A Bit More From Bettles

 We have walked upon the taut & shifting crest of the wave, as from some far sea, compass-lost, the din of ocean-swell underfoot & the brocade of stars flung in reflection from trough back to sky. The horizon was a muted thing, a blur between grey & grey, flashing matte color like a starling in shade. One thinks of life as wanting, as tending toward rest, as if once unburdened of the velocities that buoy & compel us, its roots would writhe into Reason & its flowering would pull in the scented breath of the world. I have wondered at this, & been given cause to often. I tumble as much through space as I do through time. We are given to understand them both as linear, but they grow to enwreathe me, a kind of bird’s nest wherein the bend of having been sits across the diameter & sees itself grown longer, run wild, tucked between past & future. I think about ending up here, in Alaska again, in this town of twenty or so that felt instantaneously familiar. I think about the wave sprung upon itself, about its retreat, the quiet inland, the way birdsong floats or zephyrs. I give up on linear. All of these narrative structures upon which we hang our living—progress & success & resolution & afterglow, when every day sees them ushered past, bright & expecting our gaze. We are instructed in the language of wholes & halves, binaries, taxonomies. Our worth we measure in similitude, in difference, slung from one of us to the next, sourceless & indefinite of origin. & if we find foundation, root in, rut our lifeways, we hope to sit at ease & let the world turn awhile & count the years in peace. But then there is the urgency of motion, everywhere in evidence. There are the exigencies of time, the unraveling of the whole, the loose & dangling threads blazoning against the shifting breeze. Life eschews stillness. Stillness, it seems, denotes the pretense of efficacy, & efficacy does not belong to us. We are not meant for deep time. Our species is new & infected with a malignancy of its own making. All of which to say, the more I am alive, the more I find in life’s demand & compulsion toward constant flux a rare & inestimable beauty. We are wraiths, at best, drifting from shadow to shadow in all of our rare obscurity. We mean as much & are gone as swiftly & the world, the world retains its unburnished, languid beauty, lit in a palette of wonders, benighted again under wolf’s howl & owl’s hoot. & the names fall from the constellations, dust in humus & soil, riotous color exhumed from blackest dirt.

 

*

 

The way a place takes shape, flinted into animus, the arterial pathways that redefine the center the further they protrude past the circumference. The map trading dragons & pitches of blank space for ventricular wanderings that take on names & textures—Birch Hill, past the long pond where mallards cleave their delicate wake into the still sheen of water. Lakeside Trail, the sign painted in tender letters with loping script, curled with ornamental flair, sidling up the tundra into the stunted spruce. Rumors of an old mushing trail split off to Wiseman. The Ridge Road, down, I think, to Old Bettles, & split from it the winter trail with its orange blazes festooned on swinging birch. It is enough to make you wonder, & in time, adequately provisioned with time & leisure, to begin to define by walking.

I stood at the fork in the Ridge Road, looking down the winter trail & feeling a charge in me to hitch the dogs to the sled & feel the topographies under the runners unfurling. It may be too much the shame to winter here without a dog team proper. & so old dreams & new converge somewhere beyond a duck pond, in a meadow where a cabin used to be, the birch-song sibilant & strong.

It is good to dream again. I mean waking dreams, absurd plans, a sort of ideational trying on of possibilities, all while plumbing & gauging what this place is in its most basic terms, what it could use, how we could contribute to its vibrancy. Across the one main gravel road, the old Bettles school goes to rot. Where there was a playground, the new growths of birch thrust themselves up through the rusting bars of the grounded merry-go-round. A slide, long since fallen over in disrepair, has moss growing up its side. The swingsets have no swings. There are no tamped down trails meandering through the copse, no sign of life. Inside the building, a half gymnasium, classrooms, hallways with coat hooks & boot trays. A teacher’s quarters with the roof caved in. It has not been used in over a decade & the whole of it sits there, slowly given back to the earth. Meanwhile, lawmakers in Wasilla & Anchorage & Juneau consider the burden of educating communities like this too great & propose increasing the minimum number of students from 10 to 20. Towns like this, such as they are, would no longer even fumble with the feeble thread of hope. What is a town’s future without children, & why would children & their families be expected to carve out their education against that backdrop, defunded, intentionally abandoned? The broken promise made to a town like this, to its future, looms in the adumbrated bulk of that dilapidating building. It looms intolerably from our window & looks for all its function like the cold embers of a once bright flame, pummeled by years of rain & snow, lichen sprouting from the furniture, swallows more at home than hope. It stabs my heart a little for what it metaphorizes & for the negligence that not only permits it to do so but manacles it to such a fate. With proper coffers, of course, it could be bought. Valued, incredibly, at 3.6 million dollars, if one ever wondered at the price of refusing to educate rural children. I don’t know. I am accidentally aggrieved by all of it & wish I could hear, instead of the heft & hum of its grave silence, the melodious voices of children in song, lambent over the Swainson’s thrushes & cackling ravens, singing of joy & hope & promises kept.

 

*

 

Sitting on an action packer toward the stern of the jetboat, gliding over the brown riffles of the Koyukuk & then the utterly clear oxbows of the Wild River, there came to me the memory of a feeling that is nearly impossible to describe. All this time, the river flowing by, it never once occurred to me that its traverse by boat may share in no small part that same grandeur of its traverse by dogteam. I have spent thousands of miles between the frozen banks of rivers, the runners gliding along quietly, the wind barreling down. I have looked on the angular granitic rockfaces of the Fortymile at night while wolves howled across the border, crashed through the jumble ice of the Yukon, hopped from slough to slough, & bumped over portages where the river cedes to the lake. It describes its own time. I have always thought it such a singular sense, & I think for all of this it still is its own, but just sitting there yesterday, seeing the banks blur by, I felt overcome with that familiar feeling.

Our friend Judd, who happened to be driving the boat, had said last week when we were visiting a while that certain of his most memorable & cherished hunting trips had nothing to do with whether or not he successfully found his quarry, but rather whether the gestalt of circumstance came together in such a fashion that it produced a sort of fine, transcendent feeling that resists storytelling. I had mentioned a morning near Trout Creek, the sun finally yawning over the bluffs to light the far banks ablaze in red, & how in relaying it, I realized it wasn’t much to hear, but goddamn was it something to experience. He nodded knowingly & said “a feeling, not a story.” I too often think of memory as a kind of monolithic construct that ought to abide by narrative mores. As a sort of curio cabinet of stories that can be plucked at random & worked through & related to whatever else is stuffed nearby. We are taught to experience the world against the contexts it mirrors back, to fit our understanding into the patterns we think describe how we are situated here, in space, in time, in relation. Vagaries are shunned, & impressions & sensations & penumbras indwelling the peripheries. But I like the notion of a feeling being perfectly adequate or better. I don’t have titillating context for some of the most significant moments of my life, nor would their heft or awe or music convey if I wrote of them even unto my death. But they are a light in me. A torch lit against the maw of the dark. & one comes to recognize that these fugitive bursts of flame in you, gathered & cherished & trusted, come to constellate the darkness that would threaten us with obliteration. Not stories of ancient gods, not myths strung from star to star, just light that calls out life, proves its merit, burnished beauty. That, to me, seems the very voice of awe.

I have this problem wherein I don’t know how anything I write ought to connect. It is self-instructive & hopelessly arrogant & at the same time I often think of how tenuous our relationship with the world is & turn towards softening my voice, or its claim. Timorous with the world, suddenly, even while I want to clutch it. What point in sharing when I know that I am consistently lining out my own need rather than hoping for or even so much as believing in universality. But I think under all of that, there is a feeling in whose light I want to bathe. I probably have written about only it alone for as long as I’ve written anything, & I don’t know what it is but that it is foundational & sometimes crushingly sad but always beautiful & always, I think, the reason for living in general. How to find conduit for it, let it charge what we do daily, how we are in the world, in relation to it, that seems to me the thing. An arcade project for the ineffable, a scaffold for the air. Dreaming, then doing, hand on heart & in honest conversation with the dirt. To say I love this world. & every fine feeling it permits.

 

 *

 

On a bank of river rock perched above the float pond, we watch virga drift southward & feel in the urgency of the wind occasional pinpricks of rain. We are looking at the stones beneath us, each bent over in close examination, picking through the quartz & feldspar & aggregate to find, from time to time, a fossilized imprint of a flower, or the curve of a trilobite. We gather a slate grey stone with concentric white lines bent over its contours, its own topographical map overlaid upon itself. Jade-green & rounded stones, white & porous rocks that feel light & delicate, like ossified coral. Ada believes every other stone to be a dinosaur tooth of one sort or another, or a fragment of a ceratopsian frill, tip of a therazinosaurus claw, & why not? We walk over the bones of our ancestors, the fine dust of their finitude pressed into the soil & humus, made to matter in efflorescences variegated & multiform. Somewhere beneath the strata of recency, the striated bands of time stacked one atop the other, compacted, frozen into the permafrost. We are scratching the surface of deep time, plumbing for vapors from the maw of the indefinite. Except Whitman, who delights in crawling over our laps like an amnesic & burdensome sturgeon on gunwales.

I have tried to pay attention to how time has felt since my father died. To those moments wherein it crystallizes into the maelstrom the present can become when it divorces itself from past & future, or to those times wherein the flap of the raven’s wing or the shivering birch seem so ineluctable & so eternal that the claim of our own voices is rendered utterly insignificant, etiolated by the breadth & trajectory of a world that presses along against our interjections, in spite of them. I have thought about the future only insofar as I have permitted myself to attempt sympathy with my Dad as he laid there expecting death, not exactly fighting or fearing it, but clutching so tightly to what he loved that he wanted yet to linger. I am of an age, too, a kind of fulcrum, wherein I have shed the delusions of invincibility that attend us in our youth; but neither am I statistically susceptible to any sort of rapid demise. Middle age is divested of that brightness lent of forging one’s years in the fires of life & spared yet from the penumbra of absence. A sort of high noon that pushes one to dab at the contours of one’s eschatological relationship with the world, not so much to get things in order as to search for footing in the first.

We live, here in the Arctic, with our transience stamped upon us in our daily rounds. This house was built by the FAA 47 years ago, transferred from agency to agency, upkept by people not unlike me, who passed through & called it home awhile, exerting adequate but intentionally not exhaustive effort in the project of home-making. The kids, after all, will grow & require more of us, more of their community. Alaska does not provide schooling for kids in villages with fewer than ten children of school age. We will be their teachers, their parents, their friends, their wilderness guides, their pilots. They will need more, & we will seek it out when the time comes. Our grasp on the velocities of time involves now so many fingers, & our own pacing slows & adapts.

One is tempted, on a rainy day with the wind blowing & the skies luminous & grey, to patter on about the dulled edge of that sort of thinking, of its pain & its sadness. But then we walk among those stones & look over those spruce forests & see the scrape of cloud across the vast tableau of Arctic sky, & there, after millenia, the silver-bright & blaring light of beauty. & here we are to see it. Beauty not as an idea, nor an aesthetic, nor a telos, nor a mission imbued in our being, but as a phenomenon twined to eventhood, a breath the world lets out into the air, a thing beheld & vanished, flickering & fulgent &, in the case of the Brooks Range, enduring. A thing we can visit at will. If we are to be outlasted, as certainly we are, why not by something so wild & magnificent? We are in conversation with it a brief while, & edified by the intercourse. It is a curiosity, that our exchange as humans with a landscape so monolithic & ostensibly inhospitable to our presence can lead through the circuitry of our sudden & astonishing impermanence to manufacture of it, in the end, something meaningful. By all accounts, it ought to do the opposite. I wonder if a landscape wherein the smallness of our dreaming & the whisper of our presence is so thoroughly diminished by scale & comparison enriches because it evidences that something is ongoing. Were I to live in a city, I would have about me no indication of what might pass for permanence, or indeterminate time. I imagine individual notions of meaning bouncing off of & colliding with one another between the tinny girders of high-rises, flashing off display windows & rusted taxicab doors, lost in a different kind of vastness entirely, one that caters to the age, adapts, bears only a human mark, acts only as a human mirror. A city tells us nothing of the world without but for the resiliency & resourcefulness of the peregrine roosting on the skyscraper, diving after the pigeons crowded around park benches. They are places where the world is asked to submit to human wills, themselves in flux, given to the vicissitudes. What a curious bedrock. Bouncing your name off of an unnamed mountain in the far north & hearing its echo dissipate & be replaced by a silence that has attained gravity suddenly seems like possibly the only avenue for meaningful applications to time, to me anyway. It is not anonymity if you are the only one peopling the place.

Maybe it is all fugitive, in the end, & I know the world to be unsentimental, but I know it too to be empathetic & abundant with evidence of care. There are worse conversants.

Whitman, scratching his fingers between the gathered rocks, plucks the fleshy green leaf of a dryas from the ground & holds it up to me & smiles, his eyes already scanning the ground for the next treasure.