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.

in a stampede of fumbling green gentleness

mona just emailed from toklat and said she saw 29 species of flowers in bloom today on thorofare, which made me quite aware of the holes in my observation skills. i'm still fixated on the big bright gaudy things. my count for the day is 3, so far: the pasque flowers on my hill, windflowers at savage, lupine on the side of the road.
this week has been a long series of fascinating intangibles, and not in the NPS interp sense of the word, but that too. today, i'm focusing on the concrete: numbers, colors, map coordinates. garlic. the usual.

you can't steal a kiss in a place like this

"i know most of these researchers. and if i don't know them, i know someone who does and can tell you where they are and who they slept with 10 years ago..."
-an archivist at the UAF library who helped me with place name resources

"what we call the landscape is generally considered to be something 'out there.' but, while some aspects of the landscape are clearly external to both our bodies and our minds, what each of us actually experiences is selected, shaped, and colored by what we know."
-barrie greenbie, spaces: dimensions of the human landscape

welcome to the freakshow, here we go

too much to say and no way to say it.
summer seems to have started. the bake opened, which i handled well enough, all things considered, and i know it's not about me and it's just a bar so don't bother pointing it out. that morning, i'd locked myself out of 2 cars and a house, all at the same time, and still made it to the fairbanks airport in time. tonight i welcomed my second group to the subarctic and i'm now done with the 5th in 12 straight days of work, spread between 3 jobs. GVEA wants to reopen the healy coal power plant. i sleepily sat through a meeting about it last night then made enchiladas for jeff, cassalyn and nate and examined the hypocrisy of the subaru convoys traveling up and down the same road every day. haven't been home for more than 10 minutes in a couple days and i can't remember if i left beans soaking. there are many more interesting things to talk about than soaking beans. but there it is.

then there was a silence you took to mean something

i’m paraphrasing, which goes against the spirit of this entry.
tom walker, a local historian and writer, self-described obsessive compulsive perfectionist and wealth of information on anything one might need to know about anything, including the date of the last cleaning of my chimney and the cause of the fire that swept through the mckinley station in 1924, spoke tonight at the community center on his latest book, mckinley station: the people of the pioneer park that became denali. the book is the product of almost 30 years of research, and tom concluded his slideshow of photos compiled for the book with a black slide and white text: “a never again production.” he’s into details, and defended himself again the criticism that his work “gets too personal” about the emotional struggles, flaws, and moral discrepancies of his subjects, often people we like to imagine as frontier heroes and mythic clichés, saying (something like), it’s the details that make the story. “take the small things and they inform the big picture.” he said the quest for details and the stories they create is about sense of place, and yes, isn’t everything these days, but went on to discuss sense of this place. “why are we all here?” he asked. “i first arrived in 1969 and like many of you have been here longer than i ever imagined i would be. why? i don’t know. none of us can explain it.” and that the people of mckinley station, 1922, had that same sense.
our only interactions have been last fall, a brief discussion at nan’s about the revision process, and this week, an email exchange about the melt water lake in anita’s shed and the meaning of my email address. these are details, but i agree: they can be important. it’s presumptuous to even say i have a writing project at this point, and if i did it would be, i think, too frivolous, contemporary, and lacking proper references for tom’s tastes, but i’m formulating a list of questions about details and place: where is the line between simply “true” and relevant? can any story exist independent of place and if not, how subjective is the sense of it?
in a recent interview in high country news, annie proulx describes her current project (on wyoming, of course) as “a mix of history, bird and animal observations, soil and water, rare plants, archaeology, fence problems, the rigors of house construction, things that went right and others that did not, conservation efforts—something between a memoir and a close examination of place.” in wisdom sits in places, his study of western apache place names, keith basso includes the story, for example, of being told by nick thompson, one of his consultants, that he looks lonely. “the old man wastes no time…he urges me to have prolonged and abundant sex with very old women. he says it prevents nosebleeds. he said that someday i can write a book about it” (43).
and so if nothing else, i’m trying these days to remember the details. who was seen with who and where and how snowshoe hare legs are strung up in a leafless willow by a single sinewy thread or strewn in the middle of the trail, disconnected and bloodless. the thickened point of impact on a piece of chert and who brought what kind of salsa to cinco de mayo knitting night at kris’ house. i don't have the distance yet to know what's important and what's just true.
of course, the problem is that i also make things up.
(wednesday, 5/6/09)

and all those lonely nights down by the river you brought me bread and water

sunset from the top of the hill, last week sometime:
(i’m writing at home, to be transferred to the internets later today.)
it’s almost noon, i just started my 2nd pot of coffee (4-cup mr. coffee machine mona dug out of her storage trailer for me a couple weeks ago), jeff king is playing live ani on his radio station, which seems incongruous given his propensity to stop transmitting NPR every time a democrat speaks and switch immediately to conservative country, but i suppose you can’t question the logic of such things. another cloudless blue sky and the first rays of sun are crawling in my southern window.
nan stopped by for a beer yesterday and asked if this place feels like home to me. she says after 28 years here, a kid, sled dogs, and house payments, she still finds herself thinking of it as a phase in her life that will eventually come to an end, when she finally “moves back home.” she doesn’t know where that would be. she sat in the rocking chair, didn’t take off her sunglasses or binoculars, and said it would be fun if we both ended up in new mexico.
spring arrived this week in full force. snow melted, pooled in driveways and outhouses, and started seeping into the ground. the nenana is still jammed up somewhere between here and the canyon. on wednesday craig and i walked downriver on the ice, talking about how we’re trying to be more responsible and cautious on solo hikes as we fell through slushy ice to our knees, made obvious metaphorical jokes about not learning from mistakes. we made dinner, then walked down the highway to look at a caribou carcass on the side of the road. it occurred to me that i’m incredibly lucky to have a life in which this passes for entertainment. the next day went back to the river with cassalyn, who stopped by with wine on her return from anchorage and spent the night on my “guest bed,” and it was a different world entirely.
craig grabbing a handful of ice spears from shelf ice. the next day, cassalyn throwing them like confetti:
sun makes me happy.-----------------------------------
also: talked about place names at the subsistence resource commission meeting in healy on thursday, went with sam the archaeologist yesterday to look at sites near the teklanika campground, where i recognized my southwestern bias as to what constitutes an archeological site, and have convinced myself that my car is about to blow up on a semi-daily basis. i always have this nagging feeling that i’m looking at the wrong things. like the flies on my windowsill who, after having disproportionately loud sex for the last 2 weeks have suddenly receded into a lethargic silence, giving the impression that they’re waiting for something to happen that will take me entirely by surprise.
(south on the tek, from the tek west arch. site. sam was taking pictures of tephra and moraines...i ate a sandwich and stared at the river, occasionally asking a stupid question.)