d e e p t h o u g h t s i n b e a u t i f u l i d a h o

Rural Idaho is big, rural idaho is lonely. Being in rural idaho with one other person does not keep the loneliness away- it holds it back, for hours at a time, the way a campfire holds back the dark- but then, walking in the mountains, the feeling returns- and it is not even loneliness, really, but a feeling of inadequacy- a feeling that I do not even exist, a feeling that I am tethered to nothing, adrift, alone in space- it is a hunger for a validation that the universe can not, does not provide. And really, isn’t that the point? That no-one asks us to live and yet we do it anyway, that we wake each morning, determined, in spite of our stark solitude in this cold and endless universe, that we work towards some uncertain future, and we do it without thanks or encouragement. Making art, in particular, setting aside a month of time to just make art, seems to make one feel this way. You must come to terms, each day, when the stars pale and the sun rises, with the fact that you are small, so infinitesimally small as to be insignificant, and yet it is enormously important that you continue to exist. And it is the great joke of the universe that no-one can tell you why.

But! I am writing again, and it feels easy again, and such is the mystery of making art. And Idaho is beautiful, and here are the pictures to prove it. They are all of myself, Corinne, or Nature, because it is just the three of us out here, alone in the promised land.

the wildz

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the good life #1: gluten-free fried chicken

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corinne

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corinne outside the junkshop in town

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the good life #2: our breakfasts are even better than our dinners

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an abandoned farmhouse from 1911- newspaper and cloth insulation (photo by corinne)

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fancy wallpaper over log walls (photo by corinne)

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beautiful grass and sunshine. so beautiful! (photo by corinne)

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newspaper on the logs- good times stories, june 1911 (corinne’s photo)

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scrabble in the cave-cabin (it may look like my hands are moving fast, but I am actually the slowest scrabble player this side of the Columbia) (corinne took this photo)

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corinne in the cave cabin

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corinne and mighty-man, the resident pony

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corinne in our backyard

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corinne and Hallie, the sweetest pitbull in the world, cuddling in front of the woodstove

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the good life #3: these hotsprings are three miles from the house

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the good life #4: eating buffalo jerky in the hotsprings

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the good life #5: getting buff in the sunshine

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yours truly, having deep thoughts on a mountaintop

t-bird’s shack

If there’s one thing I like to take pictures of, it’s the gently-lit shacks that some of my friends get to live in. Here is t-bird’s. We met today in the afternoon. T-bird bought me a tamale and a tiny persimmon in the bustle of the farmer’s market and then we went to her shack for tea, where we talked about romance, space heaters, and pleasure trips to Greece.

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where the mice like to rock

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For Pearl, who is leaving to go east

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Jasper

My good friend Jasper was in town. Jasper, I have decided, was put on this earth to be my personal fashion model. We did a photo shoot.

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WE WENT TO THE COAST FOR THE EQUINOX, AND IT WAS MAGIC

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because I like taking pictures of the sun

cook inlet from Anchorage, a sky-whale

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Eklutna lake

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Interior Alaska 2 a.m. sunset/sunrise combo

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.I don’t know which one I like better

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more.

Feeling inspired. Ate some coffee icecream, the sun is out endlessly. I’ve been going on these long hikes every day, just walking on the looping four-wheeler tracks that go through the wilderness, finding bleached moose bones and bits of eaten un-shy hares and impossibly lavender pasque flowers… the birch leaves have gone, in a matter of hours, from the size of squirrels’ ears to the size of birch leaves, large enough to clatter like pennies in the wind, newly minted and flawless. There are these clearings… god, I cannot describe them. Beds of moss without any trees or any sound, an impossible cornocopia of sun, ringed in cottonwoods, like a portal to a magic land…

Every day is 75 degrees and sunny, and will be, as far as I can tell, until September. My Experimental Interior Summer is, so far, going far better than I had ever imagined. I like to think of Alaska as five different states, because there are five distinct bioregions- Southeast (rainforest and giant trees, ala the PNW), South-Central (mountains/glaciers/oceans/jumping whales combo, ala an alaskan postcard, also where I grew up), The Arctic (windswept tundra and Inupiat people who eat lots of seal meat- caribou herds- no roads and I haven’t been there), Western Alaska (windswept tundra and Yupik people who eat lots of seal meat- no roads and I haven’t been there), The Aleutian Chain (islands, windswept grass and rock, nesting birds, native people with cancer- where the military dumps its nuclear waste- have not been there) and the Interior (hot dry summers with some of the coldest winters in the world- Denali is here, the rest is boggy forest flatlands with a few mighty rivers running through). I want to go to the arctic, someday, there is a dirt road that the oil trucks use, I want to ride my bicycle all the way up to the arctic ocean, see where the caribou go to escape the flies. Alaska has four oceans, did you know- pacific, bering sea, chukchi sea, beaufort sea, and more coastline than the rest of the country combined.

I slept for ten hours last night, and had a dream that I had inhereted a household of cats- I then forgot to give the cats any water, because I was having heterosexual sex. I have anxiety about animals not getting enough water… when I woke up I felt like I had gone on an impossibly long journey and had some difficulty making breakfast, going to work, and going about my day- reading books with the children, teaching them to count dimes… the cats, I kept thinking- the cats…

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impossible

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impossible

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impossible

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impossible

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impossible

ment

land of the midnite ice-cream binge

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.

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