Specimens, Days

A cusp-day, limning thing, drawn taut over its hours, the heart in me pierced & pounding heavy. Did little sleeping last night, up at 4:30 for work, my head & heart now muting after their screeching all afternoon. Slumping now. *** At the airport in Anchorage five hours early; had to leave buffer time for the drive down from Denali just in case. Things tend to take a yawning bit of time along the roads up here, & I felt better about a solid window. Here, though, in this maelstrom of activity, coming & going, I wonder if I ought to have trusted the truck & sat longer in that silence. Slept, again, about four hours before getting up at 4:30, & this string of sleep-hollow days pits a growing weight in me, a feather-light sway, fragile to the touch. A complement I suppose to the essential surreality of everything still. Everyone around me in this airport speaks with a southern accent. I find this imminently curious. Almost midnight. Doing the math, I’ve slept a tota

Morning, the sky again threatening rain, though idly, quietly, with none of the rumble rumble of other skies. Another full night of sleep, in a bed, with walls around me, however paper thin. Now, at the kitchen table, I hear Roy’s intermittent snores through the sheer folding door between us. Or earlier at two a.m., when he got home from work, the successive clicks of the beer cans opened & downed in a matter of minutes. We will know each other’s habits well, I suppose. Yesterday afternoon took one of the government bicycles from our white tent up to Headquarters to obtain a pass on one of the tour buses for tomorrow. Rode down to the Wilderness Access Center afterwards, near the entrance, to translate it to a ticket for a ride tomorrow to Eielson almost sixty miles into the park (no vehicles other than tour buses are allowed past mile fifteen). Half of me balks at voluntarily committing to more time in a vehicle, but the other half recognizes where I am again & spurs me convin

A slow grey pallor creeping slow over the quick bluffs East of here & falling in, between the peaks gradually growing in severity the further one looks to the West (this includes you, Robert Plant, & the feeling you get). Slept in until nine this morning—the first hard night’s sleep I’ve had in a solid week. Ate breakfast with Roy, who was in the mood for a “real Alaskan meal” & thus cooked up potatoes, bacon, eggs & biscuits all in heaping mounds. Afterwards, took a hike along the Rock Creek trail, which circles around C-Camp (where I live) & ends up running along the road a bit. Aside from one pile of fresh bear scat on the trail, nothing to note beyond, of course, the beauty everywhere around me on a scale I could not hope to justly represent. From the fine pedals of the lupine & cowslip, through the dense taiga of spruce & aspen & then on past, where broad meadows give out to views of the Alaskan Range snow-tipped in the figured distance. I can’t see

Arrived in Denali this afternoon, unpacked, talked with my roommate Roy (who I can’t help but think of as a 60 year old mix of Meatloaf & Stef’s uncle Ronnie) over some halibut & fries, showered in the shower-house, & here now in bed. In an actual bed. Legally. Two mornings ago I awakened at a pull-off in Yukon & within twenty yards of driving came across two healthy grizzlies grazing roadside. This morning, I awakened in the back of my truck outside of the surreal wooden gates of Pioneer Park, a historically themed amusement park in Fairbanks. I had fallen asleep, sort of, to thumping bass & teenage chatter, all the attendent sounds of people who aren’t aware someone is occupying, supine, a small sliver of space in the back of that adjacent truck. Who can blame them? The blacktop lot around me by morning had emptied but for two or three RVs at diagonals nearby. I brushed my teeth & spat into a garbage can. I walked past the whalegrey caboose in which president

In Fairbanks at the visitor center, posting to affirm for all six of you that I am still in fact alive. Curiously so. Much else to say, but for now, after sneaking a sleep in the back of the truck outside of a history-themed amusement park, coffee seems somehow more important. Down to Denali today, hopefully, though the NPS lost my urine sample & failed to inform me I needed to supply fingerprints, so who knows if that can or will actually start tomorrow as planned. If not, I will be at a total loss, having quit a job, skipped a lease, driven 3000 miles at no small emotional peril, awakened once to a couple grizzlies, & spent my little money in getting here when I was told to. Cross your fingers. Until I know, what exactly can I do? On a side note, this is the first time I've looked at this on a different computer, & I apologize for how glaringly & brightly terrible the green borders are. I have certain other priorities in life right now, but rest assured, it will s