Dear Readers,
I have decided to move my writing over to Substack. My new writing and poetry will be posted here. You can sign up for free emails to receive poems from me every weekday straight to your inbox. Every weekend I will also send out longer thought pieces similar to my posts on here. I appreciate your support and hope you will check out my new site and subscribe!
Cheers,
Micah
After too long of an absence, I have returned to writing for this blog. Over the coming weeks and months I will be sharing some poetry and prose written over the past few years and I will intersperse more traditional and more recent blog writing. Some of the writing I share will be fragment, non-sequitur or otherwise incomplete. In these instances I ask for your patients. The first piece is about a year old and it straddles poetry, prose, and science writing. Enjoy and be well!
Orchestral Protein Behavior
In a majority of human creative endeavors the product is envisioned and then the components are selected based on the design of the end goal. An example of the opposite, the parts determining the whole, is when people come together: two as a relationship with bimodal interaction, three as a rudimentary network with more complex dynamics, and eventually many as very complex networks with varying degrees of self awareness. This happens in biological systems. Proteins know how to manipulate molecules and change them in necessary ways, to create. Whether or not proteins are conscious is irrelevant to whether or not they have the knowledge to cut, slice, craft smaller molecules in remarkable ways. I have blade and handle I can make ax. But do blade and handle know their potential? At some point the same molecular materials that proteins work with became proteins before proteins were proteins.
A protein is like an orchestra. Amino acids are excellent musicians. Like a great violinist or a trumpeter each amino acid is uniquely equipped to make music of a certain character exceedingly well. What an orchestra knows is that the combined singing, and often times the strategically placed silence, of many different voices can come together to make something nothing short of extraordinary. But for an orchestra to create music, every part must know what the whole sounds like, or should sound like, when working together. It must be self-aware.
In our understanding of them now, atoms do not have the awareness of molecular properties requisite to organize themselves into the molecules they need (or perhaps choose) to be, they simply know, based on their physical characteristics, which molecules to become. Like amino acids becoming proteins. They behave exceedingly well and precisely as themselves based on their characteristics. If you asked a trumpeter to play trumpet as well as he could, and to behave exceedingly well and precisely based on the characteristics of trumpeting, there is no doubt that he could produce beautiful sounds. But if you gave the same set of instructions (play your instrument to the best of its ability) to the ninety-nine other musicians, you would not have an orchestra. No one would know when to be silent. No one would know that sometimes a tuba and chime can coordinate and by playing based on the music of each other, make a sound that is not just a tuba and not just a chime. No one would know that by downplaying one’s own attributes, one can improve the functioning of the whole.
Conversely, in a factory assembly line, every worker does their specific job to the very best of their ability. The more precisely they are able to perform, the better the product. Some would suggest that amino acids are factory workers. But what a factory creates is dead. What proteins, like orchestras, create is very much alive. In fact, what proteins create is the basis for life. It is argued that what orchestras create is the basis for life, but that is a topic for another time. The most important question to determine if amino acids are musicians or factory workers is this: Who writes the music?
On a late spring day some weeks ago I was driving back north to my home after spending a week house- and dog-sitting for a friend in Anchorage. I was giddy. I didn’t quite realize how much I had missed the cabin until the stores and apartment complexes that line the highway gave way to trees and mountains. It was a surprising happiness and a simple one.
I decided to stop halfway home to refill my gas tank. It was early on a Saturday, around 7 or 8 o’clock, and both the gas station and the adjacent parking lot for the grocery store were almost completely empty. When I pulled up to one of the pumps and got out, I noticed a man in the distance walking across the parking lot. I thought nothing of it and began fueling. The man neared. As I finished fueling up my truck and was about to get in and go home I heard a voice calling to me: “Brother! How are you? Where are you headed?” The man I had seen from across the lot had made his way over to me. He was smoking a Black and Mild and wore an Army PT jacket and well-worn jeans.
“North.” I replied, suspecting where he was going with his questions, but keeping my own plans vague. He explained that he had received and email. That he needed to get to Fairbanks. That he had been offered a job but had no way to get there.
“I can drive you as far north as Palmer.” I offered. He accepted enthusiastically, took a few final drags from his cigar, extinguished it, and got into my truck as I cleared out the passenger seat. He was African. Perhaps 30 years old, he had short dreaded hair and weary eyes. I suspected he had come to the US from Africa relatively recently and (admittedly, always looking for a chance to practice my Kiswahili) I asked him where he was from.
“Ohio.”
“I’m from Virginia.” I offered, attempting to find a common ground for conversation.
“I think I’ve been there.”
The conversation was slow and awkward at first. We talked about how we had gotten to Alaska. I had driven. He flew. I work in a coffeeshop. He had bounced from job to job working his way up the Kenai Peninsula. He’d stayed in most of the jails along the way. He had gotten a ride at one point from a trucker who had grabbed his crotch. I promised not to grope him in a failed attempt at humor that I had hoped would put a deeply tired man at ease.
The conversation wound awkwardly around and eventually we returned to the topic of origins and my further questions about Ohio led him to tell me that he was from Somalia. That he had fled his country and spent a number of years in a refugee camp in Kenya.
“You hear my accent and you think this man must not be from America.” He said dejectedly. “You can’t buy anything for a dollar. A man gave me a dollar and all I could buy was that Black and Mild. I’m not even in a refugee camp but here I am hungry.” I had tiny bags of almonds in my glove compartment left over from a road trip and I offered them to him.
“How old are you?” He asked.
“Twenty-two.”
“Is this your truck?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve been here less than a year and you have a truck? I’ve been here two years and I still don’t have a truck.”
I tried to explain that it had belonged to my parents and that I was still paying them for it, but he continued his line of questioning.
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“No.”
“Do you have a wife?”
“No.”
“Do you have any kids?”
“No.”
“Man you gotta get your shit together.”
He talked about his plans to save up money and buy a sleeping bag and then a car and then land. He wanted to raise goats. He said Alaska was beautiful but cold. I dropped him off in Palmer with the few remaining bags of almonds and the $83 of tips that had survived in my wallet since Monday. And then I drove home.
To say that I was heavy-hearted on my way home would be both an understatement and an easy way out in the face of a deeply complex and heart-wrenching issue; a quick and easy way to fit such a vivid and unsettling experience into a familiar emotional framework. I have tried to resist the urge to find explanation in terms of “me.” Instead, in reflecting on that drive, I have succumb to another of my weaknesses: to think of things in broad theoretical terms. As if the problems of the man I drove to Palmer are a case study for all of humanities problems. As if these problems are to be solved by logic and not action.
Still —when confronted with the great and troubling irony that human action (and not theoretical engineering or sociology or economics) created both the concept and physical manifestations of ‘home’ and of ‘homelessness’— I seek the comfort of the writers I revere in order to formulate some hope of better understanding the problems of modernity and their possible solutions.
Jack Turner, in his book The Abstract Wild, writes:
The condors need to get home, too. So do the orcas. That they no longer have a home is not their problem. It is our problem; we have done it. The solution is to give them their home. Why is this so difficult to conceive or act upon? Part of the answer is this: we no longer have a home except in a brute commercial sense: home is where the bills come. To seriously help homeless humans and animals will require a sense of home that is not commercial. The Eskimo, the Aranda, the Sioux — all belonged to a place. Where is our habitat? Where do I belong?
‘All sites of enforced marginalization-ghettos, shantytowns, prisons, madhouses, concentration camps-have something in common with zoos.’ If we add Indian reservations, aquariums, and botanical gardens to this list, a pattern emerges: removed from their home, living things become marginal, and what becomes marginal is diminished or destroyed. Of bedrock importance is the complexity of animals, plants, and place that creates a unique community. This is as true for Homo sapiens as for all other species.”
Wade Davis takes a more focused anthropological look at the issues when he writes in The Wayfinders:
“In reality, development for the vast majority of the peoples of the world has been a process in which the individual is torn from his past, propelled into an uncertain future, only to secure a place on the bottom rung of an economic ladder that goes nowhere. […] As cultures wither away, individuals remain, often shadows of their former selves, caught in time, unable to return to the past, yet denied any real possibility of securing a place in a world whose values they seek to emulate and whose wealth they long to acquire.”
When faced with these bleak accounts that try to explain the problems of the world, I find comfort and hope in the words of the Lakota Chief Luther Standing Bear who said:
“…the old Lakota was wise. He knew that a man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans, too. So he kept his children close to nature’s softening influence.”
“Muncho Lake, British Columbia, Canada — July 26th 2015
I have not been writing here as much, perhaps, as I should. The trip so far has been amazing— absolutely breathtaking and my only regrets are that I do not have more time to spend here and that I have not written more.
As we were driving through Banff and Jasper, the clouds hung low and hooked on the jagged edges of the mountains like wisps of carded wool. It was there by the lakes in the Northern Rockies of Banff that I felt an overwhelming sense of belonging and pure joy. I must return. Much of the journey has been hours of dull scenery, but there are shorter, more vivid stretches of sheer beauty —the kind that shrinks you down to only the parts of you that are good, which is quite small. Currently I am sitting at a picnic table in a campground on Muncho Lake and it is awe-inspiring. The lake is blue. A blue that you find rarely in nature as I experienced it so far. A blue that can only be found, if you’re lucky, in the eyes of someone you dearly love.”
I found this entry recently when I was flipping back through the pages of my journal and as I read it I began to reminisce (as I am want to do) about the countless, utterly breathtaking places I have visited. Sometimes, it is the historical or geographical significance of the place that gives me pause, like the giant rock that I stood at in Burundi almost 250 years after H. M. Stanley famously asked “Dr. Livingstone I presume?” Or later on that same trip when I drank from the source of the Nile.
Sometimes, it is the experience of the place. While in Kenya in 2013, the group I was with got the chance to climb a table top mountain named Mount Sabachi located in the arid Samburu County with a group of Masaai Warriors and Elders. The camp where we stayed at the base of the mountain was dry and dusty and hot. We started early in the morning, to avoid the sweltering heat, and followed a narrow trail that turned back and forth up the side of the mountain; slowly fine sand and dirt became gravel and rocks. A short ways into the hike someone asked if we packed any food for the top, the Masaai man who was leading us smiled and gestured up the trail to another man who was leading two reluctant goats ahead of us towards the top. The hike was long and difficult, at least more so than I had anticipated, but the pace was relatively slow and broken up by breaks and the distraction of stories and Swahili practice. When we reached the top, I knew it was worth it. We were in a lush oasis. There was a bubbling spring, tall trees, and thick green grass. We had a Swahili lesson in a shaded grove. We sat on the rocks in the warm sun with a cool breeze overlooking the camp and listened to lectures about the lands below. We roasted the goats on a bed of coals and ate as the sun set. We walked down with the meat on our backs, hoping there were no leopards nearby.
Sometimes, like at Muncho Lake, it is the all-consuming beauty of the scenery. The cool air refreshing two weary travelers as they sat on a long, pale-white driftwood log on the gravel lakeshore of the slender body of water, nestled between old stone mountains, dark blue in the evening light save one long silver brushstroke of moonlight. We met an older couple on the beach who were making the drive to Alaska again after more than twenty years since they first took the trip as college students. We retired to the warmth of the campfire. When we found it was not enough, we drank cheap scotch from blue tin cups, read poetry, and listened to the soft splashes of our neighbors fishing hooks playing in the water.
Every morning I step outside and view the rugged beauty of Pioneer Peak and —stretched out in either direction, hugging her sides— her many siblings. The brown porch creaks softly as I walk out to my yellow truck, mostly covered in grey snow scum, sitting contentedly on the icy gravel driveway. Pines and birch and the side of the mountain calm the strong valley winds to a soft breeze.
These places are special. Like all places, they are the confluence of uncountable factors; from geological sculpting to photon skipping, from wind currents in the atmosphere to electric currents in neurons, the ripples on the lake and the scratching of a pen. These places are special to me because I have been there; been a part of the confluence. The Inuit word sila means both weather and consciousness, the natural order and reason. For me there are few metaphors that are as deep or as moving. It is at times where I feel close to the world and other people, like Sabachi and Muncho, that the metaphor is most powerful.
All this and some days I still find myself in ruts. Apathy rusts passion. The mountains are just mountains. The rain and snow are inconveniences. The litter on the side of the road is inevitable. Cleaning up after customers in the cafe is a burden.
At the end of the journal entry I also wrote a quote from a poem in Sophocles’ Antigone that I have read many times— I read it again on the shores of Muncho Lake that cold evening. I found it in The Tree of Meaning by Robert Bringhurst and use the English translation he supplies:
“Or [man] paws at the eldest of goddesses, Earth, as though she were made out of gifts and forgiveness, driving the plough in its circle year after year with what used to be horses.”
Down the old highway. Past the sign full of bullet holes that says ‘no fireworks’. And the one that tells you about hidden driveways for the next few miles. Turn onto the road that is some sort of gravel or dirt or mud. And pull into the rocky loop framed with railroad ties. That is where I live. Where the once trees were laid to rest in rectangular fashion, one atop the other eleven high and as long as the treetops. At night the cabin is vocal as it settles in for the evening. By day it sits and watches over the lawn, a little greenhouse and two and a half sheds. The chimney is hung from the sky by a single, narrow thread of pine smoke that tangles with the low hanging clouds. The lawn is mostly moss.
When I step out on the front porch I am in the shadow of a great mountain. When I look up I see avalanche streaks down her face. Even when I go to the mechanic in Wasilla or the alehouse in Palmer, I see her distinctive features in the distance and know home is waiting for me at her feet. From the back porch I can almost see the Knik River lying peacefully, just before her tributaries part ways and head up to their sources at Matanuska Glacier and beyond. If you follow the flow of the river west, she joins the Knik Arm which together with the Turnagain Arm form into Cook Inlet. Jutting out into the Inlet, nestled between the two Arms is a peninsular landmass upon which sits the city of Anchorage.
Three days ago, I was driving to work on the old winding highway covered in snow; it was dark. As I was coming around one of the bends that warns you to slow down, I saw a large mass in the middle of the road. I slowed the vehicle as quickly and safely as I could given the icy state of affairs and finally came to a stop a few feet from two moose. One of them apparently had experience with vehicles and hurriedly went over the guardrail and down the hill into the darkness. The other, it seemed, was less familiar with the concept of cars — or perhaps she was just smart enough to know that there was nothing I could do to get her to move. Either way, she stood with her rear to me (which was above eye level) and made no signs of acknowledging my presence. After a few moments of wonder —for this was my first encounter with moose— I began edging the vehicle towards the moose. She finally took notice and moved forward a few feet, as if she were standing in a place I wanted to occupy and not pass through, so I continued at my snails pace until eventually she realized my intentions or tired of her stubbornness and lumbered over the guardrail out of sight.
While she had been blocking my route to work and as she left, I admired her mythic form. Moose are incredible beasts. I knew this conceptually. The Alaska subspecies (the biggest in the world) can stand over two meters tall and weigh an average of 1400 pounds. A while back I went to a class on how to butcher a caribou —a process that yields about 80-100 pounds of meat— and they talked about how a single moose could yield over 500 pounds of meat. But none of this theoretical knowledge of the size of a moose prepared me for actually seeing one. More than any other animal I’ve encountered, you can see the weight of the moose. You can feel the weight in the way it walks with its shrugged shoulders and colossal hips. Even the herds of buffalo (the only North American animal that is larger than a moose) that I have seen in western Canada don’t compare. Perhaps the giraffes I saw in Kenya come close, but still they seemed to almost glide unless you can see the movement of their legs while they gallop. A moose has presence and weight.
The next morning when I drove to work there were eight more inches of snow on the ground, the most we have had so far this year. It was early, around two in the morning, and the highway near my house doesn’t get a whole lot of traffic, so the snow was thick on the roads. I cautiously drove its crooked route toward the Glenn (the main highway in Alaska) and eagerly awaited the relief that comes from getting to a more heavily trafficked road. But as I turned down ramp that merges onto the Glenn I was greeted by no such relief. During past snowfalls, even when the snow is its freshest, the traffic on the highway has left a path cut through the snow, two sometimes four tire tracks for others to follow into town. Today there were none — or, I guess, a lot. Instead of the normal group effort to forge a few clear paths, everyone had taken a slightly different route through the snow and the resulting surface before me was, quite frankly, terrible. There were ruts and icy patches and ridges of snow cover the highway, all the way to Anchorage. There is a quiet assumption that we make when we drive, especially on winding roads or high speed freeways, that the path is clear. We assume, without even thinking about it, that the road is clear and safe and there. And this is a safe assumption because it always is. But if you think about it, it is a bit surprising what we do, barreling down roads in fiberglass boxes at 60 and 70 miles per hour or more. You might start to realize that you make this assumption when you are driving down two narrow tire paths in the snow, that could at any moment give way to an ice sheet. And —if you ever find yourself on a highway covered in snow with no paths cut and cross winds that make ribbons of snowflakes dance and twirl across a white sheet, three lanes wide with no discernible markers or indication of where the road ends and the median begins— you are unable to avoid confronting that implicit fact that you normally take for granted.
This was maybe the fourth or fifth snowfall of the year, for the first few I had regular old run of the mill tires. And it was horrifying. I drive a small yellow two wheel drive pickup truck and it doesn’t handle snow well. Don’t get me wrong, Cheech is a trooper, but he has zero traction. During the first snowfall (okay, actually the second, there was one in September but that one doesn’t count), when I was driving home the entire Glenn Highway was an ice sheet. I was rolling down the highway, topping out at speeds of 30 mph and fishtailing all the way to the cabin. I was just trying to find and stay in one of the few tracks that were relatively clear and not run off the road. Big trucks and four wheel drive SUVs were zipping past me, their drivers giving me looks like I was mad. All the while the sides of the road were littered with vehicles that had slid off the highway or simply been abandoned in snowdrifts. When I got home, I learned that almost 100 cars had lost control and gone off the road or crashed that day.
In general, I don’t like impatient drivers, people that speed around other cars, passing unnecessarily in the right lane, and making the roads a little bit more dangerous for everyone else. Surely, I thought, people will be more understanding in the snow, when conditions are dicey. But, as I learned sliding down the Glenn with cars zooming passed, I was wrong. So I promised myself if I ever had a more adept snow vehicle, I would be patient with other drivers that might be as scared of losing control as I had been.
Fortunately, by the fourth or fifth snowfall my vehicle was more prepared for driving in the snow: I had studded snow tires. My family gotten together and bought them for me as an early Christmas and quite possibly saved my life. So, the morning after I saw the moose, when the Glenn was covered with criss-crossing tracks and ruts in some eight inches of snow, I was not slipping and sliding every which way and was much more confident in Cheech’s ability to handle the difficult driving conditions. The moon was very bright and the sky was clear. The snow was glowing and, in retrospect, would have looked quite magnificent to me if I hadn’t been preoccupied with the fact that it left the direction I was suppose to drive so ambiguous.
When I got downtown the roads had not improved (if anything they were worse) and now suddenly there were lots of other cars on the road and people walking along the side of the road, some of them appeared to be homeless, others drunk bar hoppers, and many were probably some combination of the two. Just past F street a couple crossed the road in front of me and four other vehicles five abreast with a green light on an icy road. They assumed (were correct in assuming) that we would all be able to stop in time, but still I was surprised by their daring actions.
I don’t know why —maybe it was the moonlight in the sky or the adrenaline pumping through my endocrine system— but that drive to work was a rather lucid experience for me. Everything had a realness that vanished when I parked my car. The words of this first post for my blog were running through my head very naturally as I found my way through the snow, but now as I’m trying to recapture those thoughts I feel as though I am coming up short. But I suppose the lesson here is that you don’t know what other people are driving when you impatiently pass them on a snowy hill in Eagle River and you should always be careful following tracks in the snow.
§
I do not know what this blog will become. I don’t think it will be about Alaska, although much of it will be set in Alaska because that is where I live. I don’t think it will be about nature, although much of it will talk about nature because it preoccupies many of my thoughts. This isn’t a science blog, but for many years now I have been a student of science and it will be impossible not to draw on that experience. I write poetry, but I have not decided yet if I will share any of it here, but I’m sure at least I will write about poetry or poetics at times. Regardless, this won’t be a poetry blog. I could go on because my interests are varied, but the bottom line is that I don’t know what I’m doing. Jack Kerouac said:
Whether or not that is true of myself personally is a matter for another time, but it certainly will be true of my blog, so I apologize if I write about something that you enjoy and then totally bore you on the following post. I do think there will be some themes and ideas that run throughout all of my writing on here, but it is too early to tell now what they will be. I enjoy traveling and the outdoors, linguistics and psychology, anthropology and physics, and many other things. I hope to talk about many or all of these topics at some point and will endeavor to keep the content as interesting as possible. Expect typos.
Enter Wilderness 