Specimens, Days

Awakened at noon today, my circadian rhythms well-fractured by an odd schedule imposed by working emergencies. The day after the search & rescue I was detained at work until just after six in the morning, assisting with a UTV accident that, I am told, has resulted in a brain surgery for the patient flown to Fairbanks. The sun, muted by rain at my elevation & a thick & viscous mixture of snow & fog above five thousand feet, implied itself on my cold walk home. I don’t recall ever in my life awakening at two in the afternoon until yesterday. & again this morning, a constant, rolling rain, seeming usher to autumn as around me the russets & golds & yellows tendril quick across the landscape over the sated deep greens that prior lay wiry & tangled in the long absence of precipitation. Among the most overtly stunning transformations, the way season spells itself in the slow change of the fireweed, which now is tinted a vermillion in its leaves, the white stem

Participated directly in my first search & rescue last night, my shift in the communications center parlaying nicely into a three & a half hour hike that took us past midnight. Two women from Israel lost on the bank of a river with no clue how they ended up there, & since the incident commander operates from my office, I was able to force my way into helping, joining two others on a route from the south trailhead of the Triple Lakes trail up towards Riley Creek. Privileged to witness the winnowing towards their errant center, questions about the color of the water, the rocks along the creek-bed, the slope of the land, the vegetation. All of these things & they ended up almost precisely where it was conjectured they might be. From the beginning, we firmly suspected one of the other teams would locate them, but nonetheless we set out headlights blazing past the lakes & into the brush, along a game trail towards the creek a piece, a solid hour & a half before we we

Ran the Mt. Healy Challenge earlier this afternoon, up Bison Gulch in the pouring rain, thirty-seven degrees out. Two thousand feet of vertical gain in a mile & a half, which is usually my bread & butter. Usually. From the base you couldn’t see the top for the hovering billow of cloud & fog—what is termed “pea soup” to those familiar with such parlance. From the start, my legs failed me, leaden & heavy, rubbery stumps swinging under me with only the greatest of effort. & even as I pushed along running I was passed by others choosing to hike, their bodies leaning against the contrary grade. So it went, trudging upwards slow & with no reserve to conjure, & ambling back down soaked & shaking with cold. & coming down, that dawning weight in me, & then me thinking only I would get depressed about a poor performance in an unofficial novelty race. A hot shower, a warm meal, & now restored, off to work with my rattling cough in tow, constant companio

just a couple more new photos on www.flickr.com/photos/apinalaska. have to wait until september 1 to post more, but at least now the mountain is well represented.

What but the rain to fall, the rain to fall. What but lulling words, & all the tide to stem. Thinking today of this unwitting sentinel role, guardian of a maelstrom, the way I’ve remained exposed all this while to the literal toxicity around me. How stunningly clear its basic counterproductivity is presenting itself to me. Fled to all the quiet in the world, six million acres of wild alterity, & here caved up with a reeking lipoid viper in a closet-sized cabin. Where now that calm I craved? How I sought in Alaska self-refuge, time in a dear space, a chance at discovering beneath the exigencies of dailiness that rudimentary architecture of desire & necessity that would skeleton me, underwrite me, if even in some strange syllabary. & here I cast it forfeit into another’s jaws. I will need, moving forward, my own space clean & clear, absent of other, absent of what I find by the ticking second more & more viscerally repugnant, less & less tolerable, until it fi

First sustained sunlight in some time this morning. When I cusp on days off there is always a blankness to fill, always this sense of crawling from a wake bleary-eyed & tender-brained. Giving the hours time to decompress & normalize. I had decided against fishing Brushkana, the forecast all grey & raining, but I may reconsider. Or a ridge to ridge run that would take the better part of a day, some hitching to or from & some scrambling one ridge to the next. A good day, at any rate, to flee the cabin; a shared day off. I am almost past complaint, not for absence of fodder but for its uselessness alone. Maybe another month in his company & then free of it. These exaggerated versions of home that I slip into, one place to the next, shades of increasing absurdity, almost at this point farcical. How they push me towards a nesting, towards a burning for my own dear space indeterminate before me. It is perhaps always this way, hedging toward what we want by winnowing out t

Back in C-Camp, conjuring unwitting the sense memory of the breeze blown over the willows & onto the porch at Thorofare, that broad expanse stretching endless before me. The smell of the air, sweet with rosehip & blueberry, streaked with current-cold gusts off the watercourse below. The rough-hewn logs in tidy array. This was the dream I dreamt, when a child yet. That cabin clawed & shaded in aspen tucked against a rolling hill under white peaks roseate in their alpenglow. A dream I cannot forfeit; I feel something inextricable grown between Alaska & myself, some promise we’ve silently vowed, calling return if we are to one day part. It is not all of me, but it is a substantial part of me that yearns for this place. & so. A wild covenant. A sometime home, more than any geography I’ve known. *** Rain or hint of rain, swirling eddies of cloud, patterning the last few days. Thin & scattered snowflakes on my walk home at two this morning, autumn closing in & swi

Thorofare cabin, a mile in from the road along a meandering path clearing low berry bushes & dwarf willows, a beaver pond flanking momentarily the south side. The cabin sits almost hidden against a hill bluffing over the Thorofare River, under a pitch of quaking aspen & otherwise engulfed by dwarf willow & birch & low brush. To the south, the range builds higher as it crops west to crescendo in Denali’s looming 20,320 feet; peaks that earlier today shone crisp now buried in heavy lenticular cloud. The porch of the cabin looks down at the confluence of a trickling creek with the river—three hundred yards downstream the Muldrow Glacier comes to its abrupt end, an ice cliff a hundred feet tall spewing rock & ice-boulders in its calving into the silty water. One, from here, can climb its toe where it is yet vegetated & hike steadily until only ice & rock reveal themselves, a barren arrow pointing directly to the north slope of Denali. The cabin serves primarily

Heading 75 miles into park to stay in an old ranger patrol cabin on the Thorofare River alone for a few days. Until then.

The rain all day, dinner crumbling into prolonged conversation with Roy about the Kennicott murders of 1982 & the finer points of drive-ins in Odessa, TX. & me looking out the screen-door at the rivulets skirting the porch, the willow-leaves dappled & sprung with the falling rain. The way you can carry in you a gravid feeling that doesn’t come to bear any change, & how it flees from you, vanishing, a wisp of breath expired. How you can wait for some nameless joy in promenade, watch out the window for some passing sign of life, even when you know full well that it will not come. It is how we navigate loneliness, I suppose. By believing in fictions we know to be fictions. I have come a long way in my acquaintance with solitude. It does not thunder around me how it did initially, crushingly, deafeningly, almost. Nor does it spur in me a subdued panic, a feeling of restlessness without remedy. I greet it now like an old friend one is stuck with, a charge more than an enduri

In Fairbanks, cutting through thick & rolling smoke to find it was raining ash. Again. Unlike the fine silicate powder of the volcanic eruption down in Homer, this was just floating specks of ember, just discernible through the haze. Fairbanks eerily night-black at ten o’clock. Maybe a hundred feet of visibility, fires on every side breathing smoke down into the valley where I had intended to camp & fish, testing a new fly or two. There was a health advisory issued involving a carbon monoxide warning. I had noticed already a sore throat, some discomfort in my eyes, a suggestion of wheeze. Got my groceries & turned back towards Denali, arriving back at one thirty this morning instead, where it has been steadily raining ever since, the air clay-cold, the fireweeds blazing autumnal & the lupine giving out in frail whitening pedals against the lowering temperatures. All of this change, & me in it, some fetch stick floating untended down a silty river. There are times yo

Putting together a trip to Fairbanks tomorrow after resisting the impulse to flee again today. What I build I build of balsam, of hay, of sand or air itself. & watch it blow away. How many ways I have tried to cover the hole in me, tried for passage to its other side, when ever it seems I fall, & around me clapping dust where I settle, shard & splinter, palimpsests of echoed words, the grass & lichen singing you again, you again. An odd progress that would tether you to your beginning & call you swiftly back, dressing your wounds, picking at your scabs. Here, step forward, that in stepping the wind will carry the form from you, the brittle architecture of dried leaves, & that you may pause, & well note you’ve come undone. Well note the ground follows you beneath your stepping. Well note how in your heart it feels like some old prayers clink around in a dusty gloaming. & how if your present consumed you you would not even become a ghost, so implausibly em

& a nod to a curious seven year anniversary, the frame & compass to my day & beyond.

How curious the way the body seems encircled by conjectures, a nucleus spun round with a frenetic wreath of electrons. The instant of our being ensnared in its apperceptions, its steep & fathomed levels of compare, its absent attenuations or taut binds to the gravid expectations of the past. How we are never, can never be fully & singly here, can never utter a word of now being. Where perhaps in youth growing older resembled a coming-in-to-order, a woven thing, loomed & purposive, instead I see each thread individuated, frayed, laid out for my examination, & my fingers that would yoke them into some delicate pattern, braid them into a strength beyond themselves, they seem instead in some paralysis at my side, some quieted palsy, locked in an ongoing obsolescence. & so the quiet morning thrums with its inhering repetition of every other quiet morning. The humming in my head, the offbeating heart both doubled & multiplied with their selfsame recollections, conscio

In a curious dream that seemed to span the night entire I stood upon a footbridge with my sister-in-law Dawn (glad I explained who she was to you five who know her already) & between her questions & my answers we covered the entirety of my relationship of the last seven years. Our mission, it seemed, was to walk through it step by step & gauge each moment’s emotional resonance; how it was in recollection, how it must have been at the moment of its cresting passage, how it has transmuted as hostage to time & circumstance. & small details that I do not daily recall—house-sitting a week here in Santa Fe, standing upon some bluff in eastern Utah surveying the riverbed beneath. I awakened stunned, first at how comprehensive it was, & second at how simple a suggestion it offers. Too often I am finding the mineral core of things obscurely adumbrated by fluctuating phenomenal presentation. The riverbed beneath the river, & how swiftly our eye steals away upon the ri