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- May 5, 2012
- Messages
- 1,727
The boreal forest burns. Summer swelter sweeps the Arctic Circle.
Smoke slides south, smothering the subarctic. We arrive on airliners feeling somewhat complicit.
Cruise ships clog the waterfront in town.
Restauranteurs bleed our wallets like thieving crows.
Eagles congregate like pigeons on every overhead. We keep count, every part the typical tourists.
Take a gander at the gold rush glory holes.
On Mendenhall, Mergus merganser makes a game out of swim lessons.
She dives deep, leaving her crèche to flounder. The abandoned brood bobs in panic. When her hooded head reappears, they scramble to rejoin her in a flurry of fluff.
Homo solitudinem floats nearby, an invasive species.
Bigger waters beckon. We bid Juneau bon voyage. The Marine Highway ferries us north.
Mind manners at the international border.
Breach British Columbia.
Such a scenic shuttle.
On to Yukon.
Rigging for rapids.
Rented rafts don't row the same. They sag and creak like an old man's bones.
We slip along on an ever swelling ribbon.
Silver to Sediments, sloshing onto bars of gravel.
The sun makes a long sideways slide toward the skyline.
A gradual recline into the soft embrace of perpetual twilight.
Insomniac songbirds herald its return far too early.
Solar rays scatter in the Venusian sky, blotting out the batholiths.
The river, too, turns otherworldly.
The water divides and multiplies. Hydrologic mitosis.
Braids break away, somersault down cobble slopes, turn and crawl back up again.
Gravity seems selective.
Even the sun sulks, ebbing into gray, as Ursus arctos horribilis makes an appearance
The Alsek sisters — Fairweather, Pentice, Noisy — crowd close.
Grand Pacific's sons — Konamoxt and Melbern — insist on their share of the glory.
Mist metamorphoses the landscape in the morning.
Rivers fuse. Alsek gifts Tatshenshini its name by marriage.
The commingled couple dance across a broad valley, the rise and fall of their joyous steps making our boats sway to the drunken rhythm.
Current carries us over an invisible line. A lone voice raises the opening stanza of Key's iconic anthem. Then, one by one, we pick up the tune. Wind and waves swallow the sound, leaving the cloud-shrouded ramparts of unnamed peaks unmoved by our song.
Walker proves a misnomer.
An impromptu cheer arises at the sight of ice calving into the slack water.
Back in the flow, days now blurring.
The palette bursts where Epilobium angustifolium deigns to share real estate.
This place exudes an elder majesty.
Unlike the desert I know, it does not strive to impress by way of its oddities.
It is of an older world, solemn, stately, dignified.
I put these words to paper with a dull pencil.
Nearing the end now.
The door is open. We take it.
Recession.
Drawing away.
Retreating from past prestige.
The word weighs on the lips, heavy with connotation. It wedges in the folds of the grey matter, trapped like a polar explorer plunged in an icy crevasse.
It finds new context here.
The thought occurs that the halcyon of the Holocene has proved too kind to Homo sapiens.
Lost to our collective memory are the past eons when this northern land was steppe. Ignored are the shifts in climate that sang the swan song to Canis dirus, Mammoths primigenius, Arctodus simus, Smilodon fatalis and so many others.
Who will mourn for me when extinction comes?
Smoke slides south, smothering the subarctic. We arrive on airliners feeling somewhat complicit.
Cruise ships clog the waterfront in town.
Restauranteurs bleed our wallets like thieving crows.
Eagles congregate like pigeons on every overhead. We keep count, every part the typical tourists.
Take a gander at the gold rush glory holes.
On Mendenhall, Mergus merganser makes a game out of swim lessons.
She dives deep, leaving her crèche to flounder. The abandoned brood bobs in panic. When her hooded head reappears, they scramble to rejoin her in a flurry of fluff.
Homo solitudinem floats nearby, an invasive species.
Bigger waters beckon. We bid Juneau bon voyage. The Marine Highway ferries us north.
Mind manners at the international border.
Breach British Columbia.
Such a scenic shuttle.
On to Yukon.
Rigging for rapids.
Rented rafts don't row the same. They sag and creak like an old man's bones.
We slip along on an ever swelling ribbon.
Silver to Sediments, sloshing onto bars of gravel.
The sun makes a long sideways slide toward the skyline.
A gradual recline into the soft embrace of perpetual twilight.
Insomniac songbirds herald its return far too early.
Solar rays scatter in the Venusian sky, blotting out the batholiths.
The river, too, turns otherworldly.
The water divides and multiplies. Hydrologic mitosis.
Braids break away, somersault down cobble slopes, turn and crawl back up again.
Gravity seems selective.
Even the sun sulks, ebbing into gray, as Ursus arctos horribilis makes an appearance
The Alsek sisters — Fairweather, Pentice, Noisy — crowd close.
Grand Pacific's sons — Konamoxt and Melbern — insist on their share of the glory.
Mist metamorphoses the landscape in the morning.
Rivers fuse. Alsek gifts Tatshenshini its name by marriage.
The commingled couple dance across a broad valley, the rise and fall of their joyous steps making our boats sway to the drunken rhythm.
Current carries us over an invisible line. A lone voice raises the opening stanza of Key's iconic anthem. Then, one by one, we pick up the tune. Wind and waves swallow the sound, leaving the cloud-shrouded ramparts of unnamed peaks unmoved by our song.
Walker proves a misnomer.
An impromptu cheer arises at the sight of ice calving into the slack water.
Back in the flow, days now blurring.
The palette bursts where Epilobium angustifolium deigns to share real estate.
This place exudes an elder majesty.
Unlike the desert I know, it does not strive to impress by way of its oddities.
It is of an older world, solemn, stately, dignified.
I put these words to paper with a dull pencil.
Nearing the end now.
The door is open. We take it.
Recession.
Drawing away.
Retreating from past prestige.
The word weighs on the lips, heavy with connotation. It wedges in the folds of the grey matter, trapped like a polar explorer plunged in an icy crevasse.
It finds new context here.
The thought occurs that the halcyon of the Holocene has proved too kind to Homo sapiens.
Lost to our collective memory are the past eons when this northern land was steppe. Ignored are the shifts in climate that sang the swan song to Canis dirus, Mammoths primigenius, Arctodus simus, Smilodon fatalis and so many others.
Who will mourn for me when extinction comes?
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