Wildness & Spring

The cedar waxwings have moved along. The cormorants still flock in the gloaming, pointed west, with their numbers reducing by the day. Herons seem to bunch together, weaving in & out of one another’s company in the spring, displaying perhaps a bit less timidity when the kids rush to the windows or porch railings to point in wonder. & lately, the hummingbirds have returned. They hover at the windows, looking at the drawings of monsters Ada did to deter the prior passerine crowd from running into the glass. They seem genuinely interested, spending a moment at each drawing before moving politely to the next. & all the birds compassed north have flown but us, but we go about the business of packing, unburdening ourselves of more things, selling off the car, trying to organize what we can in the face of so many variables & unknowns. 


The spring in Texas has been windy, almost without exception or cease. Yellow pollen coats every surface, but the flowers erupt in kaleidoscopic color, & green-up down here is richly saturated & everywhere in evidence. It’s odd, to have a season draw you in in a place that repels immersion in the natural world. That vernal surge in energy here, I suppose, means driving to some store or other, or a Sonic. I will, & this is a promise, sing with joy upon stepping foot on a mountainside again, some barren ridgeline zigzagging from granitic tor to sumping tundra, pointing skyward & cleaving the clouds. I will run until my lungs burn & will weep with joy when they do. I feel, this close to being there again, all the giddiness of reunification with one central in the heart’s affections. I will take my grief unto the edge of all that bright country, & I will let them converse a bit, & acquaint themselves. How I have missed wildness, all of its unadorned & unsentimental space unclaimed & unclaimable. How I’ve missed what it does to us all. 


It is the audience, I think, for every animal surge of feeling the heart compels. Its rawness & slow time & your singularity within it, a solipsist in a world itself so utterly & exhaustingly nihilistic. Being a human in a wild place like being anchored in a windstorm-- everything cuts & clarifies, nothing appertains, & ultimately you stand & endure because you will your meaning into it before withdrawing, knowing that for all of the cataclysms it wrought in you, you were nothing at all to it. The river closes again behind the boulder, carries along, still fulgently itself. 


& what I’ve found every time I’ve carried my meaning into a wilderness isn’t its erasure or its dwarfing under scrutinies of scale-- I’ve found instead what is intrepid, whittled down, compounded diamond, all the filigree worn down. I have found honesty & compassion with & for myself, both generally harder to uncover than might be expected. It is a language I can speak, & one I’ve not felt upon my tongue for a long time, even when I’ve ached for its syllabary. & so I find myself, in spite of what weighs upon me, already leaning into that particular sublimity of hearing the varied thrush in an Alaskan spring-- a place known & numinous & vast enough to contain every exhalation of joy & sorrow alike.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Crow Pass Crossing

There was a point there, sliding on my ass down a hundred-yard snowfield rippled with minute waves of ice & buried rock, when I wondered if perhaps I ought to reorient myself in order to avoid slamming into the jagged boulder looming below. & there was a point while loping across another pitch of snow sidelong wherein I noticed I might well slide a mile off course if I didn’t hit the footholds. There was incessant rain, beating down from the report of the starting pistol until the finish line, & a fierce firn wind weaving through the willows, the Devil’s Club, the sedge-green grass. & the feeling on the far shore of Eagle River of wholly numb legs wobbling underneath me. I completely ate shit a half dozen times, tripped & recovered a dozen more, stubbed my twice-broken toe, stepped knee-deep in beaver ponds, slid & slopped through mud, leapt over twenty piles of fresh bear scat & clutched looming thistles to right myself, committing the ensuing mile each tim
Read more

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
Read more

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
Read more