Expand Magazine - Volume 6 Issue 2

eXPAND | BE MORE /16
living
LUMIN
By Dr. Meghan Nelson
& Dr. Ryan Allen
“For a time I rest in the grace of the
world, and am free.
”
– Wendell Berry
Copper Bay Solitude.
Snow Day in Alaska
B
efore Meghan and I had kids, we had Alaska.
It was magical, a kind of time before time, as
it’s now hard to remember or even imagine
our lives before our children. And being in
the full throes of parenthood with a 13 yearold,
an 11 year-old, and a 9-year-old to keep up with, we
don’t spend a lot of time looking back on days before we
had them. On most days, I’m just happy if I remember to
brush my teeth.
But here we are at the beginning of the year, home for days,
now watching the snow blow and fall in the midst of a high
wind, sub-zero blizzard. Just a couple days in, it’s reminiscent
of the pandemic—schools and businesses closed, sports
shut down, life outside shifted inside. It’s a kind of cross
between begrudged ecstasy and bored delight.
One can only shovel so much.
But somewhere out there in that snowfield Earth, my vision
narrows as my eyelashes and eyebrows freeze. My breath
blows wild in the wind. I follow it down a snowy white path in
my mind and come to a winterland paradise. I see it all, what
was as it was, but here and now all present—a life within Life,
a self within Self, staring starry-eyed at the Northern Lights
outside the Schwabenhof. I’m dodging moose in the streets
of Anchorage at the Fur Rendezvous, grooving with Michael
Franti and Spearhead, dancing with dogs at the Iditarod
in Wasilla, hammering the halibut (and Basil Hayden) with
Spike and Zach in the Prince William Sound, fishing king’s on
the Deshka, so many memories, so much fun.
These moments are a gift from the past reborn in the present.
Valentine’s Day in Palmer, Alaska
We walk on foot after foot of thick slippery-slick Matanuska
River frozen ice.
Last night, word of a moose mounting and stomping a man
walking out of a Fred Meyer grocery store in Anchorage. Today,
rumor of a moose jumping off a cliff and landing on the Seward
Highway. “Look Daddy, moose are falling from the sky,” a small
boy is reported saying.
Lazy Mountain, thirty-five hundred feet tall, Matanuska Peak,
five grand, loom above, pictures fixed on a gray sky wall. At
our feet, bubbles trapped in ice, ribs and ripples in underwater
frozen ice waves, circular crystal fractal prisms where ice
fishermen once drilled holes and dropped their lines.
Individuals who weather the entire Alaska winter are called
sourdoughs. A posted warning in painted bold green:
“TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT!”
Off the ice, on the boot-packed powder dust we see moose
tracks and nibbled buds, trimmed hedges, hundreds of
thousands of black birch and spruce trees, and a single tiny
saucer-shaped bird nest planted and situated firm in the fork
of some birch branches.
We walk, tucked away ourselves, settled and nestled between
two distant glaciers—the Knik, pronounce the “K,” and the
Matanuska, blowing ten thousand year clean and cold, crisp
and old air in our direction.
Our fingers, our eyes locked, hand in hand, palm to palm, flesh
to flesh, warm body to warm body, vision to vision.
On the side of the road, two moose nibbling on birch buds.