ember2

I have been absent. No new journal entry for a week and only a handful of posts. This community is easy to become enveloped in. As O said, so many voices...so many participants worth knowing. And while this is the first time I have ever paid to participate in such a network, this thing is undeniably unique. So much so, in fact, that there are times when I find it difficult to tear myself away. But then I look outside, toward the peaks of this northern wilderness just beyond the cabin window and the cyber connection ceases.

The Yukon Territory and the high northwestern corner of British Columbia have ensnared me. Places that I used to dream of--places immeasurably removed from my former life in Olympia--are now a mere 30 miles from my home here in Alaska's Chilkat Valley. Up there, above treeline, the world is blanketed in white and the topography of the tundra is deceptively subdued. Today, under the fog's flat light, I found myself falling. Yet, during the drop, the sense of vertigo was so pronounced that I didn't know it was happening until I hit the ground (does this somehow have relevance to my last post?).

After a day in the wind and snow I am back home, sitting near the woodstove crackling with buring birchsticks. My fingers and toes tingle with that prickly sensation I can only describe as skin thaw. My face is windburned and there are deep creases imbedded near the outer edges of my eyes from a day's worth of squinting at the sun. Yes, today you could say that I look weathered--that I have been touched by wind, sun, and mountain. The evidence of immersion in landscape is imprinted upon my face and etched into the fibers of my muscles. In the truest sense I live the life of an outsider...a life I wholeheartedly embrace.