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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

March 25, 2009

Past the equinox now and the light increases daily. By the end of April, light will begin to compress the deep dark of night to a few hours and we’ll be restless for the heady time of summer with nearly endless days and fizzy energy.

But now, we’re still firmly frozen in March; for us, it’s the cruelest month. The light brings promise of spring, but even a week ago the temperatures dropped to 30 below and we know more snow will fall. This is the month of divorces and suicides-not to be too dreary about it all. We know that other places are already past crocuses and daffodils. We start our seeds inside under shop lights or in south facing windows and hope for the best, for the garden is still covered in two feet of white stuff. Now is when hope fails some of us, when even all the love and care we can spare to others in our small community is not enough and, each March, a few drop away.

I was reminded of this yesterday when I heard the news of the death of Nick Hughes, here in Fairbanks. I first heard of him in the 80s when his father, Ted Hughes, came to the Midnight Sun Writer’s Conference as faculty. It seemed like a great coup to us young writers that we had gotten such a “presence” to come to our conference–though we also had Ray Carver, Tess Gallagher, Annie Dillard, and others who were rising at the time and are the literary establishment now. There was the usual gossip of writers’ conferences–who got special favor, a private reading, and why–but among the buzz was the astonishing news that Hughes was here in part because his son, Nick, was a Ph.D. student at the university and was working as a biologist and researcher here.

“Nick?,” I said, “of ‘Nick and the Candlestick’?” Yes, that Nick, whose mother, Sylvia Plath’s, passionate poem about his birth meant so much to me as a, then, young mother. The child that figures so prominently in what’s shocking, poignant, and fascinating in Plath’s own death. I don’t want to dwell on this; what’s been important about Nick in our midst is that he lived a life as remote as could be from all this history. Those of us in literary circles who knew of his presence among us, knew, too, that he wanted nothing to do with the literary world. For all I knew, he lived among friends, was loved, loved the plant and animal life of the Interior and the wild, expansive beauty of the landscape much as all of us do who live here. For all I knew, that and our careful mindfulness not to bring the past to him, was enough. Sadly, it wasn’t.

So, now, March drifts toward April. We look around, emerging out of winter cautiously. Who is still among us? This is the time to smile at our neighbors, to give that hug–flu or no flu–to share what we can. We remember who we’ve lost and the lessons of their lives. We live with them; we incorporate them into our vision. We plant seeds; they emerge, threadlike, vulnerable, pale; we hold them in the light and hope they grow.

(To read more about Nick Hughes, here’s a link to Dermott Cole’s column in the Fairbanks Daily News Miner http://newsminer.com/news/2009/mar/23/poet-sylvia-plaths-son-prominent-fairbanks-biologi/

and a link to Plath’s poem, “Nick and the Candlestick” < http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=178967>  )

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

March 12, 2009

From here on the Ridge the sun is bright behind thin clouds. I can look out over the valley, and, over where the hill shoulders down to the river, there’s a thick spread of white cloud. “Freezing fog,” the forecast says, limited visibility. In a little while, I’ll head out to experience it myself, but, for now, I’m content to be at the kitchen table with a cup of peach ginger tea and this laptop.

Yesterday was Jeter the standard poodle’s first birthday and he e-mailed his sister Lucy and brother Kooba (the whole family has celebrity names–Lucy’s a red-head) to wish them happy birthday. For his birthday, he got two dog cookies from the fuel delivery man, a long walk, and a couple of pieces of cheese. A bath and a grooming would probably not have been a welcome present for him, though he needs it.

After sixteen years of living with our old dog, Kermit, living with a young dog is both a challenge and a joy. Though we had done plenty of research on dog breeds and, like the Obamas, had considered breeds like the Portuguese Water Dog, we still had some resistance to buying a breed dog rather than adopting a mutt like Kermit from the shelter. But when the poodle puppies showed up in the paper, we took a ride out to see them, and when the largest brown puppy lay in our arms, so mellow and sweet, there was no question. And the poodle at my feet has been a wonderful dog. He’s smart, energetic, enthusiastic to a fault, and, for the most part, eager to do what we ask him. I’m finally seeing, now, that things we ask of him are becoming routine, so there are fewer communication problems. However, in spite of his baseball player name, he’s not too keen on the game of “fetch.” He gets bored after a while and claims he can’t find the ball or the flying squirrel toy and would much rather run up the hill to see what’s happening there or go off and grab a piece of frozen horse manure to bring into the house. I think more mental challenges are in order.

I know that spring is on the way. Here, schools are on spring break. I have students coming by to see Mattie and Sam today, and our horse club will visit Tom Hart’s blacksmith shop this Saturday. The seeds arrived from Renee’s on Monday and I need to set up the shelves and lights to start the tomatoes for the greenhouse. The Iditarod is halfway over, though I’m not following it the way I did the Quest. Birds flit onto the planters on my deck, nibbling the remains of last year’s flowers, and zipping away. They still ignore the feeder we hung from the roof beam. The days are filled with light.

Still, there’s deep snow everywhere. I went out to work with Mattie yesterday, using the clicker to work on “stand” and “ears up.” Mattie is less fit at this point than Sam is, partly, I think, because she spends so much time sulking in the run-in shed while Sam is out enjoying the view in all weather. Her back doesn’t seem as muscled as his is, so I’m starting off with hand-walking, practicing “walk” and “whoa” and “ears up” all at once. As we circle her side of the corral, we end up walking through the parts where she doesn’t usually walk, and she and I both sink in to our knees. Good exercise for us both, but not very practical and a bit scary, since I know there are frozen brown piles under that snow–the ones we were planning to pick up the day the snow storm hit and that we’ll see again at snow melt in late April or early May.

This is the time of year when we feel most out of synch with the rest of the world, here in the Interior. We have spring fever–our minds wander, we think of places where there are flowers, we plan our gardens and summer training schedules-but we could be hit with snow and 20 below any day.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

March 7, 2009

“Snow falling night falling fast oh fast…”

This line from Robert Frost’s “Desert Places” runs through my mind each fall as the first snow falls and the days get darker. There’s something I love about the breathless quality of the line and the distantly observed beauty of fast falling snow on empty fields, the quick darkening of night. It’s something we know well here, the muting of light in snowfall, in winter.

But saying this in March is a different matter. Just when we are expecting more light, when the supermarket is filled with tulips and daffodils shipped up from Mexico and California, just when we’ve ordered our seeds and are setting up our seed starting tables and grow lights, the sky flattens with dark clouds and, for three days now, a snow fine as pastry flour sifts down on roads, roofs, the backs of horses. After the past three days, the garden is a foot farther under snow. The wood stove ash we spread there a few weeks ago is deep below white. Our spirits, about to lift with the small signs of spring in Interior Alaska–dog races, ice sculptures, the return of days longer than nights—deflate. We shoveled the driveway last weekend, giddy with the thought that it might be our last major plowing. We need to do it again and more.

Yesterday, we got six to eight inches in a day. Mattie and Sam’s corral is deep with it. The fence seems ridiculously short, as if Mattie or Sam could step over the top rail–except they’d sink in the snow on either side of the fence. They are too smart to try. Besides, what’s on either side looks the same, and they only get fed on the inside. So they stay put. They have to lift their feet a bit higher to walk through the deep snow. I hope this works as a kind of de facto fitness plan, because it’s too deep to walk safely after them on one end of the longe line, and neither they nor I can see where frozen manure piles are buried–a hazard for them and for me, and I want none of us injured.

Every spring I have grand training plans for them, starting right after Christmas. Every year, my plans discount the most important factor: winter. So far since January, I’ve been defeated by short days, 40 below weather, snow, chilblains from clicker training with my gloves off, winter inertia and counterbalancing activities–and now too-deep snow. The other night, a friend said, “Well, you don’t ride much; you just hang out with your horses like they’re pets.” I don’t think she meant ill by it, but, compared to someone in California, she’s right. I ride nearly every day in summer, barring smoke or rain, but getting two horses ready for riding after the long winter months takes lots of ground work. I feel behind. So does everyone I know, except for those with access to indoor riding arenas.

Mattie is staying dry in the back of the run-in shed. She blends into the shadows there and only comes out if she thinks I have food. Sam, on the other hand, doesn’t like to be confined. He likes to see what’s coming: airplanes flying over head, snowmachines on the road, a stray dog running by, a car coming up the driveway. His whinny is the most reliable sign that we have visitors.

Yesterday, I looked out in the thick snow and saw him napping by the fence. At that point the flakes were about the size of dimes and falling fast. Sam lay curled up in the deepening snow, his chin resting on the surface of it. I opened the door and called to him. He raised his head, looked at me, and lowered it again. I dressed as fast as I could and folded up my medium weight, waterproof blanket and carried it out to him. He wasn’t shivering when I reached him, but his thick coat was full of snow and wet where the heat of his body had melted it. I haltered him and he stretched out his front feet, stood up, and shook the loose snow from his back. He was probably OK; just napping and watching the snow fall, but I put the blanket on him anyway and he seemed more relaxed. He’s still standing out in the snow, the white stuff filling the places where the blanket makes soft folds along his back. Underneath he’s dry and warm, ready to guard the place.

Frost said–I can’t guarantee I have it perfectly–he could “scare myself with my own desert places.” I’ve always taken this to mean the places within where we know the territory–it’s ours and in our imagination, after all–but we find a familiar terror there, anyway. This may be the unresolvable questions that we all carry with us, or the vast unknown that is our future. This is the time of year when these “desert places” open their vistas to us unexpectedly, just when we’re expecting to slip on into spring unscathed.

The snow is beautiful as it falls. There’s an uncharacteristic wind, sculpting it into drifts. The tracks from our cars in the unplowed driveway will be filled in by morning and the curves of drifts may spread across them. A good day for a morning of coffee with chocolate and ginger scones. I’ll sleep on that thought.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

March 2, 2009

Ed’s Chair

This morning, the sun was bright on the snow when I went to feed the horses. March light can be so intense; it promises warmth, but doesn’t yet deliver. Still, I can feel an inner bubbling, spring energy returning.

When I started this series of posts, it was deep winter: dark except for a few hours a day and bitter cold at 40 below. For days in January, after the holiday round of visits, feasts, gift exchanges, and as I began a semester-long sabbatical, I nested in a large comfy chair, a pillowy recliner given to me by my friend Ed. The chair faces a wall of windows that offer a southeast view from the Ridge  across the Tanana River and over the flats to the point where the Alaska Range disappears into the horizon. During the deep cold, I didn’t move from that chair except when I needed to feed horses, dogs, humans. Some nights, I even curled up in the wide arms of the chair, tilted it back and slept.

The chair came to me from Ed after a difficult period in his life. Ed is my parents’ age, a man who had been athletic and adventurous in his youth, who had come to Alaska after some unspecified difficulty to settle in for one last adventure. He loved–still does–to eat, and the confinement of winter, the encouragement of friends, and this chair allowed him to spread out in a wealth of weight. He had the kind of expansive size that’s a sign of good fortune or high rank in some cultures. In ours it’s a sign of impending disease.

Ed gave money away, and, when friends and I got involved, his money was being siphoned off by unscrupulous “friends” he had taken under his wing. He had a series of hospital stays: pneumonia, heart failure, stroke–and we contacted his children around the world. Finally, however, we were able to find him a place in the Pioneers Home, an Alaskan tradition, run on “green” principles. He’s active, happy, in love with one of the residents, though still missing things on his left side, a result of the stroke. When we were packing up his house, closing out an important part of his life, he asked me to take care of the chair, and I have. When I sit in the chair, I think of Ed, who always wanted to make life better for his friends. It’s comfortable, a good place to sit with a laptop and write.

On the other hand, now that the light is returning and temperatures hovering around zero–temperate for this time of year in the Interior–the chair feels too comfortable, a pleasant trap. I find that I have no need to move a muscle when I sit in it. I’m a person who likes to move–dance, ride, walk, fidget–and being inactive shocks my system. Outside the window, juncos and redpolls have found the bottle feeder we hung for them. They flit over, perch for seconds, a few seeds’ worth, then swoop away always on the move. Beyond them, Sam and Mattie chew the last bits of morning hay, the sun on their backs. If I get out of this chair and walk to the deck door, they’ll see me moving there and lift their heads. In a few minutes, I’ll go out with them and leave this chair.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

February 27, 2009

Grey flannel skies today, flat light all across the sky, fine snow falling. This morning, when I went to feed the horses, flakes so fine I couldn’t see them at first, sifting down, a light dust of white on Sam’s white back, a veil of it over Mattie’s black one.

It’s warmer now and there’s more light than when I started these posts in January. Today in the Effie Kokrine class, we read a poem from Joe Enzweiler’s A Winter on Earth in which he wrote of the light on snow as “burning.” When I asked the kids what he meant, they said, maybe the snow is melting. After a few tries, I realized that the poem starts with “February 1” and, for us, that time a little over three weeks ago, when the sun first began to cast coppery light over the morning or evening snow, when it didn’t quite reach full light or make anything gleam much less melt, is distant memory. Now we’re on the ever-accelerating swoop into light that fills the days and crowds out night. In less than a month, the equinox. We’re ready to forget winter before it’s really over.

Some friends of mine have finally gotten me to sign up on Facebook.  It’s a heady feeling–conversations between people who know each other but are scattered across the world. Looking at photos of horses under palm trees or reading about the weather in Australia reminds me both how narrow my Alaskan view can seem and how exotic to others.   Joe, who is my poetry hero, has resisted technology for as long as I’ve known him. When friends visit from Outside, I often take them to his house; the Alaskan cabin-dwelling poet, a cliché, but in Joe’s case his house, his poetry, his woodworking, his rock-wall building, his conversational flights of fancy are integrated, all of a piece. But now Joe has a laptop. I’m not sure how to take this.

The light is fading from the day. I’m about to leave off writing and go out to throw hay to the horses and head to a gathering of friends with a loaf of jalapeno cornmeal bread from Lulu’s. I’m grateful for the technology that lets me write this, for you reading this–a gift to any writer.   I’m grateful, too, for the mundane chores the horses require; they ground me to things it’s easy to forget, the way we forget how the light shone on the snow only three weeks ago.

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Quest Update

February 24, 2009

Sebastian Schnuelle has won the Yukon Quest.  Hugh Neff second; John Little third.  They’ll be coming in all afternoon and through the night.  Happy dogs!  Happy mushers!

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

February 24, 2009

Mardi Gras and the Yukon Quest

I’m sitting at the kitchen table, my back to the sun shining in over the deck windows behind me, still to the south, but higher now. When I started this blog in January, the sun barely gleamed above the horizon for a few minutes then slipped behind Becker Ridge, the next ridge to the west. Now passes up above the ridge, so that there’s a luxury of sunlight. I almost take it for granted that I can go out with the horses as late as 3 or 4 and still have time to work with them a little. They are glad to be left alone in the morning, standing east to west, their furry sides flat to the sun, switching position to follow the sun or change to the other side, like sunbathers working on their tans.

This morning, the news of the Yukon Quest is that the lead has switched again. Hugh Neff, who passed Bill Kleedehn on Eagle Summit had a two hour penalty at the Twin Bears layover, so left a half hour behind Sebastian Schnuelle, headed to town. They left around 5am, so may be pulling into the Chena River finish line right now. The cause of the former leading team’s refusal was a lead dog in heat–a great distraction to the dogs behind her. As is typical of Quest mushers, several mushers stopped to help Kleedehn up the summit until he finally made it over. Eagle Summit, location of the treacherous Pinnell Mountain Trail, is steep and rocky, often closed in with blowing snow or fog. Even though the race switches direction every year, sometimes starting in Fairbanks, sometimes in White Horse, YT, Eagle Summit is often the breaking point for mushers in the race. But all is well, and the first set of mushers will be eating high calorie food by tonight, their dogs nested comfy in their dog boxes.

It’s Mardi Gras today, and I haven’t cooked pancakes or thrown beads. Here, it’s a remote holiday, like Groundhog Day, but I will look at the seed catalogs again and place an order for colorful vegetables in honor of the day.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

February 23, 2009

More on dogs.

I’m listening to a report on the Yukon Quest. The teams went over Eagle Summit last night and the leader, Bill Kleedehn, who seemed to have an unbeatable lead coming out of Dawson City, stalled when his team refused go continue on up the steep trail. Now Hugh Neff is in the lead and heading for the Twin Bears checkpoint 80 miles away from the finish in Fairbanks. By tomorrow morning the teams will be heading through North Pole and down the frozen Chena River to the finish line beneath the Cushman Street Bridge in downtown Fairbanks.

This is our Groundhog Day. This is spring in the Interior. The dogs, tired but eager, strung out along the gang line, trotting down the smooth white expanse of river. The mushers, their world focused on the narrow world of the teams strung out ahead, the texture of the ice and snow, the effects of the sun on ice, the heat or lack of heat–too much, and the dogs will stop pulling and want to roll in snow to cool down.

When the first teams come in, they will be met with cheers, flashing cameras and cell phones, newspaper, TV, and radio reporters. A flurry of activity, no matter what time they come in, then a long rest for musher and dogs till everyone’s across the line-this can take up to two weeks for the last team, the red lantern–then a feast and celebration.

We may go down to the river to see the teams come in. Even those of us who wouldn’t think of following our dogs for two weeks on a dog sled know that these mushers carry the spirit of the old Alaska with them. They are our heroes in the old sense–the ones who defeat the enemy, winter, for us. For Interior Alaskans, a musher who had attempted, much less completed the Yukon Quest, enters a different realm of Alaskan credibility, a ritual transformation that few of us have attempted.

The dogs will retire after a few seasons to become recreational mushing dogs or ski-joring dogs or the core of a racing dog breeding program. Once they have pulled a thousand mile race, they want nothing more than to be in harness again with their pack, tongues out to the wind, feeling the snow beneath their feet, breathing the smells of the other dogs around them.

Once all the teams are safely in, we all breathe a sigh of relief. It’s nearly March. The Ice Carving championships begin, the last sprint team championships will speed through 2nd Avenue soon, then the roads will start to melt and freeze, the temperatures will tease above freezing on some days, then dip back down at night.

But now, we hold our breath and wait. Will Kleedehn’s dogs, tired of being passed by other teams on the mountainside, suddenly give a great heave and reach the summit? Will Neff or Little or someone else get lost in the maze of mushing trails near town and miss the chance to win? It’s happened more than once. Will a moose, munching on a stand of willows with its new calves, step out in the trail, stopping everyone in the tangle of a standoff?

And this is how we pass the last week of February, ready for the promise of March.

(For Yukon Quest updates go to www.kuac.org)

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

February 19, 2009

Gray skies today. This morning, as the horses were eating their hay, snow began to fall in big flakes. The wind picked up–unusual for the Interior in winter–and the wind chimes on the deck began to rattle and ring. We’re hearing winter storm advisories on the radio, which means blowing snow at higher elevations–the domes and summits and ridges. Because we live in view of the highest mountain in North America, Denali, 170 miles away, none of the high points around Fairbanks are called mountains even though they would be mountains in other places, say Pennsylvania or Virginia. So we have Chena Ridge, where I live, or Murphy Dome, Ester Dome, Cleary Summit, Eagle Summit. Not mountains, but high enough to have their own micro weather patterns.

We’re more than half way through February, a bleak month in any temperate climate, but here, there’s an odd phenomenon where the returning light just begins to take effect–we have more energy and more daylight to do things in–but is counterbalanced by the persistence of winter. It was 27 below the other night, for example. The temperature dropped rapidly during the day, catching us unprepared. I had gone out to do some clicker work with Mattie and pretty soon had to go back in to warm my hands. The clicker is small and hard to click with gloves on, and I had reached the limit of cold in my fingers before they became painful. So I knew it was colder than 10 above, for at temperatures above that my hands can stay warm for a while from activity and from keeping the rest of me well wrapped. By today, it’s bounced back up above zero, but with wind and wind chill. So, in spite of the returning light, February is unreliable, and we stay in winter mode.

March is harder. There will be a few days that creep to near freezing (warm, by our standards). The light will be equal, day and night, and the sun bright on the snow. We gardeners gaze at our gardens; we can visualize the plants that will grow there in summer. Impatient, we will order seeds and starting soil and plant inside under lights or by a southern window. March is the month when we lose perspective. After Equinox, the days become longer by 7 minutes a day and we remember that flowers are blooming elsewhere. We don’t want to hear about it, really. We will still be sliding through stop signs and into ditches for another month. We will be plowing and shoveling snow and watching it slide off our roofs into mounds. And as the layers of snow melt, we will find all the gloves we thought we lost, or candy wrappers that fell from our cars at 40 below, or the spare change that fell. Not to mention dog poop and horse manure that got snowed over before we got out to clean it up. March is when we find out who the real survivors are by reading the divorce statistics in the newspaper.

The wind chime jingles again. The snow is marshmallow white; the corral looks pristine. Mattie and Sam stand in their shed, out of the wind, nipping at each other’s muzzles over the board wall that separates them. What am I thinking of? Flowers? Carrots? It’s still February.

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