the Nixionary

Over the back fence hangs a huge orb, Crayola blue, on a braided rope. It’s a Japanese glass ball the neighbor found on the beach.  You can find them here–remnants that kept fishing nets afloat before catching a wild drift across the Bering Sea. A writer named Dan Henry camped under the ball this weekend and we talked about Haines and writing on a bright green hike up Indian Creek. He was working at the conference of writers that comes every summer, although this summer was its last.

On Sunday, I went to hear Gary Snyder speak. He was smaller and older than I thought he would be, and talked about life in Japan and a commune in northern California where people passed a talking stick in large circles to clear up arguments. Snyder was wearing this light blue shirt whose arm-lengths were crisp-creased, pressed by a dry-cleaner, maybe, and I couldn’t quite picture him pounding redwood poles into the frames of homes. He didn’t talk like a poet, like he was downtrodden with meanings, which I liked. He had on a fishing vest, and read a simple haiku about dew that had the ending “and yet…and yet.”

Someone in the audience asked him if his ideas were enough for newer generations and he said, “You can’t tell kids what to do, but given enough years, a lot of them will come home and engage again,” which is what I did, I think, when I moved back to Denver last year. He also said that in case kids don’t come back, which is a fear I have of having my own, that “People will use the work you’ve done, one way or another.”

Then, these two Tlingit women, one whom I know from school, stood up and handed around a basket into which thank you notes and abalone shells went for the Symposium starters. The one in a magenta turtleneck had native earrings and a long, old ponytail and they danced when she looked both ways, then said, “There is no language for true gratitude.”

This is a harbor with women who grow their hair long and gray, scour beaches for smooth glass, understand that sometimes there are no words for what we need to say.

Tags: Day to DayNo Comments.

Sitka, this summer, is very different from last. Blue patches appear like bald spots in the clouds most mornings, and this summer, I can actually move. Whether that means going on a hike or going to the rickety old gym across the street, both places are brimming with movement, which I need need need.

At the tops of the hikes here, there’s so much to see between the thumbs of fog and lumps of islands, it’s hard to make progress with your thoughts. The way down is worse because it hurts. On days when there’s too much rain, I go to the gym, where there’s a group of women who do aerobics in purple spandex, kicking out their heels and making chicken wings of their hangy white flesh. They do this right under the weights where the rest of us giggle and try to do more serious repetitions. Occasionally, one of the jazzercizers will scream a “Woo!” or a “Oh yeah!” with her fists in the air before the whole cluster grapevines with new gusto in the other direction. So the hikes are hard and the gym is hard, too. Otherwise, I’d just be sitting here alternating between work and my own work and where to put it and creamy chai tea.

We are staying with Nancy and Brent, who own a boat called the Dipper, and fish for days at a time. Nancy lives in shorts and fleece sweatshirts and hangs her brown and maroon laundry on long lines that make a checkered ceiling over the backyard. We cook salmon and albacore, rosemary bread and asparagus over a pile of wood on the dirt ground, resting the grill grate on white marble gravestones.  The man who used to live here made all the headstones for the cemetery at the end of the street, and left the misprinted ones back here, buried under the soil under the bed where I sleep.

The more I’m in this town, the more realistic life here seems. You lug your dinner home from the hull of an aluminum boat, you cook it on the names of people who’ve done it before, and in the morning, the rain has washed the soot off all the stones and they’re renewed to their purpose. Maybe it’s a Disney motif, but the “circle of life” theme plays out here with such purpose, the days feel like they are a different version of “functioning” than they are in bigger places.

Last year, in Anchorage, we had this guest speaker named Oscar Kawagley, a man born between the old Alaskan world of folklore and the new American world of institutionalized education (his grandmother didn’t want him to go to school because she thought it would make him dumb), who talked about the construction of Yupiaq homes. These dwelling places, still lived in up here, are made without nails or spikes. Each piece fits into the next perfectly–a series of sliding tongues and grooves.

What I remember most about his talk was that each part of the heated, sustainable house has a name. Each piece of cedar, each element to the fire pit is given a specific title so that it renders a specific function complete. The Yupiaqs believed that teaching happened outside of schools, that you teach the very thing itself, not just about it. There is a fish camp up here where kids can go to learn how to tan hides and can their food. The natives believe in the role of elders and environment, echoes I’ve been hearing in this town as I research its roots and talk to its white-haired characters for my work with the Conservation Society. Still, the division between the people who were here first and the people like me, who weren’t, is palpable and impossible to attend to appropriately.

Even though a new hydro plant will bring renewable energy to a town that will perish if it keeps using petroleum, to make the factory means destroying thousands of acres of trees that will take several human lifetimes to regrow. As a nod to the Tlingits, who might never have needed electricity had the whites never introduced it, the uprooted trees will be made into boats and totems for their incensed communities. The late-night drunks in the town are stumbling natives, the man who plays the ukelele at a clean, white cafe owned by a baker from Colorado sings with the sadness of a thousand years.

On the water, the division between cultures is less clear. Last night, I took a trip out to the West Chichagof Wilderness where the curve of a humpback whale surfaced and lower repeatedly right alongside the boat. His split tail fanned out like a flippant farewell each time he dove for food. A sow and three bear cubs stood on their hind legs and sniffed the air when they heard our motors approach, and later, we saw more bears, this time an injured mother and her two older babies, who lumbered through the tall grass and bumped their shoulders against each other to get the next bite. A friend told me you can make tea out of the lychen that gives the cliffs here a green and black bathtub ring. We ate local Theobroma chocolate bars with pecans and raisins and squinted into eagles’ nests in the tops of protected trees.

It is amazing to me to see that the world, like this, still exists. And, despite our human missteps, we can still be a part of it.

Tags: Day to Day3 Comments

Ketchikan is run down at first, with long lines of rust on the sides of fish warehouses and rain cisterns, but as we get into town, the paint awakens and fish houses are filled with fur-covered Swiss cruise patrons.  Krystyna owns a huge red, “brand spankin’ used” truck, which is what the shiny license plate says. She’s two years younger than me, in her fourth year in the Coast Guard, and moving to Sitka for two years. She asked her ex-boyfriend to move with her but he wouldn’t leave Minnesota, and she says, staring straight ahead at where an old cannery decays onshore, “I don’t do long distance.”

It strikes me that I might never have any idea who she is. Inside her truck are her things: a huge brown teddy bear, another lifeless stuffed toy with only one ear hanging out of the cup holder, pink and purple ribbons and bags, and sentimental country music CD cases.  We have lunch with her friend Mike who’s also in the Coast Guard and either gay or in love with Krystyna. I can’t tell. I’m not sure it matters, but what does is I am not used to being around strangers at such lengths anymore, and I feel like I’m stuck in the middle of being young and not old.

We run into Ed at a breakfast diner at the edge of town as I’m squeegying yoke off my plate with a piece of wheat toast, and he doesn’t make eye contact with me once. He says, “You’re 26 going on what? 20?” There’s an edge there that had been, apparently, smoothed out by the boat before. He has his laptop, he needs to find wireless, and he might see us later in the day after he hikes and writes. Urgency: there’s that too, in the men who come on short trips to take in all of Alaska.

Over the water, an eagle and a raven and float planes swoop down and fight for space. A 12-story cruise ship puffs its way out of town with a man on top who’s running laps against the muscles of the wind. When we make it back to the house, full on breakfast and a lunch of blackened halibut tacos and beer, we sleep hard and sweaty on two big green couches while the sun makes it slow way west over mountainous islands with ribbons left by boats in-between. The smallness of being me returns throughout the day while I watch the sky play with the waning light.

When I wake up, I walk for a half-an-hour down to a small marina with a hamburger and shakes shack and a few plump, pink little girls who are looking for a towel. From the boardwalk, thousands of needlefish catch the light on their silver scales, darting over each other and back in a choreographed blob of pivots and decisions. I’ve heard they stick together like that so they appear to be one big fish. I drop a penny into their circular system and they spread like tumbling pick-up sticks.

Getting back to the ferry for the next boarding call means waiting on the netted ramp for three hours until the sun has almost come back up. I call my mom and tell her I’ve met a friend and didn’t have to hang out with the homeless people in Ketchikan. Krystyna’s back is against the driver’s side window and her knees are pulled up to her chest. It is almost 3 in the morning, but filling time this early is the same as filling it late. I realize that some people’s stories mean little to nothing to me, but this girl whom I barely know and all these men and all these people in all these remote places and myself, we all want at least one thing, which is to be listened to as someone who’s distinct, and that’s worth not falling asleep.

Tags: Day to DayNo Comments.

The Alaska Marine Highway Ferry is nicer than I had thought it would be. My cabin is large enough to spread my arms and legs in 45-degree angles to my trunk, and thoughtfulness is nestled in here: reading lights on the top and the bottom bunks, heaters under the dome of the solarium where people pump up pool rafts for three-nights rest, plug outlets and hot water and linens folded into sharp triangles in every room.

When we push heavy into the sea, the air comes pulling through the top deck, cold and clean, and I remember now what Alaska feels like. It feels like you’re so alone, you really need to be near people you love.

Bellingham’s quaintness becomes a cluster of khaki behind us and soon there is nothing but silver and islands and sun. It doesn’t set until after 10, and in the late light, I’m talking to a man about writing and volcanoes, which I’ve been thinking about for weeks.

Before I left Denver, a friend was telling me that Old Faithful in Yellowstone is 60,000 years overdue for erupting. This has terrified me since I heard it. “If it does erupt, you better be halfway across the world,” he said, “because the ash cloud is going to block out the sun and kill most of the existing population.”

It’s easy to forget this omnipotence when the radio works and the car crosses bridges and you can close your bathroom window when the breeze is a little too cool. But when you’re on a boat or when you get talking about the tiny string attaching you to a furiously rotating and changing earth, things are not so controlled or calm, they’re horrible and scary-pretty and bigger than anything you’ve ever thought about, muchless done.

Hanging over the fourth floor deck of the M/V Columbia, this man asks why I’m going to Sitka because he’s going there, too. I’m going there to live and fish and try harder at being there than I did last year; he’s going there to hunt a volcano.

“I drove from North Carolina to summit Mount Edgecumbe,” he says. I’m surprised because Edgecumbe is no Everest. It sits northwest of Baranof Island like an overturned cereal bowl with a top of snow running over its rim and down its slopes in long, wide drips. This guy’s friend is a vulcanologist who flies into bigger monsters like Redoubt and Vesuvius, testing rocks and snapping shots of their powdery slides. Edgecumb takes only a day to climb without equipment, and I’m impressed someone would make a trip for its humble height.

Later, in the cocktail lounge straight out of a 1970’s Joan Didion novel, with gold and black wallpaper, hundreds of globular lightbulbs hanging bare from the black ceiling over booths with backs so low, your shoulderblades touch the person’s at the table behind you, I find the same volcano man again.

We have Alaskan ambers in two frosted mugs while the sun flashes through the window seams and rows of seats in the forward lounge. I want to know everything about volcanoes, and Ed seems to know everything about them and wishes to know nothing about me. He talks, I listen. It is often this way with men who are attracted to Alaska; they are attracted not only to the grandeur of the place, but also to their own grandeur as they attempt to conquer the state’s features. I have felt like an amateur in many ways for my whole life, but I feel an exterior insistence on my own inexperience even more when I’m in Alaska because I’m young and I’m a woman. I wonder if anyone ever feels like a professional or if they just talk themselves into feeling like one.

When I ask Ed about Old Faithful, he says it’s on a ridge that has been always moving west. “It’s nowhere near erupting,” he says. “Geology is slow.” His accent is southern with a metal north-of-the-deep-south edge. “People don’t realize that it’s much slower than we can even comprehend. Measuring it and predicting it doesn’t really show us anything.”

When we dock at a town where I can use my computer, I find that The National Park Service would beg to differ: their measurements do not detect any pre-eruption matter. Nonetheless, one of the most frequently (absurdly) asked questions is: What is being done by the NPS to prevent a possible Old Faithful eruption?

We decide to have dinner with a few other travelers in the nice restaurant on the back of the boat for the full experience of being onboard. While we wait for our “Tour of the Sea” dinners, an otter slides by, slick and chocolate, his hands folded on his chest contentedly, and looks straight up at our eyes above the white tablecloths. There is just the heaving of the boat’s breath as we look out at the pink and blue and bald eagles cutting through it. Ed shows me a picture of his two daughters, around my age. I ask him if it’s hard having daughters and he says yes. Women are, I think, can be more difficult than men.

Then there’s Ellis, a fisherman who lives on San Juan Island during the year and fishes for 20 days at a time in Wrangell, who never stops talking. He’s next to me from the minute I start drinking my tea at 7am til the time it’s empty, and I drink slowly. He must be in his late 60’s, but he has this boyish glee about boats and the fish he’s caught as a gillnetter and the trips he’s taken on this very same route in a 38-foot skiff. He shows me his calloused fingertips from picking knots and talks faster when he talks about storms. I am almost entirely quiet for two hours, while he talks about the Fish and Game folks who came and ripped his floorboards up to see if he was properly disposing of waste. With his nephew, we walk to the other side of the ship to see a preserved 102-pound salmon mounted on the wall, and under its belly, they tell each other, but they’re really telling me, the stories they’ve known for a long time: the biggest one they caught, the one that got away, all the others that didn’t.

There is a lot of pride onboard, but the more people I talk to, I realize there is little to no bitterness on these boats and I can take hours of cheerful braggery over the slightest bit of cynicism. I meet a young woman around my age with dark brown hair in two long braids who offers to put my stuff in her truck and let me hang out with her and her friend in Ketchikan where I have 20 hours and my four months of stuff and nothing to do. Getting off the boat feels final and a little bit unfair when the new people with their luggage bump down the gangway with all their own things rolling against mine.

Tags: Day to DayNo Comments.

Driving.

It makes you sit with things you haven’t sat with in a while:

Age. Yourself. Yourself at your age and all the ages you’ve seen in others but haven’t felt even though you know you will one day and some numbers might not necessarily feel as good as now. Hunger. If hunger continues to increase. For different things—others, aloneness, faith, hope, love, and snacks.

My parents are driving me to the boat that will take me to Alaska. We stop at Manzanita, Oregon, a little town with a little hotel where two drunk women open my bottle of wine on the balcony and scream at me about Sitka. What are my favorite things to do there? the one with tight orange curls asks.

“Fish for salmon,” I say. “Hike Harbor Mountain.” These things are true. I realize how simple some answers can be when the right questions are asked.

“Real salmon?” the one from New York says. Her teeth are turning the color of prunes like mine do.  The sun has just dissolved into the navy blue sea and behind us a salmon-colored line stretches between sharp rocks and the silhouettes of beach-combing birds. The ocean’s roar is quiet and continuous. I want to do something with it. Drink it, maybe.

I go downstairs to get my bag, and in the shrubbery between the beach and the road, a tall coyote fixes me with dark eyes. I thought they’d be yellow and he would run. He just stands there. I want to stare at him forever and see what he’ll do, but then my dad starts clicking at him like he’s a dog, and he bounces out towards the waves.

In the morning, the tracks are everywhere: pencil-thin circles of them, then straight lines, squiggles, and separated sunken ones like the animals had a little dance party in the sand.

On the way here, I read Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses. I can’t decide if I want oceans or mountains or just horses in a low field of long grass that turns to flowers in the spring. Some have shrunk and some have grown, but some of my dreams haven’t changed since I was a little girl. Petterson says: “The movement first and then the comprehension.” This is a good lesson, and I think it’s about approaching the things of dreams.

My dad likes to read every sign we pass. Salt water taffy. Shiatsu. The Human Bean. A Gypsy’s Whimsy. My mom likes to make comparisons: Portland’s tight streets are like New Orleans, Astoria’s hills dump you into intersections like Galena’s, the long log of driftwood we pass on the beach looks like the one her father brought home one day, out of nowhere, and covered with a squiggly piece of glass. It became a coffee table. It became trash when the kids kept breaking it and my grandma said, “no more.”

I can tell when my mom is thinking about her parents. I wonder if memories are the movement or the comprehension part of the Petterson equation or a little of both. Maybe we all have different ways of processing beauty and breaking it down so it makes more sense.

On 101, we pass crematories and creameries, a tree farm with thousands of trunks planted on a perfect and dizzying diagonal, halls of shade, and rows of auburn light.

I can tell that my dad wants to take pictures of everything. This is how he comprehends movement. Later, he will move the movements again, shifting the f-stop and aperture on the computer. He likes long shadows, the contrasts between sky and land. He yanks the car to the other side of the road and leaves the door open as he approaches the lip of the Pacific, crunching down on his knees and aiming the camera almost clear of the shore, up to where the clouds have been stretching thin all morning. On one spindly bridge, while he’s driving, he holds the camera up near the rearview mirror and videotapes our car just barely staying on the right side of the dividing line. My mom shakes her head and looks out the window at the white birds rising and falling in the wake.

I drive and read and see, backseat drive and write. Bright yellow bushes explode from the green. Two horses burst into movement and their tails follow. The ocean stays steady, moving, then moving back into itself.

I love how much we trust this type of travel. Engineers must have known the best road, though long, is the one the sea already chose.

Tags: Day to Day60 Comments