June 12
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 Denali itself from here, though I sense it the way one senses being watched by a stranger. Tomorrow I may pack for a long hike or ride & head to Savage River & hope for the best, knowing full well it’s visible only 40% of the time on a good year.
Worked ten hours yesterday, trying to keep a clear head while channel after channel blasts through in analog static. The building in which I work is unassuming from without, a long, skinny log cabin tucked under a copse of spruce that looks hewn from CCC hands, a few windows, nothing out of the ordinary but for the surveillance cameras on either side & the coded entry. Inside, it’s a technophile’s dreamscape: consoles, four screens per desk, radios, cords snaking around the feet of the desks, blips & beeps bursting regularly & periodically through the room as if in an echo chamber. We track all flights, route all emergency calls, respond to all LE ranger needs, run vehicle & license checks, & act in general as the primary regional dispatch for the state, park or no park. No small task, it turns out, & the challenge will be I think maintaining clarity & sense of purpose while being inundated by every kind of conceivable emergency. Luckily, I’ve grown accustomed to just this sort of responsiveness (see prior post re: sleeping in company of either bears or freakish amusement parks). Anymore, it’s the notion of stability that makes my hair rise, that sends shivers down my spine, that seems some ludicrously imagined thing—a gorgon, a chimera, a leviathan. & so it is, one moment giving way to the next, the world still turning, etc. Maybe it’s a good line of work for me after all. Maybe not. Maybe it’s too early to tell—in any case, now I have three days off in which to familiarize myself more fully with my immediate surroundings.
I wonder if there is appoint when the fundamental surreality of my life will wear off a bit, seem perhaps a trifle less severe, make root-room for some sense of comfort or enduring presence. As it is, still, my consciousness appertains to my living like a tail to a comet, borne along, never given a full moment’s pause to merely breath & be. I am living now the way I envisioned living when I was a teenager reading Kerouac & dreaming of backpacking around by myself. All around me in this camp, kids live out this same dream, twenty-year olds in pajamas living like they’re in a dorm or at summer camp. To come around to this lifestyle at this juncture is curious indeed—these neighbors of mine could have been in my classrooms. It’s not that I am old, but that I am old enough to know how these things fall into memory, how they bargain with the heart, how they sidle by the reasoning mind, & how they negotiate with oblivion. I am old enough to heed the sense rather than the reference, to navigate those auratic, liminal spaces with the appropriate respect. Maybe more importantly for me at this juncture, I’m old enough to recognize that I am living my life rather than acting as a character in a novel. Here are no fictions but the stark & silent truths of sheer dailiness—the blank & yawning walls, the gaping wilderness, the roommate & his fondness for conversation & antipathy of cleaning, my daily shock at being in the world, alive, capable of witness. For as much as I don’t know, as intimately familiar as I’ve grown with the uncertain, I feel assured, at least, in my capacity now to inhabit my own skin. For me, this is no small feat.
Worked ten hours yesterday, trying to keep a clear head while channel after channel blasts through in analog static. The building in which I work is unassuming from without, a long, skinny log cabin tucked under a copse of spruce that looks hewn from CCC hands, a few windows, nothing out of the ordinary but for the surveillance cameras on either side & the coded entry. Inside, it’s a technophile’s dreamscape: consoles, four screens per desk, radios, cords snaking around the feet of the desks, blips & beeps bursting regularly & periodically through the room as if in an echo chamber. We track all flights, route all emergency calls, respond to all LE ranger needs, run vehicle & license checks, & act in general as the primary regional dispatch for the state, park or no park. No small task, it turns out, & the challenge will be I think maintaining clarity & sense of purpose while being inundated by every kind of conceivable emergency. Luckily, I’ve grown accustomed to just this sort of responsiveness (see prior post re: sleeping in company of either bears or freakish amusement parks). Anymore, it’s the notion of stability that makes my hair rise, that sends shivers down my spine, that seems some ludicrously imagined thing—a gorgon, a chimera, a leviathan. & so it is, one moment giving way to the next, the world still turning, etc. Maybe it’s a good line of work for me after all. Maybe not. Maybe it’s too early to tell—in any case, now I have three days off in which to familiarize myself more fully with my immediate surroundings.
I wonder if there is appoint when the fundamental surreality of my life will wear off a bit, seem perhaps a trifle less severe, make root-room for some sense of comfort or enduring presence. As it is, still, my consciousness appertains to my living like a tail to a comet, borne along, never given a full moment’s pause to merely breath & be. I am living now the way I envisioned living when I was a teenager reading Kerouac & dreaming of backpacking around by myself. All around me in this camp, kids live out this same dream, twenty-year olds in pajamas living like they’re in a dorm or at summer camp. To come around to this lifestyle at this juncture is curious indeed—these neighbors of mine could have been in my classrooms. It’s not that I am old, but that I am old enough to know how these things fall into memory, how they bargain with the heart, how they sidle by the reasoning mind, & how they negotiate with oblivion. I am old enough to heed the sense rather than the reference, to navigate those auratic, liminal spaces with the appropriate respect. Maybe more importantly for me at this juncture, I’m old enough to recognize that I am living my life rather than acting as a character in a novel. Here are no fictions but the stark & silent truths of sheer dailiness—the blank & yawning walls, the gaping wilderness, the roommate & his fondness for conversation & antipathy of cleaning, my daily shock at being in the world, alive, capable of witness. For as much as I don’t know, as intimately familiar as I’ve grown with the uncertain, I feel assured, at least, in my capacity now to inhabit my own skin. For me, this is no small feat.
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