Transitions

I haven’t written in a while. It’s been months, in fact, months of upheaval and transition. When I wrote last, I lived in a small apartment in Missoula, Montana, was surrounded by an abundance of dear friends, and worked several part-time jobs, none of them enough to make ends meet. The last time I had a chance to think, the lilacs were heavy and purple in my backyard, and I stared at them from my yellow couch, which at the time sat on the porch before moving to a new home. The late spring sun soaked into me, and I let it roast my shoulders, imagining that this was all the summer I would get.

Since then, I have moved out of my apartment of five years, packed away most of my belongings, said too many goodbyes, drugged my cat, and driven 2,000 miles (cat in car) from Montana to interior Alaska. I don’t know when I will return to Montana. I drove north into winter, from flurries in Jasper the first night, up into the high mountains of British Columbia, to cold nights and frost heaves in the Yukon, and into a blizzard and two feet of snow in Denali. I have moved into a dry cabin, purchased my first car, and started two jobs. I have watched the snow recede from around my cabin into deep yellow puddles as the weather went from twenty degrees to seventy-five. From icy wind whistling through the cracks in our log cabin, we’ve seen an influx of mosquitoes and flies. In the last two weeks, the aspen have greened with sticky buds, and the puddles have soaked into the tundra, and flowers have exploded everywhere. On a hike recently, we found rich purple Pasque flowers – harbingers of spring! – wind flowers, rock jasmine, alp lily, the beginnings of Lapland diapensia, pink wooly lousewort, mountain avens, low-bush cranberry blooms. Even better than the flowers, though, more fitting with my mood, was a large mound of coyote scat, white with hair and chipped bones. I leaned over the scat and poked at it with a stick, touched the hard ivory fragments of bone.

Now I sit at my table and stare out at white spruce and my outhouse and green aspen. I sip wine and try to think about transitions. But there is something indigestible about the move I just made, something that sticks in my throat. I swallowed this move whole, both the parts that I needed, and the parts that claw me on the inside until I bleed. It is wrong to leave friends I love, friends who sustain and nurture me. It is impossible to turn my back on the low golden hills of Missoula, the towering cumulus clouds, the easy camaraderie of knowing a place well. I hug Alaska friends in greeting, but the goodbyes are still too fresh, and I tear up though I should be joyful. Oversized mosquitoes buzz my head at night and I curse their blood-lust, though my brief pain is their sustenance.

So here I am. Still reeling. Trying to figure out where I want and need to be.

Holy

This morning I went for a run up in the foothills of the Bitterroots above Hamilton, up toward Blodgett Canyon. It was a gray morning, with wet clouds hanging low over the mountains, and occasional droplets that misted against my face. Snow lined the road in slushy strips. I ran past paw prints, grouse tracks like little dinosaurs, and some sort of small pattering animal prints that skittered around on the shoulder before darting off into the woods. I saw bigger prints, obscured by melting snow. I imagined a mountain lion pacing along the road at dawn when the snow was fresh several days earlier. The jagged rock slabs of the canyon above me slid into the mist.

When I ran back toward my friends’ home, the neighbors were burning piles of brush beside the road. The flames leapt up at the sky and I caught a whiff of the smoke, sharp and pine sweet. All of a sudden, with that remarkable transporting mechanism that scent works on our brains, I was in Cairo, in a Coptic church, watching the priest walk up the aisle in his rounded hat, incense thick in the air. I was in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, I was in the tiny Palestinian Roman Catholic church in the village, and the priests walked through the high dim stone buildings, twirling incensors back and forth, walking through fragrant puffs of white smoke.

The wood smoke I ran through gave me a similar feeling, of being somewhere holy. But absent was the sense that I had to be proper, or exhibit the right amount of piety or reverence. Out there I could leap in the air like a leggy colt if the spirit moved me, and no one would care. Out there it was just me in my mismatched running clothes and the old guy in the rubber boots who tossed branches on the flames. The deer stood looking at me from the meadows, and I could feel the eyes of small animals and birds hidden away in the shrubs as I passed. The trees arched over the dirt road, creating an airy sanctuary. Small streams ran clear with a bright sound.

I didn’t feel the exclusion that I sometimes felt in human holy places, that I didn’t belong, that I didn’t understand the rites or the language or the belief behind each precise choreographed movement. Instead, I felt that in my limited human way, I could partake in this place. I felt a kinship with the man I saw moving through the latticed brushwork as he tended the fire. The careful way he tossed armfuls of branches into the flames. The quiet morning, the gentle crackle of twigs in the fire. This was his place, and he was a part of it, the wood smoke and the wild turkeys and the tangled undergrowth.

I ran on past him. The rain was on my face, the smoke perfumed my hair. I was just another animal leaving its tracks in the snow.