Alaska, Penultimate Day -- friendship and Flattop

25 August 2017
Friday

I spend most of the morning puttering around the house, performing small tasks to get ready to leave: packing my bags, drinking tea, finishing up some laundry, eating breakfast, putting things back to rights. In between each task I slip into the garage to spray layers of workable fixative onto my watercolor paintings: last year's Christmas present to Daddy and Margy, "Sourdough Mountain," "Backyard Birch." No matter how many layers I add, I cannot seem to make the postcard water resistant enough. Even though I've already put a stamp on it, I decide to make an envelope for it (using the cover of a magazine advertising the Alaska state fair) to better protect it for its trip to the lower 48. The envelope is in various states of assembly as I wander the house, periodically taking breaks to check for messages from my friend P. or faff about on the internet. I put two stamps on it, just in case--and extra tape. Happy Birthday, Jenn. I love you.

My painted postcard next to the hand-made envelope for it (with the addresses blurred out for people's privacy, though my sister has moved from there since then).

At some point I ask my Grandmother what she thinks about the current political climate, and thoughts spill out of her as if they'd been pent up for a while. I appreciate her honesty, her forthrightness. We do not argue. I try to find the common ground we stand on. Sometimes I wonder if we're talking about the same things. I'm not exactly sure how we can watch the same man speak and have such wildly different impressions of him. But I respect where she is coming from. The conversation peters naturally out.

At some point she humors me and allows me to read her some of my poetry. I read her Keepsake, and she says, "it's a message." She sees it as a story of healing. She seems to approve. I try another one--Celsius--but she is not sure about it, cannot seem to glean a meaning from it. Poetry isn't really her thing, after all. I try one more, this time a sonnet, composed more recently. She makes a noise halfway between curiosity and approval. I am pleased. There is more in that small noise than some express in paragraphs.

Early evening and P. arrives with his friend D., fresh from Oregon. It's been a year or two, but our last visit was so short it still feels like eight. It is good to see him. I don't feel estranged from him, despite the mostly-silent years stretching out between us. After all, I am back in town, and he is right there. Everything is different, yet nothing has changed. Friendship with P. is a fundamental physical constant; proximal distance changes only one's experience thereof.

We head off in his truck to Flattop for a hike. On the way, we pass a road that was named for P.'s family. I wonder what it's like to be so deeply rooted to a place. It it not something I've ever had a personal concept of.

It is a cloudy, humid Alaskan summer day, and we almost have the most popular hike in Alaska all to ourselves. I try to summarize eight years of my life while we meander up the mountain. Turns out that D. is a PhD-MD; he knows what I am talking about when I ramble on about medications and tests and diagnoses. So much of my story hinges on my August 2016 diagnosis of idiopathic hypersomnia. He is pleasant to talk to--but I am not surprised, because he is P.'s friend. I deduce that they met at science camp. I am halfway right: P. met D. through D.'s wife... whom P. met at science camp.

D. stops at the top of blueberry hill to sit and soak in the view as P. and I continue to the summit. P. and I talk about so many things--poetry and people and the strange and sad and wonderful pieces that make up our lives. He asks me about my faith, at some point, and I find myself telling him things that I don't know if I've ever told anybody else. Certainly not all at once, honest and lithic and raw. He apologizes to me for a decision somebody else made, years ago. The apology is so sweet and so pure that it dissolves what hurt remained of it. P. has a kindness rooted deeply in him, which better embodies the Love he worships than a dozen bishops with a dozen paterissas and a dozen golden hats.

If that one injury were the sole cause of my lapse in faith, P.'s apology would have brought me back into the fold in an instant. As it is, I remain an agnostic distance from the God I once believed I knew. I say, if God is merciful, and loving, and kind, then he will suffer me to try and find the truth as best I know how. Yeah, P. says. I think so too.

We make the summit. The boost in endurance gained from coming down to sea level from Denver makes me feel great. This hike was just what I needed.

P. and Jam taking a selfie with the Chugach range visible behind them.

A partial panorama view from the summit, including parts of the Chugach range.

Another partial panorama view from the summit, including more mountains and a sliver of sea.

Yet another partial panorama view from the summit, including a view of Anchorage and an oceanic horizon.

We head back to the house and P. and D. stay a while for dinner, socializing with Margy's friends, with whom they seem to have a lot in common. I am pleased that Margy's friends seem to approve of my friends. I hope they maintain a connection after I'm gone. They all seem like wonderful people. Before P. goes, I give him leftover food and ply him with promises. Next time I'll make it up to Eagle River. Next time I'll set aside more time to see old friends. I look forward to next time. I beg him to tell everyone that I missed--especially my godparents--that I'm sorry I missed them, that I'll make time to see them whenever I come back this way. I hope that there is a deep implication that I love and miss them wrapped up in these promises, as I lack a means to express this sentiment in the moment.

Everyone slows down as the evening progresses; my dad lingers in a strange sort of half-asleep state, unable to do much more than sit on the couch with half a grin and a handful of silly comments. Folk peel off one-by-one, heading home, heading to bed. I give my grandmother and Margy hugs and tell them goodbye as they head upstairs. I am the last to settle down, to attempt a nap before my early morning flight. I set the alarm on my phone for 02:00. Sleep does not come easily.

Alaska, Day 8 -- museum visit and Backyard Birch

24 August 2017

Thursday

I don't have a very long post for today, but I do have some pictures. Yesterday (the 23rd), I didn't do anything particularly interesting, so I'm skipping it.

Today starts with brunch at the Snow City Cafe with Grandmother and Margy. I get a chai. It's way too sweet for me, but at least it's pretty.

Snow city menu, the leather notebook I bought in England (Oxford, iirc) and carry around in case inspiration hits, and a tall glass of hot chai with a flower pattern on the top in cinnamon.

After this, Margy goes back to work and Grandmother and I head to the Anchorage Museum together. Grandmother is very sweet and buys my ticket. We spend a lot of time in the museum looking at a photo exhibit that depicts contemporary native Alaskan people in the context of their daily lives, next to a little quote from each person. It's fascinating. We spend the time we need to read every caption and study every photo.

In the children's section of the museum, there's an infrared camera setup. I think it's funny how my glasses make me look like a jawa in the resulting image, so I snap a pic.

My favorite might be the exhibits of native Alaskan artifacts. These masks really capture my imagination, so I can't help but take a photo (without flash, of course!). I can't remember what tribe made them anymore... I think these might be masks from a bunch of different tribes all put together in the same display.

I really enjoy the rainbow of flowers outside the museum, as we walk back toward where we parked.

After we return home from our museum excursion, I settle down to paint some more with my watercolors. My sister's birthday is coming up soon, so I decide to paint her a postcard as a present. I find inspiration in a trio of birch trees from Dad's backyard. Rather than painting truly en plein air, I sit inside at the kitchen table and look out the window.

I hold up the watercolor painting next to the trees that inspired me. I took several creative liberties, of course, in my version, such as removing houses and cars and fences and so forth.

A close-up of my watercolor painting, "Backyard Birch," depicting three birch trees, fall foliage in the back, and some raspberry bushes with sparkling berries.

Later that day, I go for a walk with Margy and Dad and the puppy, and we walk right past a huge moose just chillin' in the park. It wouldn't be an Alaska vacation without a close encounter with a moose, I suppose.

Alaska, Day 4 -- ghosts of Kennicott

20 August 2017

Sunday

A white 14-passenger van trundles along from McCarthy, navigating washed-out road with thankless aplomb. Grandmother sits up front; the puppy occupies the doorwell. I sit somewhere in the middle. Tall banks of dirt rise and fall alongside us, gnarled with ferns and evergreen roots. I eavesdrop on my fellow passengers, who talk about where they came from, where they're going, what their absent friends are up to, who's seen which episode of Game of Thrones last.

We are headed into Kennicott, a town abandoned when its mines became unprofitable in 1938. Named for the Kennecott glacier to the west--some accident of history to blame for the degenerate vowel--this town has spent more time abandoned than inhabited, it would seem. Though the Forest Service has been restoring some of its old buildings, and putting on tours for tourists (like us), the spirit of this place is still one of quiet and strangely dignified decay.

To the left, the debris fields of the Kennecott glacier. To the right, the ghost town of Kennicott. Grandmother, in her bright orange coat, looks out at the mountains.

We meander through the town, browsing local shops and scattered buildings, restored to miniature museums. Grandmother and I watch a video about the ore processing plant we are preparing to tour while Dad and Margy keep the puppy occupied outside. We wander through the general store, flipping through blown-up copies of vintage photographs and random surviving forms and manifests. I learn that when this town was first established, the Kennecott glacier loomed over it, squeezing its development into one claustrophobic corridor. Decades of ice melt is what opened up its west flank.

Margy explains something, via gesture, to Grandmother as we look out over the mountains from the balcony/deck behind a coffee shop.

Kennicott's west flank. In between us and a ridge of snow-capped mountains lies a vast gray expanse of dirt and stone, layered atop a hidden, surreal landscape of glacial ice.

Someday I hope to hike the glacier, but today we've come to tour the town. And the centerpiece of the tour is the ore processing plant. (The mines themselves are an arduous, full-day hike away, and long-since closed, besides.) Margy stays behind with the puppy while Dad and Grandmother and I join our scheduled tour. It is a bit of a hike to the start of the tour--not for me, necessarily, but certainly for Grandmother (working with half a lung less than the rest of us), and an elderly gentleman with a bad leg. Dad slows and unassumingly takes up the rear, ready to aid in case of a fall. I stay toward the back also, scanning the gravel for chaff left by the mines: scattered stones streaked with iridescent shades of green, and blue--colored thus by copper-rich minerals, malachite and azurite. I pocket one or two particularly pretty stones, each about the size of my thumbnail. I feel a strong, barely-conscious urge to wash my hands after considering what heavy metals and other elements comprise the dust that I've been sifting through.

The crumbling, red, 14-storey ore processing plant looms over Kennicott. Most Kennicott iconography depicts this building, from some angle or another.

View of the ore processing facility from the top, where the tour enters.

Slightly blurry selfie of me in one of the hard hats provided by the tour, layered over my Army surplus jeep cap. I am not sure how to categorize the expression on my face.

Our tour guide is younger than I am. Though he is engaging to listen to, I drift in and out of paying attention. I am more focused on snapping photos of everything I can, from every angle. I use up a whole battery and have to switch to my final spare. Most of the photos turn out to be terrible--dark, blurry, indistinct, whatever. But I enjoy taking them. I enjoy hanging back from the group; I enjoy the excuse to stand in certain places, walk off a ways, look under or go on the other side of things. One other person in the group seems equally preoccupied in taking photos... but awkwardly with an iPad, for some reason. The gentleman with a bad leg is also an armchair scholar, and the tour, more often than not, is less a lecture and more a conversation between the guide and him.

I hold two samples of copper ore--on the left, the colorful, shiny, 80% pure ore they found in the area mines; on the right, a dull, adulterated sample of what your typical copper mine produces.

A workbench area inside the processing plant. A row of empty window-frames lets in summer sunlight.

It seems like the type of place that ghosts hang around in. I can't decide if the ghosts would be angry or just... tired. Tired and homesick and cold.

We part ways with the tour after exiting the processing plant, 14-storeys down ad hoc ladders and stairs constructed by afterthought. The tour continues further into town, but Grandmother and Dad hurry back to catch the five o'clock van back into McCarthy, and I follow.

I think a meal commenced after this. A conversation long in coming. A series of small but significant revelations. Pregnant silences. A truce.

Some time later that evening, after the sun should have set (but didn't), I wander off to try my hand at painting en plein air. I sit on a large rock by McCarthy creek and look out toward a mountain and... come up with something.

I refill my water pen in the creek as needed, and try to get used to how watercolors behave in the saturated Alaskan air--as opposed to the thirsty air of Colorado. At some point I accidentally flip the painting into the dirt... but kind of like the texture that the accidental grit affords it. I paint until I lose my light, and I paint some more after that, until I realize that the light has faded to where continuing to paint will make it worse, not better.

Me, sitting on a rock in my purple gore-tex, reenacting my painting the next morning now that I have Dad handy to take photos for me.

My final watercolor piece, resting against the rock I was sitting on, along with my watercolor tray and the watercolor pen I was using.

Me holding up my watercolor piece the next day, lining it up with the landscape that I'd painted.

(Later I show my painting to N., and he identifies it as Sourdough peak. I'm proud of myself, that I was able to paint something he recognized just by looking. After all, when it comes to watercolors, I'm still pretty much making it up as I go along.)

The light is gone when I slip back into Ma Johnson's, and Grandmother is asleep. I move quietly to avoid disturbing her, resting my painting on the beside table, putting my stuff away, and gathering supplies for a shower without turning on the light. Only after I've thoroughly warmed my hands and feet and core with hot water am I able to slide into bed and drift to sleep.