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.

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.

sometimes you gotta go not look for nothin'

"It is not only the land itself that faces us in the North today, as real as that is, but the entire drama of European life on this continent reenacted at a pace that leaves us stunned and gasping. The experience is hard to come to grips with; there are few names for it, and too many old responses. We see Alaska through cliches to save us from thinking: 'The Last Frontier,' 'The Great Land.' What do these really mean, aside from a great opportunity to grab? 'North to the Future,' that preposterous slogan once flaunted on the state auto license plates: the whole thing is a travel agent's invention. There is no place called Alaska, just as there is hardly anything today that can be identified as California. But of course there was, and is, such a place, though it can scarcely be found any longer for what we have done to it, and are beginning to do here. What I read about Alaska in magazines is for the most part the superficial message of the tourist--he who comes to gape, but not to understand."
-John Haines, "The Writer as Alaskan," 1979.
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"i love the opportunity to fit more life into a day than most people expect in a month."
-bvt

come all you brave young cowboys and get into software

lupine on the nenana oxbow beach.
jeff and i saw greg brown in talkeetna last week. it was amazing. i was so completely in love with his voice and syntax that i couldn't even begin to contain myself. i wish i'd gone to the fairview to hang out with him after the show, with the rest of the town, but i probably would have just giggled and said something awkward, and instead i fell asleep almost immediately on jimmy's floor (and there's even a roof now!). we had dinner with keith at twisted creek before the show, and i think greg and i made eye contact across the restaurant. this is very much open to debate, and was debated (ok, laughed at. shot down completely. whatever). he was drinking red wine. i probably had food on my face. keith said jeff and i share food like an old married couple. we responded with some mumbling about health insurance and changed the subject to teamster rehire policies. delicious salmon.
desneige and anne are working at the foundation this year, and it's like ANHA 2005/6 again. except now we're older and wiser and more jaded about this place and have more hair, generally speaking...but, i've been wearing that same damn scarf for 4 years!
saturday morning, i was making coffee and looked out the window, and 2 yearlings were eating willows...they've been hanging around quite a bit. which is fine, until i want to go to the outhouse and they're right in my path...
saturday night was a potentially disastrous combination of the spike and the bake and good music and people to catch up with and a group of girls who plant ideas in my head that i can't quite let go of until i've seen them through...funny how 4 am never feels like 4 am till 5 pm the next day, when you're guiding 31 tourists through the boreal forest and making cheesy jokes about the denali's first park superintendent and wondering how and why this is all happening again...but with just enough variation to keep it interesting.

"everybody's got a story, everybody's got a family, and a lot of them have RVs."
-greg brown, "eugene"