Specimens, Days

Been looking at cabins outside the park for my vaguely continuing tenure here. I would shift one roommate to the next in a couple weeks were I to stay in C-Camp, & at this point I well can grasp the dent in my productivity imposed by sharing a small space with another stranger. & besides, these places I am seeing are phenomenal to my eye (though likely horrid to many others); all of them tucked into spruce forest on acreage, maybe next to a beaver bond that freezes over come winter, wood stoves with Toyo backups, dry every one, modest without excuse, simple without pretense. How I want to live at present, quietly, undisturbed, with this landscape sprawling uninterrupted from my window. & the last couple days a contract drawn between the last dying rage of summer & the stayed & patient hand of autumn, whose fingers have curled to touch off their fires of color already. Still, cloudless, deep azure skies with heavy sun over the blazing leaves. Already the thirties at

All's well. Put up new pictures at flickr.com/photos/apinalaska, including the Thorofare Cabin, one of my favorite places in the world entire.

A year to the day since we emptied the house on Cherokee. A year ago at this hour I was driving west along the interstate for Georgetown, for a month in the mountains, well beyond the hazed brown fog clinging to the huddled buildings in Denver. A year ago, the stopper loosed, the shift from that familiar life to this, its curious facsimile, meandering, wayward, or even-coursed. & this document, now, celebrating, too, its anniversary. Of all of my years perhaps no one more precipitous, no one more daunting in its recollection, more generative in its violent torsions, more fully striated with deep-felt sorrows & swift jubilations. A milestone, now, to sit here & write of it with an unfractured consciousness, a stable enough fulcrum of self to permit of a brief glance behind. No Orphic loss in it anymore. I think of the logic that compelled us to these farflung points, the compulsion towards self-discovery, towards an earnest evaluation of the first-terms of my own living. Tha