COME TO MY READING
A reading!
Live and in person!
Not just me, but Franciszka Voeltz, and AM O’Malley, and Lacy Davis as well!
titled WHAT WE ARE AFRAID OF.
We will read about the things that frighten us.
In honor of the cold damp end part of the wet season, and mortality, and courage, and Fedraury!
Tuesday February 16th
at the Waypost
3120 n Williams
7 pm
FREE
corinne made a beautiful letterpress flier
Hello dear readers- sorry it’s been forever since I posted. I’ve been working a heck of alot, building a thick nest of dollars to insulate me from the rough world, lake swimming, making huevos rancheros on my new two-burner campstove, tossing zucchini ends to the squirrels. The sky is clouded with smoke from forest-fires, the sun is a shiny nickel. Life is good, life is seamless, it’s summertime, I still don’t know what I’m doing with my life. Time goes on. I’ve also fallen out of love with the anonymous internet, but instead of telling you, I’ve just disappeared. I might not post on here anymore. I don’t know. I might just post photos. I have to take them.
But speaking of photos! Mike Brodie is the Polaroid Kidd, and his photos have been around for a couple years. He used to live in a house in SE Portland next to the railroad tracks with some friends of mine- he left town to ride freight trains when he was 18, criss-crossed the country, took a lot of incredible pictures, pasted them on his website. He did a show somewhere in 2007 and then fell off the face of the internet earth. What he documents, incredibly, is the subculture I came of age in, a subculture that only exists in tangible, three-dimensional, sun-and-rain, do-it-yourself reality, and has never, and will never, have much of a presence on the internet. And looking at these photographs, I think, you can see it. You can see how special and rare they are- how the people and places in these photos exist entirely outside of commercialized western culture, how they will never, ever be commodified, and you must know, too, that the the subculture captured here is self-conscious enough to discourage this sort of documentation, nearly almost all the time- to the point that an attempt to flatten it for a photo, or for, god forbid, the internet, will generally either fail entirely, or the subculture itself will simply disappear, like smoke. And so what Mike Brody has done is, too me, so incredible that I don’t even have words for it. But what it is, again and again and again, is inspiring. So, so inspiring. I have been to a couple of the places in the photos, including that shack in Asheville that is sided in cardboard and the train overpass where the kid carries a purple net bag of dumpstered produce. Mike Brody’s website, of course, has been defunct for a year now, but thankfully a chunk of his photos still circulate, and you can see them pasted on various blogs across the web. I have gathered some of the links here- one, two, three, four, five.
The sun at ten p.m. Can you believe it? Not setting. Just hanging out.
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Debbie and I are making pemmican, which first requires making caribou jerky. So today I thawed some meat from a roadkill caribou I found in the road a while ago and cut it into thin slices and put it in this awesome dehydrator that Debbie found at a yardsale that someone made themselves, because it’s Alaska. The sides are plywood or something and the trays are windowscreen and the door is piece of glass with cabinet hinges on it. In back is a red-hot element that looks like a curling iron with a fan behind it. The whole thing whirrs loudly and fills the house with gamey damp meat smell as it dries the caribou. The dried caribou, according to Debbie, will be real fragile and crumbly, because caribous are so lean. This one was extra lean because it’s sprintime. To make pemmican you need caribou fat, too, but there wasn’t any so we’re going to use coconut oil instead, and tiny dried cranberries that Debbie picked out of the bog last fall. (All of Interior Alaska is just a giant squishy bog of miniature cranberries.) I can’t wait to have real pemmican. Then I can go off into the wildz with just my bow & arrows and a rawhide bag of flint blades and walk until I discover a new continent. But I’ll get frozen in a snowstorm instead and future-humans with giant heads and squishy, formless bodies will find me and first they’ll think I’m a boy, and then they’ll decide I’m a girl and name me “Brittany”, or something. And they’ll look in my (now shriveled) rawhide bag and find the pemmican and they’ll say- “ah hah! But who did she trade with to get these coconuts?” It feels so cool to have all this frozen caribou meat. I think I just realized today how cool it was. Like, wait a minute! I can make fucking pemmican! It’s been my fantasy to make pemmican for a couple years now. I always wanted to make it and take it on the freight train, along with these little loaves of sprouted essene bread I used to make in the dehydrator before I stopped eating wheat. I would have the best train food in the world, and then the future and the past would become one, and I would transcend everything and turn into a ball of pure white light. I’m also interested to try the straight dried meat, before we crumble it to make pemmican. In Nunavut (that’s a part of Canada, I just learned today!) people eat plain dried caribou with butter on it. People after my own heart. I love butter!
Here’s the drying meat:
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In other food news, in spite of the frequency of hot-fudge sundaes in this house, I am now able to go three days at a time without eating any sugar, which makes me feel like a strong and living human, all alive with electricity and magical ideas, aka inspiration. It is but a small glimpse of how I might feel this summer, when I leave this village and set out on my own, returning to my traditional diet of raw vegetables, brown rice, injera, and beans with too much cumin. It makes me so excited to be alive. And that almost feels wrong. Like, happiness? Isn’t that a symptom of something? Could it really be so simple? Not like, overstimulated happy, but really, simply, child-like sustainably happy? No! Who am I to deserve such a thing, when all the world is writhing in pain and torment?! How will I ever muster the innocence, the reservoirs of wonder? I turn my face to the sky and clasp my hands and ask Annie Dillard’s god, a sort of spiritual death-centered natural selection with an eye for the individual, for three good months- just three good, endless, cloudless months- in which I might finish my manuscript. Whole civilizations have been created and perished in less. Colonies of insect eggs have hatched and died in a single second.
Debbie’s parrot, on the other hand, will live to be seventy-five years old. In a cage. Can you believe it? Sometimes I think I am a miracle.
Today we ate a late lunch of re-heated pinto beans and set out, sleds in tow, to move spruce rounds from the edge of the oil road. There are two sleds, both black plastic, one large, one smaller. One holds five spruce rounds, stacked in a pyramid, tilting and tipping on the packed-snow inclines of the trail. The other holds five smaller spruce rounds, stacked in a pyramid, tilting and tipping on the packed-snow inclines of the trail. They both have loops of rope on their fronts- the larger has a red and white striped rope, the smaller has a thin black rope. To drag the laden sleds we step into the rope, pull it across our hips, and walk, leaning forward. Pulling the sled in this manner makes me feel like a pony, and I tell River as much. River, I decide, is a stronger pony than I. I set out in the afternoon to pull fifteen sled loads of spruce rounds from the oil road to the woodpile in front of the cabin. I have done some shaky math, attempting to quantify every little thing like I always do, and have decided that if we each pulled fifteen sled loads of spruce rounds today from the oil road to the woodpile, we can move the whole pile in a day, a veritable mountain of logs. Three hours and eight sled loads later I, with my smaller sled, am tired, and decide in the weakening light of eveningtime to make cauliflower and smoked salmon curry and do the dishes instead. River is a strong, tireless pony, and she says Yes, of course you can make food and no, you don’t have to haul any more wood and sets off down the trail towards the road, sled in tow. The dog Brosef follows along, stick in hand, too old to help and doesn’t have a harness besides. The men on the oil-road sometimes joke, when they see us pulling the sleds with our hips, strong woodsponies- Why doesn’t the dog pull? Why don’t you have the dog pull, ha ha ha.
Inside the dimming cabin I start a fire, though the walls still hold the memory of last night’s oppressive heat. When we go to bed, generally, the stove is still warm, and we don’t want the fire to run out of fuel in the night, so we put a big green log on the coals and shut down the damper and the vent and cross our fingers, knowing that the green log will either catch and burn eventually or it won’t. So it’s heat, and lots of it, or none at all. Last night the log caught, and so we had an eighty-degree night, both of us awake at 2 a.m. to fling off the covers, throats dry, and strip down to our underwear. The walls of this cabin are insulated against fifty-below winters, in spring they hold the heat for days, like a ghost. And the stove itself is huge, a great hulking mass, much larger than reasonable for a 16 by 20 foot cabin such as this one. The stove is so huge we don’t even have to cut some of the logs, we just open the creaking, asbestos-lined iron door and toss them whole into its orange and fiery depths. The stove is, apparently, an “earth stove”, although I call it a “smoke inhalation stove”, because it doesn’t draw, at least not when the door is open- instead it sends out plumes of nasty woodsmoke, which gather like smog in the air above my bunk.
Once the fire is lit in the stove I gather rusty knife and unreasonably small cutting board and set about to chop the head of cauliflower- conventional, of course, and of questionable freshness. There are corn fields in Alaska, no fields of blowing wheat. There is no agriculture at all, save for one small valley near anchorage, where they grow carrots and potatoes for five minutes in the fall, and are always losing entire crops to blight. There was a dairy there, too, Matanuska Maid, but it went under. There are no factory farms in Alaska, either, and no cattle herds. There are no battery cages filled with chickens, no pork processing plants. The cauliflower I am cutting, in the dim and warming cabin, comes from the Fred Meyer in Fairbanks, a few hours’ drive away. The Fred Meyer got it from a barge, or a truck. The barge or the truck got it from California, which is in another universe, three thousand miles south. Everything I eat, unless I hunt it or grow it myself, comes from three thousand miles away.
I cut the cauliflower, precious vegetable, into florets and set it in the cast-iron skillet, where some butter is hot and spitting. The pound of butter in its greasy wrapper came from the cabinet. Before the cabinet it lived in River’s van. When it was in the van the dog, Brosef, got into the butter, and it still bears those wounds, a deep gouge in its center, like the circular hole in a donut. Brosef loves butter and will hop onto the counter and pull the unsuspecting butter off, to lick it from its wrapper on the dirty cabin floor.
Once the cauliflower is sautéing I open a freezer bag of smoked salmon from our friend Kaz. Kaz is an angel, always showering us with gifts and cooking us fried-chicken dinners and letting us read her autobiography which she types in chunks, a story of growing up white-trash on Crisco sandwiches in Nevada near Lake Tahoe. She caught the salmon herself, last summer, and smoked it, and I break off a piece and eat it, delicious oily meat-candy, more precious and rare than anything you could find in the lower 48 anywhere, except maybe hot basil plants in July or homemade goat cheese, or the sickening-sweet stretches of blackberries, obscene in their invasiveness and sheer volume of fruit, along the roadsides in Oregon, in august.
Alaska. At least we’ve got good meat.
I’m not sure if smoked salmon and cauliflower even go together, much less smoked salmon and curry and cauliflower, but it’s what we’ve got and it’s not beans and rice or fish and potatoes, which we’ve both, in our own ways, grown weary of.
A few minutes later I step out in the golden evening light to pee and River is back with her tenth load of wood, and she’s talking to somebody. We’ve got company, she says. Oh, I say, and duck back inside, to collect the unwashed dishes and stack them haphazardly on the table, sweep the onion skins off the crusty countertop and toss them in the stove. I feel like I should tidy up a bit, although it doesn’t really matter. I used to think it did, until River told me a story about what happened the first day the men came to cut wood for her, the old Athabascan men with their chainsaws. They showed up in the morning to buck the spruce and she met them at the trail and stood by awkwardly, unsure of how to help. One of them, Rick, pulled a sausage from the seat of his snow machine, and told her to go cook. It’s ok I’ve got whitefish, she said, and set off down the trail to make some stew. By and by the men ran out of gasoline for their chainsaws and walked down the trail through the woods, gathering in the dirty, cluttered cabin to eat, sitting on the cooler of salted fish and spooning stew into their mouths. When River freezes whitefish she leaves them whole, and when she cuts them up for stew she slices open their bellies and pulls out the sticky, silvery eggsacs and tosses them into the dog’s slop dish, which is a stew of its own sort, sprout water and eggshells and moose bones and cabbage hearts, sitting for weeks at a time in the stuffy cabin to ferment. The eggsacs of the whitefish are, to River, infinitely and immeasurably gross, and she tries not to touch them, even if she is a strong Alaskan pony, raised in the bush on fried beaver-tail and bearfat. And indeed, not even the dog will eat them, and he doesn’t even get up from his bed when the fall with a SLAP into his bowl. And so the men are sitting on the cooler eating stew, and one of them, Rick, the one who gave her the sausage, sees her drop the pouch of whitefish eggs into the dog’s filthy slop bowl, and he stoops over, retrieves the eggs, and eats them.
And so this is why I know that it doesn’t matter, when they come over, if the cabin is messy. And it always is, anyway, because there isn’t any running water, and because River has better things to do, like read about sex magick and commune with nature, and write the sorts of stories to liberate the human race.
The curry is nearly done and I really have to pee so I go back outside and walk to the rear of the shed to squat where the dog poops, out of view of the men. There are two of them, Rick and Timmy, two of the guys who cut wood for us. They are old Athabaskan men and they work on the oil road, Timmy drives a big dump-truck and dumps gravel all over the forest, Rick claims to be in charge of the whole operation. The exploration itself is being done by Doyon, which is their Native corporation. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, at some point or other, gave corporations to the different Native Peoples in Alaska, along with some land. And some of the corporations are ethical, but all of them are capitalist, and some of them, like Doyon, make Total Destroy, and mow down the forest and fill the creeks with gravel, all in the name of petroleum, and newer and shinier snowmachines for everyone.
But what can we say? They’re nice guys. They cut our wood. When we ripped all the squirrel-pee insulation from the sauna and dragged it out on a giant tarp, Timmy was our partner in crime and hauled it to town in his pickup truck, laughing, and dumped it in the dumpster behind the gas station. Rick comes by, albeit unexpectedly, on his snowmachine, and gives us long strips of smoked salmon prepared the native way, without salt, and we eat it like oily candy in the snow.
River’s property is a small piece of land bounded on all sides by a much larger chunk of property, which is owned by a woman who lives far, far away, the daughter of the old man who lived in the cabin through the woods a ways, the cabin with the iron bedstead and sheet metal stove and neat tins of pipe tobacco lined up on the windowsill. This far-away woman’s property butts right up against the oil road. At some point in time Doyon may want that property, and this one, or not. At the very least they could pollute our water by drilling down and pushing contaminants into the water table, which they will most likely do. Any way you look at it, it sucks.
The men leave before I get the chance to ask them to dinner and we eat the curry, and it tastes good. Then River reads from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek while I do the dishes in melted snow water and peppermint soap, and I marvel again at the fact that Annie Dillard could find so much, a whole universe, really, the beginning and the end, a closed loop, safe and limitless, enough- in a dry field of grasshoppers in West Virginia.
“This is what I had come for, just this, and nothing more. A fling of leafy motion on the cliffs, the assault of real things, living and still, with shapes and powers under the sky- this is my city, my culture, and all the world I need. I looked around.”
This is the sort of petition I can get behind- raise your hand if you think the justice system is fucked, and wish that all those “shoot five random people and then themselves” americans would put that shit to good use.
Reposted from a friend.
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Aaron was molested and severely psychologically abused by this guy, Darrell, when he was a kid up into his late teens. Recently Darrell’s son told Aaron that his dad was still abusing children. Darrell was a Boy Scout leader and a Big Brother, and several police reports had been made about him molesting boys over the years. The police, of course, declined to even pretend to investigate. A few days after he found out that Darrell was still molesting children in his community, Aaron killed him. He went to Darrells house/trailer/thing with an old skool black powder gun and shot him. He restrained Darrells wife from calling the police until he was sure Darrell was dead, and then he disassembled his gun and left it on the table. She told police that she never felt threatened. Since then a bunch of people have come forward and said that they were abused by the guy – maybe ten people have gone public or will. Darrell’s son and ex-wife have donated to Aaron’s defense fund. But the DA is trying to put him in jail for a gazillion years.
This is the insufficient news reporting: http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article…fatal_shooting As usual, they’re all like, “there may have been some kind of abuse case from years ago… clearly Aaron is disturbed, blah blah blah.” Fuck the news.
This is the petition to the District Attorney to drop the charges: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/petition/770311398 Check it out and see if you want to sign it, because this is a case where it actually will make a difference. This DA operates largely on public opinion. Here’s what Darrell’s son said when he signed the petition:
8:15 pm PDT, Apr 1, Mike McNeill, California
I am Darrell McNeill’s son. Aaron and I are very close friends we’ve known each other since childhood. I know how Aaron felt and I believe he sacrificed him self to save others. I stand behind Aaron 100%.
Here’s another signature:
# 439:Feb 25, 2009, Irene Durigan, California
My brother james was also molested by Daryl McNeil. Daryl was a member of Big Brother/Big Sister and was james big brother. He put james through living hell. James killed himself Jan 3, 2006. He never recovered from the hell daryl put him through.
This is the website his family made. There are links to interviews and they are seeking donations for Aaron’s legal fund: http://www.saveaaron.com/
The days are warmer now, nearly forty degrees! I hauled wood today in a t-shirt, sat for a moment in the sun on an old log. The snow is wetter, glowier, it shines like white glitter in the mornings. River says the birch trees look more alive but I haven’t noticed, I don’t know this place so well. The creek is thawed now in spots, it steams in the places there are warmsprings, milky mud-holes in the snow, not really warm, just warmer than freezing, or whatever temperature it is that flowing bodies of water freeze at- which is somehow lower than freezing. And they thaw now, these waters, when it is still ten below zero in the dead of night, the shrunken snow turned to Styrofoam, again, the stars hard and bright.
I tried to walk on the river one day, one week ago. I was out by myself, had never walked on a river before. It seemed cold enough, an ice wind was blowing, my face was wrapped in grey wool herringbone, the cheerless, smart color of 19th century institutions. The river was sculpted drifts of blown snow, with a hard crust on top just thick enough for me. In places I would punch through, but it was only more snow underneath, and I imagined the river a clear brittle mass, frozen all the way to the bottom, fish trapped inside. I was looking for a cabin upriver an old man had told me about, he’d drawn me a map with a ballpoint pen when I was doing sudoku at the community center, waiting for River to get done filling out her energy assistance paperwork, a check every month cuz she cuts her own wood, carries it stick by stick through the woods in a black plastic sled. The old man wore suspenders and a big tight gut and tried to get me to eat pretzels from the big plastic barrel, offered me a soda. When I didn’t want the pretzels he told me about the cabin, drew me a sort of map- one line for the river, the other creek, a box for the cabin. Now I was out to find it walking up the river, punching through the snow in my boots, the bottom of my pantlegs pulled down tight over their tops. I didn’t get far before the sucking gray wind discouraged me, tried to dry my lungs up, freeze their moisture into an icicle for its cruel endless heart. I climbed the riverbank up into the woods, floundered around in the deep loose stuff, stuck my mittened fingers on the bare wild rosebushes when I grabbed out for them, reminded myself to ask River to teach me to snowshoe, walked back down the river to little house.
We went back again a few days later, River and I. She wasn’t so sure, said it was dangerous to go walking on the river in March. She told me about the warmsprings that ran from the creek, the fast moving water that never froze, the fishes. I dug down deep with my boot to show her it was frozen and instead I found wet slush, some creeping water. We walked back the way we’d come. I was glad I hadn’t fallen in the river.
Apparently soon it’ll melt, nearly all at once, and crack and scream and break and flood and for a week or two all the world will be ice floes and we’ll be stuck on either this side of the river or the other one. And then we’ll cross in River’s little motorboat with the imperfect engine that gets wet by magic and then she sets the sparkplugs on fire to fix it, and it works.
Just watch the river, says River, and be careful. And if it’s sketchy one day and you really need to cross just cut a really long pole, and carry the pole horizontally like you’re walking a tightrope, as you walk across the river. That way if you fall in the pole will catch you, and you’ll have something to hold on to. And if you fall in you’ll need to THROW yourself up on the bank, you can’t really pull yourself up. Just think of a seal, and THROW yourself up onto the ice.
Yesterday we went into town, a few hours’ drive, so I could get old embroidered hankies and workshirts from the thrift store, and a pair of faded realtree overalls. We went to the bookstore afterwards, got books on gardening in Alaska, animal tracks in Alaska, ending rape culture, and sex magick, respectively. We also bought food supplies- pinto beans, sardines, mayonnaise, precious celery, precious cabbage, precious carrots, one sprig of broccoli, and delicious prunes. And a roast chicken, to eat in the snow. It felt like Christmas on the drive back to little house, all our new things piled in the car, and River was telling me about growing up on trapline, about eating the crispy fat of beaver tails, about her mother washing diapers in snow she had melted and boiled, about evenings by kerosene-light dipping strike-anywhere matches in candlewax to waterproof them. They had film canisters of these matches, said River, stuck in everything- their coat pockets, the dogsled, the bag they took trapping. In case we fell through the ice, said River. You should have one in your pocket, she said, looking at me. You should always carry a canister of waterproof matches in your pocket. So you can build a fire, if you fall through the ice.
I have a job till the end of May, now, it’s not full time but time enough, enough time to get me thinking about things I can do with the money when I have it- buy a car off craigslist, and old Subaru with a red body and a blue hood, maybe, or something I can live in, although where I want to live is here. River’s been working on resetting the timer in my brain, that little ticking hand that gets stuck on the three-month place and goes off, again and again, like a broken watch. She’s been doing it via this sort of hokey-pokey acupressure energy therapy that I can’t even get into here because the sheer woo-wooness of it would break the internetz. Truth is it’s not hokey, it’s amazing and some dude thought of it once and it totally works, but my heart is not up to the task of defending something so crackpot-sounding and hard to explain. But basically I try and conjure up the feeling I get when three months have gone by and my alarm goes off and suddenly I’m so sick of everything and life has no color and there’s no point in doing anything I used to like and the only thing that makes me feel normal again is quitting everything and leaving. I squint my eyes and conjure up this feeling and put my arm out and River pushes down on it like in that playground game where someone holds your arms down at your sides while you try and push out and then when they let go your arms float up by magic. And then she does it again, only this time my arm just goes down right away. And then I tap on my upper lip. And then I do it again, only that feeling of restlessness is a little harder to invoke this time, and after my arm goes down I tap on my collarbone. And then the third time I can’t hardly feel even the smallest bit of wanderlust, that part of me just feels so faint and far away, and I tap the ridged bone under my eyes. And then the fourth time I can’t think of it at all, and then we’re done and I start to sob uncontrollably, and all I can think of is my mother, and a gray and silty beach, and the sound of seagulls. And after I stop crying I feel like my brain is filled with sunshine, and for the rest of the day I am incapable of having a single negative thought.
River learned about this form of therapy when she was in college and had PTSD so bad she thought she’d go nuts. She went to this man who taught her to tap on every bad memory she could find until all the bad memories were dull like unpolished metal and she was cured. She’s going to try and cure my bearanoia, next, so I’m not so afraid to go out and pee in the snow at night, and only time will tell if my wanderlust is gone forever, my clock come unstuck.
The dog’s tongue is sticking out, just a bit. He likes to lay on River’s bed with the tip of his tongue out, all pink and dried up, like it’s too big to fit in his mouth. We put some moose cartilage in his dish earlier, from the roadkill moose stew that River made. There were vertebrae in the stew, and an esophagus, and some arteries, and spinal cord that looked like bright white worms that River tried to get me to eat, and a femur full of marrow. We put the last of River’s frozen vegetables in it too, turnips and purple cabbage and soft dirty carrots from the galvanized tub in the floor of the shed. There’s a whitefish in the shed too, one last whitefish, lying frozen on a plywood table in the dusty light from the window. We’ve got to eat it all up, says River, before all the world thaws and ceases to be a great freezer. I can’t wait for the snow to recede so I can see all the junk that’s lying behind the cabin, the old wooden boxes and metal tubs and cracked plastic buckets. I can’t wait to see the forest floor, the leaves on the birch trees, I can’t wait to see summer come hot and fast like a fire of dry spruce wood with the damper and the vent wide open.
We woke up early this morning in the little house in the extensive woods, at least early for us. Crack of nine a.m.! We had a pan of brownies to make, or rather River did, for Tod was coming from town with his chainsaw to “buck” some trees for us, pulled from the stacks of cut trees down on Fern Gully road. River is afraid of chainsaws, and pretends she doesn’t know how to use them, and encouraged me to do the same. So it was up in the early morning to make a pan of gluten-free brownies out of heck of cocoa, six eggs, almond butter, butter butter, and a rounded coffee cup of Magic. The townspeople are a little afraid of River’s magic, the magic of the forest creatures who live in the woods and cut the smallish trees with their feeble yet agile bowsaws. The ruddy-faced locals, on the other hand, simply back their pickup trucks with trailers down the gravel road and “buck” up whole stacks of the felled lumber, eating it all up. It was a race that we were losing, so it was good that Tod volunteered his chainsaw skillz before all the wood at the head of our trail disappeared, enough wood for three winters in the little house.
While River made the brownies I focused on the pancakes, which were to be our breakfast. But first we stoked up the fire in the woodstove, the stuffy heat of mid-night in the little cabin having tempered down to a more breathable seventy degrees. The temperature outside, according to the window-thermometer, was a balmy ten-above. A mild spring day! Before mixing the pancakes I hauled the water-buckets down to the frozen slough, which stays thin and wet in the very middle all winter long on account of the hot-springs that run through it, and scooped up a few bucketfuls of clean white snow along its banks. The buckets would sit next to the woodstove to melt, or else in the big metal stock-pot atop it. Once melted we poured the snow-water through a cheap metal strainer, to strain out the very largest chunks of wind-blown matter. The rest, we drank.
Snow melting, I mixed the pancakes, which consisted, this morning, of Teff sourdough starter, brown rice flour, eggs, a few squirts of agave nectar, olive oil, baking soda, a splash of vinegar, and some dried cherries. If I put anything else in them, I have forgotten it. They bubbled agreeably and I poured them out onto the griddle, while River mixed the brownies, accidentally doubling some ingredients and tripling others, and having a hard time breaking up the brown-sugar lumps besides, finally shrugging, sprinkling their tops with slivered almonds, and sliding them into the oven. Checking my calculator watch, which is a ridiculous thing to have in the woods, I noted that it was nearly ten a.m., and so we were almost late to meet Tod at the trail-head. Stuffing some tasteless pancakes into our mouths, we gathered our woolen clothings and stepped out into the balmy spring morning. It had begun to snow, just barely, like a light dusting from heaven, and suddenly I had a feeling that it was Christmas, that it had been Christmas every single day since I had arrived. But maybe it was just the nativity scene that came with the property, which river had propped against the sauna, with the exception of the yellow-robed wiseman, who stands long-sufferingly on the edge of the slough, for target practice. We set out along the snowy trail in this endless Christmastime of the heart, a sort of bright and hopeful Christmas time, where there aren’t any cops or invasive species or very many roads and the bright sun stays out till nine p.m. I felt so grateful, then, to be living in this little house in the extensive woods of interior Alaska, with its mucky buggy forests and brittle frozen winters and trees too small to sell for money. I was safe from the active volcanoes and frequent earthquakes of Alaska’s southern coast from which I had come, and safe, in innumerable other ways, from the whole rest of the wide world. All one had to have, I had said to River the night before, when we were pulling our sleds along the wind-blown frozen river after a night of fried chicken and smoked salmon at a friend’s house, the northern lights a faint pink smear above us like light pollution from a fantastical, distant city, was a passion for the wintertime.
At the trailhead, where the trail to our little house met Fern Gully road, Tod was nowhere to be seen. The tall stacks of trees were still there, and before us the desolate stretch of gravel where they had torn up the forest, and in the distance we could here the buzz of chainsaws, the ruddy-faced townspeople with their pickup-tucks greedily bucking the spruce trees to pieces. No matter, there was a little stack of wood there for us, cut to stove-lengths by the tractor drivers, as an offering to the forest creatures. They even guarded it for us, and shooed away the townspeople when they ambled over in their trucks and eyed it greedily. That’s for the crazy white woman who lives in the woods, doesn’t have a chainsaw! So we went about loading our sleds with the last of this, and carting it down the snowy trail back to the little house, and stacking it in our wood-shed, which is a frame of rough-barked spruce poles nailed with a few rotting boards, rusted nails popping out, the whole thing leaning over into the slough. It has no roof, and will most likely wash away in the next flood, which might be in two weeks, when the frozen river breaks up.
After we finished our merry log-stacking, we checked the brownies. They were done, and had puffed up nicely, in spite of the absence of leavening agents, on account of the Magic. Magic is the best leavener! At the encouragement of River, I ate a small square of brownie, which was of course the best brownie I had ever tasted in my entire Life, not to mention the best gluten-free brownie of All Time, including all the time before anyone knew what gluten-free was, which was quite a lot of time, I am certain. I went on to eat a whole quarter of a pan, throughout the course of the day, and now the day is at its end, and I can tell you, I am lucky to still have my pancreas. But they were just that good, and I would do it all again. And I would do it again tomorrow, if we hadn’t given the remaining brownies to Tod, when he finally showed up. He showed up at one p.m. sharp on his snow maching, which is maybe ten a.m. Alaska Time, which makes Alaska Time officially less punctual than Punk Time, with which I am somewhat familiar, having not had a job for months at a stretch and spent countless hours just “hanging out”, with or without SLUG BEAR*, in urban centers stuffed with young people.
Tod is a ruddy-faced townsperson, with gleaming snow-machine and well-oiled chainsaw, and he is appropriately wary of us, although his sense of helpfulness and Alaskan goodness far outweighs his fear of our queer woodland magic. He is tall and stooped and brushy-mustached and wears a coat fit for a marine-corps polar bear, along with sneaker-mukluks, (google it), which are all the fashion in these parts, being the historic and thereby only footwear suitable for these unique conditions. I would like a pair of sneaker-mukluks, someday, myself, so that I might bound through the woodland snow-drifts in historic regional fashion. I was just reading, the other day, in my Alaskana Adventure book, of which there are many titles, available in fine tourist traps throughout the state, that the Athabascan people of this area traditionally did not make their own mukluks, rather they met the Inupiaq people of the north at a sort of no-man’s land between their two territories, many days’ dog-sled ride away, a trade zone where the two groups were free from their centuries-old rivalry. There the Athabascan people traded birch-bark baskets, wolverine furs, and chunks of red river rock for the Inupiaq peoples’ seal oil, salt, walrus ivory, and mukluks, which came in both waterproof and warm winter varieties.
As soon as Tod arrived he set to work, hauling logs to and fro in his great plastic snow-machine sled and bucking them up with his chainsaw. The dog was upset, of course, and had to be tied to a tree in the yard. The dog thinks only of things that can be thrown, and everything he gazes at he is only thinking that you might throw it, and perhaps he spied the chainsaw and was terrified because although he knew it was a horrible ripping thing, he could not help but want Tod to throw it at him. And so he trembled and his little knees knocked together, and he had to be tied to the tree.
After an hour or so of bucking and carrying logs and stacking them on the woodpile, which kept tumbling over because the woodshed is full of holes and besides sits on the sloped bank of the slough, we managed to lure Tod inside the little house for chicken soup and brownies, against his better judgement. Once inside his sat warily spooning stew in the rocking chair and eyeing our cluttered, stuffy cabin, his bushy brows skipping from the booshelf full of tinctures to the unwashed breakfast dishes to the galvanized metal tub that serves to hold the dog’s drinking-water for the next century. River made it extra weird by announcing that it was Christmas Dinner, which I thought was perfect, and there was, after all, turkey in the soup, although it had sort of cooked away into the rice and maybe disappeared. After eating he bucked up some more logs into rounds the size of coffee tables and left them in the snow for us, hopping astride his snow machine and rumbling away into the bright afternoon forest. We looked at them there, like a hundred barrels of oil in the sawdust littered snow, and wondered what to do with them. We were tired from moving wood and didn’t want to work anymore, rather we wanted to retreat into the stuffy cabin and eat some more food, and work on our blogs with the electricity from the solar panel, except we had forgotten to dust the snow off of it, so maybe it wouldn’t be enough to power our computers, at least not both of them at once. Let’s move the rounds tomorrow, I suggested. Yes, said River, although she was worried that Tod would come back in the morning to buck more logs and he would see these huge rounds still there where he left them, and think us lazy incapable woodswomen, liable to freeze to death come next winter or at the very least have a sloppy cabin. Then River said- Yes, in the morning. And- Let’s stack them against the sauna wall, cut-side up, but with spaces between the logs. We can put little things there, for decoration.
Yes, I said, squinting at the sauna wall. I was seeing it.
We can put our alter to Durga there, said River.
Yes! I agreed. And so in late afternoon our day’s work was done, at little house in the extensive woods, and the snow fell just so, and a quiet peace settled over everything, and everything was as it should be.
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*SLUG BEAR is a phenomenon wherein you attempt to do any one thing with a group of more than two people, or with two people who are very scattered.
The cabin where I am is whitewashed inside, not dark and low-roofed like the trapper cabins you see here and there in the woods, buried in snow drifts and hung with rusting, dull-edged tools. This cabin is a woodsmoke-white inside with a good window that faces the slough, four big panes rimmed with tinsel-frost in the morning, a glittering that disappears in photographs, it is special to this ethereal plane, three-dimensional, as fluid as the seasons will allow. The outside of this cabin is rough-cut spruce, fresh and golden, the window trim is bright green. The snow makes a pure blanket in all directions from the house, a plane of light and magic from which spring the birch trees, blonde zebra-striped pillars that cut the light into bars, make a sort of grid to measure space, shed sheets of paper that I peel off with my woolen mittens, stuff into my coat to write letters on.
I know I am bad at writing letters but I promise to try. By these sheets of birch bark, I will try.
River found a bag of fur scraps at the dump in Fairbanks. Rabbit, fox, marten, coyote. Trapped in the woods, tanned, trimmed, thrown away. She keeps the scraps in a wire basket beneath the white table where we wash the breakfast dishes in a chipped enamel bowl, and I pull the basket out to stroke the scraps, try to imagine an appropriately beautiful fate for them. River says she thought once to buy the sorts of leather gloves that come in bales, trim them all in fur, sell them on etsy, but she never did it. I try to think of some sort of craft that will incorporate both the fur scraps and the birch bark, a strong and handsome talisman from the dry wintertime forests of the Interior, where all the moisture in the air is frozen safely into snow and ice and nothing will ever, ever mold- a talisman to send away to my friends in Portland to fight the musty, teeming dampness there, to see them through the spring. River says that in the summer the birch bark peels much more easily and you can make baskets from it by getting it wet and folding it into shapes, sewing the edges together with string. I want a birch bark basket to fill with cranberries in the summertime while I skip along the banks of the slough, choking on clouds of weak, sharp-tasting mosquitoes. We also plan to tap the trees for syrup, soon, we just have to learn how, which will most likely involve the internet, of all things.
We have been making, in these last few days, the most incredible sorts of log-cabin meals. I mean to start taking pictures of the food we eat so I can blog about it, because it is endlessly wonderful. Today for breakfast we ate a salad of shredded purple cabbage, celery, raisins, apples, slivered almonds and hard-boiled eggs tossed with mayonnaise and apple cider vinegar, and for lunch we had Ethiopian flatbread (injera) dipped in curried whitefish stew- a sawed-off hunk of frozen whitefish from the shed (literally, two large frozen white fish lie, blank-eyed, on the plywood shelf in the toolshed) cooked for hours on the woodstove (bones, scales and all) with some carrots, potatoes, celery, broccoli and green curry paste. We keep a glass bowl of the injera bubbling next to the stove and feed it every day, sourdough style, except instead of wheat flour injera is made with teff, which is gluten-free. River has a fifty-pound bag of said teff flour stashed under the counter, bought whole at considerable cost from the health-food store in Anchorage and dragged deep into the woods on a black plastic sled. We’ve also been pulling heavily from a bag of dried cherries bought in bulk in disguise as raisins, and River has a green thermos of tea which she adds new herbs to every few days when the flavor gets faint, mugwort and lavender fading into raspberry leaf and comfrey. All of it in melted snow water, which we cart up from the slough one pot at a time and melt on the woodstove. I drink it from a mason jar and look at the bits of trees that float in it, tiny seeds that are tossed in the wind. It tastes like wintertime, cold and milky and distilled.
In these three days I have been here we have dragged the plastic sled with the red-striped rope the three-quarters of a mile to the place where the forest has been razed, like a veritable Fern Gully, into a dirty four-mile stretch of ice and gravel, fifty feet across. Just one month ago, says River, this “road” was all birch forest, straight blonde trees in the pure white snow. But now they have cut it, they say, to drill for oil. They do not know that it is here for certain, they only like to poke around, mowing four-mile stretches of forest in the process, fifty feet wide, clogging the slough and spreading gravel over the places where the black bears sleep, mulching all the trees because they are not big enough to be worth using. It is ironic, to me, that trees, a thing that can be used for heat, are cut and mulched to look for oil, a thing that can be used for heat.
We go, to this “road”, for the cut trees. We are simple woodland creatures, with our plastic sled and candy-colored rope, our straightforward bowsaws and warm, genderless clothing, and we emerge from the forest and scamper to the tops of their tall stacks of cut willows, birch, spruce, piled every which way, and grab one single stick, saw merrily at it for a quarter of an hour and then pile it in the sled, drink some tea and then step into the candy-colored rope, brace it against our hips and pull the heavy sled like a pony through the snowy woods, along the snowy trail, all the way back to the cabin. They, meanwhile, roll here and there along the gravel in their tall dirt-yellow cat tractors, huge tires crunching, steel buckets scooping, trees falling, earth moving- looking down, ruddy-faced from their smeared windshields, the screeching, beeping ogres of civilization as we saw and saw with our thin metal saws, cheeks red, warm breath freezing to our scarves in the wintry cold. We take the fallen trees one stick at a time but it is never enough, and each day a huge pile is gone, turned into mulch. River flags them down, climbs the tall tractor steps to the little glass boxes that they hide in, uses the subtle coercive magic she learned as a sex worker until they are promising her no more trees turned to mulch, a better bridge across the slough, a stack of cut wood at the head of her trail every day, like an offering. Whether or not they are placating us with empty promises we have yet to see, and I stand back with her barking dog, watching the interaction from deep in my scarf.
What else? There is a sauna on River’s land, in addition to her cabin, the squirrels have eaten all the insulation but we might fix it up, I might live there. We want to get a bear somehow, we want a bucketful of bear fat to make pemmican with, to make soap. We want to build an alter to the Indian goddess Durga, the goddess of vengeance, we want to walk along the trail through the woods all the way to the next town, fifty miles, in the snow, just to see if we can do it. Although the temperature hovers around zero spring is here, and the way we know it is by the bright sun that lasts until nearly nine p.m. River has a stack of guns, weathered-looking men keep showing up on snow machines and giving them to her, guns to shoot bears, ghosts, rapists, whatever it is that they think she might need protection from, out here in the woods by herself. I don’t know how to use any of them and she promises to show me how, for practice she shoots at a plywood wiseman in a yellow robe who carries an urn of frankincense, he was part of the nativity scene that came with the land. There was a baby jesus too and she’d planned on burning him, but word got out and folks warned her against it, Alaska being a small town and all and lots of people being fundamentalist Christians. So she carted him away in her truck and left him with an impartial friend with whom he would be safe. This same friend came visiting last night with some paper packages of moose meat- it was roadkill, “dogfood”. If it’s good enough for the dog, it’s good enough for me, says River. The whitefish she eats, scavenged from a fish wheel that froze in the river, is also what’s commonly considered “dogfood” in these parts, but I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever eaten. But maybe that’s just because every single piece of fish you might get in the Lower 48, no matter how “fresh”, “seasonal” and expensive, tastes like rancid sawdust compared to the dogfood fish of Interior Alaska. And anyway, some people just feed their dogs better here.
Tomorrow we’re going to pull the sled to the head of the trail and see if there’s a pile of wood there, left there in the night by the ogres. They can’t help being ogres, says River. They have bar tabs to pay, child support, gas tanks to fill. They’re actually nice guys, who just want jobs, and anyway it’s the native corporation that leased this land for exploratory drilling. It’s the future, it’s today, it’s tomorrow already. There is no past left. We’ll cut a few sticks with our bowsaws and pull them in the sled, and if the ogres keep mulching the piles like they have been River says she’ll hire someone with a chainsaw to come out for a day and cut it all up for her, so she can cart it in and stack it against the tall blonde cabin wall, three winter’s worth of heat for the heavy stove.
I found this on a friend’s page (thanks, virginia!) and it pretty much sums up how I feel about how to have non-stupid relationships with other human beings on this planet, and also how to have any sort of chance at happiness in this life. The concept of Radical Honesty sounds almost too easy, like, how could the secret to happiness be so simple? but it’s actually the hardest thing in the entire world, and many people are completely incapable of it. Try it! You won’t be able to do it, and then you’ll find some reason to rationalize the fact that you can’t do it. It’s totally intense! I try to do it every day, and I’ve lost jobs, friends and dates from it!
I especially like this part-
Think deeply about whether you’re really doing anyone a favor by lying. Should you really shelter someone from reality? Are you giving the recipient of your white lie enough credit? Do you assume they’re too weak to handle the truth?
And these warnings are great too-
Today I rode my bike five thousand miles. And the front derailleur cable broke, just sort of stiffened and snapped, right at the shifter, and so the chain was stuck in the very easiest granny gear (and I ride a steadfast sort of steel-framed touring bike, which has a veritable rolodex of granny gears) and so slowly I traveled amongst the flaking victorians of NE Portland, and the flaking victorians of N Portland, and the freshly-painted Victorians of SE Portland with their neat herb gardens and red-rusted wind-chimes, and my wheels rolled forward in slow-motion while my legs pedaled manically in space, knees flying every which way, and if I forgot for just one moment and tried to shift into a higher gear my chain only ground against the lifeless derailleur with a horrible shrik-SQUEAK-shrik-SQUEAK which was embarrassing, and so I pedaled as fast as I could, and everything took seventeen hours instead of one.
Tomorrow I am going to get that fixed.
While I’m on the subject of granny gears, maybe I should tell you more about my bicycle. Her name is RoHo and she is my steadfast transportation, my pickup-truck, my Steel Horse. She was named by a friend of a friend who was visiting one warm Portland summer many years ago, and this friend of a friend (it’s easier, almost, to think of her as a distant cousin, which is how I’ve started to think of all the friends-of-friends who become my friend for a day or two, in summer, or I become theirs, and then they go back to some other place where they stay for some amount of time, and I never see them again, or at least not until I least expect it, except in pictures, or maybe on the internet, but always I know that they are out there somewhere, traversing the world, beating paths to the towns of other friends, who are also my friends, traipsing about with a loose bit of silk thread dangling from their back pocket to catch on a blackberry bramble and leave a trail two thousand miles long, through everyone’s backyards and under their beds and out their kitchen windows…) But anyway- this friend of a friend was visiting for a few weeks in the summertime in Portland and had gotten into the habit of naming bicycles, and I, having just acquired a new bicycle, took advantage of the rare opportunity to have my bicycle named. So she straddled my bike, rode it a few blocks, and named it RoHo, which is short for Roman Holiday. The name, I think, was inspired by the bike’s shining, tasteless new paint, which was a sort of creamy, rusty color, like root-beer with milk in it. I was horrified by my new bike’s gleaming, subtly glittering, new-looking paint, that shimmered like it had been dipped in cheap lipgloss, and so I painted the frame, as soon as possible, with a can of matte black spray-paint, without sanding, of course, so that the black paint only sort of stuck, and flaked off, in bits, over the course of weeks, on the parts that rubbed my ankle, and the part where I swung my leg over, and the part where I used my u-lock, until my bike was appropriately scuffed-looking, and unkempt, and its sturdy workhorse pickup-truck personality was at last allowed to shine through.
I originally got a touring bike because I wanted to bike to Alaska. Which is, of course, ridiculous. A friend and I were going to do it, together. So we got touring bikes in the fall. And in the spring she moved to Asheville and fell in love, which she had been wanting to do more than she had been wanting to bike to Alaska. And then I had some friends who flew to Alaska and biked BACK, and they said that it was nothing if not boring, and a little traumatic, and then they wouldn’t talk about it anymore.
So RoHo stayed home, and grew more lovely with age. And we would go on little trips, sometimes, when we got a bee in our bonnet- one winter in the piedmont of North Carolina we took off, just the two of us, to bike to a state park I’d seen on a map, Uwharrie, and when we got there it was nothing but clearcuts and scratchy clotted young forest and burned-out trailer homes with moldering, limp rebel flags. And I slept on a picnic table at an abandoned campground with RoHo standing guard and the moon like a gas lantern in the bare trees, and in the morning I’d gotten my period, so we biked the 14 miles to a town on the map that was, in the end, a row of strange, anachronistic shops, typewriter repair shops and shoemaker shops and alterations shops where women sat unsmiling amongst bolts of faded fabric and stared at me, alarmed, when I took off my helmet and asked them, did they know where the grocery store was? Of course they did. It was just across the street. And so I looked, and there it was. And it was that winter that was the last winter I ate gluten, the winter my cramps were so bad I couldn’t believe it, like I would die, but instead I just vomited on the coiled hose behind the shuttered church in that small southern town, I vomited on the bright green chickweed and the neatly coiled hose and then rolled on my back on the grass, clutching my stomach and moaning, while men in hardhats ate slices of pizza across the street, looked at me, got into pickup trucks, their lunch break over. Worst pain I ever felt in my life. Roho and I found the highway, slept in the woods alongside it, woke once in the night to see cows, tongues like gutted whitefish, breathing on us through the wire fence, and in the morning we hitch-hiked home. There is a thrash-punk band called Uwharria, named after the forest that once was, where owls used to be, and deer and other creatures. Uwharria plays deafening songs of loss, tragedy, noise. It seems appropriate.
RoHo has been with me through all my shifting transience, my unpredictable migratory urges, my soul-crushing seasonal wanderlust. She has dutifully been assembled and dismantled, packed and shipped and crowded, forgotten, rediscovered, brought triumphantly from the basement after a long month’s absence to roll me to the store like new in the warm gathering dusk of whatever sort of place I have found. She never ages, it seems, ever, or maybe that’s just what happens when you have a new bike, a real live New Bike, and even a New Bike you’ve had for five years is better than a long string of faceless goodwill bikes who carry the neglect and abandonment of their pasts like bed spells, like hexes, bikes whose wheels will never be true, whose bearings will always be full of sand, whose cranks will cry out like ghosts.
RoHo and I have never been in an accident. And I don’t think I’ll jinx myself just by saying that, and get hit by a car tomorrow, and come back in two weeks and write on this blog as a paraplegic, because I’ve been saying that very thing for years now, I’ve never been hit by a car, at first cautiously, under my breath, with knuckles on a wooden table-top, and then more openly, and lately I’ve been saying it all the time, whenever it comes to mind, and it never ceases to astound me, in this the most bicycle-friendly city in the country, where all of my friends ride bikes everywhere, and have for years, in every sort of whether, to their jobs and to the store and on adventures and everything, and I have never been in a serious bicycle accident, and almost all of them have. The closes thing that happened is I was stopped at a red light and a woman in a minivan behind me didn’t see me, stopped a minute to late, hit my back wheel and jammed the front of my seat into my tailbone. I had a bruise, but I was fine. And RoHo wasn’t hurt. Nearly everyone else I know has been blind-sided in the crosswalk, side-swiped in the turning lane, hit head-on at a four-way stop, went over a bad pothole and skinned their face off, broke all the tiny bones in their wrist. Although all of my friends (and friends of friends) have lived, a unusually large number of bicyclists are killed each year in portland, which corresponds to the unusually large number of people who commute on bike. It’s really the only dangerous thing I do, like driving is for most people.
Once, on a bike before RoHo, I was in an accident. It was a cheap goodwill bike, a twenty-dollar bike I’d switched the tags on and gotten for five. I was in New York City, in Manhattan, and I was doored. Doored by a sleek black cab with a sleep black door, a door which shot out into the bike lane and sheered my bike out from under me, I flew up and over the door, landing on my side in the street, my green tennis skirt up around my face, shimmery gold legging scuffed on the concrete. The man in the taxi was concerned, leaned over me and shook me by the shoulder, but I couldn’t speak, the wind had been knocked out of me. At last I got up, got his contact info, and limped home. I was staying in a dusty squat with some friends and strangers, I didn’t have any money for to the doctor. My ribs were cracked, I think, and hurt for months, when I laid on my side, when I bent over, when I breathed, but I just waited and eventually they healed. I didn’t know then that you could get money from people, that you were supposed to make them pay your medical bills when they hit you in their cars.
I left that bike in New York, came back to Portland and after a few months alone, bikeless, riding friends’ borrowed bikes, strange and oddly-shaped bikes that had been fashioned from elbow grease and the parts found in bikeshop dumpsters, I got RoHo. And suddenly it was like I had a Cadillac, a trusty steed, and a pickup truck, all rolled into one. RoHo never injured me. No matter how often I rode, no matter how far, no matter how tall the hills- my knees never went out like my friends’ did, my shoulders never cramped up at the base of my neck. My lower back never pained me, I never lost the sensation in my wrists. And on RoHo, I could carry anything- big boxes of wilted produce, dumpstered in the cold dead of night, my breath a frosted mist around my face- I kept an old bike tube wound around my rear rack for just such occasions, and with it I could strap down anything- could stack the most ridiculous loads, could balance them safely home like an ant with its giant crumb of sand, a bird with some grass for its nest.
And as I write this, it’s late, and the night outside my window is cold, almost frosty, the false spring we had gone like a mirage, and I know that RoHo is there, waiting, against the stack of plywood up next to the garage, safe in her u-lock, and that she’ll be there for me, in the morning when I need her, no money required, no job, no future, no five-year plan, that she runs on nothing but my own willpower, my legs, while I have them, and my hunger for motion, which is endless.
