Rode A Bike Today

First of all: fresh salmon and shrimp that my housemate Erik Jordt brought back from Craig, Alaska. Salmon grilled with a teriyaki-ish glaze, shrimp boiled plain and dipped in garlic butter. Hey now.

Second of all: I attended a vigil for World Oceans Day yesterday, at which I met a very decent-seeming man named Jason Weir who is involved in the permaculture community here. As it turns out, his wife is Carly Weir, who works at Alaska Center for the Environment, and who I had to call today to reschedule my booth-share time at the Spenard Farmer's Market. It is a small community here, and all the pretty girls date guys who work at REI. This isn't my point. My point is that, on the Mudflats blog today, the vigil was reported, and they recounted how we read quotes from stories of the Deepwater Horizon spill. I had read the story of an oyster boat captain. The organizer had noticed my small bit of Southern inflection and mentioned it, and I told her that my family lived in Louisiana, some in the shrimp and oyster business. In the Mudflats story, however, I was identified as a Louisiana native and former oysterman. Just another one of those tight-pants-and-cardigan-wearing former oystermen of Barataria. It was a nice event.

Third of all: Tomorrow, Sophie and I will join Julia Michaels and Beth Oates of the Sierra Club Coal Project and head down the Kenai Peninsula to Homer. Another intern has a cabin there. Every day, new things.

So.

I rode my Raleigh down the coastal trail again today, to the same lookout above the same beach I mentioned before, with the crackling, flattened stones. I sat down in the crook of a birch to read a couple chapters of Annie Dillard. Halfway through "Intricacy", I noticed two things. One was that the mosquitoes are out in force as of today. The second was that there was a little bit of blood on my right pinkie finger. It was a strip going roughly 2/3 of the way around the end joint, about 1/3" in diameter. I was not bleeding from any visible location.

If I ignore the first realization, the blood was more than likely my own and had seeped out of some abrasion I wasn't seeing. It is always interesting when you find that you've been bleeding from something that didn't hurt enough for you to notice it. As if some remote portion of your body - imagine it personified as a plucky bank clerk - noticed the problem and hastily, furtively, but effectively dealt with it and felt that what HQ doesn't know doesn't hurt HQ. Wheels within wheels.

However, in view of the mosquitoes, and the monumental slowness which is their hallmark here in Anchorage, leaving them easy targets for the hands of the distracted, there is another possibility. What if I, lost in my book, had reached out and smashed a mosquito near the butt end of my fist, a mosquito engorged with blood from someone or something else, and that blood spattered across the end joint of my pinkie finger? That would mean that the mosquito had been elsewhere, eaten elsewhere, and transported the physicalized life-essence of another living thing onto my finger. I like to think that a few minutes earlier, a swimmer with a tolerance for cold water had been floating with their eyes on the clearing sky at Woronzof Point, just north of where I was, and had been momentarily bothered for a few milliliters of blood. And there it was, in my hand. If they had died, and the police had found me sitting there, I wouldn't be able to argue.

This is not a metaphor. I repeat. This is not a metaphor.

Which is not to say that the work I'm involved in doesn't give one a certain sense of red-handedness. We're all killers. It's not okay. But that's not the point.

The point is that one of two things happened, one of two miraculous things. Either my body managed to deal with an open, bleeding wound so effectively that my conscious mind didn't have to be bothered; OR a tiny, long-tongued insect took material out of one living thing and, in death, spewed that material all over another living thing like candy from a pinata. If the first scenario is true, it is a testament to the skill with which the disguise that makes the world's gears seem to move independently is woven. If the second is true, it is a testament to the fact that it is, indeed, a disguise.

Press to play. Press to pause.

Like that, the whole moment of discovery, of realizing these things that I'm only now sussing out into paragraphs, was over. I finished my favorite chapter, the first chapter I'd ever read of Annie Dillard's, called "Fecundity." I stood up and rambled down to the rocky beach. I skipped stones. I came back up as the sun managed to actually fade without perceptibly sinking in the sky. When I put on my headphones for the ride north, "This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)" was exactly where I had left it, waiting patiently. As I rumbled up the trail, the buzzing vein of wilderness that clings to existence between the grey worlds of Cook Inlet and midtown Anchorage, a mature bald eagle flew overhead.