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View from Mattie’s Pillow

January 10, 2009

Still deep cold. The weather forecasters are predicting warming trends in three days, but experienced Alaskans have seen this phenomenon before: the cold drags on, we get discouraged, the forecasters try to lift our spirits by predicting a break in the weather in three days; this can go on for weeks. So we’re in that part of the cold spell.

At this point, after this much cold, the effort it takes to do anything begins to seem normal. The car needs to be plugged in for an hour before turning it on, then it needs to be warmed up enough that the heat inside the car melts the ice around the gas pedal, then when we drive off, we move slowly, bumping along on flat-sided tires. Going into and out of the coffee shop involves a comical amount of taking off and putting on mittens, gloves, scarves, hats, layers of jackets and sweaters, snow pants. And we make foolish mistakes-taking our gloves off to adjust the buckles on the horse blanket can lead to cold fingers and cold fingers can frostbite. After being inside or driving through ice fog all day, we decide to walk the dog at night. The dry air makes skin itch, makes sparks of static snap between people and dogs, people and partners. We snap, too, as little irritations itch at the space between us.

So, I look at seed catalogs, the luscious colors of beets, cantaloupes, carrots, lettuce. In three days, they say, we’ll be above zero-maybe above freezing (but don’t count on it).

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View from Mattie’s Pillow

January 9, 2009

Sun on the eaves again today. Though the sun is lovely to see, clear skies mean more cold weather as the heat radiates away from the ground and off into the atmosphere. On the radio today, I heard that Tok, down the Alaska Highway, had 78 below. These are North Slope temperatures-minus the wind. They say we’ll enter a warming trend over the weekend. We’ll see.

I may write this entry in phases. Today, I’m headed out to a meeting to talk about a project I’m involved with this spring-a high school outreach program involving science, writing (my part), and dance. We’ll be working with rural Alaskan and Alaska native Junior High kids who have selected this class as an elective. How this will all go together will be interesting to see, but the writing part will be about observation in the natural and human world and translating that into language. We’ll work with poetry to start, then touch on prose. Ultimately, there will be a presentation involving movement, storytelling, poetry. The wonderful part for me will be working with dancers I know and sharing the creative impulse with them and with kids who are at a wonderfully inventive stage of life. An added plus is that I will be working with my dancer son, Ira, who is coming up from NYC to work on the performance part of the project. The idea for Mattie’s Pillow evolved, in part, from long discussions with him about what’s happening in the arts in New York and what Alaska has to offer that no other place does.

More later.

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View from Mattie’s Pillow

January 8, 2009

Here’s news of the psyche.

Deep cold persists here. At forty below or colder, metal becomes brittle. Things break. Anything plastic can shatter at the slightest bump. And the psyche, usually plastic and pliable, becomes brittle, sharp-edged, and dense.

We are all waiting for the cold to lift and tallying up the list of broken things to repair: frozen pipes, a car window that won’t roll down, a phone line inexplicably dead, our frayed good will. It takes so much effort just to get the car started and drive to town that we do without things like ice cream rather than go to the trouble.

In a few days, the temperature is supposed to rise above zero. Next week, the first of a series of meetings and other activities starts. These dark days, the last of Winter Break, the first of my sabbatical semester, will seem such a luxury in memory once the activity of spring begins.

Spring, however, is a matter for the psyche here in the Interior–we’ll have snow till late April, into May (ah, even writing those words brings some relief). Spring finds its way to us through dreaming of gardens, browsing seed catalogs, beginning the slow conditioning of horses for the first day of good footing and riding. Then, in a day, the snow will be gone, the birches will be a cloud of yellow-green, the cranes and geese will babble in the sky, the horses’ coats will shed in ragged patches, and the garden will already seem behind schedule.

On the radio, just now, a warning about ice fog, bad air quality, driving with lights on, or better yet not driving at all.

Thanks to all who’ve visited this blog. I’ll post more poetry challenges, for the psyche.

Update: 11:30 Alaska Standard Time–Sun on the eaves for the first time in weeks.

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View from Mattie’s Pillow

January 7, 2009

Thinking of time today–how fluid and how relative it seems. We’re still deep in cold here. Everything takes more time. This morning, heading out to feed horses in the dark, I put on so many layers that the dog lay back down to rest and wait while I performed what must, to him, seem like a dallying obsessive task: putting on all the layers of down vest, wool sweater, hoodie, Carhartt’s jacket and lined workpants, my two layers of socks and Arctic Sport Muck Boots, lined gloves and liners, fleece hat and smoke ring. The dog sighs. He needs to go out, and I am fooling with all these pieces of cloth that he’s forbidden to chew.

And driving. First the car needs to be plugged in for an hour or more, then warmed up at idle in spite of air quality alerts, then the windshield scraped, then slowly driven off over bumpy tires that have developed flat spots from sitting in the cold.

But time has always seemed fluid to me, clocks arbitrary. On these days when I have the privilege of staying at home and writing, I tell time, if at all, by NPR–thus marking the day in hour or half hour moments–or by the quality of light in the day–so marking the day in ever lengthening blocks of hours. Right now, the sky is lightening with improbable pale pink at the horizon line, then a watery yellow, a bit of green–the yellow green of new spring leaves–then a pale blue that deepens as I look to the north, towards Barrow and Nuiqsut, where there has been no sun for a few months now, only pre-dawn and dusk light.

Time is a broad sweep here in the North–measured in the position of the sun. Winter, the sun is in the south–a short shallow arc over the horizon then back down. Summer, the sun circles from northeast to northwest, a wide long arc through the southern sky and north again. Time in summer is a long stretch of frenzied action–work, gardening, riding, evening baseball games, walks, canoeing, road trips–we cram as much in as we can, knowing that winter will come along to grind time down to its slowest essence again.

Here we are. Slow time. Things may or may not get done. We are tending our literal and inner fires, banking them up for the days ahead.

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View from Mattie’s Pillow

January 6, 2009

I’m sitting in my living room near the woodstove balancing the laptop on my lap. The stove we bought when we moved here has a window at the front, so we can see curls of light from the flame as the wood burns. These days, we’re burning only birch, those lovely trees with their white bark that peels like sunburnt skin in summer. We’ve stacked the split wood on the stove to warm  to room temperature from 40 below; I admire the clean whiteness of the bark, the dense grain of the wood itself.

In Interior Alaska, birch is the hardwood we have. It gives off more heat than other available wood such as spruce, cottonwood/poplar, or willow. The wood curves as it grows so that the trunks of birch trees look like giant legs or hips. Interior artists such as Kes Woodward or David Mollet have made much of this quality.

Today, I have been clearing out a physical space downstairs to write–a room and a desk that has been burdened by boxes, years of graded papers, old bills, a bicycle, yoga mats, sleeping bags–all the things that needed a generic place to stage when we needed to move them from someplace else. Now there is a path to the desk by the window with a statue of the Buddha, a long-suffering plant, some rocks from various places, and, on days with no ice fog, a view of the Alaska Range. I have a sabbatical semester starting today; my plan is to finish the chapters of a book of meditations n the horse, working title And the Horse, and to continue a practice I started last winter of setting a daily poetry challenge in hopes of completing a chapbook. I will post drafts of the horse book as I complete chapters and will post poetry challenges for myself and any readers who want to take them up.

As for Mattie’s Pillow, I am growing into the blogging process. All two of my readers have given me good feedback so far, and the look and content of this blog may change in the next few days. For now, while I am still mostly inside by the fire, gazing out at Mattie and Sam themselves, so handsome in their blankets and frosty manes, I will be exploring how this virtual space can parallel the one I have imagined and how I can begin to make connections between people I care about and others who care about the things I do.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

January 4, 2009

Here on the Ridge, it’s thirty below zero. Down in the valley, it hovers between forty and fifty below and the ice fog sits thick along the roads, riverbanks, neighborhoods.

This fall, with the high oil prices, people who hadn’t used their wood stoves in years dusted them off, went out to the wood cutting areas, and began burning unseasoned wood. We were lucky enough to have had several large spruce trees fall in the last couple of years and were able to harvest a downed birch and buy some two-year old birch logs over the summer. But in some areas, the extra smoke and water vapor released  from burning green wood or coal has been hanging in the air for months. Now that we’re in a period of deep cold, this smoke and vapor hangs frozen into ice fog–hard on living beings.

We are in the last days of the winter break between semesters. We’re down to one working car, but we’re holed up in our living room, dozy as hibernating bears, stoking the wood stove, watching the Christmas tree lights flicker, watching the skyline pale from orange to watery green to dusky blue. For a few weeks, as we begin the slow return toward the sun, our part of the Ridge will be in shadow. A few houses down our road, they get a couple or hours of sun each day, but we are at the head of a deep bowl of land, so it will be while before the sun reaches pver the rim of the Ridge to us.

Outside, the horses stand, blanketed, dreaming of grass. Mattie likes to hang out in the shed, sulking. Sam, the guard horse, stands by the fence, looking down at anyone driving or walking by on the road below. Their coats are thick and long: Mattie gets an undercoat like a dog; Sam’s is dense with close-growing hairs like a caribou.

I’m still learning about blogs. I’ve visited other blogs to see how they format their pages, who their audience is.

I have two main purposes for this blog at this point. First, I want a concrete way to develop ideas for a literal Mattie’s Pillow–a place with buildings, people, etc.  I’m starting this by posting links to poets, artists, horse and dog and gardenig sites–anything that fits the image I have of Mattie’s Pillow.  Second–though I’m doing this first–I want a way to share the work I do on my current sabbatical: poems for a chapbook and chapters for a book of essays on the horse.

What I’m not clear on now  is who my audience is. This may take some time. I don’t  yet know who you are, but it may be you.

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