7/25/2023 0 Comments Alaska emt practice testThen again, maybe it’s just hard to picture the start of the trip in retrospect without amplifying some feeling of foreboding. That was how I felt, watching the whale from the beach: afraid that everything was accidents. Why are they there? Why these instead of others? Why these instead of nothing?” The profusion and variety of celestial lights have always frightened me. A kind of grandeur, yes - but not beauty. Never then or now have I been able to look at a cloudless sky at night and see beauty there. “I had always been aware,” Carruth once wrote of his youth, “that the Universe is sad everything in it, animate or inanimate, the wild creatures, the stones, the stars, was enveloped in the great sadness, pervaded by it. I loved Carruth’s work but was more enamored with his persona: his yeoman life in the woods, his intolerance for phoniness and, most of all, the precision with which he articulated common suffering, including one strain of his own suffering that I related to, particularly in those years, but wouldn’t have had the courage, or clarity, to examine. I was trying hard in my letters to impress one of them: Hayden Carruth, a gruff and irreverent 81-year-old poet who lived far upstate. Watching it made me feel profoundly out of place and register how large that wilderness was, relative to me.Īt the time, I was working at a literary magazine in New York City called The Hudson Review, picking poems out of the slush pile and mailing them to an outside panel of editorial advisers. My uneasiness had something to do with the whale’s great size and indifference - its obliviousness - as it passed. It just appeared in the distance, then transited quickly past us, from left to right. Nothing about the animal registered to me as playful or welcoming. The whale left me exhilarated and gleeful, like Jon but deeper down, I also remember feeling shaken, like Dave. And so, even as Dave understood that a chance to see whales up close like this was a major draw of a kayaking trip in Alaska, and though he feigned being thrilled, some second thoughts were kicking in: We were going out there, he realized. Ever since, he had harbored a fear of large sea creatures - a niche phobia, particularly for a young man who lived in the Bronx, but a genuine one still. He could still conjure the feeling of hanging defenselessly in that water while the animals deftly swirled around him, less like solid objects than flashes of reflected light, while he could move only in comparative slow-motion. They were friendly, awe-inspiring creatures, purportedly, but they terrified Dave instead. Once, when he was a kid, his dad took him scuba diving with dolphins. Though I had no idea at the time, he was anxious that Dave and I might feel intimidated about making the trip such a big payoff, so quickly, would get us excited and defuse any apprehensions.įor Dave, the whale-sighting had exactly the opposite effect. It seemed to him as if the animal were putting on a show, swimming playfully in the kelp, diving, resurfacing, then plowing its open mouth across the surface to feed. We were only starting to move around again, packing our gear into the kayaks, when we heard the first huff of a blowhole, not far offshore. We were on earth - finally, really on earth. To me, it felt like those scenes of astronauts who, having finally rattled free of the earth’s atmosphere, slip into the stillness of space. It was a familiar phenomenon for Jon from the start of all his trips: a moment that people instinctually paused to soak in. As the boat that delivered us vanished, the drone of its engine dampening into a murmur and then finally trailing off, it became unthinkably quiet on the beach, and the largeness and strangeness of our surroundings were suddenly apparent. Jon was working as a sea-kayaking guide that summer in Glacier Bay National Park, and he had invited us up for a seven-day excursion during his week off. Jon, Dave and I had just been dropped off on a remote Alaskan shoreline, an hour and a half by boat from the closest speck of a town. The whale sighting happened right away, minutes into Day 1.
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