Specimens, Days

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

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 somethi

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

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.

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. Tha

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

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 we

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 companio

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.

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 fi

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 t

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 & swi

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

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

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 enduri

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 yo

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 em

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

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, conscio

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 ri

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 fre

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.

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

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 arr

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 spar

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 &

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 hi

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

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, b

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.

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

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

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

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

Happy birthday, Steffie Lea.

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

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 b

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, com

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.

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

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 tota

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 convin