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, 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.
***
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.
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