Transition

The vacation (ten days in Alaska, where else?) is over.

• Wildlife count: many ravens--all looking as if they'd just gotten out of bed, one oh-so-superior Bald Eagle, four moose placidly pruning roadside willows, and a chubby pheasant (a non-native species) waddling out of the McDonald's parking lot in Homer.
• Observed: Alaska is at its best when your gaze is aimed above the level of human debris.
• Reobserved: While I know airports aren't the place to look for peace and quiet, it still amazes me that people on cell phones share such banal intimacies (stinky feet, bathroom details, a spouse's shortcomings) at such volume with no thought that others might hear. I wanted to call over my shoulder, "Hey! People are trying to eat over here." When I'm Queen of the World, each cell phone will be equipped with a Cone of Silence.

In this period of transition before departure, I'm thinking about the pictures I didn't take on this vacation. I find it difficult to experience a place through a viewfinder. For me, words work better at defining memory. Words are how I give shape to my world. I like the rules of grammar and syntax; they help me prepare, sort, order. Words are slower than video, more precise than one angle of view. A photograph can show the bridge over the Donjek River in Yukon Territory, but words can add that the river's source is a glacier 25 miles back there in one of the largest ice fields on the continent; that Spring meltwater twists, rushes, and braids its way along the course of least resistance--not westward 12 miles to the coast, but eastward to the Yukon River, which takes forever and flows through just about every point on the compass to get to the Arctic Sea.

In Watson Lake, Yukon Territory, the Thing to Do (and I do it every time) is to take a picture of the signpost forest, a collection of over 61,000 road/street/municipal signs that tourists have pilfered and lugged to the site. It's kitsch at its best. However, the photograph doesn't tell you that it all started with one sign in 1942 posted by a proud (lonely?) U.S. Army soldier working on the construction of the Alaska Highway, a fellow who wanted to place himself in that wilderness, to identify and specify where he was, to record his passage and the accomplishment.

That's what words do for me. They give form to my memory, my own personal signpost forest.