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. Stopped on the way at a deserted beach in Clam Gulch, the tide low, Iliamna & Redoubt—with its cone still spewing constant smoke—clear-viewed across the water. A dilapidated trailer sits there under a cliff tufted in tall grass, a runnel cleaving the sand nearby to reach the water twenty yards off. Every window long-since smashed through, the doors ripped off & tossed to the side, proclamations of love or, as Garfunkel put it, “the old familiar suggestion” scrawled over its inner walls. & then one wicker chair half-buried in sand ten yards off, stones piled around a fire-pit. & no one to see it; not a single print on the sand, human or otherwise.
After Soldotna, drove over to Kenai, which underwhelmed as a town. The moose were out in scores along the drive. Stopped at a Kasilof River landing further south, where bulges of extant ice hug the riverbeds, great heaping things that slope down to a water the color of seaglass—the most peculiar & most beautiful water I may have ever seen, like a rushing jewel, a rare gem-stone in a riparian liquefaction. How I have loved the lightness of Caribbean ocean-blue in Mexico, & the deeply intoned emerald of the lakes on Orcas, but this was something else entire. I must admit on a side note my urge was to return with a fishing pole, odd as it is to hear myself say it. Afterwards, pulled over again by Deep Creek, itself an unremarkable sooty brown, heavier, it seemed, in ash & carried dirt. & then home.
I am wanting after this place, stretching my fingers now to caress it & know its contours. This vastness, this utter abandon, a wild entirely wild, even where roads wend & weave. I feel more firmly that my footing here should hold, that I can do more than endure time here; that I can embrace it, eventually, more overtly than my bearings now allow me to do. I don’t expect to be unencumbered, but I am realizing that my fears appertain like cocklebur when I resign & stagnate, festering things in the wings. & here in Alaska after all because I wanted to do what was most fearful to me. & here I see that terror waning, a condensation on my optic that may clear of its own accord if the focus of my gaze remains its beyond rather than its fine drops gathered in fine constellation. I have lived this first month here curled in a ball, entirely closed off. Now I would loosen, ungrip hand from opposite wrist, bend my neck to see. Gauge to self-gauge. We are our contingencies.
***
Headed to Soldotna, blooming metropolis 75 miles north, to withdraw cash for rent, & made a day of it with Wils. Stopped on the way at a deserted beach in Clam Gulch, the tide low, Iliamna & Redoubt—with its cone still spewing constant smoke—clear-viewed across the water. A dilapidated trailer sits there under a cliff tufted in tall grass, a runnel cleaving the sand nearby to reach the water twenty yards off. Every window long-since smashed through, the doors ripped off & tossed to the side, proclamations of love or, as Garfunkel put it, “the old familiar suggestion” scrawled over its inner walls. & then one wicker chair half-buried in sand ten yards off, stones piled around a fire-pit. & no one to see it; not a single print on the sand, human or otherwise.
After Soldotna, drove over to Kenai, which underwhelmed as a town. The moose were out in scores along the drive. Stopped at a Kasilof River landing further south, where bulges of extant ice hug the riverbeds, great heaping things that slope down to a water the color of seaglass—the most peculiar & most beautiful water I may have ever seen, like a rushing jewel, a rare gem-stone in a riparian liquefaction. How I have loved the lightness of Caribbean ocean-blue in Mexico, & the deeply intoned emerald of the lakes on Orcas, but this was something else entire. I must admit on a side note my urge was to return with a fishing pole, odd as it is to hear myself say it. Afterwards, pulled over again by Deep Creek, itself an unremarkable sooty brown, heavier, it seemed, in ash & carried dirt. & then home.
I am wanting after this place, stretching my fingers now to caress it & know its contours. This vastness, this utter abandon, a wild entirely wild, even where roads wend & weave. I feel more firmly that my footing here should hold, that I can do more than endure time here; that I can embrace it, eventually, more overtly than my bearings now allow me to do. I don’t expect to be unencumbered, but I am realizing that my fears appertain like cocklebur when I resign & stagnate, festering things in the wings. & here in Alaska after all because I wanted to do what was most fearful to me. & here I see that terror waning, a condensation on my optic that may clear of its own accord if the focus of my gaze remains its beyond rather than its fine drops gathered in fine constellation. I have lived this first month here curled in a ball, entirely closed off. Now I would loosen, ungrip hand from opposite wrist, bend my neck to see. Gauge to self-gauge. We are our contingencies.
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