not many good cows but many good places*

sometimes “sense of place” comes to you less like the wave of gradual located understanding and calm engagement with the present moment-in-place, as it’s so often described, but more like diving head first into cold water or unexpectedly crashing into a tree in the middle of the night (while walking). i don’t mean this in a necessarily negative sense; eventually, you adjust to it. it struck me first just south of cantwell a week ago, and it’s taken about that long to fall into the rhythm of it (it=here) again. the drive back from fairbanks on friday took almost 5 hours when it could have been 2, after running into murph in nenana, then biva at the healy chevron, where dave invited us in for beer samples from the bake, and then to the totem, and by the time i made it to the village it was too late to get my groceries down the hill in daylight, so i gave in to the endless stream of distractions that is denali and continued on to carlo for a sauna. since then: nesting, tardy gras, getting to know my woodstove, dragging stuff up and down my increasingly treacherous hill (if i survive through breakup, it’ll be a miracle), more nesting, visiting big kate and baby kate (who is now huge and talks), w-4s and program scheduling, and today, drinking too much coffee and reading about athabaskan hydronyms (and how awesome a word is that?). according to jim kari (UAF), no’ and neek’a are the main hydronyms (terms for “stream”/”waterway”) in central/western AK.
out my back door: the frozen nenana.
and i get to live here:
*keith basso quoting a western apache consultant in wisdom sits in places