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Showing posts from January, 2011

January 30

I had two strange memories flood over me this week while I thought to notice myself rooting down here. The first was the recollection of seeing the Dick Proenneke PBS special for the first time years ago, its images interspersed with a lulling quiet. I recalled specifically two things: the fact that he fashioned his own tools & tool handles on site (recalled mostly because that takes a committed bad-ass), & the sound of his oars in the glass-smooth water of the lake. Resourcefulness lending itself to recreation, that sort of thing. & then the second memory involves meeting some random friend of a contemptible peer at DU who was visiting & discussing plans to make a film featuring Alaska. At the time, I was reading a history of the state & so came to the conversation academically. Which, really, is entirely implausible. The guy, it turned out, was every bit as much an insufferable ass as his friend, but what strikes me now is the absence of the senses from that brief

January 21

Odd how standing in the cabin, feeling the sun pour down over me for the first time in months, there awake the quietest intimations of spring already. It is twenty-seven below, with a dusting of new snow, but in that bath of light there is a kind of stirring. Your eyes note the chickadee instead of the raven or the magpie. You note that the gloaming comes later & lingers a bit past the late afternoon before the moon crests above the range blood-orange or silver-white. & all at once, I clutch the more tightly to the winter & lean into the thought of warmth. So many miles yet to mush, & at the same time, I feel a bodily need for sunlight again. Before the winter came, we all told ourselves that in its frigid months we would have time to slow down, reacquaint ourselves with ourselves, work on projects & the like. & now, halfway through it, I am no less busy, only more quietly so. My busy-ness does not involve hundreds of calls & blips & beeps at work, &

January 16

So much of the park I’ve seen in the last ten days, on the back of a snowgo or from the runners of the dogsled. Out in the gloaming mornings on the tundra before the trail narrows in to the Sushana, with the sky a muted pink & the Alaska Range stirring into focus, the great cleft wedge of the mountain rising gargantuan from the dark. The yawning cornices windblown & hanging delicate over the rolling hills above the river. The tussocks with spiny copper-wire willows bare & twisting under. The river-ice of the East Fork River, a quarter mile across it seemed, steaming over sinkholes, stepping over fissures or giving in to overflow & slush. The sound the ice makes, those quiet, travelling strings of cracking that spread vermicular underfoot in sudden spells of lightning terror. Seeing your sled slide parallel beside you when it ought to be pulled behind. & then the warmth of the wood stove, the pots boiling down the snow, the dogs curled with noses under tails, the aur

January 4

A new year, & with it, the strange effects of the Chinook casting warm temperatures & gale-force winds & clouds roiling in violent torsion through the sky. Each day now a little longer, measurable for us by the line of the sun on the ridge to the north of the cabin, which each day gets closer to draping over the valley on Stampede. Not yet, not yet, but closer. Tomorrow I join the kennels folks & a ranger & head out from Stampede to the Lower Toklat, with night stops at Sushana & East Fork along the way. If you look at a map, you’ll see that after the Tek we still have a ways to go. That thumb in the park boundary gives way to a gaping landscape, the topography of which pushes us down to the East fork before ridging over to the Toklat. North of the Wyoming Hills. A part of the park I’ve never seen in any season. I’ll be starting out on snowgo, alternating from time to time with the three mushers I hope, taking the teams along a circuitous route that isn’t often