July 31
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 frequent headquarters. Returned to shower & leave again. A burger & a beer for dinner. Stopped over at Michael & Amy’s for a beer afterwards too & ended up meeting the general ranger who has worked out at Wonder Lake for several years & who will be vacating his position next summer. Gives a man ideas. Will likely head out his way & stay in an old trapper cabin next week. & last night after work headed to see my co-worker’s bluegrass band with a goodbye party entourage bidding Michael safe journeys to Palmer. Good to exercise the conversational faculties after another bout of protracted silence.
My first night down the Denali Highway, after rain began to pepper Snodgrass & usher me along, drove up an old mining road a ways & found a pull-out in a stand of blueberries, cresting over the Sustina River below & the broad valley beyond its western banks. There is a hundred-mile wide flat tundra laid out somehow between the cuspate ridges of the Alaska Range. & finally there began to reckon with myself. How I almost cast myself aside to find myself again. Self-exile to a wilderness where there is no hope of opacity, where those finely tied threads of sophomoric denouement & just-adumbrated delusion fall from your grip & unravel & rightly so. It is not a masochism but an accountability I think, one to which I am too far committed to let absent my days anymore. & myself this labyrinth I walk, corner & dead-end, false start & progress of no particular design. & everywhere a silence. & I thought once one occupied silence, as one might swim in a lake, dwell in a house. But anymore I think silence occupies you, & you hear it flushing your marrow, hear it gliding your sinews, muting your blood. & it is just that—silent.
& 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 frequent headquarters. Returned to shower & leave again. A burger & a beer for dinner. Stopped over at Michael & Amy’s for a beer afterwards too & ended up meeting the general ranger who has worked out at Wonder Lake for several years & who will be vacating his position next summer. Gives a man ideas. Will likely head out his way & stay in an old trapper cabin next week. & last night after work headed to see my co-worker’s bluegrass band with a goodbye party entourage bidding Michael safe journeys to Palmer. Good to exercise the conversational faculties after another bout of protracted silence.
My first night down the Denali Highway, after rain began to pepper Snodgrass & usher me along, drove up an old mining road a ways & found a pull-out in a stand of blueberries, cresting over the Sustina River below & the broad valley beyond its western banks. There is a hundred-mile wide flat tundra laid out somehow between the cuspate ridges of the Alaska Range. & finally there began to reckon with myself. How I almost cast myself aside to find myself again. Self-exile to a wilderness where there is no hope of opacity, where those finely tied threads of sophomoric denouement & just-adumbrated delusion fall from your grip & unravel & rightly so. It is not a masochism but an accountability I think, one to which I am too far committed to let absent my days anymore. & myself this labyrinth I walk, corner & dead-end, false start & progress of no particular design. & everywhere a silence. & I thought once one occupied silence, as one might swim in a lake, dwell in a house. But anymore I think silence occupies you, & you hear it flushing your marrow, hear it gliding your sinews, muting your blood. & it is just that—silent.
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