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Dogs First

On the trail to our cabin, the wind shifts & sculpts the landscape at whim, hurling blankets of sustained 30 mph gusts across the tundra & depositing snow in undulating moguls that cover over our precious tracks. We see gales of up to 75 mph fairly routinely. I have skied home ten feet behind my wife on many occasions & been unable to discern her tracks. Say a word & the wind will carry it aloft & away. Drop a liner glove or a hat & you wait until spring to retrieve it. In the places I’ve lived prior to Alaska, I’ve known snow to behave in any number of ways. Here, for whatever diaphanous splendor it may reveal in the structure of the flake, it is always, always dry. When it drifts, the sugary weight of it transforms into the consistency of concrete. People use chainsaws to dig out trail. & when the wind & the snow conspire, people here know precisely what to expect & what to do. No matter the temperature, our community knows to check routinely o...
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January 20

This morning I sat through the inauguration upstairs, the bosses smug in their pajamas, barking at the television, slurring ejaculates firing out of their fat lips. What a thing to witness. I live among Palin supporters, old guard Republicans who extol Christian virtue out one side of their mouth while spitting vitriol always out the other. Obama a terrorist, Obama not even a citizen, the “negro situation,” the elegance of Laura Bush, the accolades due her husband. I left the room after a comment about how blacks might finally get their acts together, went to pull weeds from the superfluous garden of these superfluous people, to tend to shoots & weeds & improve their lives even as they go about the deleterious business of condemning everyone else’s. At 11:30, I rose from weeding, nauseous with the morning, with what I was doing. I came in & packed for an hour, ate & went back to work. The neighbor stopped over in the afternoon to join the chorus & pitch polemics at ...
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April 1, Afternoon

Late afternoon on my first full day in Homer, the sun still blazing through a diffuse air, the gargantuan white-capped mountains sprawling across Kachemak Bay, an ashen haze obscuring the view. Earlier, took Willa down to the Spit, where she chased gulls along the shoreline, sprinting headlong into the frigid water over & again while the wind whipped the waves in over the packed sand & rounded stone. What can I tell you about Homer? The view in every direction is absolutely breathtaking. Muir, who spent a good deal of time along the Inside Passage, cautioned people against coming to Alaska. Once they’d seen it, he wrote, everything else would seem an ordinary disappointment. In one of his essays on Alaska he began by writing about how everything here strains beyond our regular notions of scale; writing about a place up here is like capitulating a universe in a sentence. I have found something interesting, too, in viewing it all alone. Somehow, its geologies seem clearer, more k...
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