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 conversation. His fingernails were clean, for instance, & his framing for his project was theoretical & constellated around things that had nothing to do with place at all. I was thrilled that he had simply been to the state before, but it’s curious in retrospect to think now of what I’ve done since then. How all of these small cues seemed to point me here. Passing a man in the dog park at Chatfield who wore a Salty Dog sweatshirt. Seeing a drunk at a bar on Broadway with a Humpy’s hat. Reading histories of places I never thought I’d see, or watching rapt the simple process of planning a felled spruce on some special I stumbled upon on public television. How all of my academic thinking was geared towards making complex, obscuring, yoking into relation all of these disparate threads in some futile stand against entropy. & then how so many of the things I tend to here require a simplifying eye. & then there’s my fingernails.

All to say I guess that I still can’t fathom of leaving this place. I think about it every now & again, if only because that’s how I learned to be in the world, itinerant. I try to think of any place in the world that calls more clearly, & I permit myself to absolve those tangible restrictions that would hold me here tp aid my thinking (if money were no issue, if the dogs could come with us, etc.). & in no case do I find a place more akin to my present self, or kinder to my present heart, or more consistently capable of conjuring awe than my home here, & my love here, & my self here.

A few days ago, I reread a kind of journal I kept during the dissolution of my engagement. K had read it on accident & her comments had a kind of hesitation in them, so I wanted to revisit it to find what might spur such a thing. & after reading through the exhausted chronology, through the pity & the deference & the grappling after meaning, I came upon a later bit from a few months into my relationship with K. It wondered yet if I would be able to fully love again, if my heart would allow for it, if in fact I even had the desire to do so. The prognosis was not positive. As I wrote it, Willa was on her way north to us, my family was staging their visit last June, & the season was well underway. From the first, I was enchanted by K, so it’s so odd now, from this distance, to read that cold sterility of tone & to know it for the feeble gesture at self-preservation that it was. Of course I was terrified, marred, unwilling to admit of Possibility, even when it literally stood before me, patient & wonderful.

& so I think of what time can do to us, & how we can end up after some circuitous wandering in the place we always wanted to be. & how warring & fractious fear can be, & how willfully we would reign over even those traits in us that elude reason. & how there is such grace in being, in being where one simply is. & how we can commit to our hesitations as if they were fact, when they too come to dissolve & fade from us & leave us with the first terms of enduring wonder in their absence. How I can have such a full heart, after all, & cannot now imagine it otherwise. I know it reads a little better when one explicates it & draws it out & shows the evidence, but in the end, all of this just to say that I love it here, & I love Kristin, & I love our dogs, & my life is generally surprisingly wonderful. & so, here I am.