlong into it or turn away in slow-trod retreat. Is it too much to say, perhaps for the first time in my life, I am proud of myself? It is only fear, after all, & it, too, only throws a fading shadow, a quick mist.

***

& what is everdrawn, what carriage carries still, beyond a hope, beyond a vague diminution of hope? Time’s foe is all. & we, like Hopkins says, selfwrung, self-racked, & always already a lonely begun. Here is the thing of it—beauty crushes me, & I find it, crushingly, everywhere in evidence, & all the attending terror of recognition, all of the mortal nerve splays out like quick to needle’s touch, tender-in-me, brided to the rich ache I carry now. & I don’t care what it is; only, that I care, beyond my wanting. A dog’s forlorn gaze from a wooden porch, a shallow puddle, a house in the distance with a warm & aureate glow, a kind word, a photograph, a memory, always a memory—how saturated the fiber of the daily grows in it, all of this beauty, & all of it fluxing into disappearance, coming to quick dissolution. The ache in me sometimes the world-ache, the thanatos ache—is that the word?—hum-of-life, our contract, how we relinquish to time, & how we would purport to claim some of its loosened strands our own. There is the beauty—that though we know it will all be reft from us, yet we wrestle to cherish it. And that we cherish it.

“So, what subjects do we copy out and paint, we mandarins with Chinese brushes, we immortalizers of things that let themselves be written—what are the only things we can paint? Oh, only ever things that are about to wilt and lose their smell! Only ever storms that have exhausted themselves and are moving off, and feelings that are yellowed and late! Only ever birds that have flown and flown astray until they are tired and can be caught by hand,--by our hand! We only immortalize things that cannot live and fly for much longer, only tired and worn-out things! And I only have colors for your afternoon, my written and painted thoughts, perhaps many colors, many colorful affections and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds:--but nobody will guess from this how you looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and wonders of my solitude, you, my old, beloved—wicked thoughts!”

Damn it, Nietzsche.

May 5, 6

2009-05-06T11:19:00.001-08:00

Thinking today of how hastily I would sound my retreat—tuck my tail to saunter into the lower 48 so soon. This place I’ve dreamed of since a child, fogged over & adumbrated in circumstance, & maybe now I begin to see it, the shock faded from my eyes, the stony pith in me loosing. & the thought of wandering again, alluring for all the wrong reasons. How I could almost live in my truck & convince myself it felt good. & how I would tug this carriage in me yet. So I think now of staying the summer through, committing myself to my commitment in full. I’ve not yet kayaked to Seldovia, nor seen the fjords from a Cessna, nor found a good running trail past the ridge. Not explored a wit for my paralysis, & here I am in Alaska, the very place where all of my fictitious exploration found berth. I believe I might stay. I believe, maybe, I ought to stay.

***

Headed to Soldotna, blooming metropolis 75 miles north, to withdraw cash for rent, & made a day of it with Wils. Stopped on the way at a deserted beach in Clam Gulch, the tide low, Iliamna & Redoubt—with its cone still spewing constant smoke—clear-viewed across the water. A dilapidated trailer sits there under a cliff tufted in tall grass, a runnel cleaving the sand nearby to reach the water twenty yards off. Every window long-since smashed through, the doors ripped off & tossed to the side, proclamations of love or, as Garfunkel put it, “the old familiar suggestion” scrawled over its inner walls. & then one wicker chair half-buried in sand ten yards off, stones piled around a fire-pit. & no one to see it; not a single print on the sand, human or otherwise.

After Soldotna, drove over to Kenai, which underwhelmed as a town. The moose were out in scores along the drive. Stopped at a Kasilof River landing further south, where bulges of extant ice hug the riverbeds, great heaping things that slope down to a water the color of seaglass—the most peculiar & most beautiful water I may have ever seen, like a rushing jewel, a rare gem-stone in a riparian liquefaction. How I have loved the lightness of Caribbean ocean-blue in Mexico, & the deeply intoned emerald of the lakes on Orcas, but this was something else entire. I must admit on a side note my urge was to return with a fishing pole, odd as it is to hear myself say it. Afterwards, pulled over again by Deep Creek, itself an unremarkable sooty brown, heavier, it seemed, in ash & carried dirt. & then home.

I am wanting after this place, stretching my fingers now to caress it & know its contours. This vastness, this utter abandon, a wild entirely wild, even where roads wend & weave. I feel more firmly that my footing here should hold, that I can do more than endure time here; that I can embrace it, eventually, more overtly than my bearings now allow me to do. I don’t expect to be unencumbered, but I am realizing that my fears appertain like cocklebur when I resign & stagnate, festering things in the wings. & here in Alaska after all because I wanted to do what was most fearful to me. & here I see that terror waning, a condensation on my optic that may clear of its own accord if the focus of my gaze remains its beyond rather than its fine drops gathered in fine constellation. I have lived this first month here curled in a ball, entirely closed off. Now I would loosen, ungrip hand from opposite wrist, bend my neck to see. Gauge to self-gauge. We are our contingencies.

May 3

2009-05-04T10:45:00.001-08:00

The yawning hours, laid out quiet & haunting. How they shiver in me, premonitions of their disuse. & what would a life look like, here? How rest my head upon my pillow & know an honest accounting? Is it the glacial fields spreading & sprawling across the mountains, the gunpowder-blue in the bay? Is it the sound of lapping wave, the under-rush of shifted alluvion? Is it Alaska at all? Or this wilderness in me, this landscape unpeopled, abiding grief, itinerate hope. Because this does not feel like a life should feel, does not thrum & ebb, sounding its whimpered song. I don’t know, I don’t think, how a life should feel. How I would have it feel. & in that restlessness how I have run my finger over a cornstalk or down the bark of a red cedar or cut it through the lulling tide to hold it to a wind that I can’t read anyhow. No, I’ve said, no, not this place, nor this, nor that other. As if a geography would draw lines around me, enfold me in its being-settled, its ongoingness. The cartographer’s erasure. But everywhere I go my voice echoes off whatever it will, vale or valley, skyscraper or shock of air, & comes back to me ever my own, ever intoned in familiar under-pattern. & aphasia worse still, fear pinning tongue to tongue-bed, hour upon hour of grating silence. A quadrille rattled off with every partner a ghost. Me in this empty place, waltzing to this imagined cadence. How to escape a life in its living, tunnel under the heft of its conceptualization to find, after all, a fine soil under the nails, or the spiring blue breath, wisp-of-self, flower-of-breath blooming to dissolve. & on. Every day a clutching after vague designs penned of smoke & ash. Wave a hand & watch them falter, disappear. The design is in the day, onus of the heart, fulcrum of the quick will. & mine so slow.

***

Sixties today & cloudless azure that falls now into pink light, shadow rising like contusion from the sheer steeps, that after-sun when sun has passed, its salmon glow on the ice-fields, soft-haze. Ran with no shirt today—a thing I didn’t think possible in this state. Five sandhill cranes in sharp skein drawing down towards the water. The woods brimming now with life, the hours leaning long to bookend the starlight. Halibut & collard greens for dinner, a brief walk with Willa, & Anna Karenina waiting for me. Today it was that general befuddlement, that way I have of hesitating over nothing at all, infirm, overcautious, as if walking to get a paper would toll some hidden danger. Do I dare eat a peach &c. & kept from town, letting Anchorage flush through & return north, leaving hoof-prints & atv tracks striping the Spit. The emptier the beach, the better for Willa & I. Worked five or six new pages on Hopkins, nearing a rough draft of chapter three. Four hours for those pages—I am unaccustomed to working so slowly. But today I am ghosted heavy & wrung that way. My own & not my own in mind. Errant, corner-struck. Some days you feel like a stubble-field fallow & blown over by some intrepid wind. Sort of barren, divested. & so, what can be done about it? What was that Wiebe quote, “forgetfulness is the dream of sleep?”

May 1, 2

2009-05-02T13:15:00.000-08:00

Awakened at five thirty this morning, sun filtered through low fog, Alaska asleep while we walked in its broad quiet. Then went fishing. Lighting on the dock, there is a slope from the Spit lot down to the harbor, a grated metal ramp at quick decline. From the top I say five elderly men in matching camouflage on the Sorceress. So it goes. Five loose-lipped conservatives enchanted by the sound of their voices who discussed only three things (& I wish, I do, that I were exaggerating in employing the term ‘only’): hunting, fishing & those goddamn liberals. Subsets such as the specific merits of particular rifles or the finest bear hunt in Canada or the charity underlying African safaris or, well, anything pertaining to goddamn liberals were, of course, in no short supply. Men talking about hunting, I realize; regardless of the content of the tales, the impetus, the violence; is a matter of meaning-making, an empathic bridge, a means of fraternity. The interloper, I was quickly nicknamed “the professor,” though from time to time “the liberal” also signaled. When I was asked what it was I studied & was writing about, the silence that rang out after my reply was beautifully deafening. Made for an entertaining day, seven to four on the water. “There ought to be a poem about that damn cod, professor.” “Why don’t Obama write a damn poem about them boys in Iran?” “There once was a poet in Homer. La da di di da di di Gomer.” (All verbatim). That long afloat & I fired back repeatedly, & it ended up good-natured jibing in the end; dishing shit five ways, even still, gets you tired by the end of the day. I kind of liked being called the professor, though. Pulled in three halibut (though had to release one per the bag limit), four cod & a pollack. All in all, a successful introduction. A freezer full of fish.

Now home, sore as hell already, my body yet convinced it’s on the water, the room passing the periphery in waves, my equilibrium maladjusted. Hard work, halibut fishing on open ocean. But bona fide Alaskan, I suppose.

***

Thinking about writing the wedding leads me to obvious ruminations. The eye culls backwards, grasps after its evidences, substantiates its claims. I am remembering love this morning. That fervent, inebriate heart we carry into our youth & lose over & again, a willing & rhapsodic sacrifice. We grow, we fill out the contours of love, know it matured & in relation to countless contingencies. There is something, though, in the bombination of a young heart, or a heart, at least, young in its love. I carry autumn into its conjuring, somehow. The swirl of starlight, the gleaming breath paling the sky, sussuration of leaves, & everything, everything alive. A white body in a black lake, clipped ripple of reflected moonlight. A silver cloud. The shuffle of winging birds. The world charged with grandeur. The way a branch seems complicit, or a wave seems to lap against a shore at the right moment, the cicadas a chorus to lift & elevate the spirit. The abandon of it. Falling in love something like that thrumming youth, that surrender to a wilderness untrammeled. that self gaping open, that heart in its ineffable aching. The pulse of the world entire. Dickinson asked Higginson if her poems blew the top of his head off. Where heart’s heat rises—utter vulnerability, sheer & unfathomed. The care, the tender carefulness of loving perhaps its richest aspect. & how it thrills, the sustain of it in quick tremolo. Even its echo. Even me, here.

April 29

2009-04-30T10:39:00.000-08:00

Waking up with my back out, that sharp nerve of taut pain creeping up my neck. I can’t bend my head forward. Usually it stays local to the geography of vertebrae, emanating in a quick web that quiets in inches, but today, it runs the length of me, head through neck through one side of the back before dissolving in my sits-bone. Opportune timing for one feeling already vaguely confined. Cabin fever closes in to couch fever, or bed fever, unable to so much as drive away.

The day entire between paragraphs, & little of account, my back in its apex, tight & clenched, radiating pain. Just now, though, I find myself cast beyond comfort, missing simple fun, or plain joy, or rhapsody, however brief. I’ve not laughed out loud in so long, not found mirrored gayety in another’s countenance, not felt heart sing but this one protracted dirge, monotone & ache. My feet itch now to carry me to a familiar place, to cast me from here, retract my solitude, trade it for even the quickest of bright smiles. This restlessness in me. I know joy a fugitive, but I know too this other, squatter-in-heart, how my pain halves & half falls transient & the other endures to malinger. There is no life without pain, but there ought not be life without joy either. Flint & tinder then. To spark a flame. Sit & hunch, sickle-back, or prospect some mirth.

& then thinking these the last days of my youth, or those already passed. How we grow. How our fingers clutch after a wake of ghosted artifact.

April 27, 28

2009-04-28T11:34:00.000-08:00

An interesting day.

***

The morning after the conversation. Still, a kind of heightened processing, a thrumming back-&-forth, mind to heart, heart to mind. Good to hear her voice, & my reeling from it more subdued than I’d imagined. & so. Today finally the sun & a sustained sky of blue. A snipe overhead last night, & a first mosquito lighting on my skin. So spring seems to have arrived, tardy, maybe, but charged with what it bears. The light lingering well-past eleven already. Impossible passages of sleep.

Sixteen pages into Hopkins & charging ahead. Writing, writing, writing a dissertation, writing poems, writing quick sketches for stories, notes for a book review. & caulking time stable with reading, walking long & regarding the brittle tall grass swaying just so in the softening firn wind. A sense not of pursuit or urgency but of receptivity, vulnerability. Open-selved. Saying—rush through me, gale & gust—there is nothing will pierce the heart. I flood into landscape where word is restrained, into breeze where touch is abstained. An unpeopled place. It is my conversation. I do my best to think it something other than monologue.

I am no kind of hermit.