July 18
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 him, if only in verbiage. Perhaps I ought to be easier on the whole thing. I have been reading about sourdoughs, about old-timers wintering here in this tundra, fifty consecutive nights outdoors in a cold that did not warm past fifty below, etc. Placer miners dug into riverbanks. Wearied legs stampeding through paths unconscionable to part the frigid water & eye for specks of color. & here the eye trains—past the current, past the dissolved periphery, past the orindariness of our own hands cupped as if in alms. What is forfeit in the singular gaze. The metaphor, here, accrues some heft—an aureate flake the size of a clipped nail when these miles innumerable stretch past all reckoning. For Stevens, it went like this:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made a slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
But for me, it looks slightly different, engaged as I am in this ceaseless & taxing examination, this tiresome whinnying, guttural & protracted piss & moan. Like thin bleached bird bones between my fingertips, wondering after the vestigal nubs, the beakless skull, wondering after song & flight while around me sing thrush & sparrow, robin & chickadee. I am wanting after a little reprieve, I guess, but I can’t seem to will it, even by physically restraining myself from encountering myself here on this page. If it is not a word written it is one spoken into a wind & carried aloft that way. I am willing nothing. Only the waking & the falling of to sleep, & every moment between some hung point on a cuspidate horizon that fails my grasp at every lunge. & so by the day I try after only the day itself. My domain a surrender, a kind of wordless faith underneath a river of words.
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 him, if only in verbiage. Perhaps I ought to be easier on the whole thing. I have been reading about sourdoughs, about old-timers wintering here in this tundra, fifty consecutive nights outdoors in a cold that did not warm past fifty below, etc. Placer miners dug into riverbanks. Wearied legs stampeding through paths unconscionable to part the frigid water & eye for specks of color. & here the eye trains—past the current, past the dissolved periphery, past the orindariness of our own hands cupped as if in alms. What is forfeit in the singular gaze. The metaphor, here, accrues some heft—an aureate flake the size of a clipped nail when these miles innumerable stretch past all reckoning. For Stevens, it went like this:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made a slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
But for me, it looks slightly different, engaged as I am in this ceaseless & taxing examination, this tiresome whinnying, guttural & protracted piss & moan. Like thin bleached bird bones between my fingertips, wondering after the vestigal nubs, the beakless skull, wondering after song & flight while around me sing thrush & sparrow, robin & chickadee. I am wanting after a little reprieve, I guess, but I can’t seem to will it, even by physically restraining myself from encountering myself here on this page. If it is not a word written it is one spoken into a wind & carried aloft that way. I am willing nothing. Only the waking & the falling of to sleep, & every moment between some hung point on a cuspidate horizon that fails my grasp at every lunge. & so by the day I try after only the day itself. My domain a surrender, a kind of wordless faith underneath a river of words.
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