Specimens, Days

Had some success on the Brushkana my second day. Snodgrass was beautiful; a sizable lake tucked at the bottom of sloping mountains, a three mile hike in through willow & low blueberry bushes cusping on ripeness (almost time to harvest & freeze). Without waders, though, I couldn’t do much but awe at my surroundings until rain bade me go. Camped somewhere not far off the gravel highway stretching Cantwell to Paxson. & Brushkana was an idyll almost, a picture perfect creek cutting through clustered taiga, rivulets branching & tendriling around sandbars & cleft islands thick with gnawed birch & soapberry, the river’s depth at its most severe maybe three feet. & plenty of grayling biting. & then returned & walked in the door & immediately had to leave, a tightness in my chest. Went running & smelled along the trail a bear that must have just moved along—their scents distinctive & powerful. Come to find out while I was gone they’ve began to fre

Packed up to go fishing & camping alone, either along the Denali Highway around Snodgrass Lake or down the Parks Highway around mile 166 on the Chulitna. Gone for at least one night, maybe two, depending both on how the notion of returning home strikes me & how the fish are biting. I’ve grown so accustomed to people filing backcountry itineraries I feel compelled here to do the same. So. Now you know, dear reader. Wish me luck.

Surreal day, waking late, day-blurred, the ripping wind & slate-grey sky patched with pauper blue & salmon-ridged clouds roiling over the ridge. My mind stubborn against wakefulness, catatonic all afternoon. My body’s torpor today a kind of falling apart—throat sore, voice barely here, back nearly out, enervated completely, my weight stubborn & severe against the mattress. A stumbling day, recuperative against these vague agents of exhaustion that constellate me, mind & heart, day into night & night into day. & worst, no exercise, no escape from the cabin, no reprieve from cabin’s company tonight other than withdrawing into my room for long hours of tenuous & stunted alone punctuated & intersticed with throat-clearing hacks & protracted bouts of flatulence just discernibly muted through the sheer plywood wall, wails from some distant, tortured place. Where is there rest from it. Where is there peace from life in life. For a moment, I seemed to have a

I had resolved, however loosely, to be gentler on Roy, to not target him & lade him with the heft of my ancillary problems, make a scapegoat of him. There was a kind of guilt enwreathing my will, calling into suspicion any proclivity towards kindness in me. Who am I, I asked myself, to cast a stone? I have since decided that I am in fact the one who nearly regurgitates each time he enters his own front door. I am the one who spends literally hours each week cleaning up the speckled grease cast akimbo from his fry baby, plucking his used paper towels up from their haphazard repose on the floor, clearing the table of his detritus—all of it cloaked in the dusted fur that attends exposed grease—in order to sit down for a meal. Who listens with astonishment to his ceaseless flatulence. Who hears him clear his throat literally hundreds of times a day. Whose cilia may well be singed beyond use from the sweat-panted hygienic trainwreck that is my roommate. The full reach of this living arr

At Igloo, seven clustered sites along the creek, a wolf closure across the water where bipeds are barred passage. Arrived & set up camp before hiking a mile each direction from camp to spy possible routes for tomorrow. Camped between the steeper face of Igloo Mountain & the sloping green hedging to the lofted red vaulted rock atop Cathedral—bushwacked towards the former & found the going slow (though I did see a sizable dall sheep in repose above a copse of dwarf willow). Following a game trail towards the latter I saw a more accessible point of entry along the east side, where a sinuous ridge insinuates itself gently from the broad basal slope & follows serpentine towards the summit. Tonight, then, I’ll stay in & get to sleep early after reading some Emerson & consciously reveling in the open air, the susurration of the creek. I will haunt the loneliness that haunts me, give myself to it entire—heart in me, there is yet some ghost indomitable, some captive spar

Rolling dreary-eyed & blurred from bed at eleven, the wind cussing in through teeth of spruce, teeth of willow, the clouds roiling & bruising the pigeon-grey sky. Listened to Roy’s report on Kantishna briefly over cereal. Cleaned up my closet of a room, hung a map on the wall, an old postcard. Looked over my last chapter & found less in its to admonish than I recalled. It is a curious purgatorial way to spend a few hours, caught between waking & working so soon after; I will need to train myself to rise earlier, sleep less, accomplish the day prior to working. & spent a goodly while whittling away a plan for the next couple days, drawing up lists, weighing possibilities. Rather than enter immediately the backcountry alone I’ve opted to stay at a seven-site walk-in campground at mile 34 on Igloo Creek. I’ll set up camp & then take hikes in compass directions, up Igloo Mountain first to take in the lay of the land. Along the rocky creekbed, shouting hey-bears &

Morning after my first night shift. The two proactive rangers worked through to one in the morning, so I was kept fairly busy, but managed between calls to get a good deal of reading done. It is strangely offputting for me to awaken so late, accustomed as I have become to rising before five. Rolling out of bed hesitant to do so at ten thirty seems some cruel atavistic resurgence of a teenage self in me. Just what I need, the revenant inchoate & bumbling all the more than already I do. Roy took the bus in to Kantishna today, a twelve hour trip, & so the windows open & the hazy light suffusing the blanched oil-speckled curtains, I have the cabin to myself. Roy. The thing about Roy is that I am almost certain that he means well; leastwise, there are glimpses of heart, of sympathy, of a kind of fundamental frailty. That they are swiftly defiled by untoward comments or besmirched by some malingering filth on his person is no indicator of his intention. I ought to be easier on hi

Ran up Bison Gulch this morning—four thousand feet of vertical gain in two miles. Just about fucking killed me, but I heard there is going to be a race up the same trail come August & wanted to prospect it. The remainder of the day cooking & reading, preparing for my run of three night shifts starting at four this afternoon. My legs already in revolt, rubbery & flaccid. I thought briefly about fishing Otto Lake today, since my permit stretched into this afternoon before expiring, but thought better to wait & try a river running with salmon instead of grayling. A lot of them, preferably, that I might actually catch something. I had my quick fly fishing tutorial at the Chatanika north of Fairbanks while camping with my ranger couple friends. We found a spot past a recreation area, parking our trucks just up the bank of the small river at a hole they’d fished weeks prior. & all around, just the braided river, its rocky banks, patches of dwarf willows & then forest

Back home late tonight from a bluegrass show at a bar down the Parks Highway—the band in which my co-worker plays guitar & sings. & all through the evening, the dim lights showering the worn wooden floor, the filtered half-assed gloaming feathering in through the milky windows, the too-drunk dance partner lumbering his weight into the frail frame of a woman while she forced a conciliatory grin, the clusters of friends clapping & stomping, all of it some spinning maelstrom of gaiety, & it absolutely & unequivocally suffocated me. I downed my beer & could not leave quickly enough, even though the music was warm & the atmosphere relaxed & inviting. I am balking at joy now, intermittently. My being alone will sometimes terrify me. I have this sorrow in me growing by the day, by the hour, palpably, twining its barb, wiring querulous & metallic through my every vein. Each night it seems I die a little, & I try conjuring some viable angle of reprieve, b

Heading north of Fairbanks to camp & fish one night with a ranger couple here & then to camp another alone. Two nights away from the cabin, away from its ordurous troll. Will report dutifully on the other side of life outside the park.

A day off. Headed up Mt. Healy this morning, ditching my backpack at tree-line to run the ridge up to the summit & through the scree & talus, a thin smoke-haze hovering initially over the Nenana valley & spreading west along the park road below, clearing up gradually as I progressed. Took a faulty step & went down, snagging a dwarf willow by the trunk to stay me from scrambling down a brief but likely painful descent. Cracked a toenail & cut my wrist somehow in the process. & upon nearing the trailhead had a call from a ranger asking if I was up for taking his atvs along Dry Creek outside of Healy. My first time on an atv. The paths we took led to a looming sandstone mountain cut with hoodoos; an Athabascan site a sharp ochre against an endless backdrop of boreal forest. His Newfoundland & Alaskan Eskimo joined us, their jaws dripping thick slobber under the hot sun. Fair to say access to such remote locations here has its advantages—the view west and south

A day off, Roy out of the house until nine, & I find myself almost wholly unwilling to leave just because this silence & space is my own to fill. Playing guitar, baking cookies, crying over photographs, cleaning, etc.—it is my time alone & I almost luxuriate in it, even in this tiny space. *** A perfect morning, 70 & clear, with a slightly chilly northern breeze rippling through the quaking aspen leaves. Went for a long run past Meadow View, past Taiga, & back up the Rock Creek Trail, bear bell in hand, & that entire time passed only one couple. I suppose most have ventured further in on a day like this, the mountain doubtless illuminated & crisp against the cloudless chinablue sky. & then post-run trapped into playing audience to a prolonged monologue on the progress of gold mining north of Fairbanks & on the particular merits of the Fort Knox concern. Roy, to add another bee to his bonnet, first came to Alaska to prospect for gold in 1980. He tried

A beesnest at work, humming & cackling, strand & cross-strand of livewire & static. & afterwards took a long run while hulking black thunderclouds gathered roiling behind Mt. Healy. Felt good to find the purchase of shade along the path, the black spruce & the bending aspens, top-heavy & curling leeward. Every pedestrian I come upon jumps as if I am a bear. Every squirrel that moves in the underbrush makes me jump as if it were a bear. & then just as quickly as I’d finished running fell the rain, thick & rapid, littered with fine hail. & then came the sun again, light suffusing an air now ten degrees cooler. It feels indescribably good after a night spent tossing in a sickly humid bed, with cigar smoke singing the air. Too, finally recovering today more fully from Monday night’s hourslong bout of drinking whiskey & eating Copper River salmon dip-netted the day before (holy living shit) with two of the rodeo-type law enforcement rangers, followed

Stef's birthday, & me here dumb to it, a malamute under bright clip of moon, wrought with some disfigured baying that produces no sound. & maybe fitting, to so contort the body in its craven expression & to hear only hollow silence in return. Where I have put myself. Where I have hung my catenary of days, strung flaccid from hope to reconstructed hope. & so I am deflated today, & my heart is playing a music my mouth can’t shape, & I am thinking how odd, like standing on a bridge watching a flaming barge pass under with no shirt to tug, no one to confide in witness. & fires are burning around me here, sky occluded in thick smoke-haze, that sudden gun-metal cold of dusk evicted, this muggy lingering heat seeping in the cabin, smoldering around Roy’s artifacts, his cigar stubs flaking in brown ash, his crumpled paper towels cast aside after pawing sweat from his neck, the suffocating smoke from his fry-baby, rings of coffee stain where he hoists his mug in

Happy birthday, Steffie Lea.

Hiked the Triple Lake trail down off of Parks Highway, the smoke thicker today from the two proximate fires—a subtly beautiful hike (subtle by Alaska standards, I should say) rimming, unsurprisingly, three lakes tucked behind the Nenana River. Afterwards, went to Glitter Gulch for a few groceries, trying to linger to reduce the amount of time I have to spend in Roy’s presence today. I am on edge always around him anymore. & on edge anyway. As is my habit during hikes, I talked to the air as I progressed, & found myself turning a knife in a selfsame wound over & over, wondering at the way we’ve cloven this rend between us, how we’ve struck the maul ourselves & balked at the splitting, some after-fright at its violence, some haunting by its echo. & how I tire anymore of writing these same things ad infinitum, turning, it seems, to the same sickly bough to name its few pendant leaves time & again, trying out the same languid syllables on my tongue, spitting them in

Independence Day, a little haze blown from the Kantishna fire to the west, but otherwise another in a series of beautiful days stacked one atop the other, the sky absent of cloud, blue behind the faint gossamer smoke, the snow on the peaks sharp & sun-soaked. Awakening today feeling disoriented, jarred a bit just as I had prior to California. Maybe endemic to the cabin, maybe local to my slow cruxing. Walked for four hours to post office & back yesterday before working to eleven, & maybe just thrown from that, but there is an odd familiarity in this heaviness, a kind of consanguinity with the worst of it over these last months. The in-fighting, selves in violent combat somewhere in me where words cannot reach. Amazing what remains obscure in you, what refuses clarity, what wages on obstinate against every inquiry into disposition. & I have grown so accustomed to this leaden weight in my chest, this awful sadness enwreathing my heart, that it seems a miracle simply to b

A storm rattling in over the canyon, the leaves on the dwarf birches & willows outside the window blown taut & rippling, the clouds rumble & roil, a sudden shock of clay-cold air after a warm day. To hear a thunder storm roll in one of the finer pleasures, to be sure. A reward for cleaning up after Roy when I got home, leaving him still at work. & now the evening, & me here, in some little quiet, waiting on some rain to fall. & all day the body thinks without thought, the mind in its mute perambulations, & then, come the later hours, I pause to find myself exhausted from a thinking I didn’t know I was doing, from a pulse I couldn’t feel upon my wrist. & not merely that I have lived & have not properly accounted for the hours, but that I live here in this suspended animation, this shock of being. This morning, quarter to six, walking past Rock Creek on my way to work, I felt the heft of this absurdity. It hits me that way, sudden, without warning, com

A full day live on radio at work, & fodder for a humming head, with a car versus moose promptly at 6:00 this morning & a search & rescue upon leaving at 4:30 this afternoon. & afterwards, a run clapping through the bear-dense woods on a gravel trail & then up the hill roadside a couple steep miles. Pasta. Baked a small batch of coconut & chocolate chip cookies. Talked shop with Roy. I am always talking shop with Roy. I am adjusting slowly to a schedule that permits a 4:30 am alarm without either shock or violent anger as its immediate response. That it is always light out helps convince me in the morning, when a fine chill lingers in the air, but it’s difficult turning in to sleep at nine when the sun blazes still above the trees, when its light casts the mountain in daylight rather than alpenglow. A strange place to take a troubled heart, the always-light. But then, where else.

Morning in San Francisco. Each day I awaken there is the attendant heaviness, that obscuring garb I step into as I rise, even here, surrounded by family, the sky shock-blue & unclouded. The space that uncertainty occupies inside a body so much more pronounced somehow than the weight of any particular regret, any particular decision. There is an insidiousness in that which remains obdurately unclear, a creeping evasiveness to it that spreads like a black smoke until you find it in the oddest of places. & what word would usher it out? Ferry it past the heart, past the confounded head, & issue it clear & capable into the world? Is there such a word? *** Unpacked in Denali, Roy grunting along in the kitchen after we caught up for a half an hour or so. The cabin almost disgustingly filthy with dirty dishes & crumpled paper towels on every counter, onion skins along the floor, a streak of coffee grounds along the front door. & every window closed & curtained, the