malaise*lithium

        At at time which by the sun I would say is eight o’clock, I go out for a walk. This Alaskan sun is strange, though. It seems to me to rise in the morning to a height of late dawn and then track sideways across the sky before finally dropping behind the mountains in the late afternoon. Despite this strange frosted-glass light I know that it is really late afternoon.

        The snow compresses under my feet with a sound like dry pie crust folding and there are minute flecks of rainbow that drift past my face on the surfaces of tiny crystals. It is cold enough that I wish I had worn a thicker shirt beneath my coat. I undo the crease in my collar and make it stand up around my neck. My hands inside of gloves inside of pockets. This is not really all that cold, as cold goes. There is a kind of cold that can make you sorry for everything you ever did wrong, and for some things you didn’t, but this isn’t it. This is a cold that merely makes you ache. A cold that cannot make you regret only makes you grieve.
        The path is long and it comes to me in swells and curves. It is bordered by aspens and close-growing and high shrubs which in the summer would create imposing walls. Now they are opened up; they hold tiny palmfuls of snow to the clouds and form narrow hopping courses for small brown birds.
        In a while I hear voices and shouting, and as I round the bend I see two boys with a sleds. Along the hillside I can see several streaks where they have ridden the sleds down; they are not sets of tracks but grooves, polished, like finger marks in melting frosting. As I approach from behind I can hear them talking about the course they intend to build in the coming months. One of them says it will have “banked turns and jumps,” and the other nods: it’s a dream he knows well. I consider them, their implicit appreciation for the vastness of this place. They walk quietly for some time, and I think about how nice it must be for them, even if they don’t understand it, to know silence in a way I don’t believe children in cities do anymore. Eventually, they turn off to climb back up the hill. As I overtake them, I can hear them clearly. On of them says, “Do you have an iPod?” I take careful steps to be sure I can hear the other; I shush my thoughts. “No,” he says, “I have PSP. It plays movies and games and music.” They disappear behind me into the trees and above the ridge. Whatever a PSP is, I think, or, as Annie might have said, so. Just that. So.

        Annie Dillard also said that all that summer conceals, winter reveals, and I understand what she meant there. When the soft life of summer is gone, one can see the lay of the land. She talked of being able see through the forest in every direction, of being able to walk in a straight line to Mexico. But here, I cannot see that difference; I was not here before the leaves fell from the trees, before those mountains not too far off wore glaring white hoods. As I look down this draw, finding that just a hundred yards ahead, the path becomes indistinguishable from the rest of the land, I can see all of the things Annie saw, but to me it is less like a vision and more like a viewing. The world is displayed outside of itself; it is displayed the way you can only display a dead thing.
        The snow lays on the branches of the trees. It is the same color as the sky and it interrupts the lines which tie the tree together. The branches now seem to be only standing in formation, and there seems to be no natural law to prevent the tree from simply going to pieces. At any moment, I feel, the trees may dissolve into the sky.
        Later, on a long rise up a narrow draw, the going becomes slick and I begin to slip. I start to step into the tracks of someone who had gone before. It must have been a much smaller person than I, based on the length of the stride and the size of the prints. But these little hardened cups are good footing, and I settle into the new gait. We, that is, this former walker and myself, continue through the silence. I consider the way seasons arrive young and leave aged, the way spring somehow arrives without herald, long before the first leaves or flowers, and I believe for a moment that snow must be the way that winter blooms. Presently, the tracks and I find we are not alone. Another set of tracks curl out of the trees and pull alongside us for a dozen yards before those steps, too, step into the prints I have not yet made, and we — all three of us — are walking together.