You have been forced to enter empty time.
The desire that drove you has relinquished.
There is nothing else to do now but rest
And patiently learn to receive the self
You have forsaken in the race of days. 

[...]

Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through. 

For One Who is Exhausted, John O’Donahue

Hello friends,

I’m finally back in Alaska after nearly a month away. After the weeks-long affair of closing up fishcamp for the season at the end of September, I had just two nights at my old cabin to do a duffle-shuffle, trading out the fish clothes and Xtratuffs I’d been wearing for the last six months for a dress, sandals, and other assorted Lower 48-appropriate clothing. Then I was off to two weddings in two different states, a visit to my old home in Bellingham, a trip to the National Archives for grad school, and New Hampshire to see family. Then it was back to Alaska to pack up my things again and move up the hill to a new cabin before my partner left for the season.

Needless to say, my head has been spinning. The scattered travel and string of social events alone would be enough to set sensitive-me on edge. But after six months of fishcamp living, where the nearest town is two hours by boat and I spend more time talking to the birds and the salmon than I do to any people, the maelstrom that was my life in the last few weeks was, frankly, a little too much.

The small talk and the pavement, the overwhelming number of choices to make and things to consume. The noise and the constant visual stimulation, the stress of ensuring I see all my loved ones in such a compressed time. The jeans, after so many months of long johns and Grundens.

I returned to Alaska last week in desperate need of rest.

When I left Alaska at the end of September, I packed my watercolors and my pencils, my knitting and my linocut tools. I thought my creative practice would be a grounding force while in what was bound to be a chaotic transition. I thought it would be a way for me to still feel human throughout all the travels.

I thought, at the very least, that I would write.

Instead, I did nothing. Didn’t paint, didn’t draw, didn’t carve. Didn’t even really knit, beyond what I forced myself to do, struggling to get through a sweater I started seven months ago.

I certainly didn’t write.

The void that opened in the last few weeks, where my well of creativity usually exists startled me. I spent the last two seasons absolutely driven to create, going mad during those periods when I couldn’t, grieving the long weeks when my hands were too sore from picking fish to hold carving tools or knitting needles. Creativity flowed out of me at a wild rate—for much of late summer, I created a new piece of art each and every day.

Now, I couldn’t even sit still long enough to knit a few rows in the round.

And instead of resting, I kept spinning myself up, even when I returned to Alaska. An object in motion stays in motion, after all. I threw myself into far too many work events, schoolwork and PhD prospects, moving into a new cabin, saying goodbye to the beloved neighbors who lived there before me, and then saying goodbye to my partner as he left on his own travels.

But I also began to slip back into my winter community, the embrace of my friends, with some coaxing. I attend the openings of their new coffee shops, their birthday fence-stretching parties, their baby showers, my evenings filled with the most beautiful celebrations of my loved ones’ lives.

I didn’t see most of these people in the six months I was at fishcamp, but the holes they left in my life during that time are soon filled—I give my love and care to my community and I receive back tenfold in return.

The same, I realize, is true for my creativity. That while yes, my creativity sustains me, I also need to sustain it. The energy doesn’t flow one way; it’s reciprocal, and I need to put energy back into it in order for it to be transformed into that creative force I treasure so much.

The well was empty because I hadn’t been filling it.

I’d taken that for granted this summer, when the well had seemed endless. And it was, to an extent, but only because the energy pouring into it was too. I spent my days surrounded by the sea, waking up to mergansers and seals out my window, my time dictated by the weather and the wiles of salmon.

It’s hard not to be filled up by such a place.

So, while I wait for my creativity to return, I begin to care for the other parts of me. I wake early each morning, curling up on the new couch (the first I’ve had in over four years!) before the big western window with a pile of new books. I eat berries and fish from the summer, and go for walks along the river and into the mountains. Snow falls for the first time this season, and the sight of the world all quiet and done up in white soothes me—everything is resting now. I set up my bird feeders and make a few more, stringing paper towel rolls smeared with peanut butter and bird seed from the birch tree by my porch. A hairy woodpecker visits the feeder pressed against my kitchen window, followed by an endless train of chickadees, and I laugh over the rumped headfeathers and picky eating habits of my new friends.

Mostly, I rest, truly, and try not to judge what my body and brain need, even if some days that looks like a whole bar of chocolate in one sitting and Jane Austen movies on repeat, Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion and The Other Bennet Sister filling the quiet of my days.

I still rattle around my empty new cabin most days, pacing to and from the windows and shifting from bench seat to couch to desk. While I’ve slowed down my life considerably, my body is still catching up, and there is nervousness and sadness to me that I can’t easily soothe.

But despite that, and so slowly I hardly notice, I start to feel the itch to make things again. I go easy, nurturing the sullen ember of creativity, purposefully picking projects that feel frictionless. I edit some old essays to submit for publication, and pick up a papercut that I started and abandoned last winter. The hard part’s long done, the drafting and drawing and transferring. Now I get the more mindless task of cutting. I buy bulky yarn for the first time in my knitting career, and bang out the body of a sweater in the span of a day, needles ticking along with my thoughts. I go for hikes and long walks, composing snippets of essays and poems in my head as I go.

The world starts to feel a little lighter, look a little brighter.

The well begins to refill.

In Case You Missed It…

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy a few others I’ve written about fishcamp and seasonality, such as:

If you enjoyed this essay, please share it with your friends! If you’d like to receive my essays and missives straight in your inbox and support my writing, you can subscribe to Winnowing below. Subscribing is always free; however, if you choose to become a paid supporter, you’ll also receive my seasonal print newsletter, Winnowing: A Seasonal Dispatch, in your mailbox!

All Winnowing subscribers receive a new essay every two(ish) weeks. Long-form essays are generally released once a month, with missives from wherever I am in the world and art archives about the mediums I’m exploring mixed in. If you choose to become a paid subscriber, you will also receive my print newsletter, Winnowing: A Seasonal Dispatch, in your mailbox every season. The first round of fall dispatches went out, but there’s still time to get your copy!

Thank you so much for being here and supporting my work.

-Chelsey

Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.

Bluets, Maggie Nelson

Prussian Blue was the first modern synthetic pigment created (the first ever in history being the equally gorgeous Egyptian Blue, invented over 5,000 years ago and beloved until the recipe was forgotten after the Fall of the Roman Empire). It was created by chance in 1704, when color-maker Johann Jacob Diesbach tried to make a red pigment with cochineals and potash that was unknowingly contaminated with animal blood. The result was a deep, soulful, inky blue that was soon threading through some of the world’s greatest masterpieces. It’s the color of Picasso’s Blue Period, when he lived in poverty in Paris and Barcelona after a friend’s suicide, and he turned to Prussian Blue to carry his grief, each of his paintings awash in it. Prussian Blue is the color of the Blue Revolution in Japan and it’s iconic woodblock prints, including Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji. It’s the color that weaves throughout Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, a book of fragments that uses an almost obsessive love for the color blue to delve into loss, longing, and the weight of being human.

And it is also, of course, the color of cyanotypes.

Cyanotypes, strictly speaking, are contact prints made by exposing a light-sensitive iron solution to sunlight. The result is a white silhouette of whatever you laid on the surface, surrounded by a sea of Prussian Blue.

Not so strictly speaking, they are pure magic, a sorcery of sunlight and saturation that has the uncanny ability to shake me out of whatever funk I find myself in.

I was first introduced to cyanotypes at an art residency in Norway, where they provided a welcome respite from creatively fatiguing days of learning to block print and writing eulogies for the fish I had killed that summer. Just when I felt my head would explode from both teaching myself a new medium and pulling together streams of slippery prose, our host Hannah showed us the darkened corner of the barn where she kept cyanotype materials for us to experiment with. What followed was a delightful afternoon with my new friends, creating sunprints with anything we could find. Mending needles, flowers, ferns, sheep’s wool; all of it was fair game. Hannah told us of a woman who made a cyanotype with a jellyfish and to this day I’m in awe of that woman’s fearless creativity.

Many of those prints remain some of my favorite things I’ve ever made, and I have them hanging in my cabin and out at fishcamp, tucked away into books and adorning cards to friends. But far beyond the physical products I came home with, that afternoon reminded me that creating art can, innately, be playful.

This summer cyanotype was the medium I reached for when all other mediums felt too hard. When life itself felt too hard. As someone with a creative practice often woven with deep introspection and melancholy, writing and creating art can often feel like a weighty duty— deeply necessary for myself and the people who connect with my work, but by no means easy. As a result, creating art has often felt too hard, too taxing to even start.

Not so with cyanotypes.

There is something innately playful about making photographs with nothing but sunlight, and on those summer days when I needed to be roused out of my own Blue Period, I’d gather up popweed and strawberry leaves, cottongrass and pieces of old net, lay them out on my hand-treated sheets of paper, pop a Pyrex on top to keep them flat, and set them out in whatever sun I could find. After ten minutes of sunbathing for both myself and my cyanotypes, I’d race down to the sea to submerge them to reveal the image.

As I swished and swirled the paper in the water, the little rock sculpins that live along the shore would race over to see what I was up to, poking their little fish faces into my business. For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out why they were drawn to me splashing cyanotypes in the water (did they like the taste of the chemicals? Were they undersea art critics? Was it the Prussian Blue?). The mystery was solved one day when I realized I process fish in the same stretch of beach that I wash cyanotypes; as I tossed scraps of salmon from the fish I was working on into the water, the sculpins came racing over again, carrying away bundles of roe in their mouths like tiny party balloons—my cultured little foodies.

I also had the pleasure of introducing cyanotypes to my girlfriends during the art retreat I hosted at fishcamp this summer too, and seeing my friend’s Prussian Blues hanging from the clothesline and dangling from the back deck brought me an inordinate amount of joy.

At one point, one of the drying fabric strips blew off the back deck and into the tiny tidal estuary below us, coming to rest on the gravel bed where pink salmon were creating their redds. The tide was high, the water too deep to easily fish it back out, so we left it there with the salmon for a few hours, until the water receeded enough for retrieval.

Watching all that Prussian Blue drifting underwater as the tide sank and the salmon swam around it felt like a work of art in and of itself.

Try Cyanotypes Yourself

I am by no means a cyanotype expert. I’m sure experts use things like UV lamps and professionally prepared paper and purified water. And while their cyanotypes undoubtedly come out crisper and cleaner than mine, I quite like being a little feral about the process, with my haphazardly prepared paper, dubious amounts of sunlight, and seawater.

One of the easiest ways to play with cyanotype is to buy pretreated paper or fabric; we used Jaquard’s fabric squares during the art retreat and they’re ridiculously easy. You can create clothing patches or stand-alone wall hangings with them; I ended up cutting one into four smaller squares and creating four separate cyanotypes, which I then sewed onto old fishing line to make something similar to Tibetan prayer flags.

You can also buy the cyanotype chemicals (potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate) and mix them up in your own little science experiment to treat fabric or paper yourself. This is a better way to go if you want to make a lot of cyanotypes. Just be warned that you need a dark room to prepare the paper or fabric, as the chemicals are sensitive to UV light. Dark rooms are hard to come by in Alaska during the summer and treating paper entailed creating an elaborate “dark room” out of boxes and trash bags in the attic of the fishcamp cabin.

You can also make cyanotypes using natural materials like turmeric, coffee grounds, matcha powder, and berries! I’m excited to try these methods in the future, though they of course don’t have quite the same appeal without the Prussian Blue.

As far as making the cyanotypes themselves, you can find a tutorial here (it’s very easy), or just play around with it. Cyanotypes are very low-risk, high-reward, with some of my favorite prints coming from pure experimentation. The process is the whole point!

In Case You Missed It…

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy a few others I’ve written, such as:

If you’d like to receive my essays and missives straight in your inbox and support my writing, you can subscribe to Winnowing below. Subscribing is always free; however, if you choose to become a paid supporter, you’ll also receive my seasonal print newsletter, Winnowing: A Seasonal Dispatch, in your mailbox!

Hello friends,

I am incredibly excited to announce the upcoming release of my printed seasonal dispatch! As my creative practice grows and my patience for the online world wanes, I wanted to find a way to create with my hands, share my work, and fill people’s mailboxes rather than their inboxes.

Winnowing: A Seasonal Dispatch is a quarterly publication that I will be mailing to paid Substack subscribers (if you are one, you should have received an email asking for your address). If you aren’t a paying subscriber, you can upgrade below to receive the dispatch. And if you would prefer not to become a paid subscriber, no worries; it’s also available for purchase in my new online shop, where I hope to add block prints, fishing corks, and earrings soon.

Part art project, part personal essay, the fall dispatch is handmade on a folded 8×10 sheet and features field notes on seasonality and reciprocity, block prints, and watercolors.

Subscribe now

And when I say handmade, I mean everything. We’re talking rulers and gluesticks, stamp pads, paints, and ink pens. Every evening for the last few weeks, the table at fishcamp has turned into a delightfully chaotic mess of block print material and scrap paper, a single lightbulb hooked up to a car battery my only light source as summer’s sun faded. Forest was away fishing and wasn’t here to witness the transformation that completely overtook his side of our table, but one of the few nights he was home saw him sweeping up a massive pile of rubber and linoleum scraps I’d missed under his chair, commenting with a smile that it was “the price to pay for living with an artist.” My heart nearly burst at the title.

So, expect crooked lines and grammatical errors, pencil markings and uneven folds. There’s a handmade map of where I spent the summer. Hopefully you can read my handwriting (I’ve been assured it’s legible). A remnant of my old perfectionist self wants to cringe at something so obviously handmade in this age of digital perfection, but the whole of me wants to roar with pride at creating something entirely with, as calls it, “Artist Intelligence”.

Speaking of, I’d be remiss not to mention the print newsletters I receive that in part inspired my own. I don’t get mail very often at fishcamp, as that involves either a five-hour one-way trip to my winter cabin to get it, or relying on the tenders to bring it out on their boat (always a risk). Most mail isn’t worth the headache, but the print newsletters I receive, including The Cloud Report by and Creative Fuel Quarterly by , were well worth the trips into town this summer and have inspired me far beyond creating my own newsletter.

I hope my seasonal dispatch can bring you a similar joy. I plan to send one each season, though I’m giving myself some flexibility on timing; if I’m unable to get mail most of the year, you can imagine the similar headache in sending mail, let alone finding a printer and scanner to make copies of the dispatch to send! The fall edition will begin being sent the week of September 21, and I hope to have winter available around the New Year/early January.

Thank you all so much for supporting my work as a writer and artist. I couldn’t do this without you!

Things That Delight Me Lately:

• My new meniscus: Those of you who’ve been around know I’ve had one hell of a medical journey recently (seven orthopedic surgeries in five years!). I went from guiding summit expeditions on Denali to barely being able to walk. Last November I finally had a meniscus transplant; two weeks ago, I still hadn’t really returned to hiking when I decided to attempt an off-the-couch traverse between the two fishcamps we live at. Not sure why I decided an 8+ mile, 3,000 feet of gain and loss, straight-up bushwhack was the way to return to hiking but wow, I am glad I did. We scrambled and slid up and down mountains, swinging from alder to alder to stay upright. We forded a river and Forest had to rescue my errant sock when it floated downstream. We enjoyed approximately 100 yards of fine ridge walking and seven hours of bushwhacking hell. There were mountaintop pools to swim in and blueberries to eat, endless late-summer sun and the best company, and I simply cannot believe how this meniscus, a donated sliver of tissue that is the greatest gift I’ve ever been given, has changed my life. I cannot wait for the next harebrained adventure I come up with.

  

• Whale encounters: There have been a lot of whales around fishcamp lately, mostly humpbacks and orcas. While it’s not uncommon to see them from afar, blowing and diving and bubble netting, I’ve been lucky enough to have two recent up-close encounters in the boat with curious whales. Two orcas visited the drift boat a few weeks ago as we headed back to fishcamp with friends, swimming under and alongside the boat, looking up at all of us through the veil of water. And just last week, we spotted humpbacks while out fishing in the skiff. We were keeping an eye on them from a distance and lost sight of them for a while—I looked over the side of the boat and saw a large, pale oval moving towards us. I thought it was just a huge fish, and it wasn’t until it was under the boat that I realized it was the humpback’s fin! Cue my startled swearing as the whale swam right under our tiny skiff, cruising along just a few feet below our bow as he headed deeper into the bay.

  Even as I write this, I can hear a whale breathing in the bay, though I haven’t spotted her yet.

• My spruce basket: This spring I set myself the task to weave myself a berry-picking basket out of spruce roots. All spring and summer I collected and harvested roots, peeling them and splitting them, coiling them above the woodstove to season. I finally worked up the courage to start the basket a few weeks ago and finished just in time for the blueberries to ripen. I worried the basket might hamper my berry picking efforts but my god, I’ve never met a better berry receptacle. The way it swings all jaunty on my wrist! How it hangs at the perfect height from my hand to plop berries into! The twisting of the roots and the way they’re slowly being stained purple! I’m inordinately proud of it.

In Case You Missed It…

You might enjoy a few of the essays I’ve written this summer on foraging, seasonality, my time at Basecamp, and cold water dipping!

If you enjoyed this, please share it with your friends! If you’d like to receive my essays and missives straight in your inbox and support my writing, you can subscribe to Winnowing below. Subscribing is always free; however, if you choose to become a paid supporter, you’ll also receive my seasonal print newsletter, Winnowing: A Seasonal Dispatch, in your mailbox!

Subscribe now

Sometimes in late summer I won’t touch anything, not
the flowers, not the blackberries
brimming in the thickets; I won’t drink
from the pond; I won’t name the birds or the trees;
I won’t whisper my own name.

One morning
the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident,
and didn’t see me—  and I thought:

so this is the world.
I’m not in it.
It is beautiful.

October, Mary Oliver

. . .

Did I love it enough … while it lasted?

November, Maggie Dietz

It’s that time of year when I start to get existential and achy and full of too big feelings. The salmon are dying, gasping in the creek, and the leaves are starting to turn, setting the meadows on sullen fire. The blueberries are here, the lingons fast on their way and where the hell did Summer go?

Even if it weren’t for the calendar hanging on the back door, the signs that the seasons are marching on with or without me are all around. Already, my companions for the summer have begun to leave— my rufous hummingbirds have all flown south, and I’ve taken down their feeders and cleaned and stored them for winter. The terns have left, along with the goldeneyes and buffleheads. We’re catching silver salmon now, the last of the salmon species to return home; the streams by the cabin are full of dead pinks, and the bears and kittiwakes flock to them to feast and fatten for winter. Meanwhile, little brown bats crowd under the roof of the aframe each night. They stop by to roost here in late summer on their way to their wintering grounds, some intergenerational knowledge passed down through bat lineages letting them know that this is a safe place to rest on their journey.

For weeks they wake us as they crawl and scrabble their way under the roof cap, their tiny feet wondrously, annoyingly loud on the metal as they host what sounds like an honest-to-god dance party above our heads each night.

We’re coming into our last few weeks at fishcamp for the season, and I ache with the knowledge that soon we’ll close up the cabins, get in the skiff for the last time, and head back to the world of pavement and coffee shops and grocery stores until next April.

I’ve never been very good at leaving places, but particularly not places where I feel most at home, most myself. Each time it feels like a little death, both of the place and of the version of myself that I am in that place. My brain can’t seem to separate out that it’s just for a season, not for forever, not now at least. Just last week I nearly wept when the bats didn’t come back to roost, gone south with the hummingbirds and terns, the murrelets and mergansers soon to follow. Despite the annoyance and lost sleep due to them returning home at 3AM every night, I knew that once they left it meant I’d be leaving soon too.

I’m not immune to the irony and insanity of mourning the loss of something while still actively living in and enjoying it. I still have weeks left out here before the demands of the outside world call us back.

But there are some places that make you realize that one lifetime in this world will never be enough. And that’s just it— I simply cannot believe that I will someday have to leave this place, just as Alec and Doris and John and all the previous caretakers once left, just like I’m leaving in a few weeks, and that someday it will be for forever.

I’ve poked around in enough collapsed cabins and old midden heaps out here to know how quickly this land reclaims its own. For a person who is quite literally writing a master’s dissertation on the hunters and fox farmers and fishermen who’ve come before me in the Sound, I have a very difficult time accepting the fact that someday I too will be “one who’s come before.” That we are all just visitors here, whether for a summer or for the speck of a human lifetime.

But for now, at least, I am one who will come again. For now, the encroaching autumn and winter are just opportunities to practice; I want to be able to live more at peace with the fact that this is all just borrowed time, that everything I know and everything I love will one day be gone.

Or rather that I will one day be gone.

The world will undoubtedly still exist, still turn. The hummingbirds and salmon will continue to return.

Sometimes, I can let go of my own self-importance enough to see it. To see the grace and beauty and forgiveness of a world that can swallow an entire human life whole in a few short years after the person who carved out that place for themselves is gone.

And sometimes, I think of my friend Michael Gardner, his voice overlain a video that I’ve watched dozens of times since his death two Octobers ago, his joy and vibrancy spilling over, crossing that dark threshold that now separates us— “I just like the experience of being alive.”

So do I, Mikey.

So do I.

The other night, Forest came home from fishing after dark. I’ve taken to skipping slower fishing openers; while I love picking fish, listening to a diesel engine for sixteen hours a day has started to wear on me, and I can’t help but feel an enormous amount of time scarcity whenever I get in the drift boat and leave this corner of the Sound to go fish elsewhere. Instead, I make art and pick berries, or simply sit in the sun, rarely going much more than a mile from the cabin.

I’m already tucked in and half-asleep in the loft when he gets home and cracks the front door open, calling up to me that there’s bioluminescence in the water. As much as I’ve dreaded the fading summer sun and encroaching darkness, another part of me has been waiting for it— waiting for the dark that lets so many other lights shine.

And now it’s here, for the first time this summer, and despite my fatigue I stumble down the ladder and outside into the cool dark. Forest drags the kayak down to the waterline for me, and I strike out into the night, each paddle stroke erupting with a thousand bright lights that flicker like the fireflies I grew up with, the wake of the kayak sending ribbons of it out behind me. I move in circles, seeking out the deepest, darkest water and splashing it with my paddle to rouse them, over and over and over again.

But it’s not enough (will anything in this life ever be enough?), so I paddle back to shore and strip naked, easing into the cold sea so I can watch the miracle of light my body weaves in the water. I can’t even see my limbs, just the glimmers that surround them like an aura as I move through the water. A few pink salmon linger by the shore and startle at my presence, green flecks tracing their muscular bodies as they flee. I splash and play until I’m numb with cold, then scamper back to the cabin, showering off the salt in the dark before crawling back up to bed and slipping into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Later that night, I wake to the slap of wings and little bodies against the roof above my head, a quick scurrying down the peak of the aframe.

Updates:

I’m excited to announce that this fall I’ll be starting to release printed newsletters featuring my art and some of my writing to mark each season, something I’ve been excited about for a while. Working on the first installment has helped ease some of my seasonal angst, and I hope it will for you too.

The first batch will be sent to my paying subscribers (if you are one, be on the lookout for an email soon!). I’ll hopefully be exploring other platforms where people can receive one without being a Substack paid subscriber too, but for now, if you’d like one- please subscribe!

In Case You Missed It…

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy a few others I’ve written about fishcamp and seasonality, such as:

If you enjoyed this essay, please share it with your friends! If you’d like to receive my essays and missives straight in your inbox and support my writing, you can subscribe to Winnowing below. Subscribing is always free; however, if you choose to become a paid supporter, you’ll also receive my seasonal print newsletter, Winnowing: A Seasonal Dispatch, in your mailbox!

I’m starting a new, occasional series about the other art mediums I’ve been playing with lately. I hope this will not only help me reflect on some of my creative processes, but also inspire you to pick up a new medium to play with!

Cheers,

Chelsey

Grandfather
advised me:
Learn a trade

I learned
To sit at desk
And condense

No layoff
From this
condensery

Poet’s work, Lorine Niedecker

I’ve mentioned in roundabout ways before that I’ve been playing with new creative mediums for the past year, usually as an excuse as to why I haven’t been writing anything for Substack (like right now: I know it’s been a month since I wrote and I’m so sorry!).

The fact is, writing and I have a rather fraught relationship. While I’ve always dabbled, I began writing in earnest after my dad died as a way to make sense of my grief and connect with others who’d walked the same road. Since then, most of my writing has been an outlet for really hard things, and all of my most recognized writing, the pieces that got me spots a prestigious universities or published in print, have dealt intimately with death.

All this to say, when I sit down to write— my god, is it hard. Either nothing comes out at all, or it all comes out in a torrent, and I have very little ability to prod it into being or modulate the flood when it arrives. Mostly I just hold on, white-knuckled, and emerge breathless and wrung out on the other side with a piece of writing that I’m not quite sure how it came into being, but it is here.

It is exhilarating.

And exhausting, and frankly too much to always be my constant creative practice.

******

Last summer, I attended an artist residency in Norway. I went, ostensibly, as a writer - my application had been as a writer, my proposed project was writing, I had never even really created something that wasn’t writing.

Yet I got there and did just about everything but write. I taught myself how to build web for fishing nets with a centuries-old, hand-carved mending needle. I made cyanotypes of seaweed, cotton grass, and sheep’s wool. I collected stones and bits of bone for god knows what purposes. And I began to make block prints. I’d packed a few bits of rubber and my carving tool with the idea that I might need a break from writing and something a little more tactile. To my surprise, carving those little slivers of rubber became my entire creative practice for the week. I whiled away hours and hours obsessively carving and stamping halibut and popweed, fishing nets and mending needles, otoliths and icebergs, blueberries and salmon swimming in bioluminescence. By the end of the week I had a fold-out booklet of prints that traced my summer at fishcamp, which I was inordinately proud of.

What’s more, I had an absolute blast. Nothing about it was hard. I put on Taylor Swift and carved my little heart out, losing entire afternoons to the flow state that I have spent my life chasing in a variety of ways, from skiing to mountaineering to mountain biking (all of which have landed me on surgeons’ tables). The completed prints at the end were just a bonus.

Prior to block prints, I had tried just about every art medium out there, from watercolors to oils, colored pencils, pastels, sculpture, pottery, collage. In every single one of them, my perfectionism got in the way of my enjoyment. Whereas I can edit and tinker with my writing to within an inch of its life, until it is perfect in my eyes, I could not seem to do the same to other artistic mediums, and it drove me insane. Nothing was ever good enough, and I never enjoyed the processes enough to create just for the sake of it.

But with block prints, there is no hope of perfection. Imperfection is built into the medium, so I don’t even have to try to achieve it. Each print carries variations that aren’t mistakes but instead are evidence of creation, evidence of me rolling the ink and pressing the block and lifting the paper. This freedom from perfection from the very start

Something else I love about block prints is how easily they can be reproduced and therefore given away; there’s no need to hoard a print. After I finish a block, I often go into a frenzy of printing; before I know it, I have dozens and dozens of prints, all with their own quirks and oddities. These prints then get turned into cards to mail out, bookmarks to tuck into pages, curiosities to leave around the cabin, or gifts to give away. While commercial fishing this summer, friends gave us dinner after a long opener and let us follow them through tricky sandbars. I had nothing on hand to give them back in the moment, but within a few short hours I had carved blocks of their boats and had handed off prints to them.

Art as currency. Art as connection.

If you’re interested in trying your hand at block printing, I got started with this Speedball Kit and still find myself returning to the carving tool and soft rubber even though I now have fancier tools and linoleum. Inks are great, but I have been increasingly using stamp pads from Ranger Archival Ink; they travel easily and are a lot simpler to use for smaller prints.

Enjoy, and thank you for sticking with me. I hope to be back to you soon with another long-form essay.

Chelsey

Things That Delight Me Lately:

• Anna Brones’ Analog Newsletter: I’m a big fan of snail mail, and welcome any opportunity to receive something delightful via post. Anna Brones is the writer and paper-cut artist behind Creative Fuel, a Substack that ponders creativity and curiosity and quite literally breathes life into my work each week. When she announced she’d be sending out a seasonal snail mail newsletter (sent on each solstice and equinox, no less!), I immediately subscribed. Living at fishcamp means mail is hard to come by, so I received the newsletter six weeks late, but it also meant I got to unfold it this morning beside the sea and soak it in with hours ahead of me with which to experiment and create.

• Small flying creatures: You might remember rufous hummingbirds from my essay A Slow Unfurling. These hummers have the farthest north breeding habitat of any other, and flock to Alaska each summer. After watching them zip around fishcamp mistaking everything from my painted fishing corks to my Grundens to my pink hat for flowers, I put up Forest’s hummingbird feeders and WOW. I soon had an aerial army zipping around, squabbling over sugar water. I was refilling the feeders up to five times a day for my new tiny overlords. They started flying into the boat during my meetings and perching on the driftwood outside the bedroom window. One got stuck in the shop and tangled in cobwebs— I had the honor of holding her in my hand (her tiny beating heart against my palm!) and cleaning her off, letting her rest on the deck before she zoomed off with her friends.

  

  They started heading south for the winter and all was quiet at the cabin until our next seasonal residents, little brown bats, showed up! They swing through the Sound on a local migration each year in early August, and have decided the peak of the aframe is the perfect place to hang. I sleep with earplugs all year except for these few weeks, purely so I can be woken up by the sound of bats wiggling up under the roof at 3 am after their big night out; their tiny bodies and wings smacking against the roof as they land, their toes scurrying as they crawl under the ridge cap and across the aframe peak. Last night it sounded like a whole horde of them was having a dance party above our heads!

  If you want to learn more about bats, you can check out this Wildlife Wednesday presentation I hosted last winter with Arin Underwood, a biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

• Metal detecting: I know, nerdy as shit. But as a kid who grew up pawing through 19th-century trash piles behind the stone walls of my farmhouse and a girl who went to undergrad for archaeology and a woman who is still in school studying history, adult-me has been craving a metal detector. I’ve found so many random metal objects at fishcamp this summer by just poking around without one, piling them on stumps and fallen logs and labeling them as “museums” so that everyone knows that they are treasures, not trash. I started threatening to get a metal detector to up my game and now I finally have one! I took it across the bay to explore another old camp this past weekend. No major discoveries yet, but I’ll keep you posted.

On cold evenings
My grandmother,
With ownership of half her mind—
The other half having flown back to Bohemia—
Spread newspapers over the porch floor.
So, she said, the garden ants could crawl
As under a blanket, and keep warm,
And what shall I wish for myself,
But, being so struck by the lightning of years,
To be like her with what is left, that loving.

In Praise of Craziness of a Certain Kind, Mary Oliver

Hi friends,

I’m writing this from the Kahiltna Glacier, where I’m serving my annual stint as the Denali Basecamp manager. I’m out here for less than a week, blazing in from fishcamp to spend a few days living on glacier, managing the climbers and pilots and planes coming in, sending out weather reports and trivia questions over the radio, and sinking back into a community that once constituted much of my year.

For years, I knew this little glacier in the middle of the Alaska Range much differently. I came to it as a Denali guide, flying in and then immediately setting out for the next camp, hauling sleds and carrying packs and bringing people to the summit of North America’s tallest mountain. I began guiding Denali shortly after my life imploded at 27, when, in a few short months, I lost my dad to cancer, left the Army plagued with chronic illness, and asked for a divorce from a relationship that, from the outside, seemed whole. In one fell swoop, I lost many of the pillars of my identity and was desperately seeking anything that could replace them, that could make me feel worthy again.

‘Denali guide’ fit the bill, and for years that accolade opened doors to communities and guiding work that I had only ever dreamed of, sending me around the world and to remote corners of Alaska.

Eventually, my body disagreed. Ankle surgeries and shoulder surgeries and knee surgeries— they all began to catch up to me. After I destroyed my knee, there were years when I couldn’t manage a three-mile walk, let alone guide on North America’s tallest mountain. Instead, I watched friends fly out into the range as I turned down guiding contract after guiding contract, submitting myself to more tests, more MRIs, and ultimately more surgeries.

But the mountain offered another way back. Three years ago, a chance comment in the office of the guiding company I used to work for led to my first stint managing Basecamp, only a few months after my first knee surgery. Instead of pushing toward the summit, I stayed behind to keep the small, strange community of the glacier running.

While I haven’t been able to return to guiding, I’ve returned to Basecamp every year since. It’s not necessarily the version of the story I would have chosen for myself all those years ago when I first flew to Kahiltna Glacier, but it doesn’t make it less sweet.

It’s quiet today in Basecamp. A few climbers flew out this morning, the rest holding tight higher on the mountain to wait out a weather system that promises to bring rain and snow through the weekend. If I were guiding up on the mountain, I’d be spending the day digging caches and pushing to higher camps, dragging sleds and carrying packs bigger than me, melting snow for water and cooking for hours over white gas stoves to feed nine hungry climbers.

Instead, I spend the day with one eye on the weather, my sore knee propped up while I read books and knit a new sweater. A few friends are coming in late tonight and I have fresh king salmon from fishcamp to cook for them. For now, though, the only other things alive for miles are me and a grey-crowned rosy finch flitting about camp.

Small birds like finches and sparrows aren’t uncommon on Denali. They get blown in with the storms and stick around, pecking a life out of scraps of climber food left scattered around camp. I watch this particular bird make its rounds around Basecamp, but there’s little food to be found at this time of year in the empty camp. I cut up apples and crush a few almonds I find in the tent, setting them out in the snow with a dish of water. I feel inordinately pleased when the finch swoops in to join me and begins eating.

I know it’s highly unlikely he’ll survive. Friends have tried to save wayward birds before, tucking them into their jackets and sneaking them out on the planes, and none of them survive, the stress of the rescue too much for their little bodies to bear. We do the best we can, bringing them inside tent vestibules if we’re able and feeding them just as I feed this one. But even if they make it through climbing season, what happens after? It’s the end of June and the mountain is emptying fast; soon this camp will cease to be the hub of comings and goings and return to an isolated stretch of glacier in the middle of Alaska’s biggest mountain range.

No place for me, and no place for little finches.

I watch my finch peck around in the snow, growing bold enough to flit into the vestibule of my tent and peer up at me. A second finch joins him, fluffed up and looking worse for wear. Watching them gives me the same ache in my chest I feel when I feed hungry stray cats or rescue spiders struggling in my shower. The ache of knowing that my small acts of tenderness are only a drop in the bucket of a life that can be inordinately cruel and unfair for the smaller beings of this world. The ache of knowing that a few crushed almonds and a shallow dish of water might be one of the few gifts they are ever given, a singular moment of ease.

On my last day in Basecamp, I take one more spin around camp to make sure everything is in order while I wait for my plane to arrive. Tucked in amongst the dug-up caches and old tent platforms, I find a small bird face down in the snow.

It’s a blackpoll warbler, not one of my finches; his feathers matted and eyes closed, small feet curled tight. I can barely feel his weight in my hand. I carry him back and dig a small hole behind my tent, placing the tiny body in the cradle of snow and arranging the dried flowers given to me by the previous Basecamp manager around him.

A shallow, icy grave and a handful of flowers are all I have to offer.

I whisper a quiet thank you before covering the body with snow and turn to leave for a land that is kinder to me, kinder to finches.

what is left, that loving.

In Case You Missed It…

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy a few others I’ve written about fishcamp and seasonality, such as:

If you enjoyed this essay, please share it with your friends! If you’d like to receive my essays and missives straight in your inbox and support my writing, you can subscribe to Winnowing below. Subscribing is always free; however, if you choose to become a paid supporter, you’ll also receive my seasonal print newsletter, Winnowing: A Seasonal Dispatch, in your mailbox!

Over the last three years, however, the way I travel through a landscape has changed dramatically, necessitated by a few too many surgeries. For the last few years, I’ve been lucky to manage three miles of easy ATV trail without limping by the end. Instead of hammering out twelve-hour days with an 80-pound pack and no front country in sight, I learn the birds of my backyard and look for orchids; I fish the salmon runs and knit on the deck.

Last spring, when another knee surgery shrunk my world even farther, I started foraging for devil’s club buds by the river near my cabin. The walk was just at the limits of my ability, and I’d wander down there with friends, using the steady, slow work of our hands to let the conversation weave from the mundane to the deeply personal. More often I’d go alone, moving slow and letting the quiet presence of the world heal the trauma of another surgery. When I was too sore to walk, I’d take my e-bike, pedaling home beneath the mountains I used to climb with a bag of buds clutched against the handlebars.

That year, devil’s club buds made their way into pesto and sautees, the leftovers filling my freezer with greenery, my kitchen filling with spring.

* * *

This year, I missed the devil’s club buds. The season’s short, the buds only edible when they’ve just emerged, and I came back to fishcamp after a few weeks commerical fishing on the boat to find the plants had leafed and were halfway to becoming impenetrable already.

But there’s more to devil’s club than the buds. The inner bark has long been used by Indigenous peoples along the Pacific Coast for its medicinal properties, made into teas and tinctures and infused oil for salves. I’d bought devil’s club salve in Talkeetna for years to soothe my sun-blistered skin after summit expeditions on Denali.

With no Denali expeditions to eat up my time this season, I decide to make my own. I begin disappearing into the woods each day with a pair of clippers in my pocket and coming home with stalks of devil’s club, spending the afternoons processing it to remove the inner bark and my evenings drying it by the woodstove for storage. Mason jars filled with dried bark-infused oil now line the shelves of the cabin, ready to be made into salves and tinctures and teas.

Devil’s club has led to other foraging as well. Fiddleheads from the small creeks in the meadow, where they hadn’t yet unfurled like the ones by the beach. Popweed, gathered at low tide and then baked into a delicious salty snack. Spruce roots, pulled from the ground near old stumps and game trails, stripped of bark and hung to season in the cabin. Two weeks ago, I spent an afternoon on a goose chase for goose tongue, searching for it down the beach where we found the sea otter skeleton this spring and roaming out around the corner of the coast to where Forest had seen it near his shoreties years before. I trudged home empty-handed only to find a whole slew of it in the rocks right outside the cabin. Now, it graces our salmon patties and roasted vegetables, adding some green to our plates between grocery runs.

* * *

Searching for devil’s club has rewritten the landscape around me. For years, the maps in my head spanned tens of miles, the full range I could walk in a day with a heavy pack, and covered stretches of the Alaska Range, the Brooks Range, Lake Clark, Peru, Tanzania, Scotland— all the places I would find myself in over the course of a year. They were arranged by ridgelines and summits, the quickest route between two points, and peppered with knowledge of flat benches for camping, clear water for easy filtering, and gravel bars where planes could land for evacuations.

Now, the map is a mere few miles, a small corner of Prince William Sound. And instead of beta on mountains and rivers and routes, it holds a much more intimate knowledge, the few miles arranged by foraging spots and animal dens, the best meadows for napping, and where the first flowers of summer can be found. The markers are no longer campsites or crevasse fields, but pockets of plants— the devil’s club in Slugland, with large straight stalks that are easy to peel. Another patch in the trickle of creek near the old iron pipe, once the watersource of people long dead. It’s smaller, but has a lovely smell. The rocky point where the otters play has spruce roots close to the surface, and you can use the otter’s discarded steamer clams to cut them from the earth. A gnarled black spruce near Russian Alecs’ old sawmill has the most perfect notch for stripping the bark from the roots.

In the last month of foraging, I doubt I’ve walked more than two miles from fishcamp in any direction. Geographically, my world has shrunk. But the depth to which I know this corner of the world has deepened a hundredfold.

Tonight, dried devil’s club steeps in avocado oil on the wood stove, and the whole cabin smells warm and bright. We squeeze dropper-fulls of tincture into our teas. Spruce tips and brown sugar are slowly sintering into syrup on the back shelf, and there’s fresh spruce juice to make into jelly and chopped spruce tips to sprinkle in our pancakes. I watch the tideline for the perfect moment to collect popweed, keeping an eye out for the mink that now lives under the cabin, and coil fresh roots to season and weave into a berry basket for summer.

Tomorrow, I’ll go stravaigin’ about my few square miles again and let my attention reorganize the maps in my head a little more.

Recipe for Devil’s Club Salve

Grab your clippers and head into the woods. Remember where you saw devil’s club last? It was by the old watersource behind the cabin; it was sprouting in the swamp near Russian Alec’s sawmill; it was growing with the skunk cabbage in the glen halfway to where the bears fish.

Pull your rubber gloves on, the ones you picked salmon with and sweat through for sixty hours this week. Worry briefly about the dried fish scales affecting your salve before you remember - everything, everything, here was born from the bodies of those fish.

Clip the offshoots. Leave the mother plant so it can continue to flourish, to torment you later this summer and keep you from certain places in this forest. Some places deserve to remain secret.

Sit on the beach below tideline. Take the blade of your pocket knife, the one you found in a parking lot puddle, and run the back down the stalks, scraping away the thorns and papery outer bark to get to the green heart. The water will take away your leavings on the next high tide.

Pull the medicine off the stalks in strips, cutting the moist inner bark into smaller pieces. Put the clippings in a metal bowl and save the naked, woody stalks to make beads out of. Later, you’ll hang a string of them above your bed.

Dry the bark. Sun is good, the woodstove is better. The cabin will fill with the bright scent of devil’s club.

When the bark’s dry, reach for a mason jar, the one your friend gifted you raspberry jam in after you helped him raise the walls of his cabin. Fill it with plant magic.

Top the jar off with avocado oil, and place it in the stray sunlight to soak, turning and mixing it every few days. Let the sun do its work, and then strain the bark from the oil and return it to the earth.

Melt beeswax over the stove, and mix one part wax with four parts oil. Pour it into jars and leave it in the shop where the cool air will harden it into salve.

Use your salve for everything. Massage it into your sore hands after a fishing opener. Soothe your sun- and windburnt face. Give it to your friends, your loved ones. Give it away, as the earth gave it to you.

If you enjoyed this essay, please share it with your friends! If you’d like to receive my essays and missives straight in your inbox and support my writing, you can subscribe to Winnowing below. Subscribing is always free; however, if you choose to become a paid supporter, you’ll also receive my seasonal print newsletter, Winnowing: A Seasonal Dispatch, in your mailbox!

How lucky we are
That you can’t sell
A poem, that it has
No value. Might
As well
Give it away.
That poem you love
That saved your life,
Wasn’t it given to you?

[How lucky we are], Gregory Orr

Hi friends,

I found out a few months ago that my poem OLD VESSELS had been accepted for publication in Cirque Journal. It’s the first poem I’ve ever had published, a process that took multiple submission attempts and resulted in absolutely no monetary gain (while I’m of the mind of Gregory Orr above, I point this out more as a commentary on how very hard it is to make any money as a writer). Between some design hangups and edits, it took longer than expected for the spring issue of Cirque to actually publish, but at last, my first published poem and my first print publication is out this week. The irony being that, as there’s no magazine-delivery service at fishcamp, I won’t be able to get my hard copy of Cirque in the mail until fall.

I wrote OLD VESSELS several years ago while at Cambridge, following the death of a friend in Denali. I have never considered myself a poet, nor would I necessarily consider this fully a poem. However, following the spring when, in the span of a few short months, my dad died, I asked for a divorce, and I left the army due to chronic illness, something strange happened to my writing. The form melded into something not-quite-poetry and not-quite-nonfiction, but a blend of both that was somehow expansive enough to contain my grief. Most of these prose-poems, including OLD VESSELS, were ‘written’ first in my head. They’d come to me while in the mountains, and I’d spend hours turning them over in my head while running or hiking— a process that my therapist points out mimics the bilateral stimulation of EMDR. The resulting writing was deeply cathartic and deeply personal. Most of it hasn’t been shared much beyond a few close friends and my professors in my grad program, but here it is.

OLD VESSELS

The earth swallowed my friend whole last week. A snow bridge in Denali collapsed, revealing the belly of some great, ancient beast. One hundred feet he fell, Icarus into ice. His partner couldn’t see him, couldn’t reach him at all, crouched on the blinding edge of something too big to name. How frantic she must have been, safe top-side while he. . .  he. . .

How blue it must have been, slipped between the cracks.

When the park rangers came with their helicopters and their long-lines, he was already gone.

*	*	*

The shock of grief has faded enough to wonder where his boots are. Surely he had a pair. All the people I love most do. Maybe they’re packed away with the rest of his townclothes, waiting at the airstrip for someone to go through them, parceling out possessions. 

Or maybe they’re still on the Eldridge, buried under a fresh snow, joining the rest of the detritus we’ve cached in those mountains; good whisky, old espresso, books torn in two. My favorite shirt. Some of our favorite people. 

I imagine myself finding them out there. Brushing off the snow and slipping my feet inside, the ten pockets from his climber’s toes still warm and worn.

*	*	*

If he were still alive, I would have seen him in them this summer. All of us kicking up our sticky, rubber heels at the Fairview, shaking off the mountains together. He would have smiled in that reckless, distracted way, and I would have wished I knew him better.

I wrote OLD VESSELS shortly after Mason died; as I wrote this Substack, I found out that Robin Pendery, a climbing ranger, had also just died in a crevasse near 14,000 feet on Denali. Robin was the fifth death on Denali this year, a particularly bad season. I didn’t know Robin personally, but we were in the same small circle— my people knew her people, and while any death in the mountains is tragic, it hits even harder when it’s a fellow guide or ranger.

14,000 on Denali was also where I had my closest call in the mountains, just weeks after Mason’s death, when I approached a crevasse I had been told was safe while unroped. I’ll never forget seeing the crack rip across the overhanging lip I was standing on, the boom of snow sundering and then settling echoing off the walls of the crevasse behind me. My climbing partner looking up at me, eyes wide with the same fear I felt as I scrambled back to safety, thoughts full of Mason.

I got lucky.

Robin didn’t. Mason didn’t.

And while these days I’m not in the mountains nearly to the same extent I was, and largely grateful for it, I think about that day often. If not for that little luck, I wouldn’t be here now, enjoying the simple pleasures of a summer day in Prince William Sound, the sun on my face, the promise of fresh salmon for dinner, a warm bed to sleep in with the sound of the sea right outside.

If not for a little of their own luck, a lot more of my friends wouldn’t be here either.

All this to say, I ache for Mason and for Robin, for Dylan and Balin and Mikey and all the other people we’ve lost in the mountains these last few years. I wish I had known them all better. And I’m grateful to have a poem, to have this poem, published. My freelance writing career has been chock full of gear guides and commerce articles, as those are the easiest to pitch and the easiest to sell. To have a poem I love, one that I could barely give away, let alone sell, out in the world now feels achy and vulnerable and deeply necessary.

Thank you for reading, friends. And if you have a poem that you love, that saved your life, I’d love to hear about it.

Hi friends,

I’m writing this while anchored beside a sea lion rookery, a sentence I’m not sure I ever imagined writing but is somehow possible due to a combination of modern technology (i.e. laptops and Starlink) and the flexible lifestyle of my dreams, which allows me to bug off to the Copper River Flats for a few weeks to go commercial fishing, while maintaining my full-time job in wildlife conservation. With a storm on the way and a fishing opener early the next day, we came to take advantage of the dubious shelter these two tiny islands, known as the Martins, offer from the winds coming off the Gulf of Alaska.

It seems like every Steller’s sea lion in this stretch of the world is doing the same, and the rocks just one hundred feet from the boat are piled with lumpy bodies ranging from reddish brown to a pale fawn, the same color as the over-wintered beach grass on shore. After a brief kerfuffle while we set the anchor, they’ve all settled back down to enjoy the last of the sun. Our friends motor around the corner of the island to do the same, rafting their boats to ours so we can catch up on the decks in full view of the rookery.

It is, quite frankly, a sensory overload. A cacophony of belching and groaning and barking, smaller sea lions clambering over larger ones, massive males who are all neck throwing their bulk around and waddling after each other, flashing teeth. The offshore breeze reeks of shit and wet animal. I am transfixed, a little horrified, mostly fascinated. I inch out to the back deck and sit with my back against the cabin, trading between my knitting needles and my binoculars so I can watch them.

Steller’s sea lions (as well as Steller’s jays, and Steller’s eiders, sea eagles, and sea cows, all now extinct) earned their name from Georg Wilhelm Steller, a German naturalist who participated in Vitus Bering’s Great Northern Expedition, which marked the first European contact with Alaska. While Steller recorded his observations of sea lions from Bering Island, about as far west of where I am as you can get in Alaska, he was here in the Copper River Flats first. In fact, from where we’re anchored, I can see Kayak Island, where Steller became the first European to step on Alaskan soil on July 20, 1741 (and the first European to purloin Alaska Native artifacts without consent, absconding with fish, tinder, arrows, and other assorted items from a village while the native Sugpiaq and Eyak hid). The name Kayak came later; when the Russian expedition landed, they named the island Cape St. Elias: “for the officers were determined to have a cape on their chart,” Steller’s journal reads, “notwithstanding the fact that it was plainly represented to them that an island cannot be called a cape.”¹

There’s little I love more than finding a journal entry from a salty naturalist in the archives (see: Darwin the Drama Queen).

Steller would be happy to know that these days, just the southern tip of the island is called Cape St. Elias.

With several sea lion rookeries on both Kayak Island and the Martin Islands, it’s hard to imagine Steller didn’t see some of the creatures here too. But whether first seen on Kayak or on Bering Island, it’s clear sea lions made a mark on him:

“These beasts are indeed terrible to look upon [...]. They are hard to overcome and fight most viciously when cornered. On this account, this animal is never hunted at sea by the Kamchatkan tribes, because he overturns the boat of the hunters and slays them most savagely.”²

Despite their mostly sleepy state at the rookery, it’s hard not to agree with Steller’s assessment. A few of the bolder sea lions swim around the boat, sticking their snouts to the scupper holes and sniffing around for our fish with eyes that are a little too knowing. On shore, the larger males seem to be constantly picking fights, bellowing and chasing each other off. Despite their bulk, they move surprisingly fast over the jumbled rocks, even faster once they’re in the water.

Any discussion of kayaking to shore and skirting the sea lions to stretch our legs is quickly discarded, and we content ourselves with watching from afar.

Towards the end of the day, the clouds roll in and the wind picks up. I spot a sea lion with a brand, J169, standing out stark against her hide. Later, I’ll look her up in the NOAA databases and learn that she’s a female, tagged at a rookery 75 miles west of this one in 2003. She could have been fishing these waters for close to 30 years, far longer than a lot of people in the fleet, the 200-plus boats currently hunkering out of the storm and waiting for the next opener.

That could be why sea lions are so good at it. Fishing, certainly, but in particular, fishing our nets. They’re infamous out here for raiding them, pulling every salmon out of the web the whole way down, gobbling up literal thousands of dollars. They aren’t gentle about it, either— ripping holes in the net and flinging salmon around with such ferocity that I often wonder how much of the precious fish actually reaches their stomachs. Feelings towards them on fishing days range from annoyance to rage, but here at the rookery, we’re all on good terms.

As the day drags into night and the wind picks up, more boats join us until there are over a dozen crowded into the safety of the cove to sleep. Sea lions swim between us, poking their heads out of the water to get a good look as we ride out the ocean swell, checking our gear and making plans for the morning. They’re gracious enough to share their space with us, at least for this evening.

In the morning, we’ll all go fishing.

In Case You Missed It…

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy a few others I’ve written about fishcamp and seasonality, such as:

Want to learn more about Steller? Beasts of the Sea by Iida Turpeinen was one of my favorite nonfiction reads this year, and traces Steller’s sea cow through history, from discovery to eventual extinction. You can also check out Steller’s journal and scientific text from the expedition below, both of which I quoted:

1. Steller, Georg Wilhelm. Journal of the Sea Voyage from Kamchatka to America on the Second Expedition, 1741-1742. Wisconsin Historical Society: 2003.

2. Steller, Georg Wilhelm. The Beasts of the Sea. 1753.

If you enjoyed this essay, please share it with your friends! If you’d like to receive my essays and missives straight in your inbox and support my writing, you can subscribe to Winnowing below. Subscribing is always free; however, if you choose to become a paid supporter, you’ll also receive my seasonal print newsletter, Winnowing: A Seasonal Dispatch, in your mailbox!

Subscribe now

Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body.
Humpbacks, Mary Oliver

* * *

I desire a lot of things. Fantasy books to dive into, uninterrupted hours of knitting, long meanders in the woods. The company of friends. Good whisky. Endless bars of chocolate.

I have never, not once, desired cold water. I loathed swimming lessons as a kid and the unheated pools they entailed, and preferred to stay on the dock with aforementioned book rather than hop in the lakes I grew up on. Just last spring, Forest invited me to dip in the lake behind his cabin. It was the most beautiful body of water I’d ever seen, quiet and remote, and yet my answer was an immediate no. I still cringe at the melodrama of my reasoning:

“I just think life is hard enough without subjecting myself to cold water.”

It felt true at the time. Life is hard. Why make it harder by doing something deeply, innately, and unnecessarily uncomfortable?

But late this winter, something in me shifted when driving by the tailrace near my cabin. A sliver of slow water wedged between mountains and a silty glacial river, I’d never paid it much mind, but that day I noticed a small contingent of people in bathing suits clambering up its banks. They slipped through the snow, towels wrapped around their shoulders. They’d clearly been swimming, in what was likely the only open water for miles after an unseasonably cold winter.

I thought little of it, but as I wound further down the road to home, a soft voice rose in me and said,

“I want to do that.”

* * *

I’ve been trying to listen to my body more these days. I’ve spent most of my life telling it what to do and how to do it, and very little time listening to what she actually wants. But after five years of surgeries and crutches and my own limitations—and many, many more years of training cycles and hill repeats and bodily discipline of the highest order—she’s earned that small grace.

So these days, if she tells me she wants something as outrageous and unexpected as dipping in a body of cold water in the middle of an Alaskan winter, I’m going to do it, regardless of my mind’s feelings otherwise.

The next time I drove by the tailrace, I was prepared. Spandex shorts under my flannel-lined work pants, a towel in the back of my truck. I found a quiet, deep spot along the water’s edge, stripped off my clothes, and waded in before I could think twice.

Up to my chin in the cold water, my breath began bellowing out of me in short bursts, my hands instantly aching. The cold was sharp enough to cut away any thought, leaving only sensation, dropping me solely into my body. Cars drove by on the other side of the tailrace, and a confused merganser paddled quickly away.

Less than a minute later, I was clambering back up the slope, scrambling to pull my clothes over damp skin. As I wobbled back into my boots, I started giggling at the absurdity of it all, pressing a hand to my chest as I felt my body work to counter the cold, a deep heat blooming inside me.

I went home that night feeling like I had a delicious new secret at the heart of me.

* * *

Over the next few weeks, I returned to the tailrace again and again, dipping in it nearly every time I drove by.

My dips continued when I went back to my hometown in New Hampshire. In between visits with family and friends, I’d escape to the myriad lakes in the area, breaking the ice just so I could slip into the cold water and drop back into my body.

One night, I invited my childhood girlfriends to join me. We stood on the town beach gathering our courage and then waded out to where the ice still lingered, dipping up to our chins for as long as we could before racing back out.

As we toweled off and shrugged into warm layers, I extolled the virtues of my recent cold dips. How they were a reset, a ritual. A way to cleanse myself of the day and transition to something better and more true. How good it felt to do something so simple and so hard.

I caught myself midway through my rant, qualifying, “But I’m not, like, some cold plunge bro.”

Because therein lies the last and final rub. Beyond the simple discomfort of cold water, there’s a particular culture of hyper-masculinity and pseudo-science around cold plunges that has also kept me away.

An ex in my 20s wanted to be a Navy SEAL, a training process that involves “surf torture” in cold waters. I gamely joined him on swims, doing breath holds and “drownproofing” exercises, trying to be supportive and toughen up at the same time, when all I could think about was a hot shower. Various other exes cold plunged in the extreme, forcing me out of too-hot saunas and too-cold tubs with their militancy. As a byproduct, I was subjected to a litany of David Goggins-Joe Rogan-Liver King dopplegangers, all preaching over podcasts and YouTube channels to “embrace the suck” and “choose your hard”, which to them meant dunking in glorified kiddie pools that cost more than my monthly rent.

The only thing I wanted less than getting into a tub of ice water was to join the masses of cold plunge bros doing the same.

However, something began to change in my 30s. The women in my life, particularly those older than me, suddenly all seemed to cold-water swim. They were quiet about it, which is why I probably hadn’t noticed it before. There was nothing to crow about, certainly nothing to record a YouTube video over. Just a way of being that involved frequent (and frequently cold) wild swims. They met at lakeshores and river banks and tidelines, immersing themselves in cold water together or alone.

At an artist’s residency on the coastline of Norway last summer, my friends Pat and Laura swam almost daily. I would watch from up the hill in awe as they stepped out into the sea and paddled around, looking for all the world like they were floating in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean, rather than a frigid fjord above the Arctic Circle. I joined them once, though join is a generous word. I jumped in for a mere moment before racing back to the sauna, and fell asleep after dinner fully clothed in my down jacket, exhausted from the exertions of it all.

But it stayed with me, and any woman I’ve talked to about cold water in the last year knows another woman who imbibes in it almost daily. Not to be “hard” or to suffer, though some surely feel that way. It’s for something more ineffable, more true. More about connection than detachment, which you only understand if you’ve done it yourself.

Something about the water calls to you.

It’s been three months since that first day I dipped in the tailrace. I’ve dipped a handful of times every week since, in frozen lakes, glacial rivers, the stretch of sea by fishcamp. The ice over the lake I so adamantly refused to swim in last spring remains too thick, so I dip in the outflow and eagerly await its opening. I wear rubber boots and a fleece beanie, small concessions to comfort. Some days I settle and stay in the cold, counting my breaths. Other days, it’s all I can do to dunk up to my chin and then run, naked and yelping, for a hot shower. There are no expectations, no rules, other than if I hear my body asking for cold water, I gift it to her.

And rather than a way to “embrace the suck”, cold dipping has become a way to embrace the ridiculous.

Because at its heart, beyond the multitude of real health benefits, stripping down and hopping in a mostly frozen body of water is a bit ridiculous. Silly. Entirely unnecessary. And that’s what brings me to the water’s edge day after day. As a sometimes-too-serious person, I need that absurdity in my life. That ‘just because I can’ energy.

Just because I want to.

Life is hard, sometimes.

Might as well make it ridiculous too.

It’s spring,
the calendar says and the room where
you are reading is empty yet full
of what loves you and this is the day
that you were born.

Jonathan Wells, April Morning

***

Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a slick leaf
unfurling like a fist, I’ll take it all.

Ada Limón, Instructions On Not Giving Up

It’s spring, or so the calendar says. Spring in Alaska is a season both heady and frustrating, with many false starts and much conversation, as if we can pull the season into being if we just talk about it enough.

In the past, spring for me was something to skip over entirely. Spring meant flying into the Alaska Range, leaving the awakening world behind and time-traveling back to winter. I’d spend the season on glaciers, living on snow straight through June and only returning when the green had fully swept across the landscape.

But my knee has kept me from the spring climbing and skiing season for three years, and snow and ice have taken on a new meaning—less playground for adventure and more a fearful landscape where I could slip any moment, undoing three surgeries’ worth of work. I have been eager for spring, for firmer footing, since November, but all the talking in the world hasn’t brought her closer, the bitter cold of winter lingering into May.

I’ve been in Prince William Sound since mid-April, opening up fishcamp with Forest before the salmon get here. It has rained almost ceaselessly for three weeks, temperatures hovering in the mid-30s. The lakes are frozen, river otters sliding on their bellies across the ice right over the water we canoed this time last year. The ground is hard, the ocean cold, the fish still in their winter rest and uninterested in the jigs we drop down to them. We’ve spent the weeks chipping tarps out of six inches of ice and moving frozen net bags, working in the rain and exclaiming to each other every few hours, “it’s so wet!”, with an unearned incredulity, given that it has been nothing but wet.

At night, we shuck off damp clothes and scramble into soft fleece and wool; I pull Icelandic home-knit over thick merino, thanking the tough sheep that created the cozy fibers and my own hands that knit them this winter. We stoke the woodstove and eat heaping plates of pasta, drink steaming hot toddies. I read my friend Laura Pashby’s aptly named book Chasing Fog under twinkle lights until I crawl, exhausted, into bed.

Each morning, we rise to a cold cabin and another wet day, tuning the radio to the weather channel in hopes of reprieve.

“...widespread rain showers…Monday…winds 20 knots, seas 4 feet…Tuesday…winds 30 knots, seas 5 feet…”

Amidst it all, we desperately seek signs of spring, and by the second week of May it’s here. I find my first budding skunk cabbage in the marshy ground where the otters leave their clam shells. Garnet new growth on the blueberry bushes stands out, stark against the worn green. We make out bear tracks in the meadows, and finally see our first bear on the beach while we pull shrimp pots. We wonder what she’ll eat in this mostly dormant world. I scatter shrimp heads along the trail to the creek, and at night, my game camera catches a marten making off with them.

And the birds—every day there are more birds. A fox sparrow digging busily by the outhouse, kicking up moss. Hermit thrushes hopping along tideline. Two mergansers trolling by the beach, looking for spawning needlefish. A lone arctic tern winging out into the wind.

One day, I wade out to haul the skiff closer to shore; when I turn back to the beach, I’m surrounded by two dozen least sandpipers, all of them pecking at the shore I just left. I watch as the tide rises around my boots, loath to disturb them. Later, Forest and I find a male spruce grouse strutting in the woods, tail feathers fanning and flicking, proud as anything. He’s unconcerned by our presence, looking me in the eye as he wags his tail and hops from log to log. For one crazy moment, I think he might be showing off just for us, but then Forest spots his hen perched above.

This week, the ground has finally thawed enough that I can dig for spruce roots. I pull them from the ground, stripping off the bark until my thumbnail develops a divot from the fibers running over it. I coil the white roots and hang them above the woodstove to season, later to split and weave, the beginnings of a new berry basket for myself. The winds rage up from the south, pushing against the cabin door. It seems strange to be preparing for a future berry season. Berries need sun and warmth to grow, to sweeten, and there has been little to be found here.

But maybe that’s the way of it: waiting out the hard seasons as best you can, readying for the berries, the salmon, the more beautiful days ahead. Trusting, innately, that they will come.

This morning, the sun touches the boats anchored in the cove and the first rufous hummingbird is hovering at our window. As soon as we notice her, she humms away, searching for food. Forest scrambles into the shop to find a feeder for her, but they’re all tucked away in another cabin.

I set a mug of flowers from Fred Meyer’s on the deck, and sit out there in my brightest sweater, waiting for her to return.

In Case You Missed It…

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy a few others I’ve written about fishcamp and seasonality, such as:

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The logistics for a spring desert trip weren’t easy, and neither was the timing. I had a window on my way home from visiting family in New Hampshire and before heading to fishcamp where I could squeeze a few days in Utah— if I changed all my flights, added a day of travel, rented a car, and drove for 5 hours on both ends.

I hemmed and hawed for weeks, wondering if the stress of additional travel and expenses was worth the three full days I’d get in southeast Utah. When a last, lurching conversation with my neighbor about all the reasons I shouldn’t go and the very few reasons I should ended with her very patiently saying, “It sounds like you should just go to the desert,” I relented and began changing tickets.

So, after a week in NH, I found myself in a rental car driving for southeast Utah. A few gallons of water, a pile of food from Trader Joe’s, a sleeping bag, and some clothes in the back, Taylor Swift on the stereo. The effect was immediate. After a winter filled to the brim with drudgery of another long recovery and the compounding trauma of seven surgeries in five years, the simple act of driving alone towards the desert meant I could suddenly laugh again, sing along to my favorite songs, do things simply because I wanted to.

So I did. I stuffed those three desert days with whatever my heart wanted in the moment, from climbing among the cliffs to search for Ancestral Puebloan sites based on no more than a good feeling, to following trails of wildflowers down new-to-me canyons, to sprawling out on the slick rock in the sun. I ate and drank and napped when I wanted, driving dirt roads farther and farther from civilization and falling asleep each night under a clear sky of stars. And when my three days were done, I rolled into Salt Lake City airport happier than I’d been in months, covered in red dirt, a fresh sunburn across my nose, and a thousand new favorite places in my heart.

The Magic of the Desert

As a routinely overstimulated introvert of the highest order, but also someone who deeply wants to be seen by her people, I often oscillate between keeping the world at bay and enmeshment. In the former, I can feel my edges so sharply that they hurt. And in the latter, I don’t have any edges at all. But something about the desert, the ease of living, the adventure around every corner, the expansiveness, allows me to slip into the perfect balance between the two.

I’m often the most alone in the desert, purposefully seeking long stretches of time with no company other than my own. For a while, I thought it was my tendency to hold the world at arm’s length that drove this (I’ve always said that the places I feel most at home are also the ones where I can easily disappear into the landscape— namely, Alaska and Utah); now I understand it as a desire to let the world in.

The real world, that is.

Not the one we’ve created with concrete and crowds and constant online connection. But the one that exists outside of our grand human drama, made up of honest earth and growing things and a grander interconnectedness.

The first days alone in the desert, I’m always prickly and restless, seeking stimulation. But as the red dirt begins to settle into my skin, my edges begin softening and blurring— not into another human or my phone, as is so often the tendency, but outwards over the landscape, rubbing up against the cottonwoods and sagebrush, the ochre cliffs and sheets of patina, and the lives of countless others who left their mark, the sherds of pottery and collapsed kivas and carved spirals in the rock marking a thin veil into a people who loved the desert in years past just as I do now. I feel expansive and infinite, and what’s more, I really like myself in the desert. I’m free and playful in a way that I often struggle with in other environments, everything extraneous stripped away besides the simple act of keeping my body alive and filling my days with joy.

I feel, quite frankly, like I’m living inside a Mary Oliver poem.

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“Do you remember when you were yourself? Before you had crutches?”

My partner Forest’s six-year-old niece is standing slightly too close to my chair, which I’ve been more or less stuck in the past few days. I’m a month past my meniscus transplant, still forbidden to weight bear. We’re visiting Forest’s family for Christmas, and his niece is fascinated by my surgery, gently touching my knee and asking if it hurts, snatching my crutches to swing herself around the kitchen.

Her question is innocent, of course, but it nearly sends me into a tailspin. This is my ninth orthopedic surgery— my seventh in five years, my third in the last year alone. I have always prided myself on having an enormous amount of human agency to create whatever life I want; that life, and my sense of self, has been seriously curtailed the last five years, eroded by a seemingly endless string of injuries.

While I remember who I was before crutches, I’m not sure I remember when I was myself.

In an almost eerie echo of a six-year-old’s question, my therapist asks me to draw a triptych of my life, with “before”, “during”, and “becoming” panels to signify my life before this latest round of surgeries, my life now, and the life I want to build.

The before— mountains and tailwheel airplanes, sunny skies, and my little van. Endless roads and fresh tracks. Strength and freedom and excitement.

The during— laptops and phone screens, my bed. Emptiness. A BURDEN written in the center.

And then the becoming—rolling hills and the sea, salmon and cloudy skies. Art and writing. Still beautiful, but clearly muted. Across it, I write: different than what I hoped, but no less special.

I try, desperately, to believe that.

I show the triptych to Forest, and I can feel him pause at my becoming panel. “I think you’re going to get back more than that,” he says gently.

He’s only known me for two surgeries, and he is firm in his belief that this latest one won’t hold me back. But nine orthopedic surgeries will change a person. Literally, as for the first time in all those surgeries, I now carry someone else’s soft tissues inside me, the gift of a donor’s meniscus cushioning my knee.

And while I need Forest’s optimism, it’s tempered by my surgeon’s warnings that meniscus transplants only have so much life. Ten years, twenty max, the life extended by transitions to low-impact activities.

No more running 120 miles through the desert. No more flying off mountain bike jumps and under speed wings. No more schlepping 80-pound packs up Denali.

I carry the memory of someone else inside me now.

Different but no less special.

My therapist begins, gently, to talk to me about repeated trauma, about the potential for PTSD.

But there is a glimmer of hope, of a future that is just as lovely, in the weeks just before my surgery. For a woman who loves mountains and tundra, I’ve always felt most myself in the desert, and it has long signified freedom and plentiful time outdoors. Knowing I’d need to shore up on both before the months of recovery ahead, I escaped to Utah right before my surgery.

While those two weeks were full of friends (as well as a good deal of crying and frustration over my looming surgery), my favorite day came when I woke up in Sedona and began driving aimlessly south alone, winding up at an empty day-use area called Wet Beaver Creek. I make coffee in the sun, trying to determine what I’ll spend the day doing, when the camp host, a retired Marine, approaches and tells me of the swimming holes down the way.

So I pack up my things and head downstream.

Wet Beaver Creek lives up to its name, and I spend the rest of the day wandering alone up and down its length, searching for the places where water has collected in the red cliff bends, round, blackened pumice lining the deepest channels. I find a particularly sweet one in the sun, and slink down the sandstone, slip naked into the clear, silky water, and float downstream. The cold is a sharp shock against my sun-reddened skin, and my lungs seize as my body drifts a hundred feet, trout passing beneath me, towards the drop off. At the last moment, I catch myself, hauling out onto the sandstone, letting the heat from the rock seep into my goose-fleshed skin.

Again and again, I give myself to the water until the cold exhausts me, washes me clean of all frustration and fear. A heron wings out over me as I rest, and my knee twinges as I turn to watch it, the surgery scars marking my body—ankles, knee, shoulder— standing out against my chilled skin.

And for the first time in months, years maybe, I feel complete peace with where I am, no grasping for something more, something better.

What’s more, I like myself.

The weeks after surgery slump by. I sit by my Toyo stove and read. I create art, teaching myself how to block print and felt and make paper, wildflowers from the summer pressed in the corners. Eventually, I’m cleared to bend my knee, to sleep without the brace, to slowly, so slowly, wean off crutches.

With that last bit of news, texts from my friends start to roll in, beyond the usual check-ins on my health, both physical and emotional.

Want to meet in La Paz end of February? Maybe Hawaii?

How do you feel about bikepacking?

I’ll be in Mexico City in March, El Salvador in April, if you’re free.

Not “if I’m well”. Just if I’m free.

Free.

One morning, Forest wakes late and comes down the stairs to find me standing on two legs, making pancakes. My crutches are in the corner by the door. For the first time since surgery, he doesn’t offer to take over, doesn’t insist that I sit down and rest my knee.

Making pancakes. A small freedom. A tiny independence. But they taste sweet.

Later that day, I greet my neighbors on my porch, and they clap as I take my first unassisted step outside in over seven weeks.

In Case You Missed It…

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy a few others I’ve written about fishcamp and seasonality, such as:

If you enjoyed this essay, please share it with your friends! If you’d like to receive my essays and missives straight in your inbox and support my writing, you can subscribe to Winnowing below. Subscribing is always free; however, if you choose to become a paid supporter, you’ll also receive my seasonal print newsletter, Winnowing: A Seasonal Dispatch, in your mailbox!

I’m currently midway through a funded writing residency in northern Norway, given the priceless gift of time and space, good food and a warm bed, and told simply to go forth and create. After a summer of working and fishing and living remote and creating very little, being here has unstoppered me, and out has poured essays and poems, cyanotypes, block prints, knit sweaters. I swim in the sea and sit in the sun, chatting with the three other incredible women I'm sharing space with.

It is, in short, heavenly.

The place itself, known as Singla, dates back to the 1800s, complete with cottage, lighthouse, blacksmithing forge, barn, and boathouse. It was the only homestead to survive after the Germans burned the island in World War II. The owners have poured their lives into restoring it, but much of the past remains— the old plumbing, the wood heating, mariner's hats and iron tools that have outlived their usefulness on the walls. Pictures of the property hang in black and white, traditional fish drying racks clear on the shore, no road in sight.

I've always found comfort in old places, old habitation patterns. I grew up in an old New England farmhouse, living amongst foundations that had seen countless people come and go. Since then, I have been drawn to places with obvious, tangible history, where the ghosts of past lives drift from every corner.

Here, at Singla, I drink from a mug that says “Svalbard ‘79”, though no one who lives here has been. The dresser drawer sticks and the bed creaks, just as I’m sure it’s done for countless others, over countless years, who’ve sheltered here. And surely all those countless others swam in the same sea, their feet careful on the smooth rocks same as mine, and saw the same sunsets as they did, that northern sun turning those same mountains rosy.

I'm writing this very missive from the boathouse, which holds the livelihoods of generations of fishermen (fiskere in Norwegian). As I sit here and write, I'm surrounded by whittled net mending needles, hand-carved bailers, gillnets and seine nets, hooks and lines and sinkers, glass and metal floats... all of it nearly one hundred years old and yet still so similar to what I fished with this summer. All of it left as if the fiskere simply walked out one day with every intention of returning. When I climbed into the loft, I found hewn logs hanging, just as they hang in one of the cabins I spent the summer in, still holding nets that had once been hung out to dry.

There is nothing like touching the lives of those who have long passed, nothing like seeing how little has changed, really, to put the long arc of time and your own small part in it into perspective.

I’ve a few more days at the residency, and then a few more exploring northern Norway on my own before heading back to Alaska and the Sound to wrap up the fishing season there. As always, thank you everyone for reading!

Hello, sweet friends! Apologies (again) for the silence. I was fishing and living off grid this summer, creating all sorts of art that wasn’t the written word—at least not in a form suitable for Substack!

Those close to me know that I’ve long had a fascination with place names. I believe them to be vital to a landscape and its people, carrying the stories and traditions of a culture, and allowing people to call the world around them into being. Names frame the landscape, and have the immense power to connect people to the natural world by cultivating an attentiveness to the land that begets love and protectiveness.

As Robert Macfarlane writes, ‘we will not save what we do not love, and we rarely love what we cannot name.’

Much of my personal work has centered on place names, particularly those that have been written out of our maps through colonization. This summer, I’ve made maps of Dena’ina place names for the valley I live in, maps of Sugcestun place names for Prince William Sound, created a handbound glossary of Chenega-Sugcestun place names for the side of the Sound I spent the summer on, and edited a Hooper Bay-Yup’ik dictionary of place names and climate change-related words.

While none of these projects are ready for the public eye (they’re coming, I promise!), this summer I also found a set of three poems I wrote about place names in Scotland.

Scotland is where I fell in love with place names in my mid-twenties. I can still remember my excitement in discovering them when walking across the Highlands with a backpack of old maps, stories unfurling across the landscape with each new name I learned.

Gaelic has an incredibly precise natural lexicon, resulting in a richly named landscape. However, like many colonized lands, Scotland’s names have been systematically removed or Anglicized beyond recognition. English officials were sent into Scotland in the late 1800s to gather place names for Ordnance Survey maps, under strict instructions to only accept names from landowners. The landscape itself was Anglicized, Scottish culture suppressed.

I am done of Ordnance Survey correcting, and drich work it has been. The system pursued […] in regard to taking up place names is altogether erroneous. Non-Gaelic speaking men go about non-English speaking people to take down Norse-Gaelic names with their English meanings!

Alexander Carmichael 1877

The three following poems are about place names on Lewis, an island in the Hebrides that was one of the first places mapped by the English in the late 1800s, at the request of James Matheson, the landowner. The people living on Lewis were then forcefully removed to Canada, so Matheson could turn the island over to sheep, which were apparently more profitable than people.

The first poem is a found poem on the mapping, created entirely from other texts, including as Thomas Colby’s ‘Instructions on the Interior Survey of Ireland, 1825’ (a document detailing how to record place names, also used in Scotland), the novel Young Art and Old Hector, and Norman McCaig’s Hebridian poem ‘By the graveyard, Luskentyre’.

The second, a weird little thing about the clearance of Lewis. And the third, my favorite. In the early 2000s, a British company attempted to plunk 234 wind turbines on the Barvas Moor in Lewis, citing that the landscape was “empty”. In response, Lewis locals gathered all of the half-forgotten place names for the moor and compiled them into The Peat Glossary, as proof that the moor was not, in fact, empty. With the glossary as one of their weapons, the people of Lewis turned away the energy company in what remains the most beautiful piece of activism I’ve ever heard. The Gaelic words in the poem are from The Peat Glossary.

Enjoy, and look for Alaska place name writing from me soon!

First they remove the names.

Section I.

Mapping will commence in earnest 
for no other reason than the landowner wants 
an update on the assets of his estate.

For place names the following are the best 
authorities and should be taken in the order given: 
Owners of Property.

Small farmers and cottagers (a people accustomed 
to dire poverty) are not to be depended on,
even for the names of the places they occupy. 


Section II.

I know every corner of this land, every little burn and stream, 
and even the boulders in the stream. And I know the moors 
and every little lochan on them.

(A dictionary of him?)

I know the hills, and the passes, and the ruins, I know of things 
that happened here long, long ago. Every little place, 
every hillock, every hill and slope, has its own name.

(–Can you imagine it?–)

A volume beyond the writ of authority.


Section III.

Authorities, I plead with you.
Where are your dictionaries 
of the wind, the grasses?

Where the entries for cloud-
shadows chased on moors? For flame-
light on heather? What are we to call 
bright quartz in streams…
Where is the bird’s way?

It makes a big difference
(does it?) when you know the name.
And I would not like the little places to die. 

Will they die if they lose their names?

Something in them will die.

I propose to emigrate first all bad payers, say those two years in arrears of rent […] Secondly-- I would propose to clear whole townships which are generally in arrear and […] can be converted to grazing.

John Munro Mackenzie

Then they remove the people.

Initially, less than 250 persons agreed to leave Lewis: by 1852, 
Matheson had assisted 1,554 small cottagers and farmers 
(a people accustomed to considerable freedom) 
in relocating to Canada.

A whole town given over to grazing so they cut me from the peat raw windswept and hungry. My mouth was a ship’s hold they shoved me through, charging nothing but the marrow of these bones, bones picked clean frozen and peatless I would have stayed, stayed deep buried—

But I left. Traded brindled brine and earth for a heat so thick it chokes. They told me the trees are made of sugar but it all boils down to a drop and—

what I wouldn’t give for it to be salt.

 If I swing this axe enough maybe it will look like home.

The people remember.

For 158 years 
there was a blank space
on their map. The authorities 
never found names to call 
peat bogs, empty. No names so—
Best put some turbines up.
234 to be exact.

The villagers will love the money.
The Brits will love the cheap power.

But the people knew
there were names deeper 
than maps, names scrawled slow
on rock and bone and blood.
There are shades of nothing
and shades of knowing, 
and the people remembered—

First they remove the names.
Then they remove the people.

They remembered their fathers clenched 
teeth around those names, starved 
for those names, names no one 
thought to ask, names buried deeper
than peat and paper, hidden dead
in the corners of old crofts, lapped
to bone by the rough tongue 
of some Anglicized map, old ways
forgotten, homeland fading red 
as the moor burns for those names.

Their fathers clenched teeth so hard 
the shapes of their faces changed.

But theirs was always language spoken, soft
and theirs the language of remembering
the language of land and landscape and home.
And when those men came with those turbines,
the people coaxed open jaws and went searching.

They found a’chailleach, perched on shieling stone.
Another hidden in the schoolhouse of Siabost.
They plucked fàds from the milk teeth of mother, 
and rùdhan was leaning right where father left.
Art went out to Old Hector’s and found fèith, 
sitting there on the doorstep.

Hands cupped and careful, they gathered secrets
kept for years by an island’s silent tongues,
names now light and leavened on their lips.
Mouths full they carried them, careful, to the moors 
pressed them careful into the mòine dubh, whispered
their names careful, and waited.

The next day the wind came and lifted them
free, swept them into home and school and office 
the whole world come out to watch, wonder
at rionnach maoim dashing shadowed over moorland 
and teine biorach racing will o’ whisp to chase
sleepless feadan, wandering from loch, lightfoot 
and èit settling, bright as good news,
to light the path home.

And where once there was nothing—

Look they said,  
rathad an iesin, the bird’s way.

Look.
‘Sileadh e a-nis.

Years ago, I concocted an escape for my first Fatherless Father’s Day: I volunteered to spend the weekend hauling gear deep into the Eastern Alaska Range for an all-girls’ mountain program. No cell service, no Wi-Fi, no onslaught of social media posts. Certainly no Hallmark cards. Most importantly, no one I knew and no one who knew my dad.

It was the perfect plan.

Until halfway through the day, when someone pulled out a piece of cardboard tucked in their pack, “Happy Father’s Day!” written on it in Sharpie. Everyone lined up to take a picture to send to their dads, huge grins splitting their faces as they held the sign, while I sat in the scree and held back tears, my dad barely two months dead.

But the only thing worse than taking that picture was sitting there alone in my grief. So I got up. I put on the wobbliest, shakiest smile I could, and I held that sign for a dad I believed no longer existed.

Today marks my eighth Fatherless Father’s Day, a number that would have seemed impossible to that girl sitting in the scree. Most of the last eight Fatherless Father’s Days have passed without remark; a text with my brother about the weirdness of it all, a few quiet moments of introspection. And a whole heap of distraction. As if, if I could only keep busy enough, I could avoid facing my own grief.

(A lesson I should have learned was impossible the moment that cardboard sign appeared.)

But now, after eight impossible years, the sting of a Fatherless Father’s Day has somehow faded. It no longer feels like the world is rubbing it in my face. I no longer need to busy myself or run away. I woke up today on the Kahiltna Glacier, a place my dad has never been and will never be (though I wish it were otherwise). I made my morning coffee and ate pancakes with a friend before starting my day. I took an extra moment to appreciate the planes flying into Denali Basecamp, knowing that my pilot father would have loved to see these machines work. I texted my brother, and my friends texted me, asking me how I was. And if I was a little quieter, a little sadder today, well…

I used to be scared of my grief, afraid of what I’d find if I looked too closely at it— afraid of who I’d find, if I let it take me over. Now, I can sit with my grief, turn it over in my hands, hold it close. It’s no longer a raging monster but a sweet, deep ache that lives at the heart of me, that has made me so tender and soft these past eight years.

Now, if I stare into it long enough, I swear I can see stars.

I’m no expert in grief. It is a horrible thing, especially in the early years, and no amount of preparation will make it otherwise. But I do believe that grief is easier when shared. So, here are some things I’ve learned in eight years of Fatherless Father’s Days:

• My dad still exists (and so does your dad, or your lost loved one). When he was alive, my dad was 4,500 miles away from me at any given time. Now, he lives with me always. I can feel him when I ski, when I fix my truck or my van, when I’m out on the water. He was there when I re-taught myself how to drive stick shift in the Faroe Islands, stalling all the way, and he’s there in the cockpit with me every time I fly. Always, I feel him with me. It’s like the poet EE Cummings said, ‘I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart).’

  

• Your loved ones live on in your stories. For months after my dad’s death, I dreaded any conversation about fathers, scared that people would find out about the aching sorrow I carried with me, terrified to be on the receiving end of their pity.

  And then one night, eight months after my dad’s death, deep in the belly of my grief and surrounded by new friends in the Absarokas in Wyoming, talk turned to dads. As it turned out, all three of us had lost our dads. And as we skinned slowly back to camp, telling stories about our dead dads as the sky caught fire behind us, I felt like I was part of something again. I felt like my dad was with me again.

  Tell stories. Tell me your stories.

• The Dead Dad’s Club is real. And it is horrible and awful and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone… and yet. And yet— it may be the most tender, loving community I’ve ever been a part of. Anytime I’ve met someone who has also lost their dad at a young age, there is an instant, deep knowing between us that transcends any get-to-know-you small talk. I see them, and they see me, in a way I’ve never experienced elsewhere.

  If you’ve lost your dad, too, welcome. I’m so sorry.

• Just because someone is dead, it doesn’t mean your relationship with them is over. My dad and I had a tumultuous relationship for much of my teenage and adult life. When he was dying, I panicked over all those lost years, apologizing to him over and again for not making more of an effort. It was, I believed, going to be the biggest regret of my life.

  But over the last eight years, I’ve been able to unpack and work through all the shit I wasn’t able to when he was alive. I’ve learned forgiveness and compassion for that younger version of myself and for that younger version of my dad. Both of us were just doing the best we could. My relationship with him is now stronger and deeper for it.

• Loss is terrible and inevitable, and the hardest thing about living as a sentient being. But how brutally beautiful is it that the darkest, hardest part of our lives is also the one thing that makes it so achingly sweet. My grief has made me incandescent, each moment I live that much sweeter for the bone-deep knowledge that nothing lasts.

  Nothing lasts. Nothing lasts. Nothing lasts.

  Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there. And to anyone missing their dad today— I see you. You’re not alone.

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I would be remiss not to mention Michael Gardner, a friend and a member of the Dead Dad’s Club. He lost his father in a climbing accident when he was sixteen. Last October, sixteen years after George Gardner died, we lost Mikey in a climbing accident in Nepal.

I’m writing this while sitting in Denali Basecamp, the landscape that I usually saw Mikey in, and I can feel, keener than ever, the hole in the fabric of the world he left with his passing. I revisit his writing often; his essay ‘Worth the Weight?’, about his own journey with grief is one of my favorites. Alpinist also published an excerpt of their tribute piece, ‘In the Shadow of the Grand: A Reflection of the Life of Michael Gardner’, in honor of Father’s Day.

A week before I’m supposed to fly into the Alaska Range to teach a mountaineering course, and I’m back in the doctor's office. This course is meant to be my big return to the mountains, but my knee hasn’t felt quite right after ACL surgery, painful and strange and untrustworthy. I spent the winter watching post-op milestones slip by without even attempting them; no skiing, no squat rack. I’d been assured over and again that my knee is strong, that some recoveries just take longer.

Finally, when I could no longer run or hike without pain, my surgeon ordered an MRI, “for peace of mind before the Alaska Range.”

I’d received the report a few days ago, so when my surgeon turns on his screen and the internal workings of my knee are displayed in black and white, I already know what I’ll see. A slim, dark absence in the back of the joint, a tear through the fabric of my meniscus. A strange step-off in the distal end of my femur.

“Did you fall or have an accident since surgery?” my surgeon asks, clearly confused as he toggles from the screen back to my knee, the two purple scars from my surgery a year prior stark against my pale skin. I think back to the veritable lockdown I’ve kept myself in the past year, the caution I’ve exerted over every aspect of my life, the times it was intimated that I was ‘going too easy on that knee’, and almost laugh.

Now, instead of getting peace of mind before my trip, I’m discussing surgery options to fix an injury I’m supposed to be long past. I watch as a summer’s worth of plans is wiped away yet again. The Alaska Range, Peru, my dreams of finally, finally having a body that works, that can play in the mountains and run and bike, a body that I can trust and learn to love again, erased for the sixth year in a row.

That night, I send a voicenote to my friend Riley to tell her the news, barely keeping the frustration from my voice.

Maybe it’s finally time to just let go of mountain-dreams and doing hard things. I’ll just sit on my porch all summer instead and read and fish and knit….. as Mary Oliver says, just let the soft animal of my body love what it loves.

Later, another voicenote— I’ll be honest though, I’ve always hated that phrase, ‘soft animal of my body’.

Mary Oliver also tells us we ‘don't have to walk on our knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.’

But I’ve chosen to run 120 miles through the desert repenting. In a strange way, I loved it. This is the problem— I’ve been trained to love the hard things, the summits and mileage, the high vert and long days, both in the mountains and in the gym. I’ve lived for those things, my weeks structured around my workouts, my seasons around the mountains. I used to carry around a photo of Navy SEALS doing drownproofing practice, ‘FIND PEACE WITHIN THE PAIN’ typed in bold font above them, convinced that the way to self-worth and a calm mind was to drive my body to the breaking point and enjoy it.

I’ll be the first to admit it was a twisted kind of love, one where I gave everything and walked away with very little beyond an inflated sense of worth and a broken-down body. There’s very little peace to be found in the pain of six surgeries in five years.

But I’m not alone in this. There’s an entire culture, an entire economy, built around the idea of disciplining your body, conquering it, through extreme athleticism, often coupled with some aspect of outdoor recreation. CrossFit, Mountain Tactical, HIIT, GoRuck— I’ve tried them all in an attempt to turn those long hours in the gym into even longer hours in the mountains. I, along with 250 others, once paid several hundred dollars for the opportunity to run for days on end, earning ourselves hallucinations and blood blisters. I’ve had clients pay ten times that to puke and struggle and cry their way up Denali, just to check the box that says they climbed the highest mountain in North America. Every month, I hear news of another FKT on another trail that was surely designed to be walked, to be savored.

Strava and Crossfit and even ultramarathons are all products of the last thirty years. My Garmin watch, which measures my HR and BPM and HRV, which buzzes when I’m hitting my paces and chastizes me when I’m not, has been around for even less. Even summit fever is only as recent as the 18th century, when white European men discovered they could climb to the tops of things and receive endless accolades for their efforts. Before that, for 300,000 years or more, our species treated our bodies’ physical abilities less as vehicles of self-worth and more as vehicles for us to experience and navigate our worlds, as tools for us to hunt and gather and move.

My own obsession with pushing my body to its limit is recent too, birthed from the strange worlds of the military and mountain guiding that I thrust myself into in my early 20s, where my worth was predicated on what my body could accomplish.

Before that, I moved through the outdoor world much differently, ‘stravaigin’ about as Nan Shepherd puts it in The Living Mountain, a slim little book about her lifetime of wandering the Cairngorms, rarely ever reaching their peaks. Stravaigin— a Scots word meaning to wander with a sense of curiosity and exploration. No place to get to, no pace to maintain, no elevation to achieve.

My childhood was spent stravaigin on my family’s sixty-acre property, following streams as far as I could, catching frogs in the vernal pools, climbing ancient maple trees. I spent so many years roaming that little landscape that I knew its every secret. Which creek beds had the best clay, which stonewall hid the oldest glass bottles, left over from previous residents. Where to find blackberries and long-abandoned apple trees, and where the lady slipper orchids grew, deep in the woods beside the front field.

I was always told how rare the eerie pink blooms were, so rare it was rumored illegal to pick them. But they aren’t rare at all— people just don’t know how to look for them. Don’t slow down enough to find them, hidden in the dark corners of the forest.

I want to learn how to look for orchids again.

With news of my knee, my calendar suddenly clears. And instead of coming home with FKTs and QOMs and a Garmin watch telling me my training status is “peaking”, I come home with river rocks in my pockets and hands full of feathers.

Instead of far-flung trips into the mountains, I sit on my porch and knit, listening to my creek in spate, meltwater from the mountains flooding the narrow channel. A fisherman shows me how the trees down by my river breathe and how to spot pussy willows up high. My neighbor tells me that the devil’s club buds have burst, ready to gather. That night, I feast on fresh devil’s club pesto, green as spring. Riley sends me videos of her children telling me their “bird wishlist” for the day— they want to see bald eagles and cardinals and cedar waxwings. I tell them of the red-breasted nuthatch that landed on my feeder, hanging half upside down from his tiny clawed toes.

There are bad days, too, of course. Angry days where I feel betrayed by my body yet again; sad days where I grieve for another season’s worth of plans lost; lonely days where I worry that my friends will leave me behind as they head off this summer on expeditions and trail runs and bike rides.

But slowly, I learn to find peace in the pain. Slowly, another season opens before me.

My kitchen window frames the mountains across the valley, rising nearly 6,000 feet from the river bed. This morning, I trace their rough ridgelines and ache for the version of me that thought nothing of spending an afternoon running them.

Later, I’ll go stravaigin around their lower slopes, moving slow, searching for fairy slipper orchids. I’ve recently learned that Alaska has over thirty species of orchids, and I’m determined to find as many as I can. I leave my watch behind; with near-endless daylight and nowhere to be, I don’t need it. A trail runner zips by while I’m bent over, face to the earth, and a sharp shame pierces me as I watch him disappear around the bend. He’s likely been to the summit and back in the time I’ve been here, idling. I would be running if I could! I want to call after him.

Instead, I find yarrow and violets, the new shoots of cow parsnip. No orchids.

But I have all season to look.

I was in Japan for most of December on a last-minute adventure. Every month that passes I tell myself I’m going to stay home and rest more, and every month I utterly fail at it. But when your brother invites to you meet him halfway around the world, you’re hardly going to say no.

I spent the first week in Tokyo alone. If you know me at all, you know that I am not a City Person. Friends had reassured me that Tokyo was different, and while it was remarkably clean and orderly, it is still a Big City (the biggest, in fact). I found the city overwhelming, though I adored walking around the Yanaka neighborhood. Turns out it’s the most traditional neighborhood in Tokyo and one of the few that wasn’t bombed in WWII, which explains why I loved it. Other highlights included the teamLab immersive digital art museum and, of course, the endless sushi/ramen/udon/whisky…

After escaping the city, I met up with Cody, my sister-in-law Erin, and our friend Matt and we spent a week hiking the Kumano Kodo trail on the Kii peninsula. The Kumano Kodo is a 1,000-year-old pilgrimage route that connects three major Shinto-Buddhist shrines… need I say more? We spent our days hiking long miles up and over the mountains and our evenings staying in guesthouses in tiny towns, enjoying ridiculously elaborate homemade meals and endless baths and onsens. I hadn’t hiked since my ACL tear (almost a year ago!) and was fresh off a shoulder surgery, so it was a little aggressive for an off-the-couch mission. The company and the landscape were all-time though, and well worth any lingering aches in my knee and shoulder.

I came home just in time for the Christmas social scene in Palmer; I am still simultaneously exhausted and full to the brim with love from that week. Highlights include recreating the Nativity scene complete with a cheeky ChatGPT script, a goat-themed party featuring an entire cooked goat from Costco, and an evening in Talkeetna with friends to ring in the New Year.

What Kept Me Human

• Traveling Solo — I’ve been romping around the world alone since I was 18 and the version of me that I am when I’m alone in a strange place, where no one knows my name or has any expectations of me, is still one of my very favorites. Even if that place is a Big City.

• New Year’s with the GalPals — Last New Year’s, I was in a town I don’t really like, with friends who weren’t my own, arguing with an ex as the clock struck midnight. This year? I was in my favorite Alaskan town, listening to music at my favorite Alaskan bar, and as the clock struck midnight I gathered up my favorite girlfriends, the ones who have supported and loved me throughout all of these massive life changes, and gave them all a huge hug.

• Backyard Alpenglow — I live on the north side of a 6,000-foot mountain. I’m in its shadow for much of the winter and don’t receive any direct sunlight for months. Looking out my window and seeing that rose-gold light coming off the mountains across the valley gives me hope for when the sunlight does eventually return to my side of the river.

• A Shrine to Achilles — Three friends have experienced Achilles tendon injuries, and my friend group has been fearing for the rest of our Achilles tendons. I took matters into my own hands and made a shrine to Brad Pitt-As-Achilles, featuring posters from the movie Troy. I brought it the goat-themed party as a joke to “appease” Achilles and thus spare our own tendons, and set it up with a little box that said “Submit Your Sins to Achilles” and a pad of paper. By the end of the night, the box was FULL of sins, which we then anonymously read aloud, humbly beseeching Brad Pitt-As-Achilles to be merciful. It was WEIRD. And wild and hilarious, and I’m so thankful for friends who can interact with a shirtless poster-shrine of Brad Pitt-As-Achilles without even blinking.

  

What I Wrote

Well… nothing! I took the month off from freelancing to travel and spend time with friends. I have a few new Substack essays brewing, so stay tuned. I also started as a full-time, salaried writer and communications coordinator with Alaska Wildlife Alliance! I’m delighted to be leaving the grind of freelancing for something more stable and am anticipating more time and energy for my personal writing.

What I Read

I’m back on my sci-fi and fantasy kick. I wish I had something more inspirational and thought-provoking to recommend, but reading has always been a source of entertainment first and foremost for me. With that….

• The Aurora Cycle by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff — This is the series that got me into sci-fi and is one of the finest examples of third-person multiple points of view, in my opinion. Wonderfully character-driven for the expansive plot, with so many unique voices. Easy reading and incredible storytelling.

• And, of course, poetry. “Attending the Party” by Hieu Minh Nguyen was one of my favorites in December, and very fitting for the holiday season.

  

What’s Coming Up

I head to Baja in a few days for a week of sailing with two lovely PNW friends! After that, I’m actually, truly, hunkering down in Alaska for a bit to focus on rest and recovery.

Thanks for hanging in there, and stay tuned for more lyric essays!

I crouch down in the passenger seat and uncork a bottle of whisky. The day is cold as cut glass, the wind off the glaciers rocking my old truck. I’m parked outside yet another imaging center for yet another shoulder MRI. The fifth in four years, and while I haven’t greeted any of them with anything more than resignation, this one has had me gripped with panic for a week. I’d spent last night stalking the imaging center online, zooming in on every one of their photos to ensure they had a wide-bore MRI machine, and reading every Reddit thread I could find on arthrograms and MRIs and claustrophobia.

They all had one key takeaway: if you’re scared, don’t go sober.

So, I’d ripped through my medicine cabinet for anything that would help take the edge off, Googling each drug I found.

Can Flexeril help you relax for MRIs if you're claustrophobic?

Will Lexapro keep you from panicking when you're put head-first into a narrow tube, weighed down with sandbags and clutching a “panic button”?

Does Benadryl take your mind off the too-large needle being pushed into your shoulder and the memory that, last time this happened, they nicked an artery and left you with a hematoma that changed colors with each sunrise?

As a generally calm, unruffled human with years' worth of yoga and meditation behind me, I’d never been one to stock Valium or Xanax, or any of the other “housewife helpers” in my home.

I did, however, have whisky. I’d packed it in my bag for the morning, along with my insurance card.

One quick slug, a slower burn, and I can already feel my edges softening, the panic wearing thin. I send a quick voice note to my best friend—this must be what it’s like to be an alcoholic! I’m not one, I promise. This is my first drink since Utah. I’m just really nervous — and slink into the imaging center.

I sit in the waiting room, worrying over whether anyone can smell whisky on my breath, until the MRI tech collects me.

“How are you today?” she asks.

I stick one of the lollies they keep in a jar on the counter in my mouth and smile at her around it. “It’s not my first rodeo, but I’m a little more anxious than usual.”

Utah, two weeks prior

I sit in the dirt on top of the run-in, my bike resting far below. I’m deep in the deserts of Utah with my friend Sean, and we’ve found ourselves a new playground. Drops and step-ups and hips, all carved into the ridges and cliffs of the butte, made just for us and our mountain bikes.

I’m cautious, my new knee not quite ready for this terrain, but Sean is like a kid in a candy shop. He’s found a jump he likes, and we’ve chopped the drop-in chute smooth for him. It’s steep as all hell, with a quick transition into the lip, but it’s doable. He’s given it a few go’s already, picking up speed each time. I watch from my perch as he drops in again, steady through the transition, off the lip. It’s the best he’s looked yet, and I’m happy for him.

He rides out the landing and drops his bike in the dirt.

“FUCK!”

I stand, confused. “What happened?”

“I just ruptured my Achilles tendon.”

He looks up at me and the world disappears. I’m thrown back to last January in the French Alps. My few sweet moments of flight before I hit the ground hard, the feeling of something vital tearing deep in my leg. The swift dread of being so far from home.

Of being with someone I wasn’t quite sure would take care of me.

I’m already sliding down the hill to him, a sharp pain ripping through my knee in protest.

“Back again for another MRI?” the radiologist asks. “Shoulder still giving you trouble?”

I wince as the 20 gauge spinal needle pierces my shoulder’s joint capsule. “Sorry,” the radiologist mutters. “Even Lidocaine won’t numb that pain.”

He pumps contrast into my shoulder, watching its progress on the x-ray machine beside me. My eyes are firmly fixed on the bare wall, but out of the corner of them I can see the MRI tech, smiling at me. She’s been glued to my side since I admitted how nervous I was.

“We think something's wrong with the new placement of my biceps tendon. I was supposed to get surgery on it last spring, but tore my ACL and had to deal with that instead.”

I feel the needle in my joint, the radiologist shifting and moving and digging with it. “Sorry,” he says again. “Your joint capsule is really tight from all the surgeries.” He peers at the x-ray machine. “I’m not happy with the placement. We’ll have to try again.”

My heart drops. The sip of whisky has long worn off, thanks to the delays that plague all medical appointments. I close my eyes, and the tech squeezes my hand hard.

Utah, ten days prior

Sean’s got an MRI scheduled for tomorrow morning, a Saturday, half a state away. We’re not quite sure a weekend appointment is legit, but we’re not taking any chances either and I’m driving us south so we can sleep closer to the imaging center.

I’ve been watching the temperature drop past freezing all afternoon, and it’s only just starting to creep back up. It’s past sunset and I’m exhausted and sad and trying not to show it. Taillights blur before me while Sean queues up Harry Styles, the vocals blasting over the Bluetooth.

Wondering, headshake, tired eyes are the death of me—

“I was in the 0.01 percent top listeners for Harry Styles on Spotify one year,” I tell him.

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. I got sick on Denali and spent a week in a church basement after, on a liquid food diet. Harry Styles had just released a new album... I don’t remember much but I must have listened to it on repeat. He’s been a bit of a solace ever since.”

We fly down the highway together in the dark and when the song ends, Sean presses the back button. “So good, I could listen to it again,” he says with a sly smile.

Sunflower, my eyes, want you more than a melody—

I sit up on the table, eyeing the MRI machine. This is a wide-bore machine? It looks far smaller than when I was here last year. Far, far smaller than the 70 centimeters I was promised, a full 10 centimeters more headroom than traditional machines.

Enclosed spaces have always sent my heart rate skyrocketing. It’s not claustrophobia so much as the feeling of being trapped. The feeling of not being able to leave when I want. It’s the same fear that drove me to run from both military and marriage seven years ago, to completely upend my life and move into a van, all so I could simply leave whenever and wherever I wanted.

There’s no leaving this, though, and the tech coaxes me into lying flat, weighing my arm down with sandbags to keep me still. Ear plugs are pushed into my ears, headphones put over them. She drapes a washcloth over my eyes and I can’t help but feel like a horse being led from a burning building. Except this time I’m being led into the burning building.

“We’ll be with you the whole time,” she reassures me.

“Speak for yourself,” the male tech snorts. I’ve only just met him, but I’d already labeled him an asshole. He proves it now. “I’ll be in the other room.”

“I’ll be right here,” she says again, squeezing my hand. I don’t think I’ve held hands with a grown woman since I was a child, but I am eternally grateful for it today. “Any music requests?”

“Can you put on Harry Styles?”

Utah, a week prior

Sean sits in the passenger seat, contorting his body to get one long leg up on the dash, the only real way to elevate his ankle. Admittedly, living in the back of an empty cargo van is not the easiest when you’re on crutches but he’s taken it in stride. Harry’s back on the speakers, and I’m back on my way to being a 0.01 percent fan.

I’m huddled over a small stove, making Sean dinner and a hot water bottle to warm his toes. Since his injury, I have been determined to show up fully so he won’t feel a moment of the loneliness I did this past year after my knee injury, not a moment of how am I going to get through this? or who will take care of me now?

His morning coffee? Made and in his hands when he wakes, a chair set up for him and an ice pack ready to put behind his ankle.

A doctor’s appointment? An MRI? I’m there, a second set of ears and a spare set of hands to open doors and carry paperwork.

Overwhelmed by doctors and procedures? I have a list of surgeons sourced and vetted by friends and all the recent literature pulled up on my phone.

Sean knows some of what happened in France with my ex; our close friendship has been built, in part, on the backs of our previous failed relationships. Bits of past, backhanded cruelty have slipped out of me over the past week, each admission a catharsis of sorts.

He told me I should get knee surgery in New Hampshire, that he didn’t want to care for me afterward.

He called me a burden and sat on the couch cracking beers while I cried.

He left after surgery to take a job on the Slope, and that's the last I really saw him.

Sean asks me, honestly, “Why did you stay with him?”

He wasn’t all bad. I just never knew which version I was going to get.

I pause for a moment too long and then shrug. “He was hot.”

Which is an easier way of saying... I don’t know.

An easier way of saying, I wish I hadn’t.

Home from Utah, and I’ve dragged myself to therapy. I overslept my alarm and skipped my morning coffee to make it on time, knowing I needed these extra minutes here, unraveling what had happened in Utah, more than I needed my caffeine.

“I’m just really hurting for him,” I tell my therapist. “I know what it’s like, seeing the future you’d planned wiped away in a moment, erased and supplanted with surgery and months upon months of recovery.”

“It does sound eerily similar to your injury in France.”

“It’s exactly the same. Except my ex was taking care of me, and he was as cruel as he was kind. I didn’t want that for Sean. It felt important to make sure he didn’t… that no one, especially not a friend, felt the way I did.”

“You’re trying to rewrite your story, in someone else’s life.”

I rub at my knee. Even through my jeans, I can feel the scars, the dip where the muscle hasn’t come back. I look up and Kathryn meets my gaze.

“Are you hurting for him? Or are you hurting for you?”

Deep in the tube now and Harry is crooning in my ears over the grinding of the MRI. I can feel my heart pounding, my palm slick against the panic button. But as I grow accustomed to the too-small space, my heart slows. It starts to ache. And I realize just how much I am hurting for myself.

Because while I put on a brave face, the truth is that I am so, so tired of being poked and prodded and sliced open, of fighting to find surgeons who treat me like a human. Tired of finding some new allergy every surgery and tired, so inexplicably tired, of having my life rearranged every six months. Four surgeries in four years, a fifth on the way…

Who will take care of me this time?

My ex’s care came with conditions, but it was care all the same.

I’m startled when I feel tears slipping down the side of my face. Afraid to move, to feel the edges of this confined space, I let them slide into my hair. The ache in my chest ebbs and flows, and finally, miraculously, I find myself drifting off to sleep.

The tech’s voice crackles through my headphones.

“We’re all done. You did so well!”

By the time she pulls me out, salt tracks have dried all along my face.

I sit at an intersection and sip my flat white, my little treat for being such a brave girl. Just one last stop to see a friend and I can take my tired bones home. My shoulder is sore as hell, and the bottle of whisky winks at me from the floor of the passenger seat. The woman who sipped straight from the bottle seems ages, or at least hours, away. Harry Styles is still blasting from my speaker, and I revel in hearing him without an MRI racketing around me.

Ringin' the bell and nobody's comin' to help—

A CRASH! rockets through my world, the sound followed by my body, my head whipping forward and then back, my flat white exploding over the interior of my truck. It takes a moment to orient myself… was I just rear-ended?

I sigh, rest my throbbing head against the seat, and punch my hazards on. Oat milk and espresso drip from the windshield, from the ceiling, as I pull my truck out of the way. The old bird’s faired well, the metal bumper sitting just a little lower than usual. The man who hit me scrambles out of his new Volkswagen and looks at his own bumper, shattered and hanging crookedly. “Oh thank god… with how hard I hit you I thought there would be more damage! Lights broken and frames bent and—”

I rub my aching neck, think of the Flexeril still sitting in my medicine cabinet.

Can Flexeril help with whiplash?

Are you hurting for him? Or are you hurting for you?

The man writes down his insurance information. I text Annie to let her know I’ll be late, scrolling through my unread messages.

A group chat, organizing a care package for a friend getting surgery this week.

A girlfriend checking in on me after my Utah trip. Knowing, somehow, that my heart hurts.

Annie texts me back immediately.

Do you need any help? I’m so sorry. Take your time.

Let me know if there’s anything I can do.

We can all send a care package your way next.

Who will take care of me this time?

I smile, and head for home.

A week later, I’ll go in for another shoulder surgery. Mara, my neighbor, will drop me off in the morning and Annie will return later, keeping me company in post-op as I choke down applesauce, and then driving me home on the slow, snowy roads. I’ll remember how much she hates winter driving when we turn onto the unplowed road to my cabin.

There, I’ll find a care package on my kitchen table, put together by my friends and collected by Mara while I was under anesthesia. Handmade cards with cats drawn on them and loose-leaf tea from the land I live on, books and journals, painting canvases and Etch-n-Sketches and candy… I’ll sit on the floor and weep with gratitude.

Later— soup deliveries to my door, my favorite flowers pressed into my hands, phone calls that last hours and text messages late into my sleepless nights. I’ll cook myself my favorite gyoza dumplings for lunch and drink peppermint tea in bed. My friends will pick me up at my cabin for long dinners and slow walks and Sean and I will sit on his couch, both of us a little worse for wear but just happy for the company—

And I will not, for one moment, wonder how I am going to get through this. I will not worry who will take care of me now.

I will never feel more loved in my life.

Hello, long-lost readers! Clearly, I am just no good at creative writing on any sort of schedule. I attribute it to the fact that I write on a schedule for work constantly, and I just can’t bear to do the same creatively. But I do want to be more prolific here, so I’m trying something new and more sustainable— monthly roundups rather than weekly. I’ll also have a new essay out later this week, featuring parking lot whisky, MRIs, and Harry Styles. I promise; I just need to cross some t’s and dot some i’s.

In the last few years, I’ve started to ascribe to the idea that the whole point of this little life is to experience the breadth of the human experience, emotional and otherwise. Some months I feel like I fit it all into the thirty-some-odd days, and November was such a month.

Brilliant! Heartbreaking! Exciting! Frustrating!

And beautiful beyond measure.

I spent the first half of November in Utah with a dear friend, sleeping in the back of a cargo van and riding bikes. For those of you who’ve been around for a bit, you’ll know that I go to Utah at least once a year to soak up some true, desert dirtbag time. And while I usually go alone, it was an absolute delight to introduce a friend to all my favorite places. We spent long nights in front of campfires, drinking whisky and whiling away the hours with conversation (and one memorably awful night watching election results on his phone) and even longer days exploring the desert on two wheels.

Our idyllic Desert Days were cut short by injury (not mine, for once), and we both came home to Alaska in all its dark, cold glory. The transition was abrupt, to say the least, and not made any easier by the fact that both of us headed into surgeries shortly after. Thankfully we’re on the other side and I (hopefully!) have had my last shoulder surgery for many, many years. Luckily I have quite literally the best community in the world, and my post-op days have been filled with dinners and walks, soup drop-offs and phone calls, and all the support a gal could ask for.

The Things That Kept Me Human

• Coffee mornings in the deserts — Now that I live by myself and I’m not guiding nearly as much, I spend most of my mornings alone. I was the first to wake up during the Desert Days trip, and there was something really lovely about sitting in the sun alone, hearing my friend stirring in his sleeping bag, and knowing I’d soon be sharing a cup of coffee with him. Most mornings we hardly even talked, both of us just enjoying our thoughts, but the easy companionship was unmatched.

• Spanksgiving — Hosted by two lovely friends in their beautiful home. We all brought aphrodisiac foods, explained our recipes while holding a magic wand as a microphone, and then gathered around the pole to share thanks and sexy stories. There were many, many times throughout the night when I looked around at everyone gathered together and counted my lucky stars to be there at all.

• The unwavering support of my friends — I came home from surgery to find a massive care package on my table, filled with handmade cards, loose-leaf tea gathered from around my cabin, Etch-N-Sketches, painting supplies, and candy. I promptly burst into tears, right there in my kitchen.

• A bright future — I was accepted into a writing residency in northern Norway for next summer! Still in shock, still massively feeling the imposter syndrome, but the good news is I’ve got almost eight months to get over it.

What I Wrote

• A little essay on Utah, injuries, friendship, and fear, mostly composed whilst I was shoved head first in an MRI machine, that I have yet to publish. Watch for it on my Substack this week.

• The holiday season means a ramping up of gear gift guides, a necessary evil for freelance writers. I finished several for Nat Geo, though only one has been published thus far: a guide on what to pack for a ski vacation. Slightly ironic given that my last ski vacation ended with a torn ACL and, ultimately, a breakup. Crutches, tissues, and the last shreds of your dignity not included in this particular gear guide.

• For those that don’t know, I’ve been the Communications Coordinator for Alaska Wildlife Alliance since spring. The job involves a whole truckload of writing, and you can find most of it by signing up for AWA’s newsletter, on the bottom of the homepage. One of the bigger projects recently was the 2024 Annual Report, where we detailed all the amazing things we accomplished this year and tried really hard not to think about how shit the next four will be.

What I Read

• Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession by Craig Childs - I read this every year while in Utah. An intense, impassioned investigation into the nature of the past, the things we leave behind, and who they belong to. Mostly set in the American Southwest.

• Poetry… so much damn poetry. One of my favorites from the month, on the small joys of living:

  Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

  The Orange by Wendy Cope
  
  At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—
  This size of it made us all laugh. 
  I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
  They got quareters and I had a half. 
  
  And that orange, it made me so happy, 
  As ordinary things often do
  Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
  This is peace and contentment. It's new.
  
  The rest of the day was quite easy.
  I did all the jobs on my list
  And enjoyed them and had some time over.
  I love you. I'm glad I exist. 

What’s Coming Up

• I head to Japan in a week! I’m continuing this bizarre theme of traveling with people (?!) in 2024 and will be meeting up with my brother, my sister-in-law, and an old friend for a whole lot of ramen and a little bit of hiking.

• Another month of ludicrously wonderful evenings with friends, including one where a pole barn will be demolished and a goat-themed party. I love my Alaska community.

• Rest and recovery and hopefully, fingers crossed, a successful shoulder surgery outcome.

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