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Showing posts from May, 2009

up to May 28 I think

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

May 21, 22

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 &a

Up to May 20

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 al

May 10-16, in that order

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,

May 14

Been working a lot. Will update soon--

May 9

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 bird

May 8 in fact

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

May 8

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 &

May 5, 6

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. S

May 3

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 on

May 1, 2

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 nic