no moonlight in the world can compare

i can't think about bernie madoff without thinking about scotty's castle in death valley. i was there in december when the story first broke, and within minutes of reading out loud in the car about "death valley scotty's" made up gold mines, i heard the phrase "ponzi scheme" for the first time on las vegas NPR and said something to jeff along the lines of "yeah, like anyone will take a story seriously when it includes the words 'ponzi scheme.' what the hell is that stupid word supposed to mean, anyway?" and i tuned out most of jeff's explanation because it included "money words" like "investment," but after a pause i made a connection: "oh, it's like telling your friends you've got a bunch of gold and they build you a big castle in the desert and then later realize you're just a sun-baked old cowboy with no money, right?" effective NPS interpretive publications at work! brilliant!
and that's about when my interest in that story ended.

the lines

"Read between the lines. We'll meet again in 200 years
when the microphones in the hotel walls are forgotten
and can at last sleep, become trilobites."

-Tomas Transtromer, translated by Robin Fulton, quoted by John Haines, "To Friends Behind a Frontier"

mama D knows how to party.
i've got some hot friends ;-)

but now they're tired, don't wanna think no more

partly for l e-c and partly for me:

"I wanted her to see that the only life worth living is a life full of love; that loss is always part of the equation; that love and loss conjoined are the best opportunity we get to live fully, to be our strongest, our most compassionate, our most graceful selves. "
-pam houston

cantwell bluegrass this weekend. friday: sharing whiskey in the mud and asparagus omelettes in the morning around julia's table, with headaches and conversations starting with "do you know that you ____ last night?" followed by laughter and groans. saturday: recovery, work, learning, again, that just because it's the truth doesn't mean it's welcome. crawled into desneige's sleeping bag next to anne at 5 am mumbling something about distractions and dreamt about imaginary birds. i never claimed to be able to make decisions. but i think i could learn.

and i'll forgive you if you find that you cannot swim

"it's nice to have a sense of entitlement," brian said laughing last night. we were sitting on the side of the park road at mile 55, above the wolf den, next to the wildlife closure signs, talking about using government vehicles for totally self-indulgent purposes and feeling no guilt whatsoever. i got to the toklat dorms just as his crew was finishing dinner, and got to hear some drama about concrete slabs and a misunderstanding about a generator that may or may not have been in healy, and we took off on bikes, west, then east, then set up my tent on the leach field behind the gravel pile, which was a first for me. our sleeping bag zippers are incompatible and i swear to god i am not attaching any overthought symbolic significance to this. b.e. came in to the dorms this morning when i was eating oatmeal and reading about frank lloyd wright's extramarital affairs in the corner, and when he saw me said "what are you doing here?" "it's a good place to sit," i said, as if that explained it. he shrugged. "guess it is." i thought a bit about the entitled way i move about this park, still with the innocent confidence of a 20 year old who thinks she can get anywhere if she smiles enough, and about how, when you pile story upon story in a certain place, the less the place becomes about the story and the more about the place itself, again.
i had ambitions of hiking divide or the east branch of the toklat today, but it was rainy and grey and i settled on craig's couch and didn't move. there's an irony about traveling 53 miles into a federally designated wilderness to find a place where you can enjoy the luxuries of running water, an NPR signal, and an espresso machine, all consolidated into one little government cabin, but that's another discussion altogether. i drank more coffee than a person should in a week, wrote 13 pages in my journal and learned about iran. tagged along on the relaying of a dumptruck to teklanika and got a ride east with bobby arund 6. some days, things really do make sense.

watching your hips move and the cloudy sky

(poppies on the thorofare, looking west towards denali, thursday)
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slept till 12:30 yesterday and spent most of the afternoon with coffee watching my basil sprouts uncurl out of the soil in the row of yogurt containers in the window, until keith came over and we planted peas in anita's greenhouse. the night before, desneige, anne and i danced panorama, where jimmy and woody were playing and keith kept buying pitchers till 3 am. the day had started on an angsty note and too early and flowed into an incoherent jumble of disney and wolves and overheard annoying conversations at black bear, dumb questions from cruise west, and a lot of information on darwin, and i was ready to start drinking and mean it. definitely an interesting trip down the hill when i finally came home.
woke up in cantwell this morning. you can laugh if you want. i am, a little. clouds are hanging so low that you'd never know there are mountains out there, if you didn't already. weekend edition is visiting dhabas in chandigarh and i'm having an intense bout of food nostalgia: chapatis and vegetables from the side of the road. i just put milk in my tea. brian's house smells like bacon.
i went to town last week--wednesday--to try again to get my AK license so i could get cheaper insurance and also to pay someone who doesn't already think i'm an idiot to look at the car. it was rather tedious. i had to get a fake social security card and try to prove that i live somewhere--anywhere, really--and was unable to prove that i live where i do, but after much effort and resourcefulness and telling fairly unlikely stories, i was able to prove that i live somewere that i don't, which seemed to do the trick. i look exhausted, drugged, or incredulous that i had actually completed the process in my license picture. which expires before 2048. arizona is weird.
got back in time for free food at the bake with the girls, and didn't get past healy with the car full of groceries in tow till the next day, after vacuuming juniper and rotating her tires in jeff's driveway. i made some reference to greg brown's line in "marriage chant" about how married people rotate tires and work in the yard, but the joke may have run its course. it's ok. i didn't want health insurance anyway.
then, girls' night at 229, where we spent exorbitant amounts of money on food that was absolutely worth it, and later knit at jodi's, and i snuck away to cantwell around midnight.
salmon nicoise. i have no idea what nicoise is. but you should absolutely try it.desneige, cassalyn, molly, and kate.
a while ago, between the spike and the bake.
anne and me.
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after a lot of somewhat disorienting work earlier this week, i took scottie's bus to toklat on wednesday afternoon, and arrived in time for a pizza making party. all i had to contribute was panorama leftovers from going out with tardy the night before, which i ended up eating sitting in the mud the next day on glacier creek. craig busted out the plastic toklat party fish, and bobby j gave me a pint glass full of wine. the trail crew decided to tube down the toklat from the bridge. i watched with some amusement and then went to sleep, eventually.
in the morning, i played with craig's espresso machine, and when i finally made it to the road, met the elderhostel group with whom i'd spent the last few days, and they crowded around me like little kids to tell me about their bear and lynx sightings. i rode with them to eielson, and then hiked to glacier creek and up to the little lake where, in 2004, janice and i swam with a bear. no bear this time, but a beautiful day.
which brings us more or less full circle. the clouds haven't lifted, and the bacon smell has faded. i should probably head north. but it's so hard to leave the internet sometimes...

but my courage is roaring like the sound of the sun

silhouetted trees from various driveways between milepost 224 and 229, last monday around midnight.