Into the Woods: Lower Russian Lake 11.21.09

We started out into the icy frosty woods yesterday, Trout, Potato, and I. The clouds were hovering below the ridgeline, hiding the tops of the mountains from our view. I cared a little, dogs not so much. Trout tore it up out onto the snow-covered road as soon as I opened the door, an animal in his element, glad to see the joys of winter upon us. Is he smiling as he comes barreling towards me or is that just the wind resistance pushing his jowels back?



The snow has covered the whole forest, the limbs look like they've been dipped in white cake frosting and coconut flakes. Feet tramp over squeaky powder, still not enough to warrant snowshoes. Into the woods, on up the hill into the broad valley of Lower Russian Lake. I biked up here in June with Dave and Claire at 5:00 in the morning to make the Red Salmon opener. Biked back down a few hours later with a garbage bag full of fish strapped on my back. No fish today, no fishermen, just me walking into a dying sun with a couple of dogs. No bike gliding me over the trail, two feet steadily moving forward to keep the body core warm on this single-digit day.



We climb gradually higher, not an LV Ray experience in store for us, but a faded daylight, the best time to be out hiking, is. Soon we are out of the thin cloud cover and see just how little there was above us. Wouldn't have known that if we'd stayed in the car. We get to an old prescribed burn and get our first look of the valley completely open. The sun is blaring behind a veil of clouds. The dead sticks and trees in front of me frosted still, serving as front row seat, puppets at attention, to this early winter light show.



The trail leads up and around the lake, offering views up and down the opposite range. The trail of clouds we've walked through has a partner on the other side, though not as prominent, skirting the hills and fading off into nothing. Just enough to grab your attention, to help you look through. Much more so than if there would have just been A MOUNTAIN IN THE DIRECT SUNLIGHT. Snow blindness, meet cloud blanket. Become good friends, know when to call on her.

And when we arrive at the cabin I shake my hands earthward 30 to 40 times to get the blood back in 'em. I munch on some almonds, take a leak into the still dropping air, throw on an extra layer and summon the four pawed companions back the way we'd been. Alpenglow is pink and orange against the dark blue night as I squeak back home, a fortunate field mouse in the forest.

Total Immersion

Here we go, folks. It's a warm one this week, after gaining twenty degrees and shedding the golf outfit I wore for Halloween recently, it's time to attack a few projects. Not that we are ever completely our actions, but you know sometimes you have to work from the Outside In. So while rearranging some rooms of the house, digging all those pushpins and dust bunnies from their corner homes, while chopping wood and stacking 'em in the shed while Trout watches curled up in camp chair on front porch, while learning once more the regular feel of plastic keyboard under fingertips, the world slowly opens up.

~
Last night. 11.05.09. Carter Lake Trail.

The mist had fallen in quickly. Where LV Ray had just been was now a wall of cloud. Ankle deep and crusty, the wet powder grabbed onto my boots with each footstep. Headlamp, strapped onto ball cap, was still turned off. Trout was out hustling through alders, chasing scents and readjusting his legs to the pounce of the snow. My plan to make it to Carter Lake was coming to a close, and also coming to a re-evaluation: my pant legs were cold and wet enough to be uncomfortable, the crystals that had made it to the back of my legs not melting. Trout wasn't coming back any time soon, and I didn't feel like disturbing the silence with my cry into the night.

I closed my eyes and pointed my face skyward, attempting to straighten out and treat the reoccurring pain that has invaded my neck muscles in the last two weeks. Tilting my head now to the left shoulder, I was shocked with how much time it took my neck to reach full extension. I then faced the snow at my feet, a position making it easy to relax and let my arms hang like an orangutan's. Finally I rotated my heavy head over to my right shoulder, a move just as creaky as the other side's. Rolling my shoulders towards the front, I breathed deeply while listening to little critters bounce around off trail. I extended my arms and started swinging them back and forth, still focusing on my breathing.

The fog continued its mystical roll across the tops of the alders, hiding the mountains from view. Looking back towards the trail I had walked up to get here, towards the creeks starting to ice over, the dirt and leaves now saying their goodbyes to fresh air before being blanketed for months, I imagined a figure emerging out of the mist. For a second, I thought I saw one, and I believe I wasn't alone. Fear bubbled up my spine into my consciousness and I called for Trout, glad when I saw his eyes reflected in my headlamp light.

Up above the highway noise, this was a world unlike any I had been in all day. Unlike any I had been in since the snow and darkness melted away from us this past Spring. I didn't have to wait for the white stuff to hit down at my house before Trout and I could get back into it once more.

Apparently I wasn't ready for total immersion. But as these chores and routines continue to shape the world around me, as the growing snow pack continues reflecting light, rivers of spirits past, present and future are making themselves known. Bon Hiver!

Best of September '09

Sheep Mountain 09.05-07.09











Canoe Woods 09.11-13.09









Crescent Lake Valley 09.18-20.09







Kenai Lake 09.25-27.09

Howdy Everyone,

The hike up and down LV Ray Peak this weekend delivered as only Crescent Lake Valley could. Friday and Saturday indeed proved to be spectacular, warm, and made for climbing high. Sunday morning's sideways rain wasn't even too bad, and waking up to a pile of Trout's grass-puke on my Thermarest was a first. Unfortunately, Jonathan did not get a moose.

I'll have to wait until later in the week to post pictures, since I was using a couple of disposable cameras I picked up just for the trip. Luckily, another digital camera has come into my possession, by way of my friend Martha Story. She has recently bought a new camera, and decided to give me hers. Thanks a ton, Martha!

Howdy everyone,

What can I say it is great to be back in the blogging world after a summer's hiatus. As some of you might have noticed, I spat out a blurb of a poem a couple of weeks ago that was meant to serve as a welcome back to myself, to TWOTC from Trout and I. I can only say that my heart was truly behind it, if not my complete awareness, and that what is left behind after the trimming away is still worth something akin to a chuckle. Enjoy if you can.

As you know I have started another part-time school year in Whittier, a place that keeps showing up, like your boss from your first high school job continuing to pop up in your dreams, Whittier continues to change yet stay exactly the same, a constant something at the end of the tunnel over the last few years. The quiet concrete, green brush, and rock of this place is especially honest in the early mornings and late evenings, something true of all places that mean something to us, that aren't just another place.

Yes, Mr. Clay is back on the scene, back in his room, changed it up a bit this year. I'm really going for the "enema" approach to my house and my job lately. Keep the essential, and absolutely boot OUT the rest. Stacks of papers from years past, written about in springtime blogs, are lying together in a box in the back of my truck, waiting their time to be tossed into a large blue recycle bin in Anchorage, where they will continue their reincarnation in the Paper Circle of Life.

Brightly colored posters now face my students and I in contrast to faded ones, made by kids now graduated, now adults, that had been on the walls for years. It's time for some new memories, I tell them, and the tiny flinching in the corners of their eyes tells me that this is immediately unnerving to them. Maybe it's just the natural resistance to change that we all seem to experience. Or maybe the kids really liked those old posters...I had come to think in the last year or two that my leaving them up had served as a barrier to connecting with them, that the slogans, drawings, photos, cut and glued behind my desk and around it of students from years ago were to them work of my "favorite" students, and that I was just teaching these guys because I I had to, but that it would never be as much fun as back in the "good ol' days." More than likely I'm just giving my ego its daily steroid boost by dwelling on all this. Hey, at least now I've got clean walls.

Light another match and strike anew,
Jeff

p.s. Sorry 'bout the lack of pics. Blogger is acting funny right now so I can't post any. Hopefully this will work soon and I'll post more pics of my epic weekend...all I'll say now is it was one mother of a walk!

Enough Truth to Spill: An Evening of Writer's Strain

And so it began last night when I arrived back at Whittier School, my home for the next two days, where I have been residing basically half of this past school year.

It began on a couch, a rotten and rotting couch, already ancient, faded and pathetic when I inherited it seven years ago with my classroom. The cushions let you sink much too far down, the computer is uncomfortably warm on my lap, and there is too much synthetic stimuli all around, including Petco-purchased tetras toiling back and forth through green aquarium water that is both bright and dark green at the same time. There are laminated North Face ads spinning on fishing line from the ceiling, clusters of desks where worksheets, pencils, erasers, and rulers go to die.

I’m in the same room as my massive teacher's desk—a hulk surely from the ‘80s that is the home of too many papers, too many books, too many stacks of random school paraphernalia storing the potential energy of every one of my educational questions. All of my seven years of visions mixed in with seven years of disappointments and confusions, and the attempts to try again, day after day. I wrote a page, figure if I do that each day I’ll at least have the volume. Figure each day holds enough truth to spill.

And if I manage to make do in a room filled with too much of those circular suffocating memories, I feel pretty good about my chances when I let the windows open and allow the noises of the outside world to invite me instead.


Leaving Lake Iliamna ~ 04.15.09

Clearing Roads

The world comes crashing down in the Springtime. We literally see more of ourselves and of the world every day because of the hours of daylight that inch and inch longer and longer. In Alaska, we've the lost the comfort of darkness. The night doesn't come until well past midnight now, and the vast amount of remaining snow only reflects even more pure white back into our eyes. It all leads to a different kind of cabin fever.

Near Portage Lake, one mountain has literally begun to fall down, turning the fever up a notch. For the past month, the road to Whittier has been closed due to a massive rockslide that has only continued to build with efforts to clear it. At first sight, the Department of Transportation needed to hire out contractors because the rocks in the road were bigger than their equipment. After several drilling measures, helicopter scouting missions, and a large blasting, D.O.T. has finally given official notice that they will open the road on Friday the 8th.

The road will have one lane available from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. each morning and from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. in the evening. Some call it progress, some call it not enough, and surely there is someone in Whittier who is working on ordering a tank from the Lower 48. Sometimes you have to blast your way to freedom, whether the walls are in your mind or standing right in front of you.



For updated information on the rockslide, click here.

Bulletproof

Remember when you were bulletproof? For me it was years ago--a much shorter version of myself. I commanded my bike every day after school, riding it in full standing position, letting the wheels spin unhindered down steep riverside hills. The soundtrack in my 10-year-old head, Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead or Alive," only helped to continue the myth. We lived just miles past Appleton's southernmost developments, where the road turned from concrete to gravel. Dirt that originated under future subdivisions floated in the air and turned the green grass fields just enough of a brown to fit the music--to fit the rider, the badass in bifocals and tube socks.

In these years before I began to analyze, I would sail around all the avenues of south Appleton--Telulah, Calumet, Taft, Carpenter, Roeland, Meadow Grove, Kernan, Gladys, Sylvan, Oneida, Lawe Street hill, College Avenue--solo or with a pack of others also fearless. Even when the necessary brain development began to take hold--thinking about what I should and shouldn't do, weighing consequences, wearing a watch--the urge of flight remained.

Perhaps your unstoppability began at the base of a mountain, playing basketball until the sun turned its top orange-pink. Perhaps you were king of your own mountain on the playground on a Saturday, when you held your own recess. Maybe you fled across a rocky ranch of dirt, building calluses on your feet, soaking them in mud puddles to cool them off.

Wherever you were, however the air smelled on those nights, however the fields felt on your outstretched hands, whatever shapes the clouds took up above, let yourself go back. Let yourself feel the power of fearlessness. It is this force that will create every moment of beauty in your life. Like the one you experience right now my friend....


LV Ray Peak, 04.04.09

Shelter

Sleep beneath a mountain,
and dream of trains and blizzards.
Your traveling companion
will wake you when it's time.

You will see your tent
you've assembled inside this
log cabin, next to a lamp
and a satellite tv.

You'll laugh at your absurdity
of fear--that you needed to
construct one shelter inside of
another. You'll open the
refrigerator and grab what's inside.















I step down onto the asphalt and it is cool in the light evening wind that has picked up tempo. I feel the wind on my bare feet, in my hair, on the crest of my forehead, and on the undersides of my arms. The night looks like day now, sun still high in the air as seven o'clock approaches. Students of mine are playing basketball in the street behind me and to my left, carving out any free space to be kids amongst the snow berms and concrete buildings that still rise above their heads.

I turn to the right, down the slow artery of road that slopes down toward Passage Canal, toward another artery of a more liquid sort, the one that leads to the heart of this ecosystem, Prince William Sound. My hands are in my pockets at first and then they are out, at my side lightly bouncing from front to back. This movement takes place completely on its own, just as the pendulum needs no help once it has been set in motion. As I draw closer to the water, I see Reinaldo Arenas in my thoughts, the persecuted Cuban poet of the 20th century whose biopic Before Night Falls I watched last night. Reinaldo, or rather Javier Bardem in his portrayal, walks on a sidewalk as well, in a shirt similar to mine, surrounded by a hustle and bustle, by women laying with their backs over hoods of cars. It looks warm where he is. It's cool here, and I notice little noise.

When I was living in Eau Claire back in my early 20's I would think of similar movements while walking home with a bag of groceries cradled loosely in one hand--paper, never plastic. I would walk out of Kerm's Grocery with a sack of some produce, chips and salsa, probably a package of Oreo's too. The rectangular bottom of the bag would give just enough in its corners to rest between my arm and ribcage without moving. It would wedge just right and my hand would be free of grasping anything. And although I'm embarrassed to admit it today, I thought of this as the "money" way of walking down the street with a bag of groceries. I told some of my fellow cooks at the "Cam" restaurant about this once. Totally dorky, and so totally me. It just feels good to move the right way.

I near a "t" intersection and turn left. The rail yards stand directly between me and the ocean now. I could take the pedestrian tunnel underneath them, but tonight I feel like staying in full view of the sky. I step around the edges of the last remnants of snow to be melting in the street. A white pickup truck pulls onto the road up ahead, turning towards me. I wave in a style I have adapted over the years, a quick flick of the wrist, two or three fingers out. If you drive a truck and are driving through a rural Alaskan town your hand just seems to do this automatically. Strangely, this is the exact same wave my mom uses as she executes her Buddhist Wisconsin got-my-shit-together smile-beaming walk through life.

Husky - Cam

I'll let Trout take the lead on this one...
He says it all. Pretty much.