July 25


Maximus rests under the feathered shade of a spruce bough with his paws tucked under his body & his chestnut eyes following each swing of the mattock. Intermittently, we hear the rising sound of Wils & Moose crashing through the willows, seeing the bush-tops jerk in rapid succession before they both burst out onto the clearing with great wide smiles, tongues wagging & eyes bright. I’ll pull at the tundra, around the swath I’ve axed out, & use the pick to pull the heavy duff & soil to the brush pile. & look over & see Kristin cursing a root buried deep under the top-layer while she brings the pulaski down over & again. & look past her to see Healy ridge off to the south, dusted with vestigial snow from the cold snap last week, bathed in a uniformly crisp light. Past it, the ridgelines we finally found up past Sugarloaf, a kind of alpine running paradise. To the East, Dora & Jumbo & Walker Domes, & the endless strip of tundra yawning out past Ferry. & to the west, accessible from our property, the mushing trail heading off Stampede & out along the northern boundary of the park as long as you please.

We are realizing after several days’ worth of clearing with hand tools that we are just beginning to have a taste of the extraordinary amount of work we have ahead of us. Clear & pull back sod & duff, & tamp & level, & dig through permafrost for the posts, & construct batting boards & string the whole site & square it, & haul the concrete out a half mile with no motorized assistance over bog tundra. Get our post & pier set-up in by fall, with an adjacent clearing for a walltent platform, & build said platform so we have a warming hut come winter (& ideally, we’d use green-cut logs halved on the property for that purpose). & then haul timber by snowmachine or dogteam over the snow so as to protect the fragile ground. Stockpile every item we can from the Gransfors Bruks catalogue, learn all that we can about woodworking & cabin building, watch Dick Proenneke documentary repeatedly, find ourselves an Alaskan sawmill attachment for the chainsaw, & then come spring, well, go build ourselves a handhewn cabin with our own hands. This, friends & family, is what it looks like to literally materialize & construct your most enduring & beloved dream. I go to bed at night kissing the blisters on my hands.

& it’s no secret in the meantime that my carpentry skills are at absolute best completely suspect, if not altogether absent entirely. Studying poems seems an odd preparation for building a cabin off the grid, but then, maybe there’s something to the shared process of deliberate construction, of slow navigation, that will reveal itself in time. Being me, I don’t think I can hope to avoid metaphorizing the building of this place. But praxis for metaphor is a salve, & renders it meaningful in a way it usually isn’t. You can’t argue with the notch-fit of a log about its metaphysics, really, if you want to be warm come first snowfall. But you can extrapolate all that you wish once you’re safely installed under its shelter. I don’t know. Maybe this is a caution that as this progresses, I’ll likely be rambling tangentially about the days’ work, but in any case, that work will have been done, & slowly, bit by bit, we’ll have something extraordinary to show for it. Hell, it’s already one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen.

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