August 14
That trip to the glacier a kind of repositioning for me. You feel subtle shifts, time to time, or tremors, or intimations of something in the throes of change. & then there are precise instances wherein you seem reaffirmed significantly, or redefined, or something akin to either. How you are, & how you are in relation to the world—how much a part of it. How the novelty of going into an untrailed wilderness for the first time in any extended capacity seemed to dissolve into an utter familiarity, a kinship almost. & how in so doing, these details that confound the intentions of our days fall from us, absolutely unable to find purchase or sympathetic ear. Which I sort of love, really—that transformation of daily pressures from their gathered urgency into not only a kind of circumstantial impotence, but a complete inability to mean, fundamentally. & in their dissolution, as rehearsed as it may sound, I find myself closer to myself, living without context. & I think I sort of love that. I think I sort of need that.
The trip itself took us south from the East Fork bridge, seven miles across river bar & easy tundra. We skirted an island in the drainage where a sow & two cubs seemed intent over a kill site. & in our passing, we saw three, four caribou, & then five or six more, until a herd revealed itself near an alluvial fan behind which we were to set up camp. & the herd would grace us twice daily—towards the toe of the glacier in the morning, back out to the tundra to forage in the evening, twenty or thirty strong, & we would regard them from beside the tent twenty yards away, the scree slope behind us angling upcanyon.
A day hiking onto the glacier, the heaving moraine a study in slow, violent torsion.
& on the way out, gaining a ridgeline, I came upon a subadult bear tucked into a concave swath of tundra about 200 feet away. When he caught my scent, he fled at full speed down-mountain, his sudden fear somehow greater than my own.
Along the same ridge a few miles down, a pack of seven wolves fanning out in hunt, falling in to line, again & again, their running like water flowing around out-jutting boulders midstream.
(& yes, sitting under that rock with the two rainbows yawning overhead, with the rain trailing us in windblown coma, calling that expanse what it was, naming that expanse within)
& returned now with the appetite for more. Here at work circumstance & detail appertain & choke & coil all about me, & their stresses run in tendrils fine & twining until they speak through me & I don’t know the voice I hear. But how they fall from me sometimes, & I need only a handful of words. & how I’d have them fall again & again.
The trip itself took us south from the East Fork bridge, seven miles across river bar & easy tundra. We skirted an island in the drainage where a sow & two cubs seemed intent over a kill site. & in our passing, we saw three, four caribou, & then five or six more, until a herd revealed itself near an alluvial fan behind which we were to set up camp. & the herd would grace us twice daily—towards the toe of the glacier in the morning, back out to the tundra to forage in the evening, twenty or thirty strong, & we would regard them from beside the tent twenty yards away, the scree slope behind us angling upcanyon.
A day hiking onto the glacier, the heaving moraine a study in slow, violent torsion.
& on the way out, gaining a ridgeline, I came upon a subadult bear tucked into a concave swath of tundra about 200 feet away. When he caught my scent, he fled at full speed down-mountain, his sudden fear somehow greater than my own.
Along the same ridge a few miles down, a pack of seven wolves fanning out in hunt, falling in to line, again & again, their running like water flowing around out-jutting boulders midstream.
(& yes, sitting under that rock with the two rainbows yawning overhead, with the rain trailing us in windblown coma, calling that expanse what it was, naming that expanse within)
& returned now with the appetite for more. Here at work circumstance & detail appertain & choke & coil all about me, & their stresses run in tendrils fine & twining until they speak through me & I don’t know the voice I hear. But how they fall from me sometimes, & I need only a handful of words. & how I’d have them fall again & again.
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