remain in your place for your season

last week, UAF landscape ecologist terry chapin spoke at the MSLC about climate change in alaska, and presented two maps side by side, one of the geography of native language groups of alaska and the other of the major bioregions of the state. the point was that they're the same, that language and culture evolved around place and these places are defined by certain ecologies and these ecologies are dependent upon certain climactic conditions, which are changing rapidly and this is a sociocultural issue as much as an environmental one, if there ever is really a difference.
a few weeks ago in fairbanks, i saw will steger speak, on his eyewitness to climate change tour, and granted, it was at the end of a town trip so i might have been feeling extra cynical and hopeless, but i was struck by the grand inaccessibility of most of what steger is able to witness on his expeditions: how does the average person experience the dramatic collapse of antarctic ice shelves or unprecedented raging rivers flowing over greenland's ice? exactly as steger presented it: on a screen, as an abstraction, or not at all. steger was not in any way claiming to be the only witness to climate change, but the discrepancy between his footage of the world's most endangered ecosystems and the immediately tangible lived experience of people whose culture and language and means of survival is based around a spruce forest that may not be a spruce forest for long is striking.
but i'm not really writing about climate change right now. i just wanted to give you boys in the NPS auto shop something a little more political and a little less personal to read at work (don't think i don't know). ammie and lauren both posted recently about their concepts of home, with pictures of their books, and how it relates to a relationship with a place. as i've been bouncing back and forth across the highway and up and down my hill recently, i've been thinking a lot about what i mean when i say "home," and how sometimes i mean the specific structure where the majority of my stuff is and how sometimes i mean a region where a certain kind of flower blooms at a certain time of year. so, here's my Home pictures.
molly and i hiked up flat top on saturday, and looked down on the neighborhood.
my cabin's a little dot near the middle of the picture. from the highway, the thinner of the 2 horizontal lines running through the picture, look down, towards the river, on the first shelf after below the first drop-off. that's the hill.
there's a bench on the hill, looking across the river towards flat top.
and next to the bench, pasque flowers! like awareness of the shift in midnight light, i missed their first few days, and it's good to be home on the hill with them.
a.s. commented a while ago on my ever-increasing "alaskan-style" piles of crap on the porch. and molly said "why bother putting things away when you're just gonna use 'em again next year?"
i cook here. i like the aesthetics of this corner. above the pot holders there are 2 feathers from the first thanksgiving turkey i ate in 11 years, last november at nan and bob's, and a photo of last year's pasque flowers on the hill, and bearflower in 2005 after i fell down divide mountain and stumbled into toklat coated in mud on the 4th of july, with a bloody left hand and a new favorite flower. that round green piece of wood was here when i moved in, 13 months ago, and is perfect for rolling tortillas. most of the books i've got in this state. i still have ambitions of reuniting all of them, the crates in my parents' house with this shelf with those i've lent out and scattered across the country, but as time passes it seems less important. and that spider plant has had a hell of a life, let me tell you...
lauralee made felted outhouse seats. i got this one in payment for helping her move a couple van loads of fibers from carlo to her house a couple weeks ago. and the board to cover the hole has a picture of g.w. bush looking confused, which ammie sent years ago and on the back it says something about how she got it free at a bar.