Bettles

We live in Bettles now, with no phone & very limited access to internet. Drop me a line at PO Box 26046, Bettles Field, AK, 99726 & I promise I'll write you back. In the meantime, here are a few things I've thought about since arriving. Hope you all three are well & sending my love. 


*


All morning, the snow fell thick & wet, clumping & carpeting the roofs. Blue sky pokes through now in the afternoon heat, & drip edges shed curtains of melt. The skies here are epics written in slow time, their characters clashing across tableaus of unimaginable distance. The Yukon Flats & Kanuti form an arrow that points a few dozen miles north of here, & to the west, north & east, the mountains hem the arrow in, crested white, gauzy across the country.

In Bettles, the old gravel pit is a swollen lake & the migratory ducks & shorebirds whittle away their time. Godwits & kittiwakes flit overhead while snipes out by the float pond stutter along endlessly. There are two sandhill cranes along that road determined to assert their sovereignty, flying low overhead & scolding us on foot. Out by the float pond, the viewshed opens up. The Jack White Mountains, the Alatna Hills, Twoday Hill. All of these chthonic tributaries of the massive reach of the Brooks Range, laid alluringly beyond the muskeg & floodplains. It is new country for us, new ground underfoot, but in it the echoes of the familiar & that song we so missed hearing in our peregrinations outside.

Our neighbor & friend last night described standing out on the runway in September, looking at the sunrise in one direction & at the lingering auroras playing between the stars in the other. There aren’t words for a thing like that, she said. Imagine a place vast enough to fit the grandeur of daybreak casually beside the sweeping filament of the northern lights. We are rendered down to size. Finally.

What place has meant to me, how I have shifted from desirous of it to needing it profoundly, has been a lesson in exponential shift, an observance of what the body tells you. There is no other place for me anymore.

I have thought since returning about how my attentions are attenuated by where I am, how that is true for all of us. Whenever we walk with Whitman & Ada, my eyes once again scan for bears or moose or otherwise, & with that acute awareness, the diaphanous marvels of the world articulate themselves. I am suddenly listening to every bird, hearing every murmuring breeze woven through the trees. I look at the riverbed to find baby black bear prints pursued by wolf, snapped willows in a line, rose quartz. The ice pans along the river banks are melted almost completely now, but when we arrived, they stretched out for miles & made the urgently quiet cavernous sound that ice makes, even while utterly silent. The world makes you care here, requires it of you.

It is good to be back in the north country, thinking through the sieve of it provides & mandates, a part of its tapestries again. No one is in much of a hurry & everything gets done eventually. Outside now, the slate grey sky is festooned with bulbous white cloud to the east, while the searing azure meanders up from the flats to the south, bringing the news that matters in the timeliest way it can.

 

*

 

A bright morning. The sun upon awakening has already lingered long enough in the sky to attain to radiating heat, & it falls on our shoulders warm against the crisp vernal breeze. The paper birch & poplar green up already, shimmering out verdant leaves that catch the light & luster & then go dull & flat, over & again. The shorebirds still gather in the shrinking puddles. Last night at the float pond owls hooted back & forth while loons stretched across the open water between extant floes. & everywhere, the sky opens & unfurls wider & further than I’ve ever seen.

 

We made sourdough donuts this morning, delivering them still warm to the neighbors & talking casually with them in brief visits about wolves & airplanes & community needs. We are suddenly more a part of where we live than perhaps ever before. Even in Healy, the magnitude of our daily undertakings was such that we didn’t impose ourselves upon the social machinations of the place much. Maybe after such a dry spell in America, our thirst for conversation with like-minded people has pushed us into an accidental garrulousness. In any case, it is a comfort. We end up shaking our heads in disbelief when the door closes behind us, incredulous that here, after such a long sojourn, we’ve landed somewhere that feels so oddly like home, so eerily familiar. It is early, I know, for grand pronouncements, but life is for the living, & a life without the charge of speculative planning is a life devoid of meaningful connection. So I consent to think myself home awhile.

 

*

 

Where the old quarry sits, between the runway & the Koyukuk River, the snowmelt & rain have gathered a pond in the depression. Canada geese, horned grebes, shorebirds & a solitary trumpeter swan have made themselves at home. The resident pair of sandhill cranes loudly presented themselves for a visit while we were there, pronouncing no doubt their dominion. There is something to the avian adaptability—the spot has everything they need, in a quiet, unmolested location tucked beneath a crown of thickening paper birch & slow spruce. They don’t mind its prior use. Here they are, in the bounty of the present, trusting that their migratory impulses will in time disclose the need to move along, should that season ever arrive. & here we sit, nestled in the valley beneath the distant amphitheater of the Brooks Range, unperturbed, dipping our toes & settling into the gifts of presence we find around us, trusting that in spite of the relative absurdity of this Arctic familial enterprise, we have made the right choice. Our kids are ebullient, awash in the constant grasp of sunlight, attuned to the natural world around them. Ada points out kingfishers & hummingbirds & golden eagles in the bird book & then turns around to tell neighbors about the enduring reign of the allosaurus, or how she intends to discover a new hadrosaur in a mountain dig some day, once we get the plane up here. Whitman has begun running, halting suddenly at the sight of a snowshoe hare & bending over, hands on knees, to watch her hop into the willows. He hears every engine & looks skyward. They are happy, simply, & so are we. Already I am imagining the winter, its vascular network of trails blossoming as the rivers freeze. I am devising plans wrought from where we are, wrought of its foundational warp & weft. I am wondering if three more dogs wouldn’t be such a bad idea, or which snowmachine we should bring up, or what long excursions we can plan from here, poised in conversation with the greatest contiguous wilderness in North America. I sense the trembling filament of possibility again, feel its pulse & hear its soft music swelling. After all that time away, my self an instrument gone horribly out of tune, to hear the notes fall in place again an experience almost revelatory, slow in its sculpting, incredulous in what it sheds. After all that grief & all of that daily bafflement in country closed off to me, to feel again a becoming. A quick flame backdropped by what had been a glacially stunted stretch of days collapsed into anonymity.

 

In the water, the swan lurches his chest up, flapping his wings & holding them extended like a cormorant for a moment, then lifts, rises & circles beyond sight. I wonder, in his absence, if he has begun another long journey. & then he appears from the west on low approach & skims into the water, leaving but little wake.


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