April 16
I think I could live a dozen lifetimes & not scratch the surface of what I want to do in this state. Looking over pictures of Bering Land Bridge & Kobuk Valley has spurred in me a new yearning to head north & west, toward those unfathomable sweeps of tundra valley & those rolling, languid rivers. & all of it, all of it unpeopled. I see the patchwork of vermillion & blazing gold, the heavy cerulean sky with its spires of slow cloud, the maars at Devil Mountain, & I want to start walking. Or I see the undulating hills that conjure to my thinking a hugely amplified facsimile of western Iowa, covered entire in thick, wind-driven snow, back-dropped by looming ranges in the distance, & I want to harness a dog team & mush into it instead. & the more I think about the purpose of preserving wilderness (the more I talk to Kristin about it & the more I steal an education in it from her), the more I think a place like Kobuk or BELA would feel like home. & the more the road winding through the park here comes to seem a kind of open scar across the landscape (a scar that pays my salary, but still). As a species we’ve done a fairly astonishing job of fucking up everything we’ve touched, most of it quite literally beyond recognition. We are compelled, it seems, by the precarious semblance of balance that Reason provides; in it we procure all the necessary justifications, & from those we cull our delusions. We end up caring vehemently about things the absolute meaninglessness of which we are well aware. We are buttressed this way, fortified by a kind of gestural architecture that we take to be solid when it is composed of air. (& by we, I mean me). & I don’t intend this as echo to some well-rehearsed manifesto or something, not in the least. & lord knows I love me some Netflix & Starbucks & a hundred other creature comforts besides. But I guess from time to time in accounting for myself I wonder after those cultural entanglements, or the excuses I furnish when confronted with disparities well within my ability to alleviate. I think it peculiar that I have always married perception with evaluation, if even inadvertently—as if there is some hierarchy underwriting things, calling one way of living better than the next, calling one profession more sensible than the other, when in fact the significance of what we do seems entirely self-generated. If it matters to the doer, than it irrefutably matters, period.
The thing I’ve been attuned to in me lately, to my utter, childish delight, is where that meaning finds purchase. Where wanting something & getting it instills an enduring, deep satisfaction predicated on the patient appraisal leading up to it & the humility in its face to give it the gratitude it merits. In other words, very deliberately making my choices based only on what I want viscerally, what I yearn after, rather than what I can simply justify wanting. & then sharing that richly abiding desire with another. It’s something, seeing how much more rewarding & accommodating my life can be when I steer it toward its underlying passions. & it’s endlessly curious to me that when I was a kid, when I was fucking ten years old, I was so clearly keyed into it, wanting after the life that I am building now, dreaming of some unattainable vision of the far-off wilds of Alaska, a then-unimaginable landscape yawning magnificently all around me. & in that dream I was always outdoors, doing the chores that survival requires in places farther afield, or retiring to the cabin to sit in a rocking chair & read & smoke Cavendish tobacco from a corncob pipe. & in the dreaming I could feel the textures of that life, the carving firn wind dropping down the valley, that deeply intoned smell rising off a river in the morning, the grain of the wooden maul handle as it slid down to split a round of birch, the swishing tail of my dog nearby. & absent the Cavendish, here I am. Now that I’ve dreamt a bit & found it so enormously gratifying, I think I’ll look at the sand dunes up in Kobuk, or the lazy arm of the Noatak, or the granite tors jutting out above Serpentine & see what else I can fathom, knowing it somehow curiously, thankfully within my reach.
The thing I’ve been attuned to in me lately, to my utter, childish delight, is where that meaning finds purchase. Where wanting something & getting it instills an enduring, deep satisfaction predicated on the patient appraisal leading up to it & the humility in its face to give it the gratitude it merits. In other words, very deliberately making my choices based only on what I want viscerally, what I yearn after, rather than what I can simply justify wanting. & then sharing that richly abiding desire with another. It’s something, seeing how much more rewarding & accommodating my life can be when I steer it toward its underlying passions. & it’s endlessly curious to me that when I was a kid, when I was fucking ten years old, I was so clearly keyed into it, wanting after the life that I am building now, dreaming of some unattainable vision of the far-off wilds of Alaska, a then-unimaginable landscape yawning magnificently all around me. & in that dream I was always outdoors, doing the chores that survival requires in places farther afield, or retiring to the cabin to sit in a rocking chair & read & smoke Cavendish tobacco from a corncob pipe. & in the dreaming I could feel the textures of that life, the carving firn wind dropping down the valley, that deeply intoned smell rising off a river in the morning, the grain of the wooden maul handle as it slid down to split a round of birch, the swishing tail of my dog nearby. & absent the Cavendish, here I am. Now that I’ve dreamt a bit & found it so enormously gratifying, I think I’ll look at the sand dunes up in Kobuk, or the lazy arm of the Noatak, or the granite tors jutting out above Serpentine & see what else I can fathom, knowing it somehow curiously, thankfully within my reach.
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