matter bent into life has hallucinations

may 20, 2010, milepost 39ish, park road.
same, june 2, 2010. unintentional. that view has been speaking to me the last couple years.

June 2, 1985

Mile markers are up again. Wooden mileposts once marked the road and offered a method of locating points of interest. In the 1970s they were removed to minimize human intrusion, to prevent people from flocking to known wildlife hotspots and scenic areas as publicized by various trail and road guides keyed to the mileposts. Now flexible, synthetic posts have been set out. A new interpretive guide will be keyed to the markers.

June 2, 1989

. . .I walked downstream from Teklanika Campground to the old dig on the bluff overlooking the river. . .Here archaeologists unearthed stone spear and arrow points, scrapers, knives, hammerstones, adzes, and blanks. . .
Before firearms spread across Alaska, the Athabascans subsisted with ingenious hunting and fishing techniques. . .Not far from the Teklanika campground, an interpretive sign says that the Ice Age hunters who lived along the river left "scant evidence" of their passing--just a few tools, datable to 10,000 years ago. Modern man's passing won't be described so kindly.

-Tom Walker, Denali Journal: 20th Anniversary Edition

a couple weeks ago, when i took the first of the above pictures, i biked the park road to toklat.* i noticed for the first time that there are no mile markers within the 5 mile sable wildlife closure, which starts just east of that photo. i was especially aware of their absence in that stretch because it was the first place i started looking for concise, quantifiable measures of my progress towards the goal: 53 (plus a little bit). it's interesting how simply knowing the topography of the road, the ups and downs and curves and passes, wasn't enough. i needed those "flexible, synthetic posts" to truly believe i'd gone anywhere, somehow.
above: the road, and east, from the ride behind toklat road camp; below: west, same, may 21. last spring, i visited the teklanika archaeological sites with sam, a UAF researcher, who pointed out details my southwestern-trained mind took hours to process as evidence of human habitation. despite knowing better, i kept looking for remnants of sandstone walls and pot shards in the excavated glacial dust. humans live on land in so many different ways.
last week, a grizzly was shot 4 times out of 9 rounds fired near tattler creek. the NPS is investigating whether the shooting was necessary or not. i've been thinking a lot about what seems "necessary" when you know you can.
i'm not talking only about guns.
every poet and every stoned college hippie has tried to address questions of space and time and absence and existence and i'll spare you some sleepy rehashing of the same, but i will say that i've never been so hypnotized by green as i have been these last few weeks, that the appearance of something whose absence has become the norm hits like a drug, and you can stare at it for hours or days and wonder how you lived without it.
tonight, i'm alone. i had beer and potato chips for dinner and watched the wind whip the willows against each other out the window and briefly obsessed on the origins of leaves, the transfer of energy to matter. but that was not the meal for such a topic (matter-->energy) and so i leave you with this:

"What history fails to mention is"

What history fails to mention is

Most everybody lived their lives
With friends and children, played it cool,
Left truth and beauty to the guys
Who tricked for bigshots, and were fools.

(gary snyder)

*in light of past events, a clarification may be necessary: when i say "biked" i really do mean "rode my bike," and this is not in any way a code for "illegally drove a government van ."