you could descend like rain

it has been brought to my attention that my recent vagueness is bordering on boring. i’ve tried to write more, but my internet time is so rushed and public and my brain is so abstract and generally inappropriate for public consumption (or google) that very little tends to come of it. so, at home now, just after midnight, and my cabin smells faintly like chiles and red wine. it's warm enough to leave the door open, and can hear the river and nothing else. the sun has set, but it’s not dark and won’t be for a couple months.
last week anita lent me her copy of john haines’ living off the country, the same copy she lent terry tempest williams when she was here in 2005 and no one since (i’d gone up to deliver my overdue rent checks and conversation turned to place and authoritative voice, as it is maybe wont to do in a relationship based on land ownership and the lack of it), which is sitting unread in the pile of books others have lent me. today i opened to a page marked by a post-it scrawled with a rudimentary map to an address in fairbanks (69 cumberland street), where someone--anita, ttw, or one of the many others who have borrowed this book before me, had underlined this line in faint pencil: “it may be an entirely imaginary place invented for the poem, but it is nonetheless true.” i thought something like why would you invent places when you have real places like these, but then i thought that maybe there's no real difference.
[couple days later. black bear coffee house]
yesterday brian and i hiked up slime creek, which brian told me is really sline creek, named after a person, and whose ahtna name is nanikaeni na’, or “those (rocks) which fell across creek,” and after walking on the rocks in the creek, slipping on mossy rocks in the painfully cold, clear water, reference to both slime and fallen rocks made sense; "sline," less so, whoever he might have been.
we alternated between the creek and shwacking through alders, each of which started to suck after about 20 minutes, and by the time we'd lost all feeling below the ankles and our arms and legs were scratched and bleeding, the creek opened up to a wide tundra valley,where we were followed by a group of young, indecisive, curious caribou.
but this is not really about caribou, of course.
"oh, the things you can justify by saying 'i was curious,'" cassalyn said recently, and by "you" i think she meant me, and by "justify" i think she meant "fail to adequately explain and then be mocked about for years." the theme came up again later in the week. i decided that cookies are not quite a replacement for satiated curiosity but sometimes all you can really expect. there was something recently on NPR in defense of curiosity, in the context of science education for kids, but i thought it was applicable to other arenas of life as well.
rode my bike to the chili cookoff last wednesday, after a long work day culminating in flinging some animal parts around and then having dinner with some disney guides. biva pointed at his feet and his eyes (he told me a while ago at the bake (not that i've been going) that he wants to dance with me again, sometime when he's not tripping on mushrooms and wearing steel-toed boots. i said that's the sweetest thing anyone's ever said to me and went home). waltzed with jeff instead, until i realized i was dancing half-asleep and went home. going home is usually a better option than i give it credit for being. repeatedly returned to carlo (slt'uuli na', "that (creek) which is tied up and bound") over my weekend. stumbled out of tardy's bed for breakfast at creekside and then fall asleep again (or whatever), north on friday afternoon long enough to briefly go home, chop wood, welcome 34 people to the subarctic, visit jess & jim and be invited by baby kate to watch her pee in the potty (!), and back that night to panorama to eat pizza with cassalyn and drink whiskey with nate. our subarus spent the night side by side in the parking lot. an ideal day, all things considered, and the kind of place that ensures that i don't have to make them up.