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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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August 12

Thorofare cabin, a mile in from the road along a meandering path clearing low berry bushes & dwarf willows, a beaver pond flanking momentarily the south side. The cabin sits almost hidden against a hill bluffing over the Thorofare River, under a pitch of quaking aspen & otherwise engulfed by dwarf willow & birch & low brush. To the south, the range builds higher as it crops west to crescendo in Denali’s looming 20,320 feet; peaks that earlier today shone crisp now buried in heavy lenticular cloud. The porch of the cabin looks down at the confluence of a trickling creek with the river—three hundred yards downstream the Muldrow Glacier comes to its abrupt end, an ice cliff a hundred feet tall spewing rock & ice-boulders in its calving into the silty water. One, from here, can climb its toe where it is yet vegetated & hike steadily until only ice & rock reveal themselves, a barren arrow pointing directly to the north slope of Denali. The cabin serves primarily ...
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