“If I develop this little story of a personal experience as a kind of parable, it is because I believe that in one way or another we mirror in ourselves the universe with all its dark vacuity and also its simultaneous urge to create anew, in each generation, the beauty and the terror of our mortal existence.”

Loren Eisley, The Mind as Nature, 1962

There are awakenings. Last night I had at least three different kinds, which did not do well for my sleep budget, nor for the length of this post.

I was awakened by a restless Cedar-pup, with real fear of a repeat of the previous night’s diarrhea fest, and a hurried stumble out the back door. I was re-awakened a dazzling couple of minutes later, at 2:30 am in the frozen muskeg that is my back yard. And I think I’m at least a little awake today to some left-behind aspirations of my youth, as I entered the teaching vocation.

Potty training Cedar is not one of my better teaching performances. After a couple of nights of pukey-skittery misery, last night I finally put her to sleep in the kennel in my room. I heard her stirring somewhere after 2, hustled to find my slippers and sweats — all elevated to be free of teeth– sniffed each room wary of more brown slime, and stumbled out onto the frozen grass. Above us, the aurora twisted and spun black into green into pink and back. With Cedar on the leash I tried to capture a photo or two, but then just made myself stand still and feel really tiny— a speck in fathomless universe, tiny.

I was awake, and duly stunned. But I had a dog to wrangle, and only an hour and change to sleep before the alarm would go off, so I swallowed it whole and inarticulately, dragged the dog in, and got another hour or two of sleep.

Later in the morning, I was too busy to write, but I realized that a moment under the aurora had stirred something in my own Lab-thick skull. I had fresh recall of some blend of haunting moments walking to school in the pre-dawn hours at Unalaska. It was my first teaching job, and to survive, really, I had to work 12 or 14 or 18 hour days. Some of those dark morning walks were dreadful, in mocking winds, sideways slush, an occasional cab-van splashing through muddy potholes. But sometimes, between Aleutian fronts, the planet would still, and the sky would open up to a zillion stars. I had the feeling I was at sea.

Maybe because earlier in the evening I was texting with cousin Steve, who is at sea, on night watch somewhere in the Atlantic, crossing into the horse latitudes, or maybe I somehow saw myself in the dark vacuity of the universe in a way that floated some random debris up from the shipwreck of my memory. But this morning I had a keen return of the kind of feeling that got me into teaching—the idea that finding young people’s spark, maybe even their genius, as we explored beautiful works together was a calling, an adventure, a quest of some kind. (This was long before I’d encounter No Child Left Behind or standards or Robert Marzano or pacing guides or “The Science of Reading”.)

That momentary flash to the star-still walks to work at Unalaska turned me back to Loren Eisley, one of a handful of writers who rescued me from withering as an English major. An archaeologist and a naturalist, a brooder and a poet, Eisley wrote clearly and compellingly about specific stuff in the outdoors, but also about how our brains, our existence, are themselves part of an evolving nature. (Now I need to go back to The Immense Journey.)

Between meetings (one of which included Cedar going Kujo on me…biting me under the table, nearly tearing the arm of my shirt as I tried to summarize our morning’s accomplishments), I found a copy of Eisley’s “The Mind as Nature” online. I was searching for its final lines to try to stitch together the morning’s awakenings. As I skimmed the brooding essay, I came across lines I quoted in my application to a teaching credential program 30 years ago.

“There is no more dangerous occupation on the planet, for what we conceive as our masterpiece may appear out of time to mock us–a horrible caricature of ourselves The teacher must ever walk warily between the necessity of inducing those conformities which in every generation reaffirm our rebellious humanity, yet he must at the same time allow for the free play of the creative spirit. It is not only for the sake of the future that the true educator fights, it is for the justification of himself, his profession, and the state of his own soul. He, too, amid contingencies and weariness, without mental antennae, and with tests that fail him, is a savior of souls. He is giving shapes to time, and the shapes themselves, driven by their own inner violence, wrench free of his control–must, if they are truly sculptured, surge like released genii from the classroom or, tragically, shrink to something less than bottle size. “

Eisley, “The Mind as Nature”

How I miss that mystery and sense of indeterminism in teaching, where it was up to us to walk warily between those edges, rather than needing “to be accountable” and to “deliver” pre-selected content with “fidelity.”

Anyway, I found the concluding lines, and in retrospect they are colonial and patronizing. Why do we need to know her skin color? (Cue a fourth awakening.)

In Bimini, on the old Spanish Main, a black girl once said to me: “Those as hunts treasure must go alone, at night, and when they find it they have to leave a little of their blood behind them.” 

I have never heard a finer, cleaner estimate of the price of wisdom. I wrote it down at once under a sea lamp, like the belated pirate I was, for the girl had given me unknowingly the latitude and longitude of a treasure–a treasure more valuable than all the aptitude tests of this age. 

But I do love Eisley’s sense that we have to get out there under the dark sky–even here in a subdivision built over muskeg–if we’re going to expect to wise up, or to create something before the muskeg takes over again.

Cedar, I’m afraid, is in grave danger of becoming that horrible caricature of one bloodied up, and partially washed up, educator.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

If I had an audience for this blog, I’d be worried that I’d be disappointing them. Here I am in the midst of some of the wildest country in the hemisphere, reporting on the domestication of a puppy by his domesticated human. I grouse and joke about slogs through our muskeggy lawn, and I wander scent by sent with leashed Cedar past others’ manicured properties. If I were a better Alaskan, I’d be relaying tales of deer hunts and bear encounters and telling you about the Tlingit history of the land we are sniffing.

But since it’s just us, I’ll confess. I dropped everything to read this piece today. Spoiler alert, dog Grace survives the sinking.

Puppy found alive on beach after fishing boat capsizes off Sitkalidak Island

(And yes, I do have a bit of an obsession with rescue swimmers. Next life, please. One time I did a survival training course with a rescue swimmer. Three of us had to abandon ship, swim to shore, make a shelter and try to sleep through the night sort of miserably spooning each other in the October rain. In the 3 am desperate hours, the rescue swimmer among us revealed that he had snuck a thing of Jiffy Pop into his survival suit. We lived.)

Grace, the 80lb Lab mix, somehow survived capsize of her humans’ boat and the godawful after-hours cliffed out and freezing. Grace. Katrina and I long half-joked about naming a big clumsy dog, Grace. Because, really, we love grace. We need grace. And we try to give it when we can. I think of grace as that state of mind that recognizes other people are going through more than I can conceive. It’s the space that we open — a momentary pause to assume best intentions– even when the pause sort of undoes who we thought we were, where we thought we were going, what we thought was reality. Others, like Ann Lamott, and my friend’s wife Emily, (this morning’s other drop-everything-and-read) have written far more profoundly than I ever will about grace. Lamott writes, “I do not understand the mystery of grace — only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.” And Emily writes tenderly of dressing her father, who is failing with Parkinson’s, to go outside, as he once did for her, of playing cards, building models, and re-assembling the past together during a familial and global pandemic.

In addition to the global pandemic, there are 416 documented disasters around the world in 2020. On January 1 floods in the capital of Indonesia kill sixty-six people. On January 12 twenty-five thousand people have to evacuate their homes in the Philippines because of volcanic eruptions. On January 14 a hundred people are killed in avalanches in Kashmir. On January 24 an earthquake in Turkey kills forty-one people and displaces thousands. In early February locusts swarm East Africa, devouring crops and threatening the food supply for millions. On May 20 a cyclone in India and Bangladesh kills eighty-five people. On May 27 the COVID death toll in the U.S. passes a hundred thousand. On July 7 thousands of dead fish are found floating in the Hudson River, suffocated by the lack of oxygen in the water.

On July 23 Dad dies.

Emily rinkema, “Between Notes,” The Sun, November 2021

Today I’m thinking of grace as that dog we don’t quite deserve. She’ll hang in there for us if we mobilize and go looking. She is an 80lb pup after all. Grace of Sitkalidak’s story reminds of of the story of the English Terrier who showed up covered in oil in Tee Harbor, the serene cove where we used to keep our boat. That was October of 1918, and she was the only one to reach the shore after the horrific sinking of the Princess Sophia where today we try not to think too hard about the bumps and crannies our halibut rigs are bouncing on and in. I don’t know who knew that dog’s name, but that was some hard earned grace, there.

Maybe each day we end up a little off course. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing if we imagine Ann Lamott’s grace could have had a little to do our landing. And maybe I’m just a lousy navigator, grateful for those who come searching, and those, like our Cedar, who will wait around a while.

When Katrina and I visited Tim at his college’s “family weekend” last week, he was refreshingly eager to introduce us to his friends’ parents. As we hunted and pecked for common ground, we came upon biking. “Oh you cycle?” the guy said. Tim saw where this was going (we just bike), and interjected, “Yeah, indoors. He’s a spin guy.”

True. I had been. And with my booster on board, I am agin. “You try ‘cycling’ on these dark wet mornings,” I wanted to tell Missoula hipster dad with kind eyes before we switched topics.

I do cycle… through love and hate of 6 am spinning… through conscious list-making for the day, and through the untethered ramblings of my mind as I start to lose consciousness. This morning, I reminded myself-of-the-too-preoccupied-to-follow-commands, Cedar. I hope my body did what I want hers to–responding instinctively without really processing the language–as the hard-driving bodybuilder instructor shouted all kinds of “motivation”. I was hearing Charlie Brown teacher language today, but the sweat came eventually, and bits of the language made it through to my conscious mind.

“This is your peak!” she shouted.

“Okay, I can do that,” I thought.

And then it became, “That was one of your two peaks” which later became, “You’re done with the first part of your second peak.” I noticed today that none of her qualifiers helped. “You’re almost done…with your first group of hills…” “Give it all you’ve got…for now!” I realized how much I respond to linear thinking. Other instructors throw out the bait plainly…”Here comes 60 seconds of work” and I can charge through that with no fear of death. But after summiting the false summits of our “peak” and then being almost done (except for that mile long two-minute sprint) I tuned back to Charlie Brown teacher and let my mind off leash.

I thought of a poem I read as a freshman at my blog-hosting college. I was in “Introduction to Poetry” as part of my grand awakening that although I was a conscientious public school student who loved his English classes, I was not like the others. I had never heard of synecdoche, or metonymy, or of Wallace Stevens or New Criticism or any of that stuff. I liked to read and fish and play hockey and write (badly) with lots of modifiers, and false summits. But here was one poem I could connect to in my bones.

I knew streams and I could skip rocks and I knew how to articulate that I had no idea where I was going and I loved that someone else could so clearly pin all this certainty and confusion on the fact that we were both spinning and revolving on a PLANET and that little dry classroom with all the prep school kids hardly mattered compared to those big forces. And maybe I would settle down some day on a single creek and write.

Well, sorry readers, but I’ve arrived at that false summit, writing to no one in particular (okay Mom and Katie, and sometimes Katrina, you are each very particular, but I really doubt you want to read “Cascadilla Falls” this morning).

I guess the semi-adult thought I have this morning–and it’s almost light enough to see the single creek in the back yard which means I have promises to keep for Cedar–is that while I’m so much more easily motivated by linear thinking, I’m increasingly aware, and maybe even hopeful, that the real energy is in the cycles. I can’t see Russia or death from here, but in my late 50s, I guess I’m hopeful that our most sincere efforts in life–whether to build things or articulate wonder or raise sensitive and good people (and pups), or just to push ourselves past a false summit or two of good intentions– will matter in some way when we do reach “dead rest”.

If not, if there’s no linear “mattering,” maybe spin class will have been the ultimate training for working hard and going nowhere. At least there’s endorphins.

Yeah, dude. I cycle. I guess. But I don’t think I’ll ever wear one of those trucker hats.

My cousin Rick–who knows better than just about anyone else how my oddly functioning brain was formed by days without structure, a lake, a bobber, and thousands of small fish–gave me a good way to organize my thinking about my not-so-obedient pup, and maybe other things in my life.

Rick turned some unspeakable age — we’re only about a month apart–on Saturday and when I wished him a happy birthday, he responded, “According to a pal in Denmark, they don’t say you’re getting older, instead you’re getting less young.”

I like this level of denial. As good as a shot of akvavit. And I’m going to put it to work.

My dog training goal this week–and in covering my many moments of frustration last week–is to allow Cedar less failure. As she gets less young, her nose seems to be growing bigger than her Dad-pleasing-heart. Many a time, on to some olfactory goodies left by neighbor dogs or deer or whomever, she acts as if she doesn’t even hear me when I call COME, or blow the whistle. Enter another actual dog, and it’s like she just landed on the planet.

So… this week, we’re back to manufacturing success with the leash. When she’s off leash and roams across the street and gets lost in the scent-jungle, I’ll need to walk over to her and distract her at close range… And when we experience “less success” there, I’ll carry her back inside.

My less young 12-week old is less light, too. Then again, so am I.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

•