Homebound

 

I have been homebound, rutting into a rhythm that permits that blend of ease & challenge endemic to raising two small children. Our morning forays outdoors invariably punctuate a mile-long walk with a session on the swingset, looking out over the waves of the lake, the dragonflies helicoptering above, the occasional sparrow or cardinal alighting on a distant branch. There is the small cast of herons gracing this sliver of bay, taking their turns appearing, preening on the dock, darting their massive beaks into the water & pulling out fish sometimes up to two feet long. There are the cormorants ducking percussively under & popping back up, leaving a fine algorithm of concentric circles teetering toward the shores. But our lives here wear these small & precious few gifts ornamentally—they do not come to compose the architecture of our thinking so much as permit a discursive flight from it.

In Alaska, we lived outdoors, or by the grace of the outdoors, or embattled against its waged wars. We lived among our twenty-six dogs, feeding them or running with them or tending the property in some way in every weather & at every conceivable hour of the day. We drank water from the roof, bathed on a splintered pallet on the bluff with snow underfoot. We took fifty mile dog runs that brought us home at two in the morning under the auroras in the bitter cold. We watched foxes hunt, grizzlies amble by, owls perch over the puppy pen for a curious inquiry into how things were progressing. At our door, rain boots beside running shoes beside pack boots. & the caribou antlers nailed to the logs inside displayed a dizzying array of raincoats, vests, parkas, hoodies whose use was utterly consigned to the dogyard, toolbelts, ear protection & so much more. Bear spray next to the fire extinguisher. A .357 next to the sesame oil.

Which is to say our lives at their most domestic were a sort of protracted rest on the threshold of the outdoors, which, in our case, meant the threshold of the wilderness. We came to see our world through its lens. When will winter come? Look at the fireweed going to cotton & look for that last wave of sandhill cranes, the holdouts loathe to go too soon. When will the winter break? Look at the pussywillows to see the second budding. Our calendar on the wall eventually stopped featuring reminders for appointments & birthdays & instead took note of the first varied thrush in the small hours of summer or the first plaintive star hung in the blue-muted darkness of the autumn after the long wash of summer light retreated. Our everything was built upon the architecture of the world itself.

& here’s the thing with the world—it is alive & teeming with energies & ensconsed in a myriad of dramas that we can’t even begin to fathom but that we feel nonetheless, elementally. All of the urgency of living & dying, the slow defeat of macescent leaves yet clinging to their branches, the hopeful swoop of the gyrfalcon, the swollen stumble of the creek below the bluff—everything sang the song of its being because everything was charged with the swirling whorl of life. To be among those things, daily, hourly—to know them minutely because life there demands an accounting, a phenology of place requisite for survival—was to breathe in their breath, organize phenomena according to their rules of engagement, feel time not in the counterfeit click of a sprung hand but in the turning of the world under light & shadow. To be by grace of what was outside, in every sense of the word.

Here, I see the world from a window, & the world I see is groomed, domesticated, rendered humanly purposive. It is a blight on what the world wants to be, a bad actor lugubriously inhabiting the role, her costume tight & misshapen. Its music is dimmed & made dull such that one can scarcely hear it without fully attenuating & aching after it. There is nothing here that unfurls in the world’s time, nothing that shocks out from its depth & darkness like a vixen fox call piercing the night or a goshawk tearing the sky in twain. This world disdains its source, finds it a burdensome interloper on domestic comforts, sets up its clocks by the windows & closes the blinds. I don’t know anymore what each wind sounds like or what they presage. I don’t know what trees line the hill behind this house, when their leaves will change. No one here wants to know. Nothing about life away from the limning wilderness seeks bewilderment, nor even an admission that it could not only exist, but prove wholly regenerative.

Inside, inanimate objects are strewn everywhere. Children’s plastic toys, televisions, end tables & lamps, dart boards, picture frames with paintings of horses or boats in harbor. From these things, there is no animus, nor particulate spark. They are in conversation with nothing, & yet at present, they are the holds upon which our children grow, the details saturating their notion of the world. They have made a dullard of me. Hope is a living thing, the fragile thing with wings, one requiring the engagement of the world it would cast in aureate pallor, needing to know the vocabulary of its trajectories. How can we hope in these plainly human terms? How can we think within this architecture? The mind withers at walls giving out unto more walls, windows closed upon the world. Thoughts spin into increasingly ornate & intricate excuses that come to resemble in their complexity the urgency of the necessities everywhere actually evidenced outside our doors. But they do not breathe, can be only simulacra, cannot couple & gather & fall into the bonds of need. How a bird on birth becomes enmeshed in the tapestries of wind & sun & bee & flower, tree & leaf & water, a thousand times involved precariously in the web of its ecosystem. & how in contrast we pale under our roofs & contribute nothing, taking exhaustively without further thought.

It is time, then, for bewilderment again. I have heard the language of these many plastic things, of the furniture or the ornamentations or the floorboards, the hum of the HVAC, the murmur of the television from the other room. They fall quiet, over & again, & are forgotten, because they were made to be forgotten, to enfeeble the hours until they pass & we can lay down to slumber or death. If there is meaning in life, then it must be out there among what remains yet alive.

We will dig the old coats out, then, hang a new caribou antler. We will line our doorway with a dozen pairs of shoes, all of them necessary, & given the weather, look then for which among them is absent & follow us down the trail a bit. There is a Swainson’s thrush singing & a soft blessing in the breeze.