August 23, 24
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 companion anymore. Already, I slate another run along the trail, my own, my own consolation, reckoning or recovery.
The rain meanwhile hinting at comfort, at warmth, at those things that ought likely to inhere in the very thought of home. My eye fixed now on conjuring such a place manifest after the brittle architecture of the cabin here blows down. Until then. Home. The very word.
***
& rain still tireless against the fogging glass, the spruce-tops swaying in brief winds, the clouds molting white to grey, corollas of soft mist ringing the mountains & staying their summits from view. & through a wet black soil the fireweed bleeding violet, the ground-scrub taking a russet hue, the berries thick in the tangled copper wire-patches of the tundra. & a dull yellow now hastens to flame gold, maroon to split vermillion in swathing gashes across the broad green valleys. & the raindrops appertaining, clutching pine needle or quivering on an aspen leaf flickering against the muted breeze, just so, before thudding soundless to the dirt. A sense of the pending in it. Look south where the clouds cleave & leave Cantwell white with snow. It’s coming, sooner than later. Every day, someone is packing a car & saying a round of goodbyes, everyone’s days in camp numbered, however obscure their mathematics.
Inside, Roy is beginning to root through his artifacts to organize them prior to his own departure. Polished boots sit on the kitchen table on papers bleeding with scrawled ink. Trinkets from Thailand fill blue speckled ceramic mugs with ursine forms engraved on them. Cigars half-smoked & rolled in Ziploc bags. Notes on gold mine strikes burgeoning from a black & white composition notebook. These curiosities on display. & there are, in my stowed places, curiosities of my own to ponder. Today, there is no judgment in observation. Life accrues its heft in such artifacts—its ponderous weight, its root room, its sprite airiness. One wonders at them as one might puzzle over evidence of one gone missing, the narrative they suggest, their essential human-ness where human fingers touched them & left them still, spiraling labyrinthine prints hardly discernible. What is jacketed in a film of dust. What wears a bright sheen yet. “There are things we live among, & to know them is to know ourselves.” Anymore it is the peculiar refulgence of any given object, how it metaphorizes the fugitive desires surrounding it, center of that pulsing constellation. What stories they tell, & how heartbreakingly those stories mumble into a silence that will not hear them out, will not bare the weight of the words. How the words, then, seem to drop brittle upon the unyielding floor, how they shatter, & how over time it is the shards we recover that constitute a past. What gives a word a glow, every one a ghost, & in every ghost the dullest spark of having-been. A whisper. The part of dreaming that will not convey itself to the light of consciousness. The remembrance not of the content of the irrecuperable dream, but only of its having unfurled during the long hours of dark, a banner unfolding in a hieroglyph the eye cannot read, though it strains to try.
How could the past be anything but a fiction? Itself some slivered clip of a vast & looming arc. Fraction in fraction. But room there for belief, for the faith inhering in form. “My words echo / Thus, in your mind. // But to what purpose / Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves / I do not know.” How we cling savage to beauty.
The rain meanwhile hinting at comfort, at warmth, at those things that ought likely to inhere in the very thought of home. My eye fixed now on conjuring such a place manifest after the brittle architecture of the cabin here blows down. Until then. Home. The very word.
***
& rain still tireless against the fogging glass, the spruce-tops swaying in brief winds, the clouds molting white to grey, corollas of soft mist ringing the mountains & staying their summits from view. & through a wet black soil the fireweed bleeding violet, the ground-scrub taking a russet hue, the berries thick in the tangled copper wire-patches of the tundra. & a dull yellow now hastens to flame gold, maroon to split vermillion in swathing gashes across the broad green valleys. & the raindrops appertaining, clutching pine needle or quivering on an aspen leaf flickering against the muted breeze, just so, before thudding soundless to the dirt. A sense of the pending in it. Look south where the clouds cleave & leave Cantwell white with snow. It’s coming, sooner than later. Every day, someone is packing a car & saying a round of goodbyes, everyone’s days in camp numbered, however obscure their mathematics.
Inside, Roy is beginning to root through his artifacts to organize them prior to his own departure. Polished boots sit on the kitchen table on papers bleeding with scrawled ink. Trinkets from Thailand fill blue speckled ceramic mugs with ursine forms engraved on them. Cigars half-smoked & rolled in Ziploc bags. Notes on gold mine strikes burgeoning from a black & white composition notebook. These curiosities on display. & there are, in my stowed places, curiosities of my own to ponder. Today, there is no judgment in observation. Life accrues its heft in such artifacts—its ponderous weight, its root room, its sprite airiness. One wonders at them as one might puzzle over evidence of one gone missing, the narrative they suggest, their essential human-ness where human fingers touched them & left them still, spiraling labyrinthine prints hardly discernible. What is jacketed in a film of dust. What wears a bright sheen yet. “There are things we live among, & to know them is to know ourselves.” Anymore it is the peculiar refulgence of any given object, how it metaphorizes the fugitive desires surrounding it, center of that pulsing constellation. What stories they tell, & how heartbreakingly those stories mumble into a silence that will not hear them out, will not bare the weight of the words. How the words, then, seem to drop brittle upon the unyielding floor, how they shatter, & how over time it is the shards we recover that constitute a past. What gives a word a glow, every one a ghost, & in every ghost the dullest spark of having-been. A whisper. The part of dreaming that will not convey itself to the light of consciousness. The remembrance not of the content of the irrecuperable dream, but only of its having unfurled during the long hours of dark, a banner unfolding in a hieroglyph the eye cannot read, though it strains to try.
How could the past be anything but a fiction? Itself some slivered clip of a vast & looming arc. Fraction in fraction. But room there for belief, for the faith inhering in form. “My words echo / Thus, in your mind. // But to what purpose / Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves / I do not know.” How we cling savage to beauty.
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