July 19

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 & hand-clapping. & there is in it perhaps a shadow of the anchorite, cusping now on that pending conversation, stumbling as I have been through my thinking & feeling like some pauper poor of vision through a cobwebbed darkling catacomb. It’s been a taut stretch, I might say. Divorcing myself from this cabin, from work’s steady traffic, from routines of diversion witting or otherwise, will be a boon. I weary of my shying from the root. I recall in first heading north the distinct thrill of diving headlong into some ominous misted landscape of fear. Just under those overcurrents of sadness & sudden shock there sang faintly a tinny song, a thin melody heard like a stranger’s singing miles away. To turn & wrap a shaking arm around the grey robes of fear & step forward. & there it was, my muted footfall, the scratching, advancing horizon—one can survive in the midst of one’s fears; one, in fact, does it every day aware or no, in city or in utter seclusion, always some wilderness of heart to trespass, always some daemon to guide that passage, some Charon clutching an oar. I think of that initial fear, of those frayed & fraught lines of reason that brought me here in the first, how they swelled in me, how they beclotted my heart & mind like ink spilled in colorless water, & how they diffused, & settled, & took up enduring residence in me. I am thinking of those first weeks in Alaska because I am wondering what progress I have made, how the fears in me now differ, how the cry that continues to pierce me has altered in tenor, if it finds me some changeling, some homologue of my prior self. I am wondering about these things because I seem still fixed in some crescendo that will not quiet. I am caught unawares by tears the more violent each day, sudden paroxysms. I don’t want pity, nor explanation, nor tender care nor helping hand, but I say it here because it is a vexing & urgent curiosity to me that my initial grief, so profoundly felt, was only inchoate, gravid of a greater heft I could not imagine, a child-grief, an infant-sorrow. I wonder what I have done wrong that I am visited this way. I wonder what I ought to be doing with myself. I listen & sound the silence for retort, but there seems no discernible word in all that shudders through me. Only that same echo, that sharp & panicked cadence over & again, saying I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.