50

This is the 50th post on the blog--honestly never thought I'd keep it up this long, but here all three or four of us still are. And now there are pictures, too.

So it seems, at half a hundred, I should have something wise to say, something to capture the moment, but I'm afraid only two things are leaping to mind.

One is the Shriekback quote that I think pretty much sums up the key to life: "Free your ass, and your mind will follow."

The other is a quote by Emile Durkheim, in his book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, where he says--and I think this holds true in a remarkable variety of ways--"Whatever touches the sacred carries the sacred with it."

From there, all you have to do is figure out what's sacred to you. And maybe the best way to do that is to free your ass.

Bears Do

I was at Anan Bear Reserve, a few years back. If you're deeply interested, check my story "Surrounded by Bears," in Traveler's Tales: Alaska, or it's on the routeofseeing.com website under its original title, "Do Bears."

But this story isn't in that story.

It was a crowded day there, and I was sitting on the edge of the viewing platform, my feet hanging off the edge. You're really not supposed to do that, but I knew the ranger, she wasn't worried about me, and we were all fine and happy.

I had the telephoto on and was shooting a rather distant bear that happened to be standing in quite dramatic light.

Then I felt something breathing on my feet.

Kind of a small bear. A very handsome bear. Fish in his mouth, head cocked slightly, looking at my feet from all of two or three inches away.

And the obvious expression on his face is the one we all have when we are traveling and something unexpected happens:

How did those get here?

Richard Brautigan

"You can't keep everything. You'd run out of room."

Rules of the Orange

For the first fifteen minutes or so, I want to think this is some kind of Zen lesson I’m not ready for yet. After all, I only just got to Japan. I’m missing practically everything. In the grocery store, there are carrots the size of a baby’s arm, barrels of pickled things that I still won’t recognize when I leave the country six years later. I end up eating a lot of boil-in-a-bag spaghetti.

So I’m keeping an open mind. For the past fifteen minutes, Atsuko has been peeling this orange with single-minded concentration such as I have never before seen, and she’s only about halfway done.

This should have been simple. When I walked into the office, Atsuko offered me an orange.

Of course, she did not simply hand me an orange. That would be rude. You never pour your own drink, and if someone offers you food, they offer you the finished product. There are rules of hospitality.

And so she goes to work on it. The thick outer peel only takes a couple minutes. I have no idea how she tears it off in such even pieces.

But this is where we would all finish, right?

Atsuko starts in on the white inner strands. One by one. With perfect poise, moving like later I will see her move when she does the tea ceremony.

This is the proper way to do things, plain and simple.

When the larger pieces are off, she takes a toothpick and works on even the tiniest flecks of white, leaving behind only a completely orange orange.

In Japanese, the word for orange is “orenji.” The fruit has never lost its gaijin, foreigner, status in the three hundred years since the Portuguese first brought them here. It’s as out of place as I am.

It takes Atsuko about a half hour to be satisfied with the orange before she hands me a section.

Never for a second am I bored watching her work, making a neat and flawless pile of orange peel.

And it is the best orange I have ever tasted. Not because of the flavor—in fact, much later I will meet a man who explains Japan's fertilizer industry to me and who almost makes me afraid to eat the rest of the time I’m in-country.

But Atsuko's orange has been the recipient of complete attention to detail, an absolute and utter respect for the food and for the gift it involved.

And that was well worth watching.

Her hands moved like there was nothing else in the world for them to be doing.

Under the Pinball Moon and Sun

The arctic is famous for what it does to light--holds onto it all summer, refuses to let it near in the winter. Mirages, flares, the northern lights.

The first week in the arctic, in Vuntut, the sun did not set at all, although it did go progressively further behind a mountain each night. The last evening, it was far enough back that it simply lit the entire chain of hills a bright red, pure magenta, really.

Earlier that day, I'd been walking on the mountainside, and it suddenly got dark--sun moving behind a cloud. I looked up, glad for my eyes having a moment's rest from the constant light, and somehow, the sun had lit the edges of four or five clouds with rainbows--the color simply followed the cloud contours.

In the Alaskan arctic, the moon would shoot straight up, but not very far; then it would move sideways across the sky. One night, it rose huge and red between a cleft in two mountains, while loons yelled at it.

Earlier that day, I'd gone for a walk--not an easy thing to do, with my knee not working, but I found if I stuck to the trails carved across the tundra by caribou (oh, how I wanted to take home that caribou skull I found, nubs of antlers still attached), it wasn't too bad.

At the far end of the lake, sitting on a nice rock, surrounded by those fresh water snail shells that seemed more delicate than the origami my brother does, I was suddenly aware of a strange shadow behind me. The sun had moved behind a cloud that was puffy on the edges, smooth in the middle. And in the middle part, the light had gone nacreous--how often do you get a chance to use that word? Pure mother of pearl light, or the light from an ocotoscope aimed at a screen door in summer.

Listening to Mountains Breathe

On the Noatak River, in the Brooks Range, I could feel certain mountains breathe. We'd be paddling along in the canoes--a string of five boats, two people in each one. I was in the front of the lead canoe, feeling that lovely dip of the paddle, the cool water splashing back over my hands, trying to remember if it was Lewis or Clark that Mom always said we were related to.

And from time to time, I'd feel one of the mountains breathe.

The mountains were all around us. The Brooks Range is a beautiful batch of mountains, craggy and steep, and the tundra colors were starting to pop nicely--magenta red bear berry, deep yellows of the grasses, and just a few orchids appearing on impossibly thin stalks.

"I'm feeling big mammal," I'd say, and for the first day or two, everybody else just laughed at me.

Then they realized that every time I said that, we'd spot a big mammal. Bear, Dall sheep, caribou, and, best of all, a lone male musk ox, who hung out on the hillside above our camp for two days.

I don't know how I knew. There are simply some landscapes where the language of the place makes sense.

I could head the mountains breathe.

And the sound was astonishingly beautiful and full of life.

Vuntut Moment

Day three, the wind started to blow.

On the one hand, this was good--it knocked down the mosquitoes that had formed a fog around our camp.

But then it started to blow harder. You could hear it, coming up like a train pounding across the valley, getting closer and closer, the monster ready to jump out of the closet.

And then suddenly there were no pauses at all.

Here's what you can do in a tent when the wind is pushing a hundred miles an hour:

Absolutely nothing.

And I felt lucky to be doing it.

When the wind finally died down, three days later, the arctic alpine butterflies came back out, the light brown edges of their dark brown wings blending perfectly into the tussock grass.

Minor Revenge

Got home, opened my bags, and found I was not the first person to open them that day. I had that little white love letter from the TSA in both duffels, and I must admit, after the pointless disgust at the pantomime dumb show of it all--oh, yeah, we all feel so much safer now--I had to feel sorry for whoever opened the bags. I mean, okay, so the job is better than working fast food, but not by a whole lot.

So I thought about it: you wake up, put on the white shirt, go to the airport. A couple big, black bags are slid aside for further inspection--was this while they were checking the spike on the tip of my cane, not that amused by the fact that it was covered only by a wine cork?--and you pull the zip.

And then the smell hits.

Now, my brother, who lives in Korea and travels more than I do, says he always puts his dirty clothes on top, just in case this happens to him. But that wasn't my intent. Truly. It's just that I had nothing but dirty clothes at this point.

The pants stained when I slid down a hill in Vuntut; the shirts caked with bug spray; the fleece that I used for a pillow every night, then wore during the cold mornings; the capriline that could almost stand up on its own by the time I got it home.

I was in the arctic. Even washing clothes in the river didn't help, because the river was full of silt, and the clothes that have not yet made it from the pile in the living room to the washer out back glint with a silver, silicate light.

There's an old Richard Brautigan bit, "The Last of My Armstrong Creek Mosquito Bites," in which he points out that "you can't keep everything. You'd run out of room."

But there are things I'd like to keep. Fear of memories washing down the drain, literally. There are many different kinds of souvenirs, and I have to wonder: once the scent is gone, once the feel of foreign textures is washed out, will it be harder and harder to keep the thought of the delicate wings of the arctic alpine butterfly, a startling brown against the gold and red of the tundra?

What about the sound of a seagull coming in through the skylight at 3 AM?

Maybe I'll wait another day to finish washing the clothes.

Sometimes, Pleasure Is Easy

In mid February, before going to Petra and Wadi Rum, I bought a new briefcase. This is always a momentous occasion for a writer—as important as your desk, but more vital in the details—and I decided to go all the way, to buy well, buy once, and never have to think about this kind of thing again.

So I bought a Filson.

The C.C. Filson company went into business in the late 1800s, making clothing for men headed for the Klondike gold rush. More than a hundred years later, they’re still in Seattle, still making cloth goods that you can plan on handing down to your grandchildren.

There is an essential joy in the zippers of the case, knowing they will never snag; and the cloth itself is tougher than a tank yet ages as well as the very best wine.

Everybody who travels has their gear that goes with them every trip. I wear a t-shirt of Tintin’s dog, Snowy, on all outbound flights; my Filson rain hat, which I bought four years ago in Alaska, has been in twenty or so countries now.

And now I have my case.

No, this isn’t an ad for Filson, just a minor expression of pleasure in something well made, perfectly suited to its purpose. In a disposable world, it’s a joy we have all too seldom.

What made me think of all this is an ad in the Filson catalog, where someone says, after a million miles of travel, the only wear his own Filson briefcase shows is a little scuffing.

So naturally, I wondered, how far has my case gone in the past six months, since I bought it? It still looks new enough I could probably send it back for a full refund (well, I could anyway; these people guarantee everything, and their motto is “Might as well have the best” for a reason).

At a rough estimate, the case has traveled not quite 53,000 miles. That’s better than twice around the earth at the equator, and it would be more, but I left the case behind a couple times, stored it in a closet in Old Crow, in an office in Fairbanks.

53,000 miles is a pretty good chunk of territory. The case—and of course, by extension, I along with it--has made three round trips across the Atlantic. It has twice crossed the Arctic Circle. And it’s gone to the photocopy place down the road.

A thing of beauty is not a thing to ignore.

Later today, I find out for sure where the case is going next.

Post-Arctic Shock

After 10 days in the Canadian arctic, a week in British Columbia, and then 12 days in the Alaskan arctic, I am home at last, and to all three or four people who read this, the next few days I'll fill you in on a few of the things that happened. Not today, though, as it's spatial dislocation day--a side effect of airplanes, of waking up above the arctic circle and going to sleep in the Arizona desert.

So just a few quick thoughts.

First, tundra is really cool stuff. The bear berry was changing color, there were reds and golds popping everywhere, and the closer you get down to look at things, the more detail appears.

Second, it sucks to be a musk ox when it's 70 degrees out. We were in camp in sleeveless shirts; that poor guy was wearing a qiviut coat.

Third, apparently, it pretty much sucks all the time to be a caribou, but those guys can swim. Watched them cross a half-mile wide lake, their pace not varying, their heads staying pefectly level the whole time.

And fourth, shooting stars in the arctic are especially lovely. The night sky there this time of year is the prettiest I have ever seen, made all the more so by how short the time it's around. Things have barely gotten dark before the first hints of dawn are coming up; and the full moon, instead of rising, seems to slide sideways like a pinball struck by a flipper.

A Random Travel Thought

Today--leaving Vancouver, flying to Seattle, Anchorage, Fairbanks, getting ready to fly into the arctic tomorrow--reminds me of one thing:

the road signs in Nepal that are nothing more than exclamation marks.

Trees Are Good Things

Today, drove from a farm outside Duncan--perfect farm house, all porches and high ceilings, but a few things you don't expect on a Canadian farm, including water buffalo--into the Cowichan Valley, then onto a logging road, down to Port Renfrew and across to Sooke.

No reason for any of that to mean much to you, unless you've spent way too much time studying the geography of Vancouver Island.

The thing is, in the middle of the drive, there was a sign pointing to a spruce tree.

And it was a really good tree, probably upwards of a hundred feet tall, a good twenty or thirty feet around.

But how did we get to the point where these trees, which once dominated the forests of the Pacific Northwest, needed signs to point them out?

They got used in guitars, in Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose. They were used heavily for making fighter jets in World War Two.

In this part of the world, it was actually the Western red cedar that was the center of life. The First Nations people made everything out of it: canoes, totem poles, clothes, medicine.

It was also the tree that was the center of the forest itself. The top soil is very bad all along the coast, only a few inches thick in most places. When the cedar trees would die, they'd provide the nursery for new trees, which would grow up right out of the fallen log.

Live cedar can also support fully grown trees growing off it; the cedar is so massive, a fifty-foot alder seems like nothing more than a pimple.

A couple years ago, north of here, I paddled to a small island with big trees, including one of the largest Western red cedar trees still standing. But that wasn't the one that got my attention. There was another, which perfectly showed off a facet of cedar life: as they age, they rot from the inside out. This is normal, does nothing to slow them down, but it means there's a big hollow space inside.

In this particular tree, you could walk inside, like you were a Keebler elf, and stand in a hollow space in the tree, maybe 15 feet across, 30 feet high.

It was like that book I loved as a kid, about the boy who ran away from home and lived in a tree in the woods.

It was like being taken into the tree's breath.

It was a way of understanding, for the first time ever, the depth of time in any life.

Trees abide. Trees hang out. Even if they're so lonely they need a sign pointing to them, trees will wait for what happens next, because they know all things must pass.

Many, many years ago, the guy who wrote Doonesbury did a TV special with his characters. The last line of the show was, "Things gotta change, right? And the trees agree. Good going, trees."

Rituals

Some places that I end up in over and over again seem to require their own rituals. I'm in Victoria, British Columbia right now, my favorite city in the world. I've had my hot dog from the cart in front of Monroe's, I've had my chocolate at Rogers', and this morning, went out to watch orca--about 30 of them, some nice leaps, a few spyhops.

And now it's time to go buy tea.

Genius Loci

Some places just feel right, and that's what British Columbia has always been for me. Simply a place to fall into again and again, a place where the light slants in a way that makes perfect sense.

I'm here to chase a couple different monsters, most in or around Vancouver Island. Also trying to drive some inland roads that I haven't been on before, little middle of nowhere stuff, blank spots on the personal map.

Last night, there was a carnival outside the hotel, and the world smelled like french fries.

Like Laurie Anderson said, Paradise is exactly like where you are right now/only much, much better.

What a Loony Buys You

I have about five minutes of internet time left, here in Whitehorse, Yukon. Just came out of a week of camping in the bush, a bit north of 68 degrees, 24 minutes north, as close to the pole as I've ever been.

Here's the sad truth: arctic ground squirrel tastes like chicken. Dark meat.

The last morning, about 50 caribou went by camp, the first of the migration of the Porquipine herd, which, in a week, will send about 35,000 animals through the valleys where we were in Vuntut. Simply marvelous.

And the tent held up in 100-mph winds. What more can you ask?

At Whitehorse, the Yukon River flows swiftly past, and it looks like there are only a fraction of the tourists I usually see here in the summer. No matter. Tomorrow, south to British Columbia, where there is email and phones, but there will not be that incredible quiet of Vuntut, where the only sound you hear are the mosquitoes in your ears.