When I back up out of the driveway, I back up into Crow’s front yard: a ramp that ends at a concrete slab in front of a door decorated with tossed off child toys and upended grocery carts. Crow wears a black t-shirt over his widening gut, which stretches out the already stretched out wings of a huge yellow-beaked bird. Above the bird are the letters (in the same font as the “Led Zeppelin” on the my brother’s favorite tie-dyed high school shirt): CROW.

Go four blocks in this neighborhood and you’ll find four times the income level you started at. A man with a Rodesian Ridgeback called to me from behind the potted plants on his front porch: “Is that a rescue dog? Good for you!” The white on his plaid shorts matched his teeth. It is sad that people are so supportive of rescuing stray dogs, but they won’t look closely at the situation across the street. The proximity of people living opposite lives are part of this place’s charm and part of its tragedy.

Crow and I say hi in the mornings, in the afternoons, and late at night, when I get home alone and hope that Crow is out smoking a cigarette and thinking whatever he thinks. Crow’s toothless mouth looks like his yard, gray-brown and lacking landscape. He said he’ll make sure I’m safe while Luke is gone. So far so good. Except for the retarded man who wanders the neighborhood early in the morning (when I’m out with Quincy), spearing trash with a sharp stick. When he sees me, he sticks his tongue out at me, and then I have to alter course. Yesterday, we went on two long walks, past the bilingual school’s community garden on 2nd, past the Victorian houses with their catalpa trees and long swinging bead pods on Galapago, past the creamy mansion of West High School, and all the way down to the smelly Albertson’s on Alameda.

When I came home in the late afternoon, a woman with egret legs was leaning back and screaming something in Spanish into a red cell phone in Crow’s driveway. Crow sat on his concrete wall, puffing on a cigarette, looking alternately between the dirt and the woman. His young son twirled a plastic bag on a stick.

Last night, I went out with my Maldovan friend Natalya who calls everything buckets: the containers where her bolts of fabric sit waiting to be made into dresses and shirts and robes, the laundry basket, the holder of the fried calamari we ordered on the corner of Broadway as the first fall breeze came in off the Divide. We talked about how part of the American myth is that we’ve all had hard childhoods upon which we can place the blame for our decisions and psychologies. Natalya became an orphan before she turned 21, made her way to the United States, and had a child–a joyful, earnest, astonishing little girl–with the wrong man. Natalya made me think about the people whose gestures and brake lights I watch from behind my barred windows. While we finished our wine and talked about how long we’re able to manage hope without knowing where it’s going, she described her life right now as a bubble:

If you reach out and touch it, it might break.

Funny that “storm” is a noun and a verb and that storms themselves are nouns and verbs. A thunderstorm appears as a bulky puff and then it puffs its bulk over the fields. Rain rains, tornadoes tornado, but humans don’t human. Maybe we are weaker. Just proper nouns who do things.

I probably should have pulled over. Whatever in us makes us think “Surely, I won’t die. Everyone else might, but not me,” is the same thing that made me drive through the storm. I watched the black mass circle around the highway counter-clockwise as NPR announced its very clear severity. The swirls started south of me, whispy and half-serious, becoming black, but soon they were sitting on the highway, straight east, straight ahead of my hood. A fat rainbow twinkled out the edge of a furry gray cloud. The sunflowers bowed down, yellow bonnets curling over brown faces.

“If you’re on I-70,” the crackly voice on the radio said, “You should pull off and wait this cell out.” Cell. This storm sounded like something in The Matrix. I had a wierd feeling I’d either hit a really bad storm or no storm at all. Red pill or blue pill? What did I do? I kept driving. Well, no, that’s not entirely true; I pulled into the McDonald’s drive-thru for an ice cream cone, then I got right back on the highway, with my vanilla soft serve in one hand and my camera, flash turned off, in the other.

I don’t know what I was thinking. Wind does not blow over the plains; it rips across them. It tears paneling off cars and knocks semis over sideways. I tried to catch a line of cows running on camera. I tried about 15 times to capture the lightning hitting the ground and the dust galloping over the highway. But I could barely drive with two hands, much less none. I threw my cone into the cup holder and I wouldn’t find it til later, til it had melted into an opaque, milky pool.

One thing I love about storms in the West is that they approach. In Alaska, they just sit on the town, stubborn and sullen. In Colorado and Kansas, they make an entrance, swooshing their robes of many colors across the ground like an angry king. “Who stole my land without asking?” This king would say. Farmers would scatter. Sunflowers would lie prostrate. Cars would pull over and passengers would enter McDonald’s and stay for hours. The clouds would move and the world would run for cover, then stop.

This was one of the most magnificent storms I’ve ever seen. I counted: for every five seconds, I saw at least five bolts of lightning, sometimes more like ten. The bolts turned all my windows white (I took the pictures above during the same second). Some cracked sideways across the sky, then like a shattered windshield, branches erupted from the initial line, and squiggled down to the ground.

When my brothers and I were little, we used to go into this spoof gift store in Southwest Plaza called Spencer’s for ten minutes at a time while our mom was in the department store. Amongst the dirty playing cards and pins with the F word on them, they had one of those electric spheres on a stand—a crystal ball that looked like a giant lit-up snowglobe, with electric bolts wiggling out from the epicenter towards the glass like wavy tentacles. If I put my hand against the glass, the tentacles all came to meet it. They were hot pink and hot to the touch. The ball felt like magic. Was it magnetic? Did it sense me? Each of my fingertips controlled a magenta zigzag. I could rake the electric fingers with the tips of my own from one side of the curve to the other, from the top to the bottom. We always had to leave Spencer’s before we’d had enough.

So it was with this storm in Kansas. I couldn’t just sit there under the McDonald’s awning and watch the sky turn from inkblack to milk-white without going into it. So I drove. Pretty soon, I had my shoulders pulled up towards my ears. I leaned over the wheel like my mom does (even in sun), and sent the wipers into a fury. They did nothing. The rain came from both directions. The man on the radio reiterated the speed of the wind: up to 75 miles an hour. “Trees are lying across the road in Hays,” he said. “It’s too dark to see how deep the water is. Get off the roads!” I went 80. I would beat this thing.

There were other headlights, but not many. I had started going so fast that I realized, as suddenly as a bad headache, that I couldn’t stop. A black shimmery curtain covered the exit ramps. All I could see was the white line along the shoulder. If I stopped, someone would slam into me. If I tried to pull over and pulled over too far, I’d roll down the steep hill or end up going off the side of some bridge I didn’t realize I was on.

There was one brief moment, it lasted maybe two seconds, where I could see absolutely nothing. I wedged my car in between the shoulder and a semi spraying even more water across my windshield, and thought, prayed, I hope I make this, I hope I make this. I couldn’t see the shoulder, the sky, the truck, just water thrashing its way across glass like a thousand transparent snakes. When you’re going fast, momentum makes more sense than making a decision. My speedometer still read 80 (I know because I had never turned cruise control off—I just wanted to burst through the storm like I was digging to China and I’d end up in some wonder world if I could just get far enough to pop out into the other side).

Which is pretty much what I did. Right after I pictured my bloody body on the side of the road and my car flipped over and some bystander calling my mom, the rain let up just enough for me to see that I wasn’t on the road anymore, but driving down the gloriously wide shoulder. I righted the wheel and the semi disappeared into the mist behind me. The rain splashed against the windshield, but it left spaces for me to see. I breathed and brought my shoulders back against the seat.

I have probably driven across Kansas and Nebraska 30 or more times. We used to take I-80 to Chicago, I-70 to Kentucky, and later, I used to drive those same flat roads to pick up Ashley on the long drive to Louisiana. Most people think the plains states are boring, but the continuity of the land has a strange beauty and dependability to it—gray rocks, slow livestock, lines of gold-green that will pull a car across the country.

When you drive alone across a place that is mostly bare, you begin to feel that way yourself. Your best and worst memories wave from the roadside. You’re like those rusted old trucks half-decayed under the grass, half-growing into the green. I know all the signs along the side of the road like lines in a song about my summers growing up—“World’s largest Czech egg, next exit!” “A Kansas farmer feeds 128 people and you”, “Come see the largest live prairie dog in the world”, “Pet the 36-inch live donkey!”

When I drive across Kansas, I think of pulling over for storms and eating gorp in the back seat of the minivan. When I drive past the camouflage tanks parked in long, blocky strips at Fort Riley, I think of my uncle Mark who went AWOL from the Army and ended up in Alaska. When I pass the wooden “Welcome to Colorful Colorado” sign, I think about all the heartache I carried across these plains when I was in college. I like driving here because of the time and the storms and the parts of history–my history–that I would have forgotten if it weren’t for this highway.

I-70 was the first stretch of interstate that opened in the U.S. I always think of one of my favorite books, My Antonia, when I drive east out of Colorado. “There seemed to be nothing to see,” Willa Cather writes. “No fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”

When I checked the weather yesterday before heading out to walk, it was 59 degrees. One thing I love about Alaskan kids is that as soon as the sun’s out, it’s an opportunity to get in the water. I had on my sweater pants (no, not a sweater and pants–we’re talking the softest, most sweater-y pants you’ve ever touched) and a light jacket, and here these people are, stripping down to practically nothing to soak up what I feel is one of the biggest sacrifices of being here: living so close to water and not being able to snap on my goggles and get in. Well, I could, but on most days, the double cold would make me miss the Gulf even more.

That scene, though–stumbling into what looked like some south side of Chicago lake shore picnic–is how it feels to live here for part of the year. I’m always coming around some corner in Alaska, tripping my way into an unexpected view or an unexpected realization of my place in this place.

A friend in the program writes about finding bones in the fields where he grew up caring for and killing cattle in Minnesota. Another writer showed slides of the bones he’s found in deserts where the sand sticks up like small castles and few animals can tolerate the change in the weather’s extremes. On my walk yesterday, running into him, I mentioned when I’d been Colorado three years ago, when I was waiting for those old knee bones they put in there to become my own, and sometimes, here, I feel like I’m taking all this cold, wet marrow into me to see if it will set.

I hate the houses here–poop brown, single-story shacks with overgrown grass and green trim–the sprawl, the strip malls, the way the trails I took yesterday kept ending up on some road. Sure, there is natural architecture–those Chugach mountains rise navy blue and angry just above Tudor Road, the one we take to the bar and the coffeeshop and the well-organized, over-priced Anchorage thrift stores. But this is no city for me. I will come here next year to finish my degree and buy used books, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be back after that besides as a stopover to smaller towns. In Sara’s voice, I notice this longing to leave Alaska mixed with a stable–or at least stabling–loyal love that might keep her here for longer than she planned. I wonder if that happens to most of us. Is it by convincing ourselves that we make the hardest decisions?

Michael, the friend who writes about bones, described himself as a city mouse-country mouse kind of guy. I thought I might describe myself the same way, but as I think about going home to Colorado, I think of all the places we’ll fly over that I’ve never seen. I want to find watering holes and wolves, vineyards, vultures, haunted hotels. Maybe I’m more like the “Give a Mouse a Cookie” mouse. Give me water, and I’ll want to swim. Give me mountains and I’ll want wild music. Give me bones, and I’ll want to pick apart whatever’s left in the ribs.

It’s a very Seattle day today. Everything’s white. The sky, the runways, the planes. It’s not gray, like rainy days in Colorado, when the clouds come in angry and stratified, layers of midnight blue and charcoal and ash. Flying into Seattle, like Sitka, the clouds seem like the thin cotton sheath a doctor wraps around a broken bone before covering it with a cast. With all this pale drizzle, it would be a hard day to draw.

Most times when I’ve been here it’s been hot and humid. I think of the weekend Luke and I spent two hours looking for an Asian market. We drove up Seattle’s east side hills, from Chinatown up to some brick hospital, parking and shuffling into stores that smelled like fish and old ice. We must have gone in and out of 10 of them, but I can’t remember what we were looking for. Some kind of sauce, I think, or maybe a rare vegetable. I can remember the place, not the purpose, which is something I’ve been thinking about as I talk to people about where we’ll spend the rest of our lives–should we choose our places because we like them, physically, or should we choose them as a step towards a more focused purpose? Our decisions feel like the chicken and the egg. Move, then figure out what you’ll do. Find out what you’ll do then move. Decide to stay or stay to decide.

At work the other day, we had to look up two words: purposely and purposefully. “Purposely” is when you do something “on purpose” or intentionally. “Purposefully” means to do something with a specific purpose in mind. We purposely drove around for hours because we enjoyed seeing the not-so-touristy parts of Seattle. We purposefully chose Asian markets to find whatever it was we never found.

I tried to get on an earlier flight today, but I would have gotten stuck in Ketchikan, and that’s happened to me once before, so no thanks. I got caged in Ketchikan for 20 hours one day with a girl I’d met on a boat and her friend from the Coast Guard who drove a red car with a flip flop figurine he’d strung from the rear view mirror. That little metal sandal swung 180-degrees, from east to west, west to east, then in defiant circles shedding sun as we flew down his 16-mile road and into town. I think I wrote about this day before, but it would be interesting to go back and see what escapes me now. Ketchikan, in my mind, looks like this: a prefab building that says “Fish House,” four horrible 12-story cruise ships, mountains upon mountains, and a harbor where kids had ice cream in the sun and skipped between skiffs. Dropped coins and waving kelp and needlefish held audience below the surface, and I walked and watched them run and writhe away, and then return.

I chose this seat in the airport because it was near a drinking fountain, but now I wish I hadn’t. Every time someone leans over for a drink, a speaker under the spout starts this ridiculous, loud imitation of what an elephant would sound like tromping around a shallow pool. The water fountain glugs and glops, hooves pound through water, and innocent old women straighten back up from the trough, look around, and wonder if it’s them–innocently trying to hydrate–and making all that sloppy racket. This is actually pretty funny. Every person who uses the water fountain hasn’t used it (I guess you usually only use them once), and it either startles or amuses or angers or all three. A mom leans over and her sons start roaring and when her red face resurfaces, she says, “Isn’t that the loudest drinking faucet you’ve EVER heard?”

The Philipino men who work at SEATAC in the baggage claim department have to take their breaks in the airport. One of them is watching me write and he has a closed-lip smile that looks like it might become a laugh, and two freckles next to his left eye. A friend sits next to him and they say nothing, just smile and look on. I wonder if this is where they come for their break because of the stereophonic watering hole a few feet away. I feel bad for people who have to take breaks from work at their place of work.

I know they’re from baggage claim because their hospital blue shirts have a canary yellow circle over their hearts that says “bags.” All lower-case. I wonder who decided not to capitalize “bags” on their shirts, and if this was on purpose or just easier to stitch. Easier can be a purpose, I guess, but usually I hope it isn’t. Maybe that’s why we live in two places–staying in one would seem too easy. It would be easy, in many ways. I wouldn’t be sitting here thinking of all the people I should have spent more time with. I wouldn’t have to have two sets of hiking boots and two rents. But my places and purposes would also be halved if we bought a house and lost our harbor.

On the other side of me, two twins from India are kicking each other on the airport chairs. The little girl stands in front of the little boy who is swinging his legs so hard, his little body is lifting off the chair. She gets closer and closer until he bangs her in the knees and she falls over, stiff as a board, stunned, then rolls over on the carpet giggling and readjusting her red hat before getting up to get kicked down again. The parents don’t notice, it’s just me here, watching the kids and listening to the African bathing ritual and waiting to get on my plane.

I still have a few more hours. I am hoping for a late, melty sunset as I crest the mountains that separate Juneau from Sitka. If you know me, you know I don’t like to fly, but here’s a secret: I love airports. There’s a young man playing an electric guitar (unplugged, but resounding) (and the music is actually quite beautiful, water-like and unending) in the middle of the concourse. Here, there are purposes aplenty: to listen to these melancholy fingers finding the strings, to snag words from foreign languages and roll them around in my mouth, to anticipate a new place even though I already know it.

I’ll start. I got a few haircuts. I got a new job. 9,000 writers came to town, including Sara and her new son, who flew through the 12-hour clouds from Kodiak to Seattle to here. We walked to the middle of the park to eat blackberries and comte cheese and figs and honeyed almonds on a white sheet we stole from her hotel. In the foothills, we feasted on eggs and toast, strawberries and yogurt, and huevos rancheros running over the edges of wide white plates, and wondered at the rocks bursting into stillness along the front range.

We listened to dozens of writers talk about their doubts and their duties at the AWP conference, and I showed Sara the places here that I love. She showed me that you can ache for simple things: fresh fruit sliced by someone else. Thirsty land that stretches, red, under a rainless sky. People from Alaska have this rare sense of gratitude and awe (tinged with a certain sadness) for “life down south.” They reintroduce me to what I should appreciate: art, sky, fresh produce, restaurant design.

I love having visitors because it reacquaints me with hunger. No matter where I live, I always feel that the place is lacking. Maybe it’s the ocean or the heat or the colors I loved in some city on its homes. For me, getting to share my home with someone makes me realize what I have and what I wish for the most.

Sometimes I wish to be in certain places, but lately I wish for time. Time to write, time to read, time to be. My friend Annie says she and her dad have a favorite thing they do together and it’s “just being.” Just to be. To sit and be one person in one chair with two hands and two feet.

In the writing classes I’ve been teaching, I’ve been trying try to create an arc–the students should sense the scaffolding from one class to the next, not just learn how to accomplish disjointed series of exercises. Sometimes I have no idea what my own arc is; I remember moments like snapshots, but they never assemble into a neat little story with a lesson.

We moved, too, and all the shake-up came with. When I first came to sign the lease, the crumbling house out back scared me. Handshakes held drugs, trash reached through the chain-link fence when I walked by with the dog. Luke and I went back to our old house, still full of our things, and I had this deep sense of foreboding that I had made the wrong choice to move our books and blankets into a less-safe neighborhood, albeit into a loft that felt, with its high ceilings and clawfoot tub and concrete counters, that it had more life.

The Victorian homes and the shades of purple and the amount of people lingering on the sidewalks of our new neighborhood reminded me of New Orleans, but then I wondered, is it fair to keep moving our lives closer to a life I used to have, or should I be wherever I find myself, and just try, like Annie and her dad, to be? Maybe it is by just being that our lives attain their arcs, and when we think too hard about how they play out, we strangle the intuition that creates our direction.

Another thing that happened recently is I got a bad cough and Luke’s dad gave him an orange bottle to give to me.

“Don’t drive on this stuff,” Luke said, handing it to me. The grains glinted on the top layer of the liquid. I took a little swig.

“Is it a daytime or a night-time drug?” I asked him.

“Daytime. Nighttime. Just don’t drive.”

Ten minutes later I felt like a cloud with no arms. I bumped into the dresser and missed my mouth when I went to drink water. I forgot the conversations I had at work the next morning. Tussionex: a narcotic cough syrup made of hydrocodone and chlorpheniramine. Not recommended for human beings who plan on functioning. My cough is better.

I’m getting used to where we live now, too. The Tai Chi instructor with the studio downstairs keeps encouraging us to come, and I will, if he gives me enough time. There’s a house I want to buy, down the street, with trees that smell like jasmine, a red door, and a yard covered in petals. When we walk here, the kids follow the dog and speak two languages.

Last night, I listened from our deck as a mariachi band burst through applause three yards down, and the Burlington Northern train let out an extended moan over its tracks, like a synthesizer chord being held down by heavy fingers. I thought of the kids in the drughouse out back and hoped they could sleep or hoped they know what hope is and don’t grow up thinking they have to stay in one neighborhood and watch images repeat themselves without evolution.

Today, on my way home from work, I saw two figures standing in that yard. Two nuns were slipping through the chain link gate, smiling under their long white veils with navy blue edging. They’re the Missionaries of Charity, and like everyone you can see around here, they live right down the street. The kids jumped off the tiny, broken trampoline, beaming, and let the fabric of the nuns’ habits run through their hands while they circled around the swaddled women.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the insights from the panelists at AWP. “You can learn to look at things,” Robert Wilder said. “Examine where you live.” Pam Houston mentioned how being from a place makes it hard to see it for what it really is. And someone else, I can’t remember who, urged her audience to “fall in love with something every day.” That’s what I fell in love with today. Those two nuns and that group of happy kids, singing in the trash-strewn yard.

Well, my friend Lauren just sent news.  The janitor at her school agreed that this feeling of suffocation is–as I had feared, and according to Mexican legend–the devil sitting on top of the one possessed. This scares the poop out of me because the man who confirmed my fears is a man of wisdom, according to Lauren, who knows history, religion, and myth, and who looks for the shimmer where others see the sludge. He collects any shard of gold glinting from anywhere in Denver–on the bus, on the curb, under a restaurant booth–brings his booty home, and melts it into jewelry for his wife. His cure for waking up under the weight of who-knows-what: two Hail Mary’s, which would imply that he believes one is, in fact, awake, during the sleep paralysis state, if they can muster two memorized prayers.

Lauren also prompted me to look into the definition for sleep paralysis, which seems to fit the symptoms I’ve had. From wikipedia: sleep paralysis occurs when the brain wakes from REM activity, but the body paralysis enacted during the dreaming state persists. While the brain dreams, the body supresses the physical actions which might accompany the thought progression of being asleep (your legs and arms don’t pump if you’re running in a dream, you don’t generally throw up in your bed if you’re throwing up in a dream).

Put simply: when REM is ON, your muscles are turned OFF. With sleep paralysis, it remains unknown why REM switches off–meaning consciousness prevails–and the body still sleeps. Or why somethings sometimes appear.

When this happens to me, all goes stiff but my eyes. I yank them from wall to wall, looking for a way out, and sometimes I see twisted images, contorted faces, or just the hovering essence of something horrible. I found that yes, eye movement, according to tests, is possible during such episodes and that “the paralysis state may be accompanied by terrifying hallucinations and an acute sense of danger. The hallucinatory element to sleep paralysis makes it even more likely that someone will interpret the experience as a dream, since completely fanciful, or dream-like, objects (often described as looking distinctly demonic by those who experience the paralysis) may appear in the room alongside one’s normal vision.”

This explains some things. The folklore surrounding sleep paralysis points to the darker side of the mystery. The stories range in narrative creativity, but not in root beliefs. In Nigerian lore: it’s known as “the devil on your back.” In Hmong culture: “dab tsog” or “crushing demon.” The Mexican belief: “subirse el muerto”–dead person on you. In Vietnamese: to be held down by a spirit, smushed by a shadow.

WebMD says not to be scared of night demons, to try antidepressants, or different positions while sleeping. Obviously, whoever wrote the sleep paralysis entry has never experienced it. First, you cannot convince yourself out of the fear that you can’t move and desperately need to get out of that room. Second, antidepressants aren’t good for people who aren’t depressed. Third, how do you try a different position if the condition’s number one symptom is that you can’t move?

I’m not sure what I think. Is “the dark presser” (the Turkish term) something worse than the body and the brain’s waking disagreement or is it just a physical fluke? I remembered recently, while telling Lauren about the bad mornings, that the man who used to sleep on the same bed as me also engraved all the headstones for the Sitka cemetery. We used to find cracked headstones in the yard when we looked for good grill grate props to use as hot beds for our peppered salmon.

Look up any ailment and it has its lore. Look up any folk story and it has more logical explanations. I remember a friend once saying that people who don’t believe are just as uncertain of their stance as those who do. Straying from science and math at an early age for literature and history, I realize certainty isn’t something I’ve ever pursued. Who knows what sometimes stops me from moving. My husband’s early mornings or the hangings-around of people who have only half-left the world. As the events in my life increase so does my stock in at least two beliefs:

1. From the smallest beauties (the perfect spores on the underside of the infinitesimal fragile fern) to the largest horrors (the dusted corpses of mothers holding their dead babies in Haiti), the natural and the supernatural coexist in all things.

2. Every quiet morning, my mom slides her small fingers over the 100-plus beads of the rosary, and I know–regardless of if I believe in the words or if sometimes I just believe in the comfort of my mom believing–that there’s no way it’s for nothing.

I spent last Saturday shoving myself up a gradual incline on cross country skiis and then falling on my ass, wrists, and chest on the way back down. Now my knee and my ego hurt, and the impingement problem I’ve been having in my shoulder (which sounds whiny, since a person is only allowed one physical thing to complain about lest they be labeled a faker) has worsened.

A correction following a misconception: I did not quit my gig with The Denver Post. I resigned from the food magazine where I wrote boring articles in a basement. I spent today writing other articles, rubbing my deltoid, and talking to principals in front of a huge coffeeshop window until I got home and realized I didn’t have a key to my own house.

I wonder, as I enter a freelance “career”, peppered by part-time possibilities, what happened to the rags-to-riches myth we read about in high school English? If I were getting paid in rejections, I’d be making a good living. I have a hard time accepting that the Horatio Alger stories may have become one burnt-out version of American dream.

I consoled myself when I was working on my first essay for grad school that effort was everything, but I recently read this quote from Antonio Porchia, the Italian shortist and sweetist, and felt that it better qualifies the work of anyone trying today: “No one understands that you have given everything.  You must give more.”

It seems harder now to strike upon good luck (and by luck, I mean good fortune invited by concentrated effort) than it was for my parents’ generation. I’m working at a steady pace, but I feel like the guy on the treadmill tonight at the Wash Park gym whose ipod ripped off his arm, and whose legs got ripped right off the conveyor, too, when he turned around to look for his tunes.

Despite the fact that we’re trying to save money, Luke took me out to dinner for a pep talk. A woman with long gray hair pulled halfway back served us dinner in an underground pub where bottles of wine line the walls and caved candles flicker from every table. She called the hazelnut beer “lovely” and every one of her descriptions thereafter convinced me. I squeezed a lemon wedge over our raw oysters and then poured scotch over a basket of homemade chips.

I’m pitching articles left and right, and ideas come to me faster than I can query, but I’m only getting tiny bites, I lament to Luke over my creamy orange soup. Luke says that I have to have confidence in my product and that in this case, my product is everything I’ve ever experienced.

This is the other lesson I’ve learned so far in the last three days: do not underestimate what you’ll feel like after bad decisions. My shoulder hurts because I should have sat at a low chair, not the nice big table where I had a wobbly, white, and frothy chai tea this afternoon. The entrées (butternut squash bisque, toasted bread, and a burger covered in Stilton blue cheese) following the chai following the appetizers following the huge beers made me feel sick. I regret that I missed an important meeting last week because my keys were in Luke’s coat pocket. I regret the other things I think about when the Quincy and Luke’s heavy breaths fill the room.

When we got home tonight, I nurtured myself with a hot bath while Luke talked to our friend Jordan about the fishing moratorium they’ve scheduled for summer 2011 in Sitka. People who were boat owners in 2004 or 2005 in addition to 2008 will have their current permits transferred to next year based on how many days of fishing they’ve logged. But a lot of people will be cut out of the fishery, like Jordan, like Luke, who bought boats in ’08 and hadn’t logged any days in 2005. Unless we can pay for a permit someone else wants to sell.

In the tub, I put down Madeleine L’Engle’s journal on marriage that I’m reading (yes, THE Madeleine L’Engle of A Wrinkle in Time and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, who changed my childhood life and, as it turns out, is having some influence in my adulthood) to ponder this weird concept:

all the fish in the ocean are owned.

I can hear Jordan’s anxiety rising up and down in intonation through the phone in the other room and then I hear Luke joking to cheer him up. I’m a little worried about it, but I don’t understand fish talk so much, so I defer the anxiety and keep reading with my chin just barely dipping into the liquid. When I get out, I have a hot pink farmer’s tan around my upper arms and down near my ankles from the heat, but warm water always keeps its promises to me. My ski knee and tight shoulder are easy going for the time being.

“How much will it cost?” I ask Luke later about the permit I know he’s thinking about but not mentioning.

“Pfoof” is the sound he makes. “15 to 40.”

Thousand.

Luke is lying next to me in bed and pretending he’s dead. I wonder where we’ll be next year with these new developments in the fish world and the lack of work world. “Look,” Luke says, freezing his face with his eyes wide open and his mouth in a deranged grin. Then, without blinking or moving his mouth the slightest bit, he moves his eyes over to mine.

“I like being married to you,” he says.

We have a lot on our minds right now, but it’s true. I like it, too.

Of note in my Nixionary inbox after my last few articles:

A single-sentence man writes: “You should learn how to fish.”

John tells me about the book he’s writing and the books his semi-famous southern son has already written.

A woman living in the Sangro de Cristo range without electricity was crumpling up newspapers to start a fire in her wood-burning stove and came across a few of my wrinkled ideas.

An email with no body. Subject read: “If you need extra income I have here some information that you might need.”

Another one: “If you look to the bottom of the real barrel, Ms. Nix, what you’ll see is yourself.” (Extra care taken to italicize).

An email from an old swim team friend I knew when we had hair on our legs and painted “Homestead” down our thighs in zinc oxide, who writes that she believes we can hold a lot of pain, but we have the capacity for just as much happiness.

An online comment from someone I know who says that “occasionally” my writing crosses the boundary from “stylistic to sappy.”

Yeah. Well …

I’ve tried to respond to all of the emails that were reasonably written. My mom and I took a walk tonight towards the jagged black silhouette of the mountains and talked about how people never seem to know what they (themselves) sound like. I took a long bath and let the conditioner sit in my hair for half an hour and that felt like I was doing something with definite results.

Now I’m sitting here in my thick white bath robe with the tips of my hair dripping Pantene Pro-V Intense Conditioner down my neck. Somewhere between July and now, the ugly-mean emails have begun to matter less and the good ones have begun to matter more. I wonder if I only want to be conditioned with goodness once it comes time for public judgment, and if so, does that make me a self-absorbed writer, or just a realistic one?

I’m reading Volume One of The Paris Review Interviews, and up pops this part from an interview with Truman Capote who calls the interviewer “girl,” and says things like “Heavens,” God love him.

Of note here–

Interviewer: Do you think criticism helps any?

Capote: After something is published, all I want to read or hear is praise. Anything less is a bore, and I’ll give you fifty dollars if you produced a writer who can honestly say he was ever helped by pissy carpings and condescensions of reviewers. I don’t mean to say that none of the professional critics are worth paying attention to–but few good ones review on a regular basis. Most of all, I believe in hardening yourself against opinion.

I believe in it, too, but believing and being love to play opposites. For me, hardening is harder than softening. The sappy comment really stung and I’ve been trying to wash it out of everything I’ve ever written. I know, that despite (and maybe even because of) my efforts, it’s staying put. Sap’s in me. And it’s sticky.

Being Married. It’s a subtle change. Like getting a haircut and forgetting you look a little different until you glimpse a glance of your new look swishing past in a mirror, and you feel a little ping of excitement at the new you. Since I’ve felt my whole life that I was made to share it with someone, living a half-shared life feels pretty natural to me. Luke scoots around on his hands and knees sliding dog hair out from alongside the baseboards while I pour hot water into the French press and my tall teacup. I look at him and I feel lucky, so I say to him, “When I look at you, I feel lucky.” He calls me his wife, and that’s still a little wierd.

Boxes are stacked in every doorway and on every flat surface—serving bowls and silverware, salad bowls and wine glasses, towels and trinkets—the things you receive when you have a wedding. My parents brought us a basket of booty they’ve been collecting for months—books on cooking fish, seafood platters, placemats, a little treasure of a letter stuck between sets of chopsticks. Luke’s parents and brothers handed pizza around the room and tore shiny ribbons away from three-by-three foot packages while we read little notes from our friends like Dr. Savory (a dentist) who wrote that “every good relationship has its foundation in proper oral hygiene,” and whose daughter reminded us that “the key to a good life is a leisurely breakfast.”

This morning, our little house has the feel of leftover Christmas with its shredded paper and sharp edges as I shuffle my way to the back door to let out Quincy and Wyatt, the new dog we can’t decide if we’re going to keep. He’s somewhere around 10 months old, a border collie/Australian Shepherd mix, with white fur, big brown spots, and eyes a cornflower, crystal blue. He’s not a bad dog, just a new thing, and I think I’m hesitant about him because I just want the peace of mind to enjoy things like my new husband and our nice knife set and the books and books that have been waiting for me for the last eleven months.

This morning the snow is eight inches deep when both dogs highstep into the stuff, and I don’t realize as I hold out my palm to catch a few flakes spinning down that the gate is open out to the street. Wyatt, a low-scurrying cattle dog who doesn’t have the speed of walking built into his genes, bounces out past the chain link fence, and stops to look at me like he’s waiting for some direction. Come here, I say, and he stays. You better live up to your name, I tell him, then he pushes up some snow with his nose, and comes trotting back.

I can sense he’ll be loyal if we just let him, and he’ll stop peeing in the corner behind the yellow chair if we have the patience to teach him. Most of the time I feel like I do until he gets muddy and puts his paws on my clean jeans and then I feel like he’s ruining my life. When I lay on the couch with a book, he points his bright blue eyes up at me with a look that says please keep me, and he sleeps under the bed with his nose sticking out, which makes my heart hurt a little, so I guess we probably will.

We took both dogs to the park yesterday and sprinted around in the falling snow. Wyatt is so excited to not be at the pound, he can’t help himself but pull so hard he starts hacking up. Poor Quincy has a little extra padding around his orange hips and huffs and puffs the whole way, lagging like an old emphysemic man even though he’s only six. There are so many perfect people in this neighborhood with their perfect dogs, sleek black labs and shiny golden retrievers, who leave slack on the leash and heel when that weird command is called. Wyatt fits in our hodgepodge house stocked with wild game and Byzantine icons and salvaged goods, and he reminds me, when we let him off leash and he’s so excited that his legs slip out from under him as we’re crossing the street, that life is inclined towards the unwieldy, not the ordered.

Mostly I’m leaning towards keeping Wyatt because when we saw him at the pound, Luke, who longs for space in the same way as this silly little dog, said, “I’ve been waiting to have someone like him my whole life,” and I know how that feels.

Most marathon runners don’t train beyond the mileage of my lucky number. If you run further than the 22nd mile during training, veteran marathoners say you’ll dread the actual race. You won’t believe you can actually make it 26 miles if you train for 26 miles. The training run will hurt way worse than the real race which brings the greetings of adrenaline and momentum and, maybe most importantly, witnesses.

I was one this weekend for Pizzo’s first marathon. I rode a turquoise bike with a hard seat while she chugged up 7th, down Downing, around Wash Park, across Logan, and straight on to Civic Center Park Sunday morning. Sometimes, mostly on the uphill parts, she stayed pretty quiet, which is when I talked about candy, shoes, and how great she was doing.

“I hurt all over,” she said at one point, while we bumped across the uneven pavement on Speer. We were in front of my old apartment and I missed the way the sun came in over the golf course and through the wrought iron window frames. I like marathons because you cover a whole town in a single morning, slowly enough to remember the parts of your life that have happened on those same corners. Marathons, when I watch them, make me think of my best friends who have done them in different cities, and as sentimental as it sounds, long distance races make me proud of human beings.

I think part of what makes people run is you think in a different way when you’re willing yourself through your body’s physical resistance. The snow looked wet on the sloped side of Mt. Evans and the trees blinked red and silver in the sun, but Wash Park didn’t really feel like Wash Park, Denver wasn’t really the same workday Denver. Races can make you hate or love a place, but for me, they always make me see that space like it’s being poured out, layer by layer, and you’re stepping into each memory or sidewalk or streetcorner with an awareness of those past miles and how your mentality will effect the present ones.

I asked Peez where her favorite place in the world is, and she said a cavern off the side of the Grand Canyon that looks a like  rainforest in the middle of a red desert. I thought about my favorite places. A gelato place in Trastevere. The blue and yellow, chipped mosaic table Kate and Ashley and I used to sit at on the corner of my porch in New Orleans. My parents’ kitchen when it’s early and the Sunday paper is still one unruffled chunk on the counter. Groups of men turned around with their mouths open and congratulated Sarah when we passed them, me on my bike, cheating and thinking, and she in her day-glo gear.

At Mile 22, Peez looked a little white and unsure when she looked over at me and said, “I’ve never felt like this before.”

Teenie, who had joined us, said that at the worst point during one marathon, her sister asked another runner, “How many miles are in a marathon?” and the other runner replied, “Shoot. I don’t know. 22? 23? I really have no idea.”

How do you explain that?

Mile 22 also presents to the hopeless runner a catch-22. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If you stop running, it will all be for nothing; if you keep going, each step means more pain. Joseph Heller’s book, Catch 22, where the term came from, was a book I didn’t totally get when I read it in high school. I remember Major Major Major Major and little else. I felt like I was in a catch-22 when I was reading that book. Keep reading and I will be more bored and lost; stop reading and I might never understand. In Catch 22, the catch-22 is when a paradox in rules makes a character a victim, but they can’t do anything about it. What if you put yourself in that helpless position, regardless of definitive rules? Is it still a catch 22? And is there really such a thing as a catch-22 if everyone either quits or keeps going? I’ve had a lot of 22nd miles, but no true catch-22s; I grew up with a mother who taught me that hope will always push you out from between the rock and the hard place.

My favorite number is 22 because a girl I used to dance with named Emily opened my eyes to all the 22’s in the world. “Once you start to look for it, you’ll find 22’s everywhere,” she said. Emily’s dad died when we were young, and she kept a t-shirt and a tiny black comb that smelled like him under her pillow. Her mom had a mini grocery cart that held their apples and bananas near the kitchen sink, and we used to swing from a knotted rope into the Highline Canal behind her house after Saturday dance practice when the summers brought enough rain to fill the channel to its grassy banks.

Because of Emily, I learned about cherishing objects and numbers and people. I did start to see 22’s everywhere. I was assigned number 22 for soccer. Cars in front of me had a 22 on them more often than not. I could convince myself I’d see a 22 in the next 22 minutes and I would—on the front of a house, on a sheet of wayward paper, on a digital clock. I even turned 22 once. That year, the year Katrina hit, felt like a much worse 22nd mile than the one I’m at right now. “I’ve never felt like this before” is the only way I might have put it.

I don’t remember moving  a single thing into our house in the Garden District with the dusty camping chairs and the pigeons that roosted on top of the pillars. I don’t even remember the drive back to the city after the hurricane. I wonder what it is about stress that makes us lose our memories. Sometimes I feel like I’m running after the blurry snippets of my past all day and all night in a race I’ll never finish.

People who run marathons don’t finish single trains of thought, prayers slip into daydreams, and songs become single line mantras. I’d like to do a test on marathoners and talk to them at 22 and see what they remembered. What does the brain do during all those grueling, stretched out minutes? Does it go quickly or slowly? If I can remember all the songs on my Mariah Carey tape from 8th grade, shouldn’t I remember my more current, maybe more important footfalls?

The memory is like a choosy little person with tight fists. Sometimes you can get her to open her hands, but only when you catch her unawares. I know my own memory doesn’t remember myself as well as others, but I’m glad. I love the snapshot insights that stick with me from all my favorite people. And if you gave me a choice, I’d rather be the witness than the runner.

Just after the 22nd marker, Sarah said, “Well. I have about a 5k left. I can do that.”

Since I’ve been home I’ve been thinking more in contrasts than comparisons. When I got back to work, it felt like the room was more full of stuff than when I’d left. When I put my clothes on, I realized I’ve been smelling more like mold for the last four months than I thought I had. When I thought about my grandpa, I had to shift everything a little bit to remember he’s not in his apartment anymore on a green sunken couch above the lake listening to the radio station on his TV. I wonder why it’s sometimes hard to remember that people have died, and I think it might be because so little else changes until we make an effort to take our notes–to notice, really. When I came off the plane, Colorado felt light on its feet and dewy, but I woke up the next day and, to my surprise, missed the curved spoon of a sky in Sitka and the way my boots sound when the mud sucks them down then lets them go.

Then my best friends came. We hiked up a shallow stream, set the camera timer, and tried to jump right when the shutter went off and I realized how good it is to be around a group of girls for a few days before you share your life with a man. We fixed each others’ hair and ordered flavored vodkas. We traded clothes and read magazines. It was perfectly cliché and sometimes a girl needs to live out a few magazine scenes to feel like her life is familiar again. I remember last summer, during the months with no sun, I saw a magazine photo of a woman in a white dress and I cried. This time, in Alaska, I read books about ice and realized as long as Luke lives where I do, I can do cold. Teenie sent me a long sweater and I bought expensive teas. Some days, I almost didn’t notice the rain. When I got home, the sun was nice, but I waited for Luke like light. When he got here, it was like putting on that white dress.

Last night, my mom and I pulled the flowers in towards the side of the house and draped flannel sheets over them like you would with a corpse. I bought a six pack of socks and some exfoliating soap. I read another magazine and drank wine instead of writing even though I’ve been telling myself for weeks I need to. I learned you can use a rubber band to open a screwed-tight jar. I clipped out an article on managing anxiety. I thought, for the first time in my life, I might be an anxious person, and thinking about anxiety makes me more anxious than the things that are supposed to start it. Then I laid in bed and thought of everything I’ll never do, like eat dinner on a crane, suspended 180 feet above Las Vegas, which is what I’m writing about at work, and the anxiety inched up a little higher under my heart. I thought of the flowers under my bedroom, like lumpy monsters sleeping on the porch, and I wanted to rest like that, and then I dreamt of a red boat, the color of our gardenias, that crested the mountains like it would a wave.

Sometimes I’m afraid of spending the rest of my life between two places. It’s not that here is good and there is bad or there is good and here is bad, it’s just that everything moves differently away from the sea, and here, the ceiling is always moving east. I realize the problem isn’t where I should live, it’s that I want the whole world to inhabit my immediately present world. I guess the only way I know how to do that is to read, and maybe sometimes, when I get it right, to write.

At work, the angled light coming off the tin in the window-well reminds me of Alaska’s not-quite-enoughness. Not quite enough sun, not quite enough of whatever we might need to fully process beauty or largeness.  My coworker’s black dog Bowie noses carrots across the carpet and catches my wrist in his pointy teeth. At the coffeeshop this afternoon, nubs of soft feet stick out from a stroller and try out different directions. A Van Morrison song, Indian Summer, reminds me of the way a best friend in high school moved. There is then and there is now and for me they meet in the afternoon.

I’m also up because there are more things that keep me awake than those that put me to sleep. If there were an antonym for lullaby, I would use it here. The morning is a series of stimulants and shufflings that begin with the slow, weighted creaking of the upstairs floorboards while the tenants pour their coffee, feed their old dog, Crow, and get ready to be in their boat for four days. Sometimes I can smell the slightest hints of chocolate and toast while I’m still in bed, and instead of rolling over, I lie there thinking, “is that coffee or chocolate and if I want toast, do I have to walk to the store to get some bread today?” Then I think, am I honestly thinking about this at 4 in the morning and what’s wrong with me?

Then I think about if I’ll go into town for a mocha this afternoon and if I’m in town, if I should bring my interviews to transcribe them, and if I’m doing that, I might as well go to the library and get Trespass, a book on my to-read list about the desert and a Mormon and how religion and environmentalism might save the orange canyons near Green River where I almost, one hot summer, ran out of gas, and can religion or environmentalism really save what’s still naturally orange and, come to think of it, what if I’d run out of gas?

What gets me out of bed is a “give a mouse a cookie” set of incentives, not necessarily good or bad, but so connected to memories and necessities and tasks that rely on other tasks, that my time with my brain translates into time to get away from it, so lying in bed longer is an against-the-grain, ugly option. I sling my legs out of the sheets and reach for my knee-length sweater and woolsmart socks. I start the tea. If I could be different, I would move more and think less. I would transform rhetorical questions into rhetoric. It’s getting colder, says the morning. Not yet, my summer-loving insides insist.

There’s another thing. Some mornings after the fishermen leave, I could go back to sleep if I tried hard enough to not think. But when I do force myself back to sleep, I keep having this recurring dream/state of semiconsciousness where I’m in the room, lying in bed, and I can’t move. The first time this happened to me, I thought I was paralyzed. My eyes were wide open, and one corner of the dark blue curtain was folded under itself like a bird’s wing at rest. I remember I looked at this small detail so I could test if I was awake, like I was pinching myself. I tried to lift my head, but I felt this immense weight pressing down all over me, like an invisible and immovable person had spread themselves, heavy and dead, on top of the blanket.

I tried harder to move. All I could do was shift my eyeballs from the closet to where my feet lay lumpy and lame. I seemed to go back to sleep. I opened my eyes and it happened again even though this time, I tried to wriggle from side to side to wrench myself from whatever it was that had trapped me either in a dream that looked like my room or my room that had become a frozen state of awakeness. It was nauseatingly warm and the compulsion to move was terrifyingly urgent, like I’d slept through my alarm, only it was an alarm to save the world. That bad.

The next time I opened my eyes, I hinged my upper body upwards so fast I saw little lights flitting like perforation lines on the walls and in front of the open window. These little dashes moved where my eyes moved, and my heart was banging behind my sternum, and I was thinking, I am going to keel over, and I’ve never even known what the word “keel” actually means.

After three or four of these incidences, I started looking and I found someone else who had the same experiences. She’d done an interview with Ira Glass on This American Life. I listened and it was the exact same sensations I’d had: she woke up, like a life had been pushed down on her, felt that she had lost the use of her limbs, and wrestled to get free until she either did or she woke up. It was unclear whether time or effort had resurrected her.

She, like me, has had this happen multiple times, and as you would in a lucid or recurring dream, you make yourself aware of your own awareness: you look at the folds in the curtain, you chronicle your foiled attempts at moving–the neck didn’t work, the fingertips didn’t work, nope, not the toes either–then you say to yourself, I am stronger than this feeling and I’m getting up now, no, for real, right … NOW. But that doesn’t work, either. The word mire sounds as seriously stuck as you feel.

I wanted to find some commiseration or some tricks for untangling myself online, but the interview made no conclusion as to whether the girl had been asleep or awake. She’s from a Mexican family and a relative, who seemed to be religious or a carrier of myths or both, told her, “Oh. That heaviness? That’s the devil sitting on your bed.” Oh. That. So much for consolation!

I haven’t had one of those dreams(?) for a while now because I don’t stay in bed long enough to tempt them. There’s too much day, good or bad, to be had. None of these feelings are really recent. I think we are born to the morning or the night. I used to watch Rocky and Bullwinkle before the sun or my parents rose. I found out my friend did, too, and she became my best one. I’ve always felt a sisterhood with women out walking or drinking coffee or bending over for the paper in the low-lying blue, undeterred by the silence and aloneness of early morning.

I am, on the other hand, jealous of Luke, who falls asleep in public and snores like an old truck. My life would be easier if I had a relationship with sleep like I do with the dawn.

This morning, I was lying there thinking about my dying grandpa and the trash I need to bring down to the harbor because of the bear ordinance (no trash out until Tuesday). I guess it’s a good thing that the mind makes no priorities of its musings–the brain brings issues of all weights to the surface, one after another. It’s the decisions we make that organize them. Love and death and garbage are what brought me into today. I’ve gotten some small things done and thought about bigger ones. I’ve been awake for six hours and it’s only 10 o’clock.

Every time we came up to a pile of scat, I’d ask, “What do you think?” or “How new are you?” or nudged it with the tip of my shoe to see if it would steam or break into days-old pieces. Natalie would say, “It’s ok, I saw that scat last week,” or “Can’t really tell.” She’s braver than me. I don’t want to be afraid of bears, but I am.

We saw one last week, small and dark as a wet rock, slipping his tongue around the reeds at the estuary. That bear didn’t scare me because we watched him from a bridge and he wanted to eat plants, but the hidden ones, the ones who eat me head-first in my imagination, do. Like the sow with her four cubs, plucking salmonberries in a friends’ backyard who I know would shred me just to protect her young, or the one who knocked a woman off her bike, pinned her down, then ran away, or the one my neighbor warned me about when she flung the door open and said, “Get inside, don’t you know there’s been a bear on this street all afternoon?!”

Thing is, I wasn’t even thinking about bears until she said that and bravery must be innate, like ignorance, until questioned by something bigger. I was on my way home from swimming laps, swinging my bag of shampoo, devil-may-care, but now I scurry home from the gym and check my hands for honey strings before I leave the house.

I know that groups of three or more (that can be three humans or two humans and one dog) have never been attacked by grizzlies. Bears would rather not bother with humans, it’s just that when you come out of nowhere and startle their status quo, they’re apt to start something right back. I understand that. I am afraid of stepping on bear toes. The trails we take through the trees are on the cusp of crossing some sacred line. I can feel it, like fog. We might even cross it. The scary thing is how much we don’t know we don’t know.

There are more bears in town this summer than this town’s ever seen. Healthy sows have adopted neglected cubs because the rivers are dry and the bears’ lifesource, salmon running upstream to spawn, are late. The bears come hungry and begrudged. They leave hunted. The police have shot at least one already.

The times this summer that I’ve actually seen bears (in the flesh, not tearing my flesh in the narrative my imagination illogically returns to), when they’re standing on their hind legs and sniffing the tips of tall grass, I love them. Their hulk and silvery coats, their toes which can be larger than my entire foot. Their hangdog lips and gleaming teeth, eyes the color and sharpness of copper fish hooks. I keep hoping I’ll see one while we’re hiking even though I know I might crap my pants and fiddle so much with the bear spray, I’ll shoot it straight at myself.

I wish the police would leave well enough alone. I wish I knew what well enough alone meant. Seems to me that well is always enough. Seems to me that bears only make big trouble for people who haven’t been careful. I secretly (and I know, stupidly) wish I were Natalie’s friend who had her arm gummed by a grizzly before her boyfriend yelled, “Hey bear! Get outta here!”

I’m sure there were bears who saw us while we walked the other day, but we didn’t see them. The Chariot crunched the gravel, and the twins made happy little gargles under their polka dot blanket. Natalie said she’d like to think that the sows understand she has babies, too, and they won’t mess with us.

When we hike, I mistake everything lumpy and dark for the hunched back of a brown bear about to rear up for a false charge. Natalie mistakes confidence for safety. No matter. Moving and pretending are two things we do more effectively at steeper levels of resistance, and maybe I like hiking so much because it affords us the pleasure of holding tight to our illusions.

I have gotten used to reaching for Liam’s little hands above wet pants and milky puddles and listening to Sara’s sharp and soft insights on being a fisherman’s wife. Leaving friends is never easy and it’s especially hard when it’s raining and they live on an island without a phone.

When I got to the loading dock, the same oompa-loompa-ish man who patrolled the gangway in Homer asked me for my ID and boarding ticket, and I asked him if it would be as rolly as our ride three days prior. “Never can tell,” he sang with a voice that seemed to come out his nose, so I went up the slick plank to my narrow room, 22C, the same one Sara and I had last week on 20-foot seas that sent a chorus of barf noises from the bathrooms and a captain with a pad of bandages rushing past who said, “We’ve got another bleeder on level two!”

Sara was in our cabin and I was upstairs watching cold drinks crash when the intercom told the passengers to remain seated for at least 15 minutes and to steer clear of detached objects. When I went to check on her, she admitted she’d already planned an escape route for every person on board, while I had only planned on the stroke I’d swim in the event that the whole ship went down (freestyle). Sara reminds me of my own mom; they both exhibit that rare, instinctual compassion that comes with being thoughtful mothers.

The weather is better on this long leg back to Sitka. From my porthole, I watch the waves for hours at a time, alternating between the gray and its foggy lid, and the two books I have going: My Antonia (“Half the sky was chequered with black thunderheads, but all the west was luminous and clear: in the lightning flashes it looked like deep blue water, with the sheen of moonlight on it and the mottled part of the sky was like marble pavement, like the quay of some splendid seacoast city, doomed to destruction, and all about us we could hear the felty beat of the raindrops on the soft dust of the farmyard”) and Speak, Memory (“How small the cosmos (a kangaroo’s pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness to a single individual recollection and its expression in words!”). One takes place in the plains and one somewhere far away, and this is where I live.

Outside, the waves are dark gray, rolling like a snapped sheet in slow motion, and right up under the lacy fringe where the water breaks is a ribbon of vivid turquoise, the color of the warm water on the Maya Riviera. Today, we were supposed to see Mt. Elias, the 18,800-foot peak above Yakutat, but instead, there is only the charcoal unrolling itself from under the boat and blending with the edge of the gauze-like fog. For dinner, I eat a gingerbread man and a green apple that tastes like Anchorage.

In Yakutat, I follow a road past lily pads in a still pond to Fat Grandma’s—a dusty store of t-shirts and candles and leaning shelves where the woman behind the counter calls, “Swap out a book and take one for free!” Before I leave, she says she’s getting on the boat, too, and corrects herself, yelling: “Anyone in the store can take any books for free!” The only books I see are Nora Roberts and John Grisham and the shiny kinds with lots of moonlight and the authors’ names bigger than the book titles, so I decline.

A little further down the road at a jam-packed general store, I buy two bars of soap and a mango, but they don’t have knives, so I spend a half a mile trying to pry it open with a plastic fork before two tines crack off inside. Back on the boat, a very old man comes up to where I’m sitting (I’ve found a knife and am pulling long strips of juicy mango off the blade with my teeth), and he says–slower than I’ve ever heard the word–“Pap-eye-ah.” I say, “Mango.” He says, faster, “Papaya.” And we leave it at that.