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?
“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.”
It was a quiet, sunny day in Bujumbura and we were going to the zoo. The group walked from our meeting place in the courtyard of our five star hotel out to the back parking lot beside the golf course where our cars were waiting. As we passed the security guards, some of us greeted them in our broken French. C’est va. C’est va. As we loaded the SUVs, three people per vehicle, I looked for one of the drivers who spoke Kiswahili so that I could practice another tongue as we drove across town. I interrupted their conversations in Kirundi with the one word of it that I knew, mwaramutse, and then I continued the greeting in Kiswahili. Habari ya asubuhi? Unaendeleaje? It was a good morning, like all of the mornings I had in Burundi, and apparently the drivers were having a good morning as well.
We drove away from the hotel and the four vehicles moved aggressively through the chaotic Bujumbura traffic. At intersections and roundabouts, one of our drivers would block the intersection while the others sped through. The maneuvers were rehearsed and they moved fluidly with little communication between the cars. We soon arrived at the zoo. The scene was rather underwhelming. In retrospect, I’m not really sure what I expected. There was a dirt lot with a few trees and a building with ticket window. To the left of the building was an area full of kiosks and a small stadium. They were empty. To the right of the building was the gate to the zoo.
The zoo was at most an acre, if that, in size. As we entered, everyone slowly spread out, going here and there, unsure what route to take through the exhibits. I wandered through one of the buildings. It was dark save the sun creeping through the door, but the light was enough to see the walls lined with aquariums of various sizes and levels of completion. In the ones with water, fishlike bodies floated in silent green murk. Their eyes were dead. As for the fish? I heard voices calling for the group.
We all gathered in another one of the buildings. There was a long cage. The room was once again dimly lit and it took a moment for my eyes to readjust. When they did, I saw the contents of the cage: a dozen or so guinea pigs and a few rabbits. It seemed an odd exhibit for a zoo in a country that was surrounded by some of the most ecologically and taxonomically diverse countries in the world. Burundi itself still has some amazing rainforests, but much of their wildlife was run out years ago by long periods of civil war.
One of the people, who had been in Burundi longer than the rest of us and who had visited the zoo before with other groups, was speaking to the zookeeper. We all waited and wondered. After a few moments of negotiation, there was an exchange of money. The zookeeper picked up a tattered cardboard box, and then grabbed a number of guinea pigs and one fluffy white rabbit from the cage and put them into the box. He preceded to lead us through the zoo.
The first stop was the crocodiles. We walked over to a circular inclosure that was barely bigger than the crocodile it contained. It had a few puddles of stagnant water. The zookeeper pulled one of the guinea pigs out of the box and offered it to various members of the group. There were no takers, so he tossed the guinea pig to the crocodile who chomped it down. I glanced at the cardboard box that held the other furry critters. The bottom was now soaked with urine. We proceeded to the other cages, feeding some of the other crocodiles as we went. The plump white rabbit was dropped in one of the biggest, best kept pits, so there were logs and grass for it to hide behind. It survived much longer than the guinea pigs; running back and forth, hiding, running around some more until it was tired and the crocodile was bored and hungry.
Next, we went to the snake exhibit, a building without any doors that contained fifteen or twenty cases, most of them had snakes inside. The zookeeper was adamant that we would get our money’s worth from our rodent purchase, so he opened the case of one of the snakes, took one of the remaining guinea pigs, and dropped it directly in front of the (I don’t know the name, something very poisonous) snake. It was unimpressed. The zookeeper poked and prodded the snake to no avail. He wasn’t hungry. So the zookeeper retrieved the guinea pig and proceeded to the next case, leaving the previous one not quite closed. The next similarly poisonous snake was similarly unenthused. The zookeeper continued from snake to snake, leaving many of their doors wide open. There were no takers. I honestly don’t remember if I stayed in the snake exhibit long enough to find out if any snakes bit. Looking for a distraction from the zookeepers pleads with the snakes, I turned around and saw one of the other zoo patrons reaching into one of the cases and pulling out a slender green viper. This was my queue to leave.
I stepped outside and found myself beside the chimpanzee cage. It was roundish and maybe three meters in diameter. The cage was build around a gnarly tree, but only could contain the bottom half. Inside was a solitary chimp. There was a man there who had attempted to shake hands with the chimp, but now was caught in a cruel business transaction where he pleaded for his hand back and pried at the primates impressive, deal-sealing grip. Ultimately, there was an exchange made. The man was returned the use of his hand and the chimp received one liter of precious, clean, bottled drinking water —which he immediately dumped on the dusty dirt floor of his cage.
The zookeeper soon arrived. He had one guinea pig left in the pee-soaked box. After some hemming and hawing, he handed the final guinea pig to the chimpanzee. The chimp took the small critter, his new friend, and started to play with it like a small doll or action figure; pulling at its limbs, throwing it up into the air and catching with his dexterous feet, aggressively petting it. After a few minutes it died and the chimp carefully handed the limp guinea pig back to the zookeeper.
I heard other people at the zoo talking. They were appalled at the way that the chimpanzee treated the guinea pig; throwing it around here and there, playing with it like it was a toy. They pointed through the bars of the small cage. How could it be so cruel?
Driving north on the Glenn Highway on a rare sunny day in Alaskan February, the light broke through the occasional cloud and illuminated the Talkeetna Mountains in bright white and shadowy blue. The variance in the way that the sunlight hit the mountains creates a discordant patchwork of color that added even more depth and sweeping distance to the already intimidating size of the vista cresting the last hill before The Valley.
The show that the sunlight put on reminded me of an often forgotten and startling fact: everything we see has been touched by the same photons that touch our eyes. The constant ticking of particles of light through the rods and cones of these strange orbs in our heads tells us a lot about forms that are unimaginably far away. The sense of sight is so crucial to our perception of the world that visual signals in the brain are able to override other processes like when smell or taste or the unspoken logic of how the world works are disrupted by optical or psychological illusions.
Perhaps this intense power of sight over other senses is why it is hard to recognize one of the most fundamental attributes of our world: it is highly interactive and connected. So many of the incredible phenomena that take place in the world are not clear to the naked eye. One of my college roommates pointed out one of these basic-yet-unseen truths: you are what you eat. It is a terrible, ear-grating cliché that actually has an important meaning. I believe his phrasing was “humans are machines that turn food into humans.” The food that you eat literally becomes part of your body. This is most noticeable when humans are growing up from babies to adults because there is a drastic increase in size and shape. But even after growth has ceased, the cells of the body are replaced on a regular basis. This varies wildly depending on the part of the body but the average is about eight years for a structure to be fully replaced— all the while the body is taking in material like bananas and carrots and beer, processing them into building blocks, and manufacturing human organs.
This principle can be applied to any living and many nonliving things. A bear is a machine that turns berries and bucks into bears. Physarum polycephalum is a machine that turns oats and sugars into physarum polycephalum. The most concise summary of this idea and its implications that I have seen is that the world is a series of stories about things eating and being eaten. This certainly has some startling implication when we think about the food we put into our bodies that will become our hair skin and bones, but it is just as important when applied to nonliving things. An ecosystem is a complex system of eaters and food and although there is not a specific thing or things that an ecosystem eats, it does utilize natural processes to transform the materials it has available into different forms. This is why arctic foxes are white and baobab trees grow fat in the hot equatorial sun.
Just as important as being mindful of what we eat, given this information, is what we are feeding the world that we are a part of, never forgetting the other end of the bargain of eating is being eaten.
Mistreatment of the environment is not a plight of modernity. The issue with modernity is the scale of the mistreatment. I believe the Earth is resilient and can handle whatever we feed it, but trash that fills an ocean takes a long time to digest and exploded mountains take a long time to rebuild.
§
When I was in Kenya in 2013 I spent part of my time living in a Maasai boma (a semipermanent, multi-home enclosure with animal pens) in Samburu in the North. My home stay family talked about dry weather and the need to take the animals long distances to find food. City folk came and took sand from the rivers and now they hold less water. The plants stood stoic in the arid plains of dirt, craving the nutrients of the cattle feces piled a foot high in the boma’s animal pens. In the afternoon, after taking the animals to the river for water, we sat in the shade of one of the small homes and played bao, a game we know as mancala. The other students and I were new to the game and slowly learned the strategies necessary to win. One of the Maasai spectators, a friend of our host family, was impatient with us for not seeing all the right moves immediately and he would try to show us what to do or even make the moves for us.
Later, one of us lamented the intrusion into the competition, recalling the frustration of not being able to figure out the game for himself. All I could recall was the scratching of small stones on the wooden board. The soft tick tick ticking of the pebbles.
That evening it was quite warm long after sunset. I looked up at the moon. It was as bright and big as I had ever seen it. Shining down on me were photons from the sun bouncing off the surface of the moon into my eyes, so white and so cold.
This morning driving into town, I stopped on the west bank of the Knik. At this crossing there are two bridges: the one currently in use and the one it replaced, now slowly growing clumps of weeds and crumbling into the river. Every time I drive across the new bridge I have to force myself to keep my eyes on the road because the crest of the bridge is a particularly powerful outlook on the surrounding beauty. Today I decided to pause for a moment and take it all in. I had my camera with me. It was around 9:30am and still dark, especially because of the rain. Most of the usual mountains that amaze me were obscured by the low hanging clouds. In short, I couldn’t have picked a worse day to try and photograph that most picturesque of spots.
Stubbornly I parked my car in the pull off that was sadly covered in beer cans and other trash and full of puddles from the steady rain. I tucked my camera into my raincoat and made my way up to the abandoned bridge. It was cool and damp, but not entirely unpleasant. As I walked, I looked up at my subject: the lone mountain still visible in the dense grey. Her face, still covered in snow despite the balmy forty-degree weather of the past week, was beaming in the overcast sky. As I scurried up the rocks and gravel that barred vehicle access to the bridge, I reached for my camera and was immediately hit by intense, bitter-cold wind roaring down the valley, skating on the smooth surface of the still icy river and tearing across the bridge. My mind immediately jumped to two of the news stories from the past week —tractor trailer blown over by 90 mph wind gusts, plane crashes into office building— and began imagining a third one.
I pressed on, turning my back to the wind and walking sideways across the bridge. The first part of the bridge has no side rail or wall to prevent those who cross it from falling off the edge or to block them from the wind. A hundred meters down the bridge, however, there are trusses. I hurried to them in the hopes they would provide some relief from the wind so I could pause and take pictures. They did not. I took a few hurried snapshots and ran back to the car. The whole ordeal probably lasted less than ten minutes and left me cold and shivering despite my warm hat and coat. In total I have ten photos to show for it.
One of the ten is a picture of a small, explicit painting. Three simple brush strokes from a can. Three uninspired waves of an arm. One defiant act of rebellion so located that it will almost certainly not receive any attention from anyone worth rebelling against, let alone the authority it sought to defy.
Now I sit at my favorite coffee shop in Palmer. The rain has turned to snow, the broccoli quiche is delicious, and I am warmer. I have not been to any other coffee shops in Palmer, but this one sells pottery and paintings. There is a pleasant din and the quiet comfort of use scrawled in the scuffed wood floor. I sip my coffee.
This is a fact I know to be true but cannot yet explain: the second cup always cools faster than the first. Surely, there are always thermodynamic factors at play — residual cold from the previous cup, decreased volume in the pot means it is slightly cooler when you go back for more — but even if you rinse the cup with piping hot water and pour in completely fresh 190° coffee, the second cup will still get cold more quickly then the first. Not surprisingly, this phenomena has useful implications. When you first sit down to think, or write, or talk, or not think; you can savor the coffee. Relish the flavor and smell and warmth. As you get wrapped up in your chosen activity, the act of drinking coffee goes from a indulgent meditation to a functional task. You can no longer wait for your coffee to be drinkable you need it now. The second cup is gulped three-fourths of the way down and forgotten. When it is time to change activities, when your work has stagnated, you reach for your cup again and the cold bitterness wakes you from your trance. The cold coffee tells you it is time to go to the store or post office or head home to cook dinner.
On the solstice, the sun rose at 10:14 am in Anchorage and set at 3:41 pm. Today has been dreary. The past week has seen rain and warm weather and the snow has mostly been grey-washed away. It is not a coincidence that, in the northern and southern ends of the world where our 23.4° tilt most drastically effects the daylight hours, the Earth covers itself in a blanket of white beauty that actually insulates the area from unrelenting cold and reflects the precious sunlight and moonglow in a brilliant display that savors the day time and fights back against the pitch dark of night.
The lunch rush has arrived at Vagabond Blues. The din grows to a lively chatter. Outside the clouds have receded now. It is noon and the sun shines for the first time today. My coffee is cold.
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.
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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 