March 29

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 rends in the ice gave view of rushing streams & rivers underneath. Everywhere, the conifers veiled in powder, a kind of latticework over their heavy-hung boughs. Past Chelwyn, a deep road curving between vast & looming mountains that were not merely white-capped, but white to the base. Driving, I could not see my immediate environs for the snowbanks piled ten solid feet on either side. A bit of a difficult passage, the road tattered by the season, frost-heaving, puddled, cut through by wind & water. & past that I stopped in Dawson Creek, the official beginning of the Alcan, the zero mile marker. Drove another stretch to Ft. St. John & spent the night in an Econolodge made of thin paper, Willa on edge all night & both of us unable to sleep for any considerable length of time.

All the while the circumstances of the move wash over me in waves, ebbing & flowing. How I can look over a foreign landscape & feel my breath taken from me, & how my impulse is inevitably to tell her, to sieve the world’s beauty through her. But here I am, & this beauty about me is unpeopled by the familiar. It will take some time before I stop talking to her unconsciously, before her absence is always, always the first thing that I notice, even without noticing it. Borne along by a capacity to marvel in this trip that seems to increase by the day, though, perhaps a balance will come. This is a dream, & though its impetus is wildly different than what I had hoped, I must remember that I’ve held Alaska so close to me for such a long time in my imagining.

So, to the Yukon Territory today, to Watson Lake. & from there, we’ll see.