Alaska, Day 3 -- in media McCarthy

19 August 2017
Saturday

Today, I decide not to take any medicine. This allows me to drink a little alcohol--at lunch, a very dry English cider with a skull on the bottle; at dinner, a hopped cider from the Square Mile Cider Company (my favorite cider of all time). I spend the day in languorous trance: limbs heavy, thoughts muddled, movement slow. It is not uncomfortable, but it is not exactly pleasant, either. It is how I used to move through the world... before I found a medication that worked. Strange how "normal" is not, in fact, a constant after all.

There is nothing in particular planned today. Margy and I start the morning with chai from the Potato. It is pleasant: complex, and not too sweet. We wander up and down the muddy roads. We breathe McCarthy in. I make sure not to go anywhere without my camera swinging from my shoulder.

Grandmother stands next to a gate wrought from artifacts and junk. It makes no architectural sense, and I enjoy it very much.

Close up of copper ore held in place by rusty screws. It is part of the gate. Something about it makes me feel as though magic might be real.

Close up of another part of the gate. It is the metal skeleton of an antique child's bike, suspended in decaying metal circle.

A red building. "McCarthy General Store" in spindly black font. A cow skull, for some reason. The store has a sign on the door that simply says, "shut." I don't think this place has been used in quite some time.

Rusted remains of a typewriter or cash register, slimy with moss and rain. Antique junk like this is everywhere you look in this little town, rotting away wherever it was left.

Red cabin behind some kind of... wall?... constructed from (what I think are) angular fuel cans.

Mountain looms over antique yellow building.

At some point we rendezvous with N., who takes us on a tour of the old hardware store building. Upstairs, the rooms-cum-offices are littered with reminders of school trips and internships and art projects that once took place there. I find a wall of haiku.  

Moisture-warped poster containing several ink sketches of flowers and a haphazard smattering of three-line poems--English haiku/senryuu.

I absorb all of them. I'm in a pensive sort of mood. They aren't the best poems I've ever read, nor are they particularly skillful examples of haiku/senryuu. Nevertheless, they make a connection. I pick my three favorite and snap closer pictures of them to remember them later. I don't know the authors' names, or I would attribute them correctly... but, nevertheless, here they are:

-----

I see the fly land

And swat it with ease and grace

He did nothing wrong

-----

The ice looked hollow

standing on infinity

the whole earth melting

-----

melting ice

sculpts

its own body

 -----

Later, we go on a walk. The puppy cannot do without one--and neither can I. We walk further down the creek we'd started exploring yesterday. We find moose tracks and bear tracks. I am looking closely at the multicolored stones that line the creekbed, and I lag behind Margy and Dog and Dad.

Bear tracks. Puppy paw for size reference. They are not particularly large, for bear tracks... which is probably for the best...

Stones of McCarthy creek.

I am carrying, in my pocket, a piece of volcanic rock. I took it from a parking lot on the Big Island of Hawai'i (a parking lot, mind you, and NOT from Volcano National Park, which would have been illegal--not to mention disrespectful). It burns in my pocket with the wrath and fire that wrought it, half an ocean away.

They say taking volcanic rock from the islands is bad luck. They say Pele will curse anyone who carries pieces of her away. Tourists mail thousands of pounds of rock and sand back to the islands every year to try and break the curses they didn't believe in until, well, they did. Some say a disgruntled park ranger started the rumor--others that it is considered disrespectful by the native culture. I find it hard to believe that no minerals would find their way off the islands in export, blessed in transit by the priests of capitalism... and can't see how my acquisition would differ in principle. But it doesn't matter. What matters is I carry the stone in my pocket, and it remembers nothing but fire.

My eye catches on a smooth gray stone, streaked white with quartz. I am compelled to pick it up. Basalt, I think: forged in fire, just like the chunk of scoria I am carrying. But this stone remembers more than that. It remembers glacial ice, and river-water, and rain, and snow. It is calm. It soothes.

An oval impression remains in the soil I plucked it from. I press the piece of Hawaiian scoria into it--a perfect fit. I invite Pele to make her acquaintance with whatever Athabaskan spirits might still dwell here, appealing to pantheons that do not exist to release myself from curses I don't believe in.

I pocket the new stone. A fair trade.

The day winds down slowly, twilight lingering long after night would have fallen, were we further south. I wind down slowly with it, and fade to sleep as darkness falls.