the Nixionary

I’ve always wanted to be someone who slept well. Lately, 4a.m., when the light is already a wet blue through the windows, is the beginning of my day. I have nothing to do this early, but everything to think about. I am up because I’m my mother’s daughter. She does the same thing.

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.

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A few days ago I hiked with my friend Natalie on the new cross-trail–a wide gravel path disappearing down from the high school into a shaded maze of greens and streams and sounds with no origins other than the hanging tangle of the Tongass rainforest. When we hike, she pushes her ten week old twins in their Chariot, a bright yellow stroller with bike wheels, and I lead her black cattle dog, Lydia, on a leash until we enter the forest where we attach a cow bell to her collar and set her free. Between puddled forks in the trail and patches of sun on the clumps of smushed stones, you can hear the dog’s neck ringing with delight and warning the bears: We’re here! We’re here!

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.

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I’ve been on the water for three days, having left Sara and her son Liam and their kitchen smelling of honey and bread dough, warm milk and washable markers. On my last day in Kodiak, the fog looked thicker than the icing on the little gingerbread shapes Sara snuck into my going-away bag. Also in my bag are the three little jars of salmonberry syrup (our botched batch of jelly-jam from the spoils of our walk along the sunny coast), some smoothed-over green and blue beach glass, a handful of the chocolate bunnies I kept stealing from Liam when he wasn’t looking, eight books, a lump of clean clothes, the jojoba and almond face scrub I bought at the little health food store I wished we had in Sitka, and a bottle of screw-top Shiraz.

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.

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Now that our writing residency’s over, my friend Joan and I have been trying to do non-writerly things. We went to Harry Potter, we hiked up the Chugach Range behind her house and pulled sweet blueberries from their tangled green carpet. We corralled her four dogs like sheep into the back of her burnt orange SUV where they screamed their sound and fury all the way to Girdwood.

I am trying to not think about the work this coming year will bring, but I can’t. While we weave through blue canyons and watch fog rise steadily, smoky, over rivers of pastel-green glacial ice, I am thinking about the book I’m supposed to write. It’s not about here. It’s about New Orleans, but I can’t be there, and I don’t know where to go so I can write it. I look at lit cabins and talk to people who say they would move to Alaska in a second if they could, but I don’t know where I’m supposed to live or if I’ll ever decide on one place as home. This worries me a little bit, not in a way that preoccupies me, but in a way that makes me feel like I’m trying to remember a word and it’s almost in my mouth, and then it’s gone.

On the narrow highway outside of Anchorage while the dogs were baying in the back, I saw this black blocky shape galloping across the mud flats the tide had left behind. “What is that?” I asked Joan, who veers into oncoming traffic anytime her eyes leave the road. She crossed left over the double yellow, then skidded into the gravel on the right-side shoulder. “I think it’s a bear! It IS a bear!” Joan’s anxious hands moved up the wheel, back down, back up. We watched the bear some more, and I could tell Joan was getting worried, which is what she does, which is why she’s rescued four dogs and a husband and a house with raw floors.

Through the long shoots of fireweed and alder on the highway’s edge, we watched him sprint back and forth on a slippery strip between the ocean and the smaller ocean closer to the shore. He was on a stranded sandbar, pounding across an almost silver, ice-white island. For a second, looking at the water and the bear under the heavy fog, I thought it was winter. I think I kind of forgot where I was.

The bear threw his front paws down, brought his head in great swooping motions from the ground up towards the sky. We sat and watched. We couldn’t really do much. He looked panicked and like he was trying to get somewhere and couldn’t. I wondered how he’d gotten himself out there. I reminded myself: you are in Alaska, you got yourself here. This felt satisfying and deliberate, unlike writing or thinking about writing. I haven’t written for weeks because being around other writers sometimes does that to me.

Tomorrow, Sara and I take the ferry from Homer to Kodiak where her family lives. I miss the sun and my mom. I love the sound the bananas make, a weighty thunk, when Joan tosses them at her chickens. I miss the green parrots in the trees on Jefferson Street that I never noticed until my fourth year living in Louisiana. I love to watch the eagles here ride the current above timber line like they have nowhere to go. I will miss Alaska when I leave, like everywhere I have spent time, and I wonder if going more and more places means leaving more pieces of ourselves behind. I heard that people given only one option are on the whole happier than those who have too many.

Joan and her husband have folded some blankets and packed their F-250 with bread and red wine and their pile of hyper dogs. I keep looking through their books and stealing small handfuls of cashews from a jar. I decide on Oprah Magazine so I don’t have to commit to anything too serious, but inside an article by Michael Cunningham says, “A writer should always feel like he’s in over his head.”

The kitchen still smells like the halibut omelets we had this morning. Bursts of wind make this house shift and click and a calico cat slips between the rooms like my being here means she needs to keep secrets. I think of the bear whose movements might have been pure excitement, like the ones of Joan’s dogs, and instead of hoping he’d make it back to where he’s supposed to be, I realize (with a little jealousy) he’s probably been there all along.

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Over the back fence hangs a huge orb, Crayola blue, on a braided rope. It’s a Japanese glass ball the neighbor found on the beach.  You can find them here–remnants that kept fishing nets afloat before catching a wild drift across the Bering Sea. A writer named Dan Henry camped under the ball this weekend and we talked about Haines and writing on a bright green hike up Indian Creek. He was working at the conference of writers that comes every summer, although this summer was its last.

On Sunday, I went to hear Gary Snyder speak. He was smaller and older than I thought he would be, and talked about life in Japan and a commune in northern California where people passed a talking stick in large circles to clear up arguments. Snyder was wearing this light blue shirt whose arm-lengths were crisp-creased, pressed by a dry-cleaner, maybe, and I couldn’t quite picture him pounding redwood poles into the frames of homes. He didn’t talk like a poet, like he was downtrodden with meanings, which I liked. He had on a fishing vest, and read a simple haiku about dew that had the ending “and yet…and yet.”

Someone in the audience asked him if his ideas were enough for newer generations and he said, “You can’t tell kids what to do, but given enough years, a lot of them will come home and engage again,” which is what I did, I think, when I moved back to Denver last year. He also said that in case kids don’t come back, which is a fear I have of having my own, that “People will use the work you’ve done, one way or another.”

Then, these two Tlingit women, one whom I know from school, stood up and handed around a basket into which thank you notes and abalone shells went for the Symposium starters. The one in a magenta turtleneck had native earrings and a long, old ponytail and they danced when she looked both ways, then said, “There is no language for true gratitude.”

This is a harbor with women who grow their hair long and gray, scour beaches for smooth glass, understand that sometimes there are no words for what we need to say.

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