August 30
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 protruding molting into brown like a spring ptarmigan. Meantime, wanting urgently to surround myself in these varied hues & textures, I await a response from the kennels manager who controls the schedule of the backcountry cabins, & will hopefully get the green light to stay again either in Thorofare or out in Kantishna at the Busia cabin on Moose Creek.
One usually sees autumn manifest in these brief pyrotechnics, framed in by the faultlines of roads or towns or civilization. Never has my eye followed such refulgence to find it doubled, tripled, endlessly replicating itself for as far as the eye can see. As always, it is the scale of this place that lends it a stunning beauty that I can’t begin to articulate. There was a bit in McPhee about witnessing a grizzly that comes to mind. “What mattered was not so much the bear himself as what the bear implied. He was the predominant thing in that country, and for him to be in it at all meant that there had to be more country like it in every direction and more of the same kind of country all around that. He implied a world.” & that’s just it. A male griz prefers to have a sixty-mile radius to himself. This park has upwards of four hundred grizzlies on the north side of the Alaska range alone, not counting black bears, & the population does not suffer any hint of claustrophobia. I take a picture, & the moment it is hemmed in by four lines it becomes an absurd, tinny echo, a whispered & misremembered melody that would conjure a symphony entire. Scope & scale, breadth & vastness—none of this grandeur can fit in a word, such a fragile vessel. & me, a believer in the efficacy of the word, as these often tiresome redundancies suggest.
Maybe the word isn’t the word at all, but the reach of our capacity to intake experience without loosing it to awe. & the word the bird-bone thin architecture through which it blows, firn wind, heavy gust. We do the constellating that we may walk among the constellations, know them named, know them ordered. But yet the wind blows, & if our eyes upturn, our ears attune, it is the wash of random starlight cast & scattered voluminous & random, it is the wind’s constant song through the reedy bones.
One usually sees autumn manifest in these brief pyrotechnics, framed in by the faultlines of roads or towns or civilization. Never has my eye followed such refulgence to find it doubled, tripled, endlessly replicating itself for as far as the eye can see. As always, it is the scale of this place that lends it a stunning beauty that I can’t begin to articulate. There was a bit in McPhee about witnessing a grizzly that comes to mind. “What mattered was not so much the bear himself as what the bear implied. He was the predominant thing in that country, and for him to be in it at all meant that there had to be more country like it in every direction and more of the same kind of country all around that. He implied a world.” & that’s just it. A male griz prefers to have a sixty-mile radius to himself. This park has upwards of four hundred grizzlies on the north side of the Alaska range alone, not counting black bears, & the population does not suffer any hint of claustrophobia. I take a picture, & the moment it is hemmed in by four lines it becomes an absurd, tinny echo, a whispered & misremembered melody that would conjure a symphony entire. Scope & scale, breadth & vastness—none of this grandeur can fit in a word, such a fragile vessel. & me, a believer in the efficacy of the word, as these often tiresome redundancies suggest.
Maybe the word isn’t the word at all, but the reach of our capacity to intake experience without loosing it to awe. & the word the bird-bone thin architecture through which it blows, firn wind, heavy gust. We do the constellating that we may walk among the constellations, know them named, know them ordered. But yet the wind blows, & if our eyes upturn, our ears attune, it is the wash of random starlight cast & scattered voluminous & random, it is the wind’s constant song through the reedy bones.
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