The trees of Juneau

Working a silver mine story near Juneau, Alaska, I was overwhelmed by how routine man’s co-existence with nature was there. Ah. So Eden has not been lost after all. Here the human footprint has not squished aside nature as if only mud around a boot. The mine itself was on an island hosting the world’s densest concentration of brown bears. Deer lined up along the road to watch our bus come back down to the ferry. I saw glaciers, seals, whales, eagles, and spawning salmon. 

But most impressed upon my memory are the trees.

Juneau is surrounded by the United States’ largest protected woodland, the Tongass National Forest. I had known, of course, spruce grew that tall. But it was secondhand, cognitive fact. To be standing at the base of one of those evergreens looking up to the clouds through its limbs, nearly falling over backward to look for its top, is so much more than fact. And the density of that forest! Mendenhall Valley residents do not have yards: they insert a cabin or house beneath the trees that remains hidden until you are abreast its driveway.

In Juneau, skyscraper spruce look down upon lowly buildings six and seven stories tall. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder as mothers in a nursery, they protect its infants from low and heavy clouds bulging round them, monstrous gray caricatures crowding close, taunted by humanity’s bumptious intrusion. These moving colors and unsettled sounds baying in sacrilegious contrast to the silent, prehistoric backdrop of moss-laden, ragged branches hanging heavy and tired, dark green against dark green till eternity. Above them the stern gray clouds of Juneau frown dissatisfaction, demanding reverence.

Reluctantly I left Juneau, as I found it, beneath its moist grey shroud and its legendary promise of a glimpse inside the treasure chest to any who’ll wait for the sun.

Really? His greatest fan?

So now you think I'll quote from Whitman a lot? Can't.

But I don't need to. I understand Whitman. I get him. Rude old grouchy but really sensitive and almost not manly man. I love him. I am Whitman reincarnated.

I get the mixed up business, too. I love being a man. And I'm not afraid to do or say things that might cause others to doubt my manhood. I like fixing cars but I like the smell of crayons. All those colors. The waxy paper smell. I like the feel of a hammer in my hand, to inflate my lungs with the air of freshly sawn wood, and I like the taste of nails in my mouth. Ten penny. Sixteen penny. Slick brads. The iron in my own blood, that taste, too. And then I want to build something.

Or write poetry.

I began life hating men, what they did to my mother, my aunts, and me. I was horrified to become the enemy, fighting against recognition in my teen years. And then, just as hair began to grow on my face, and I wanted more, and my legs and back and arms grew enormous, and I wanted more, I loved being a man. I loved being a man my mother was proud of. I loved being a man my father was proud of. I loved being a man that was being a man "the right way," noble and beautiful, fit to be in the world.

I read Whitman and I knew him instantly. A man who hurt to see men hurt. A man sensitive to pain in others. Love for the world yet already careful because of it. It judges. It hunts you down. It finds ways to punish you for drawing attention to yourself. Fight or run. Hide or join the herd.

Or write stories. Write poems. Sing songs softly to yourself and understand things only learned in silence, only by watching. The boy against the wall in the playground, watching other kids ride round and round and round on the merry-go-round. The boy near the window, smelling dust on the hard, dry caulking, the pane of glass, the rusty screen. A window like a television. A screen like a computer. But to life unaware. Bringing awareness to the casual existence of a moment that had no reason to be watched. No one assigned to direct it. Life as it happens. Raw life. Cars zipping by in the street. A bird that lands briefly, reconsiders and hops up in the air to beat wings and fly away fast. Minute seeds floating on silk parachutes to no one knows where, except for this one, which for a moment crashes onto the cement sill, rests a second, then rolls over and scoots over the side, swept out of sight by invisible breath from nature's invisible mouth, pursed somewhere, blowing.

A world that lives for me, since no one else is watching it. All mine from my dark classroom, looking out through the earthy window, witnessing what otherwise would be a lost scene, unobserved, unrecorded, meaningless.

Who's watching ... me. That's what I've always wanted to know.

Anyone?

I am here

No small feat for me, getting an account here. I had to prove I was real by typing characters correctly in a box. Many times. Many, many times. How do you know if an h whose legs circle under and touch isn't really a b?

Then I realized I already signed in with my Google account, which means I don't have to accumulate rejection notices from the bot protector.

(But why can't I do it? WHY? I never get those things to work).