Summer Report NUMERO UNO

This summer's visit was truncated for my oldest, pictured here on the close end of the sofa. He doesn't know shit, won't know shit, for some time, maybe not even ever. I went on a bike ride downtown today with the remaining two. Uly wanted to bike through the neighborhood and did so, until we got to the intersection where he was to be ensconced in the bike trailer for the lion's share of the trip to the mid-morning Saturday cafe. We, K and I, crossed before Ulybear and he became spooked at the approach of our neighborhood mail truck. He stood across from us on the asphalt, his face a screaming terror. I yelled at K to take my bike and I ran back to get him. I scooped Uly up, his legs gripping my torso and him fright crying until he finally subsided into calm. He hugged me and had no idea that on the trip to the intersection I had watched him grandly smiling as he biked with his brother and my heart broke and I wept, wept at his joy.

As the last hurrah of the short summer, A graciously reserved for us one of the yurts at the Eagle River Nature Center. We hiked in with all our supplies for an overnight in said yurt by the rushing and churning and ever changing Eagle River. A bear went through camp. I ate some questionable things and went on a hike with the boys wherein we spoke of machine guns and combat tactics I'd learned as a foolish young man and myriad other things. We arrived at a bend in the river and sat for a bit amongst the mosquitoes and flies and the inexorable river. On the way back things got very Alice in Wonderland and I spent the next few hours in a kaleidoscope where I completed a flora collage with Uly and watched the river and we threw hatchets and chopped wood and attempted to pump freshwater from the river with a faulty filter and played cards and motherfucker do I hope, with all of the urgency of being, a live sentient being, on this planet that I made an impression on these boys, these sweet and stupid and ignorant and beautiful boys, that they could someday impart to whomever they decide to fuck with.

I took G back to the airport a scant 3-ish weeks after his arrival and, due to the awful nature of his flight time, we went to stay in A-town at the Qupqugiaq Inn, known on the internet for being home to cheap lodging with the added bonus of also being a haven for for bedbugs. We checked in with the concierge, a young woman with a forgettable name and an utterly defeated face, who showed us to our room at the end of a hallway carpeted with ancient and strangely patterned low pile industrial grade covering that looked at one point to have been improperly dried after a plumbing mishap. The corridor fairly reeked of reefer and the walls were set close and bore the evidence of the passing of many bodies. The room was quaint, the deadbolt out of commission, the door jamb victim to many previous and ill-repaired break-ins. My oldest and I repaired to the patio section - a pop-up canopied area in the parking lot, complete with rickety chairs and tables - with drinks secreted away in traveler mugs, him ginger ale and me a forbidden vodka. We watched the by the week renters arrive after their day's labors and my oldest and I spoke of many things about his future, living wages, employment and educational options, living arrangements, a grand unspooling that I hope yet to be witness to while at the same time having no real expectation of living long enough to see the things we parsed. Later would see the early morning airport in all her badness and a pisswarm beer back in the inn and a nap and then I'd return to work in the empty cab of my ride.

Sometimes, a small and childish part of me wishes the world were simpler and I could be like this vehicle's owner, or at least be like the persona this owner projects onto the world. I mean, how nice would it be to know my place in life as well as this guy seemingly does? I can't even imagine the lack of self-doubt, the missing sense of sham-hood, the absence of one's lurking fraudulence, the sheer confidence that all one is doing is good and right and capital "t" true. 

In any event, the summer churns on. We made tie-dyed shirts yesterday, one for G in his absence, then K and I biked to town for pool and NASCAR and communal vegetable harvesting then back home for pizza and Hot Pockets and drinks and old episodes of Chopped and The Great British Baking Show and a hostile email to my state Senator about the budget then oblivion sleep. Today is gray. Sad tunes pump out of my computer. I write on.

The Inexorable Tourist Menace Is Upon Us

Summer in Alaska, like many places, sees the arrival of vast swathes of tourists engaged, as they are elsewhere, in a great orgy of entitlement, selfishness, and general ineptitude. When I used to give an "importance of the tourism industry to AK's economy" presentation in the classroom, I instructed the students that, per the AKDOC, for the summer of 2014, something north of like, 2 million mostly white and older people visited the state and dumped an approximate 4 billion dollars into the state's economy. While we are instructed to love our neighbor and give aid to the sojourner, my God, do I hate them, wandering around in North Face windbreakers and REI meshy hats with slack jaws, clutching their information guides and ruining the local establishments by dint of their presence alone. Here, where I write from my remote office at the Moosehead and in front of which I snapped a picture yesterday of this Albertan monstrosity, I would lay money that during my time here, a bevy of four of these visitors will shuffle in, inquire if there is food and finding there is none, not even have the common courtesy to order beers (the absolute cheapest in town) anyway before departing a door down to Klondike's for the fare offered there. Pathetic. 

Yesterday also saw us hiking in the Talkeetnas, April bowl in Hatcher Pass, one side of the road sloping down, westward facing out onto the vastness of the Susitna river basin, the other leading down into the Matanuska river valley of our home. It was me, the boys, Uly and A, trucking up switchbacks to the crest of the bowl. I had the fear in a bad way, and my mind was a cavalcade of irrational thoughts and images - Uly tumbling in a ragged mass down the slope, the rounded back of my oldest bobbing in the frigid waters of the bowl's pond, an earthquake landsliding us all into oblivion, K screaming in terror as a blast of meteor impact in the valley below reaches us with its scorch. Unnerving sights and sounds, all assaulting my mind's eye.

At work, I've been tasked with leading a "success skills" group for the students. It's a thinly veiled and mostly mandated class for anger management and I was recommended to lead this class by its previous instructor on the notion that she believed me to have "really good boundaries". The universe is archly ironic in her narrative, indeed. Anyway, the material of the course is not bad and while it centers on anger, it's really about the skills of emotion management for all of the turgid murk lounging in each of our souls. On the mountain, I had to employ these self-same skills to maintain, to persist. I only once flared up at the backpack for failing to disclose its final Clif bar that was the snack for the hike's final event pre-descent, calling it a cocksucking motherfucker, as I could hear the Mylar crinkling in the bag yet could not blindly procure it. A came close and hugged me, knowing of my fear as we'd discussed it on the ascent. The wind coursed across the bowl. The boys ate perched on a boulder. I could not bear the views from the bowl's rim of the valleys below.

On the driving descent back home, A and I talked about the experience in the front seat while in the back the boys tooled about the internet in their new and flashy phones. I related to her that, in the parlance of the success skills class, my anxiety about the hike reached a nine of ten when all three of my boys stood near the skyline of the ridge, the drop of which I was unable to approach but which she had assured me was smooth and not cliff-like. I spoke with the boys on the drive back about the necessity of doing uncomfortable things in life, and that while the hike and drive up to the trailhead had been agony for me, I did them anyway, and of the importance of taking the beach, whatever that sand happens to resemble. Who knows if they understood, but it reminded me of the lasting advice my father gave me as a young adult which was that since I was going to join the Marines, I needed to, "Stop being such a pussy."

Perhaps I've said this all before. Perhaps you're growing bored with the same shtick, the same bringing it back around to writing, but as I've likely quoted somewhere else on here (I have been grinding these out for no-one for the past 12 years), Richard Rodriguez said once that, "We are all circling our own obsessions." I suppose the point I was trying to make, keep trying to make, is that life is this bizarre swirl and for some reason, I keep trying to make sense of it with squiggles and jots, tittles and lines, and failing. Just Monday I received a rejection from the Southeast Review. This morning I queried literary agents about these insane manuscripts I keep producing. Does any of this matter? Objectively, no, but you get up and you get going, up that beach, regardless the cost.

Facebook told me that, two years ago yesterday, I had taken a similar picture of these three in the summertime hammock. Tourists, two of them anyway, in their own right, crowd this space of mine. I decided to recreate the scene, post-hike. They're huge. Please, make it stop. There is no stopping.