Specimens, Days

Ree Nancarrow gave a slide show presentation last night about life in Denali over the last forty-five years. When she came to the country, there were no actual roads, & local travel required a good dog team or an airplane or a great deal of patience with the ongoing tendency of Alaska to brutalize an automobile. Her cabin was built by hand, as were all of the outlying structures on the property. When the snow fell heavy decades ago, her husband built a bridge over it. When they decided to dig a basement, he did it by hand, with a shovel & a wheelbarrow. In permafrost. & when they ordered groceries, initially the order was placed through mail to Seattle. In the absence of an electric grid, they built their own generator. & in the absence of a well, they melted snow enough to water themselves & their dogs every day. At that time, the entire Denali fleet consisted of seven trucks, one snowgo & twenty-eight dogs. Rangers (the two of them that were here) spent the en

Woke up thinking about Thales, who famously fell into a pit as he was walking with his eyes upturned to the stars. Last night the auroras were snaking & fluxing, a limn of purple along the bottom of the green band, & then those vertical tears that shimmer & fade above the long arc below. To the south, meanwhile, the Milky Way like a bucket of soap water cast out over asphalt, the stars bright punctures in the ever-dark sky. It’s been some time since I stood slack-jawed staring at the firmament. Driving home last night, we passed the metal sculpture of a team of dogs that lines the top of a gateway just next to my pull-out, silhouetted black against the surging green behind. It’s a structure like you see at the beginning of ranch roads, two huge spruce posts & one cross-beam, & in this case, it signifies passage into the Kingdom (all the land once or presently owned by now retired musher Jeff King). There was some small tug in me though, seeing it, knowing that every