Specimens, Days

Watson Lake, Yukon Territory, 1350 total miles, with perhaps the slowest 500 miles I’ve ever driven today (eleven & a half hours). It turns out the Alcan exceeds my expectations—not that I anticipated four lane industrialized freeway, but there are considerable stretches wherein exceeding 30 kmh (yes, kilometers) would imperil you beyond belief. The fastest one is permitted to go is 100 kmh (62 mph), so making good time is necessarily secondary to an awareness of your environment, which I suppose I like. Today, after hours of road that made Guenella Pass look like child’s play, I thought I had emerged into an easy driving section prior to the BC/YT border, but found that every half mile or so I had to slow or stop so that small herds of buffalo could graze at leisure along the side of the road, the only strip where the copper-wire grass is visible. They barely glance as you drive past, ignoring Willa’s incessant curiosity. & beyond them, there is the snow, the snow. Towns along

Awakened after a shoddy night’s sleep at six for a run in the crisp BC morning, the sky a healing bruise, orange & pink streaks stretching long across its fledgling blue, my feet cracking ice with each step. Snow towers alongside the roads, here up to eight feet in spots, & negotiating these avenues with Willa has proven interesting. A good deal of Queen of the Mountain. Yesterday’s drive was one of rich beauty—where the day prior recalled any number of landscapes from my past, it was instead a gradual discovery, starting down before Prince George with wheat fields bunkered under snow yawning out past undulating hills. The slant of light over the icy sheen atop the snow renders it all a fine kind of blue-white. Bales of wheat & hay littered the edges of the fields, wind guards against which the snow was blown high. Gradually, north of Prince George & almost to Chelwyn, the fields gave way to endless lakes, frozen over & again buried in snow & ice. Occasional ren

Off for Dawson Creek this morning, head of the Alcan. The sun slants over the snow-capped pines, a valley stretching out ahead, the Fraser Valley with its variegated geologies behind me. At points in yesterday’s drive it was the Rio Grande canyon on the low road to Taos, then the Western slope by Buena Vista, hoodoos capped in saturnine crimson rings, or the jutting lush peaks of the Cascades cloaked in heavy fog. A history. & afloat, progressing, a normative longing that swells within. But on, & on, & time unfurls, a banner tossed by the wind. I inhabit an odd dream

At a Ramada in 100 Mile House, BC, the snow falling hard outside, the light in the room diffuse & soft over the maroon carpet & gold walls, a kind of dark womb here. Drove up from Seattle en route to Alaska, my heart hanging unspeakably heavy in my chest the entire time, my words swallowed whole in that emanating hurt. I don’t know what to do without her. I speak her name & there is no reply. I recognize the thrill in this, though it is something more like an idea right now, a ghost, a kind of light flickering in some figured distance obscured by a briefly dark & muted landscape. We built this road & now we must follow it. I know that it ultimately will yield wonderful things for us both, but to look her in the eyes & say I love you & say goodbye & drive away into some silent ether was to feel some deep rend, some fissure burst wide. & now here I am, a hotel in a hard snow, Willa’s eyes hopeful, widely scanning every sound for evidence of someone who

The vocabularies of rupture, a book open & supplicant upon a table. Harder now to lend my time to abstraction, our time now measurable in mere days. At every instance I wonder at it & appraise it anew, measure it, weigh it, find it enduringly appropriate, however it blackens towards becoming. But listen: this morning in the coffee shop I ran into Samantha, who wore a khaki baseball cap pulled low over her brow to hide her tears, who seemed to wear her body like it was searing her to the touch. Her boyfriend went missing Sunday night & was found Tuesday morning at low tide with his seat-belt on & airbag blown in his inverted car in Deer Harbor, where he skidded off a cliff, rolled repeatedly, & fumbled unconscious into the sea to drown. He was the evening-shift flagger for the ferry, so everyone on the island knew him, if only from behind their windshields. & this morning as I sat, my own sadness the object of my contemplation, she told me that she cannot shake t

Snow driving down all morning, giving way to piercing blue sky to the East & gradual, undulating cloud to the West. Here, still. How many things I await, spurs for which I reach just beyond my grasp. So many of the details of action rust over so quickly, & the machine growls & groans, idle where it would want of moving. A ghost in its cockpit. Fan flame for steam, & turn, engine, turn, to take us willing to the next version of our lives. How I can’t leave her behind in the barn’s capacious cold, & how she oscillates in her plan. How I hunt for a car. How I think now to wait on Alaska, to hole up until the thesis is done in some cabin in the lower 48 & head north after the wedding. Or fly to Denver to empty our storage area. Or walk the PCT. Or to head straight to the Kenai. & over & again. How life stands gaping open, an eye through a wound, a hand laying aside its sutures. Move along then, it says, & I’ll sew then. My head here a soldered tin shed i

Spent the week in the woods with a chainsaw, a pair of loppers & a rake, tidying up the drive on a 75 acre property, pulling down alder & sapling & briar grown thick. Took a severed branch square in the left eye & winked incessantly for two days. Piling the scrub & scratch in the bed of an old Ford & loading it high on to a burn pile. Went from sleet two days ago to straight sunshine today. & in the meantime, we crawl forward, clawing after each inch or letting go, allowing ourselves a present in which joy is no taboo, in which we recognize our love & are heartened by it. All of this, after all, in its service. Perhaps the most difficult thing is the willing of the rupture, the moving on it, the quick blind scratching into some unimaginable future uninhabited by one another. We talk about its every detail, though we hesitate in doing so. These are to be individuated decisions, after all, unfiltered moves. I was to work on a salmon charter in the Shumagin