Sahalie FallsMcKenzie River Trail

Sahalie Falls
McKenzie River Trail

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Chris Roddy A member of my cohort1 A good man A butterfly man Cohort is an awful word that means “all the other people starting your grad school program the same time as you.” I just started the Masters in Environmental Studies program at University of Oregon. So did Chris. ↩

Chris Roddy

  • A member of my cohort1
  • A good man
  • A butterfly man

  1. Cohort is an awful word that means “all the other people starting your grad school program the same time as you.” I just started the Masters in Environmental Studies program at University of Oregon. So did Chris. ↩

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Journal entry 20090917 Streeter Park, Aurora, NE Beautiful this evening. Some school team was romping on the swings. I took a walk around. The sky was such a beautiful blue, with bright-pink + purple clouds. The light was so vivid it made the white pea-gravel covering the road + trails look colored in pastels. Walking alongside a cornfield staring down the perfectly straight rows, the world seems like a diorama, the field seemingly big but really small but force-perspectived, the hills and houses and sky behind so two-dimensional they seemed like a painted wall. Birds flew overhead in the warm, semi-humid air. Bugs + frogs buzzed and chirped in the trees. I felt incredulous that the world could be this beautiful and real. I smiled deep and spontaneously.

Journal entry
20090917 Streeter Park, Aurora, NE

Beautiful this evening. Some school team was romping on the swings. I took a walk around. The sky was such a beautiful blue, with bright-pink + purple clouds. The light was so vivid it made the white pea-gravel covering the road + trails look colored in pastels. Walking alongside a cornfield staring down the perfectly straight rows, the world seems like a diorama, the field seemingly big but really small but force-perspectived, the hills and houses and sky behind so two-dimensional they seemed like a painted wall. Birds flew overhead in the warm, semi-humid air. Bugs + frogs buzzed and chirped in the trees. I felt incredulous that the world could be this beautiful and real. I smiled deep and spontaneously.

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Ted Stevens International Airport Anchorage, Alaska

Ted Stevens International Airport
Anchorage, Alaska

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I’m missing Denali much more than I thought I would. I dreamed I was standing with my family in an Alaska Range valley—a mile-wide braided river with banks of vast orange-red tundra rimmed by craggy snow-capped peaks—and the enveloping light of near-Arctic fall made everything glow. All the life in everything had turned into light and was speaking in signals. And somehow I knew it was a dream, that I wasn’t there then, and so I was crying and so happy and so sad.

I’m missing Denali much more than I thought I would.

I dreamed I was standing with my family in an Alaska Range valley—a mile-wide braided river with banks of vast orange-red tundra rimmed by craggy snow-capped peaks—and the enveloping light of near-Arctic fall made everything glow. All the life in everything had turned into light and was speaking in signals. And somehow I knew it was a dream, that I wasn’t there then, and so I was crying and so happy and so sad.

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Leaving Alaska was hard. I made many good friends, had a job I enjoyed, lived in a place that was open and alive and beautiful, and just plain enjoyed my day-to-day. A long streak of painful beauty—clear skies a blue of such depth and being backing a foreground of golden-yellow leaves that seemed to glow from inside1—didn’t make it any easier.

One of my last evenings was spent with friends and co-workers at my boss’s cabin sitting on the bank high above the Nenana River. Looking out: miles of river, boreal forest, muskeg, snowfields, mountaintops. Incredible quantities of birch were stored out back, ready for more than one winter. And I thought, “I don’t want to leave here. I want to stay, get a cabin, ski and stoke fires and hole-up and feel/fear the deep cold. See the blue/pink/purple of short-lived winter light.”

Aunt Beverly: “So you think you’re going to make your home in Alaska?”
Me: “Maybe.”

Today, letting my car’s engine warm up before I checked her oil, I was looking through my trusty road atlas, reveling in the country I’m about to cross. Before I put it away, I turned to Alaska, and stared and stared, remembered, dreamed. Like looking at a picture of a loved one you haven’t seen in awhile.

Coming back here2 after every adventure, my life seems like a dream shaped in waves. Or a life lived here with vivid footnotes.

Bev and Norman are moving into Mamaw’s house. Cleaning, painting, rearranging. I’m glad it’s staying in the family, still a home for some of us. And that we can visit. Hard enough to lose a person and a place that you love all at once.

Papaw’s got bone cancer, is thin and weak and in pain. He was there for a few minutes when I first went to see him, laughed a bit and seemed at least mostly himself. His pride and stubbornness give—mowing the lawn, going up and down the basement steps to get to the freezer, bringing in some potatoes my dad dug from the garden—and take—cussing and being plain mean if you try to help him at all, mostly ignoring anyone that’s around because he doesn’t want to be seen as old and dying, driving to Kroger3 even though he shouldn’t be. He’s not himself most times, I think.

And Keane came, and we all sat around the house reading and watching TV and petting Ellie4 and generally being boring, and it felt so good.

  1. I tried and tried to take a picture to capture this for you and could never get it. As it should be, but I’m still sorry. ↩

  2. Brandenburg, KY, where my mom and dad and just about everyone else in my family lives. ↩

  3. He’s always called it ‘Kroger’s.’ I don’t think there ever was such a thing as a store that didn’t follow the possessive-form-of-the-owner’s-last-name formula when he was growing up, so Kroger’s it is. ↩

  4. The dog. ↩

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On the road again

0917 Here to Nebraska
0918 Nebraska to Salt Lake City1
0919 Salt Lake City to Eugene
0920
0921 UO’s Masters in Environmental Studies Orientation begins

  1. Katie (and Sloan?) and I are going to rape the American Apparel Flea Market. ↩

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