2012 Artists-in-Residence

"The Soul of the Wolf Cries (L'âme du loup pleure)" 72" x 72" oil paint on four wood panels

Deborah Bouchette

The Soul of the Wolf Cries (L'âme du loup pleure)

As artist-in-residence, I never felt more mindful of the movements of wild animals: eating the spring earth, drinking the rain and river, migrating, hunting, fleeing, romping, swimming, and shaking the fur coat of winter in the warming spring sun. Feeling like a voyeur called to mind the responsibility of the delicate stewardship we all have in interacting with this ecosystem. I realized all of the place names that I found on the old USGS maps in the East Fork cabin are symbolic of our interventions here. I wove the names into this painting, along with the drawings reminiscent of animal movements, and a wolf — the one creature that I did not see during my stay. The title is a line from an old French song that I love.

— Deborah Bouchette

Visual artist Deborah Bouchette is exploring philosophy as a parallel to art and art as a parallax for philosophy while she pursues her PhD at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (Portland, Maine). Visit Deborah Bouchette's website.

 

“Unquiet” 38” x 72” oil on five canvas panels

Trine Bumiller

Unquiet

My paintings reference the natural world. Images are abstracted and recombined to convey the patterns, rhythms and underlying forces inherent in our immediate environment, both near and far. Merging the reality of place with the memory of experience, altering colors, forms and perspectives, and through multiple transparent glazes, the work suggests an alternative universe in which connections are made between memories and experiences.

In Denali I embraced a relationship with the landscape that was both intimate and grand. Exhilaration tempered by solitude presented the landscapes as it is, somber but bold, still yet powerful. “Unquiet” refers to both the immensity of the landscape and its transcendent loneliness. The painting exits in the liminal space between the imagined and the physical, and the individual and the universal.

— Trine Bumiller, 2013

Trine Bumiller is a graduate of The Rhode Island School of Design. She has exhibited nationwide, including the Cincinnati Art Museum, Las Cruces Museum of Art and the University of Wyoming Art Museum. Grants include: Colorado Council on the Arts Artist Fellowship Award, Grants to Artists and Organizations Award, and Arts Innovation Award from the Colorado Federation of the Arts. Trine has attended residencies at Yaddo and Denali National Park. Trine has completed public art commissions for the City and County of Denver and the University of Colorado. Private collections include the Four Seasons, HSBC, AT&T, Hewlett Packard, Century Link, the University of Iowa and Denver Children’s Hospital. She is represented by Robischon Gallery in Denver, Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in New York and Zg Gallery in Chicago. She lives and works in Denver, Colorado. Visit Trine Bumiller's website.

 

Erik DeLuca

During the winter solstice of 2011-12 I skied out to the Savage Cabin in Denali National Park where I stayed for nine days as a component of an Artist-in-Residence position. Out there, in the frozen hush, there were moments where I perceived no sounds between the rhythms of my breath. Within these moments of silence, where time seemed to stop, I started imagining sounds. These imagined sounds, in a sense, became "Winter." During the residency I spent time reflecting on my musical past and how it could inform my future artistic pursuits. I thought about the politics of musical borrowing, the collaborative process, genre blurring, and issues of framing. These concepts, in addition to my engagements through ecoacoustic tasks, ground "Winter."

— Erik DeLuca, 2012

Erik DeLuca is a composer, sound artist, and scholar of sound. As an Artist-in-Residence and “social science” researcher in the National Park system (Grand Canyon, Denali, North Cascades, Isle Royale, Wrangell-St. Elias, Crater Lake, and Acadia) he has taken to fieldwork-esque experiential modes of making. His music has been played by Ensemble Signal, members of eighth blackbird, Todd Reynolds, Splinter Reeds, Vicky Chow, Andie Springer, Talujan, Vicki Ray, Dither, Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival Orchestra, and Friction. He is a lecturer in the music department at the University of Virginia. Visit Erik DeLuca's website.

Sonic Portraits: Winter in Denali

"Silence moves way beyond the absence of sound and into personal metaphors for how we explore everyday life." — Erik DeLuca, composer

Composer Erik DeLuca worked with students from the Denali and Nenana Borough School Districts during January 2012 to interpret the winter soundscape of Denali. DeLuca spent a week at the snowbound Savage Cabin, Mile 13 along the Park Road taking field notes and recording natural sounds in preparation to compose an original piece of music. Post residency, Erik took students on a field trip into the park where they explored the winter soundscape through listening and writing exercises. The group discussed the nature of silence and how we interpret it in these natural spaces.

 

 

Kim Heacox

Kim Heacox is the author of several books on history, biography, and conservation. His Alaska memoir, The Only Kayak, was a 2006 PEN USA Literary Award finalist in creative nonfiction. He was a writer-in-residence at Cambridge University's Scott Polar Research Center in 1998. In 2009 he appeared on camera in the Ken Burns film The National Parks: America's Best Idea. He lives in Gustavus, Alaska with his wife Melanie, two sea kayaks, two guitars, one piano, and an African drum. He often volunteers as a music teacher at the local school. Visit Kim Heacox' Website.

 

• A Letter to Ade Murie

  
  

  Kim Heacox reads "A Letter to Ade Murie"

  Credit / Author:

  NPS / Emily Brouwer

  Audio Transcript

  Dear Ade,

  I miss you.

  First, may I call you Ade? In the photos I see of you, white-haired on a high ridge in Mount McKinley National Park, a thousand feet or more above the Park Road, field glasses in hand, tundra underfoot, looking, always looking, you strike me as the kind of guy who’d say, “Sure, you can call me Ade. And what’s your name?” Warm smile. Soft voice, almost musical. It seems odd, I know, since we never met. But many people today know you, or of you: travelers and teachers, scientists and students, scholars and conservationists, artists and politicians. If you only knew. Maybe you do. Living as you did, first as a visionary wildlife biologist, then author, and always a crusader for wildness and wild places, you did something remarkable. While Walt Disney pounded us with messages and images of “the big, bad wolf,” you said just the opposite. You said wolves are beneficial to prey species; they cull out the old, sick and weak, and create a more robust, vibrant, magical landscape. You took risks. You spoke the unpopular truth. You lived with great intention and reached beyond your allotted time and created a legacy, a damn good one. That’s how I know you.

  Second, you always wanted this park to be larger than its original size as established in 1917. You wanted it to protect entire watersheds and the summer/ winter home ranges of wildlife populations; you wanted an intact ecosystem. It happened in 1980, six years after you left us, with passage of a lands act that established more than 100 million acres of new Alaska national parks, preserves, monuments and wildlife refuges. Your park was tripled in size to six million acres and renamed Denali National Park and Preserve. It could happen only once, and did; it’ll never happen again. We’ll take what we can get, and be grateful every day.

  Third, I hope you’re comfortable with this. You’re now called “the conscience of Denali.” A heavy mantle, for sure. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “conscience” as “the faculty of recognizing the distinction between right and wrong in regard to one’s own conduct.” That can get confusing these days, bombarded as we are by television and Twitter, Facebook and You Tube... things you never heard of. Just as well. Everybody’s got an opinion. If they believe it enough, it’s fact; if they shout it, it’s truth. What they need is time on the tundra. Quiet reflection. Less noise. Fewer gadgets. A historian I know says you “exerted a force both spiritual and scientific” in the early development of this park. In other words, you gave us all something to admire and strive for.

  You changed the way we see the world.

  And last, the cabin you so loved on the East Fork of the Toklat River, still stands. In winter, at twenty below, it’s used by rangers on sled dog patrol. In summer, bathed in light, it’s occupied by visiting scientists and artists- and writers-in- residence for inspiration. Sometimes bears, standing full height, scratch their backs on the weathered corners. From inside, you think it’s an earthquake until you hear the low, satisfied sound of groaning.

  It’s September now. Getting cold. I’d write more but I’m drawn outside. The stars are out; the wolves are howling.

  Thank you, Ade.

  In gratitude,

  Kim

 

Marybeth Holleman

Marybeth Holleman is author of The Heart of the Sound, co-author of Among Wolves, and co-editor of Crosscurrents North. Pushcart-prize nominee, her essays, poems, and articles have appeared in dozens of journals, magazines, and anthologies, among them Orion, Christian Science Monitor, Sierra, Literary Mama, North American Review, AQR, The Future of Nature, and on National Public Radio. She has taught creative writing and women’s studies at the University of Alaska Anchorage, and writes for nonprofits on environmental issues, from polar bears to oil spills. She writes a blog called Art and Nature. A North Carolina transplant, she has lived in Alaska for more than 25 years. Visit Marybeth Holleman's website.

 

Tattler Creek

“There’s such incredible stories in these rocks,” he says, arms spread wide. We hike quickly up Tattler Creek, hopping back and forth across threads of clearwater, through willow and over a tundra-blanketed bench, as Tony Fiorillo tells me how it came to be that he is here, climbing Denali’s mountains in search of dinosaur fossils. It took years to convince the National Park Service to let him search this wilderness; it took someone finding the first print. A geology professor was in the park with two graduate students, explaining Dr. Fiorillo’s theory that dinosaur fossils might be found in the dark sedimentary rock near where they stood at the base of Igloo Mountain.

“Like this one?” said one of the students, pointing to a boulder, just feet from the park road. She had found the first dinosaur print in Denali National Park. Tony and three others were soon carefully extricating the footprint to bring to Park Headquarters, where it’s displayed at the Murie Science and Learning Center. Bent over their work, they noticed a busload of visitors stopped on the road next to them. At first they assumed the driver wanted to show these visitors the archaeologists extracting the park’s first dinosaur print. Then one of the four noticed, just on the other side of Igloo Creek, lying down as relaxed as the family dog and watching them intently, a wolf. The bus had stopped to see the wolf, and the wolf had stopped to watch the archaeologists.

We climb upvalley, leaving willow thickets behind. The rock changes from the reddish volcanic of the Upper Cantwell formation to the slate-colored sedimentary of the Lower Cantwell, formed from an ancient river system of the late Cretaceous. This dark older rock, Tony tells me, is where fossils are found. I point to a line of rocks jutting out like fins running up the mountainside.

“Is that the kind of place you look?” I ask.

Seconds later, Tony’s colleague from Japan, Yoshi, points to a footprint, and Tony picks up part of a fossilized tree trunk. It’s a hidden world from deep time here, when these black mountains were plains of mud and stream and lush vegetation, and twenty-five-foot dinosaurs roamed them.

“This is the most exciting place to work,” says Tony. These prints reveal the lives of high-latitude dinosaurs; they help prove that dinosaurs migrated across the Bering Land Bridge, that Asian and North American dinosaurs were related.

We stop at a Y in the stream and a field of tent-sized boulders. Tony points out print after print in the boulder field, from several different dinosaurs, including the three-toed duck-billed hadrosaur and the pachyrhinosaurus, a cousin of the triceratops with a knobby face that, says Tony, “only a mother could love.” We climb up further and, on a slab of dark rock surrounded by scree, he shows me the dance floor. It’s upside down, a result of the crumpling, grinding, and uplifting of shifting tectonic plates, and it reveals at least a dozen prints of dinosaurs all together—a place where dinosaurs gathered to feed. Tony invented the term “dancefloor” to connote a place with many prints on one intact rock face, the term itself borrowed from the floor of a Fred Astaire dance studio, where tape outlines help new dancers find their way.

And Tony discovered another dancefloor in Denali, one with thousands of fossil prints from sediments so fine that even skin impressions are preserved, as well as traces of crayfish and other invertebrates, the body hop impressions of crickets, fish fins, and even the probe marks of shorebird bills and ripples of waves at shoreline.

Tony, Yoshi, and Yoshi’s student Tomo head further upstream to a newly discovered print from a four-toed theradinosaur that may be an omnivorous cousin of the carnivorous therapods. I stay in the boulder field to see if I can relocate the prints. It’s surprisingly difficult, as if they slipped back beneath the muds of time. Then I meander downstream, thinking about the mysteries still contained within this vast and beautiful wilderness. All these dinosaur prints, 65 to 80 million years old, were left unseen until 2005, a mere seven years ago.

Driving by this unassuming creek opposite Cathedral Mountain, it’s impossible to guess what treasures lie upstream. I’ve been to Denali dozens of times over nearly thirty years, but am still learning—will always be learning—what this place holds, for it is rich and diverse, and slow to show its treasures. This is wilderness time. Different from our clock time, the wilderness follows its own ticking, and reveals its secrets to those who are patient, and persevere. In these wild mountains is a lesson for us: as much as we think we know, with all our years of science and experience, it’s just a drop in the bucket to what is held here.

Sable Pass

Place is the first of all beings, since everything that exists is in a place and cannot exist without a place ~ Archytas

Nearly ten at night, I stop at Sable Pass to watch a caribou feeding near the road. He trots beside me, then halts, startled by a truck roaring up the hill. The truck stops, the caribou crosses into willow, and I’m just about to move on when I see them, the sow’s blond fur shimmering, the two cubs clustered near her thick legs. Midway down a mountainside in a field punctuated by willows, the grizzlies are eating late summer’s bounties of bear flowers and berries. So intent is the sow on eating that, though I watch for nearly an hour, not once does she lift her broad head. The cubs are sometimes focused on eating and sometimes more interested in other things–scudding clouds in the darkening sky, a tangle of willow, the butterfly that flushes before them. Their mother begins to dig, powerful shoulders working, chunks of tundra tossed skyward. The cubs scamper over, a playful rocking-horse gait. The lighter-colored one, blond like his mother, joins in the digging; the darker one approaches, then emits a few high-pitched grunts, like a baby’s squeal of surprise, and bounds back.

The cub’s cries flow downhill to where I sit, the only sounds in the cool evening air, and stir within me a memory of an early July day when I saw another sow and cub, just down this hill in an interlinked series of tundra ponds. My husband, son, and I watched them feed on sweet summer grasses, then amble downhill, across the road, through willow and into a pond. We watched as they plunged their heads underwater, as the cub pulled up a plant and swung it around, back and forth, like a baby with a rag doll. Watched as they climbed out of the water, the cub splashing and loping. Watched as the cub ran and jumped on the sow,who rolled over onto her back, gigantic paws and long black claws limp in the summer air, rolling and hugging and wrestling but so carefully not hurting her cub, who was all-out playing, hard and tumbly.

I saw these bears more than a decade ago, but haven’t remembered them at all until this moment. This happens every time I come to Denali: I see a certain rise of a hill, or slip of a stream, and recall something experienced there, something I had forgotten until the place itself revealed memory to me. Then I remember with a precision that makes me wonder about time and memory, about the inner workings of my brain and the outer workings of place. Climbing the hill toward Polychrome, I recalled stopping there one late September day to watch four wolves, two of them black, trot down the braided East Fork River, the first wild wolves that my son, then eight years old, had ever seen. Winding up Stony Dome on a hot sunny day, I remembered a caribou high on the ridge, silhouetted against a robin’s egg blue sky, shaking its great antlered head against an onslaught of insects, as I climbed the slope with friends. Struck by how memory is tied to place, I realize my memory isn’t stored entirely within me, but resides in place, too, in some space or energy between.

The Native Athabascans who once traveled Denali to collect berries or hunt caribou had their own place names. They called Caribou Creek “Gal Neelekh No’:” the creek which king salmon swim to. Baker Creek was “Noch’ elt lek No’:” game leaps across creek. And “Khotolnodenh,” where water surges up, is their name for Toklat Springs, a legendary place where there was always open water, where they could find food during very cold winters. These names signified what happened here, and helped hold memory in place.

I leave the bear family to their late-night grazing and continue up the hill, but at the crest I stop again for another sight burned in memory, both rare and familiar: rising over the top of the now-dark mountains, still bathed in sunlight, white that isn’t cloud but sharp angles and glimmering ice, the top of Mount McKinley, Denali, the Great One.

Stony Dome

She stood looking at us, this group of six people on the spongy tundra, close enough to fill the frame of my binoculars. Cinnamon face, soft brown coat glinting in midday sun, she was hot; her tongue hung long and narrow, her mouth opened in a wide smile, and her ears pulled toward each other and back. We stood still, barely breathing, my beating heart the only sound I heard. I didn’t reach for my camera: like an apparition, she might have vanished into blue sky.

On this discovery hike near Stony Dome in late July, our ranger, Dianne, told us that this wolf was one of the Grant Creek wolves, a family group that had been seen frequently in the park for many years. Busloads of visitors have watched these wolves chase caribou, lead pups across the road, set off for a hunt with a chorus of howls. But Grant Creek suffered such losses in spring that sightings were way down and the remaining members were scattered and rarely seen. I knew this story, carried it with me like a lead weight.

I carry it a week later as I peer into an empty wolf den above the East Fork River. Hands and knees on powdery loam, I peer into the ten-inch-wide hole tunneling back into the grassy bank, into darkness, but find only two faint prints and one tuft of fur, pale gray and light as air. The summer before, the
Grant Creek wolves raised pups here. The female who was trapped this spring nursed them here.

I climb above the den and sit with Tom Meier, the park’s wolf biologist, as a steady wind blows and sunlight slips in and out of clouds. We talk about the Grant Creek and East Fork wolf groups, the most viewed and longest lived lineage in all of Denali National Park. They are direct descendants of the same wolf family Adolph Murie studied seventy years ago, watching them from the bluff across from us, the same wolf groups Gordon Haber studied for forty-three years. When they denned here last summer, it was the first recorded use in decades. This thrilled those who followed Denali’s famous wolf packs, but it only lasted one year.

In April, after mating and before pupping, the Grant Creek alpha female was trapped at the park’s northeastern boundary—right where the state had just removed a buffer that had prohibited wolf hunting and trapping. She likely carried the year’s pups, for though they were seen at this den in May, the remaining members have since scattered. Wolves exist in community, everything done as one, a rhythm to their seasons, nomadic in winter and den-centered in summer. Without pups to cooperatively raise, without an alpha female, the Grant Creek family group has fragmented. According to Tom and all the bus drivers and park rangers I’ve asked, no one has seen any Grant Creek pups. Throughout the park, wolf sightings have dropped by seventy percent. It will be years, if ever, for that to rise, for eastern Denali wolves to recover. Generations, intact, are required for the intricacies of cooperative society to evolve.

In previous years, Grant Creek wolves were the ones visitors saw. The summer before, a bus driver and her passengers watched the wolves prepare for a hunt, the way they have for millenia here in Denali. The adults began gathering and chorus howling right next to the road. On their heels were the pups, wanting to join in but reprimanded to stay with one adult, their pup-sitter. As the hunters trotted off single file across tundra, the pups sat in the middle of the road, whining and howling, gray-fuzz heads turned intently toward the departing line.

For my residency, I’d been most excited about staying at the East Fork cabin while the wolves denned just upriver. Perhaps, like one former resident, I’d be awakened in the mornings to wolves howling after returning from a night’s hunt with food for the pups. Or perhaps, like another, I’d look out the window to see a yearling wolf on the porch, wrestling with the broom. Instead, the wolves were nowhere to be seen or heard, and I was bereft over all that one trapper had taken from this renowned family of wolves, from me and from everyone else visiting the park.

High on the the bench in an open field, Tom points to a dead wolf, the older Grant Creek female who also died in spring, but of natural causes. Nature is swift to reclaim her own: only a few months dead, she is already no more than skin and bones, tufts of white fur scattered around her. Most wolves turn white with age, says Tom; rarely is one born white.

Years before, one young white wolf from the East Fork group was also killed just outside the park, by a sport hunter from the midwest. On a visit to that hunter’s state, Tom saw the stuffed and mounted wolf, and told a friend he was glad, in a way, it had been preserved, so everyone could see what a gorgeous animal it was. His friend told him, no, he’d rather see it dead on the tundra, having died of natural causes, rotting into the ground.

“Well,” says Tom, “I guess I’d have to agree with him.”

Nature gives answers in response to the kinds of questions we ask, wrote the poet Pattiann Rogers, and in this scientific age, the questions most asked are those that science can answer. But what other questions could we ask of nature? What else could these wolves tell us, if we let them be? What can community form, what relations to place? What shape does grief take in the physical world? What does love look like when it’s shattered?

Standing at Stony Dome, I looked hard at the wolf through my binoculars, and wondered: was she too thin? Was she split from the pack, and having trouble finding food on her own? A lone wolf is a dead wolf, so the saying goes, and it is true, they cannot fare well alone for long. I scanned her body: were those ribs sticking through, or just sunlight playing on her brindled coat?

She resumed her slow trot across bearberry and dwarf birch, making a slow arc around us, then turned downhill toward the stream. As she entered willow thickets, in and out of my view, she sprinted, stopped, and pounced—all four feet off the ground, neck and head up, as if she was spring-loaded. Then the slow trot again, and she disappeared around a bend in the stream, into the narrow opening between two mountains that water had created.

East Fork

for Louise Murie, 1912-2012

I sit on the porch and think of her, sitting on this porch, as her husband perched upriver on the far ridge, waiting for pups to emerge or adults to arrive at the wolf den across the East Fork. Louise, having finished her morning chores around the one-room cabin, may have risen, begun walking down to the stream to fetch water, and been stopped, as I have been, by the sweet scent of northern bedstraw, by rows of equisetum shimmering in morning light, by river beauties nodding fuchsia faces over clear-running waters. Perhaps she wondered how the cinquefoil with its five petals was related to the rose; perhaps she wondered if gentian grew on other continents. So many blossoms at her feet; in one week here I have found over fifty different types. Louise began collecting plants, pressing roots, stems, leaves and flowers. She and Adolph packaged them off to those who helped identify them: a friend in Maine, a lichen specialist in Norway, a botanist in Sweden who later wrote the definitive book of Alaska flora. Louise Murie was among the first to begin identifying and classifying the plants of Denali National Park, just as her husband Adolph Murie was among the first to study the park’s sheep and wolves and bears, the first to urge protection of the wolves. Pioneers, the Muries were, like these river beauties I now sit beside, watching the stream tug at their leaves. In the Cathedral Range I have seen these flowers pour down either side of steep- falling waters like a long, billowing scarf. At Wonder Lake they fringe lakeside; near Thoroughfare Pass they slip between rocks and willow. Their other common name is fireweed, because they are the first flowering plant to colonize after fire.

In this new landscape recently released from icefields, they are the first to succeed after ice; I’ve seen them cling to granite walls revealed by receding glaciers. Now I sit on the porch in evening light and watch their bobbing heads. In another few weeks, pink petals will fall, and pistils will swell, split, and send puffs of seed like starlight out into the air to settle where wind carries all pioneers: someplace new, undiscovered, and lit from within.

 

Red Carpet” 91” x 24” digital print on canvas

Rika Mouw

Red Carpet

A red carpet is used for distinguished visitors upon their arrival. With its history Park Road, Denali National Park offers visitors unparalleled access to a vast and wondrous wilderness. A maintained road inside a designated wilderness is uncommon. Good or bad, it serves as a "red carpet." It is a true privilege to be able to enter the heart of this spectacular landscape, stand in awe of North America's highest mountain peak and experience the amazing wildlife that inhabits the wondrous place. It is my hope that each visitor will come away from Denali as an ambassador for this untrammeled wilderness, and for all remaining untrammeled landscapes.

It is through this piece, created with an assemblage of red fireweed leaves gathered in the fall, that I hope to evoke a sense that each of us travels on a red carpet while inside this wilderness. The gathered leaves were individually pressed, dried, arranged on a large sheet of paper and then photographed. This photograph is the actual size of the assemblage. Once photographed, the leaves were returned to the landscape.

— Rika Mouw, 2012

Rika Mouw is a studio jewelry maker/sculptor living in Homer, Alaska. She studied and received her degree in landscape architecture from the California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, with the intention of better integrating human built environments within their respective surrounding natural landscapes.

She worked in this capacity in Colorado for many years Today her artwork is inspired by her continued deep connection with Nature and her on going advocacy for the natural environment. Her work is in the collections of the Anchorage Museum and the Pratt Museum in Homer. It has been shown across the country in museums, galleries and publications in her ongoing advocacy for the beauty and importance of the complexly interconnected natural systems which we all depend upon.

 

Linda Schandelmeier

Denali Poems

Being in Denali National Park for 10 days was like stepping through a doorway into a landscape that was simultaneously familiar and foreign. I had visited the park multiple times over the previous 40 years, but had never stayed long enough to learn much about it. I knew the physical and emotional terrain only superficially. These Denali poems explore the literal and figurative landscape I found when I stepped through that metaphorical doorway that allowed me to experience the Park as a quiet participant and observer. Some of what I encountered (the bears at the window of the Murie cabin, the rams on Polychrome, the riotous budding and blooming flowers and shrubs, and the sandpipers and white-crowned sparrows) appear in the poems. I believe these poems celebrate the vastness of this space and reflect on how wild places allow us to connect with and learn from the other living things that share our planet.

— Linda Schandelmeier, 2012

The Sandpiper

At the edge of the muskeg ponds,
near the place
where the boardwalk turns
toward the mountains,
a solitary sandpiper
bobs on its greenish-yellow legs,
probing for insects in the murky water.
Sun shifts through jumbled branches,
a wisp of breeze keeps away mosquitoes,
and cobbly rocks line the dry creek bed
we hike over.
Flowers unroll everywhere,
the yellow and rose louseworts,
violets, nagoonberries,
smolder with color.
But the bird with its
brown and white-splashed feathers,
long beak and elegant legs,
and unassuming grace and form,
is breathtaking.
As we approach
it flies to the top of a ragged spruce tree,
its wary high-pitched call
echoing off the wall of trees.
That call opens inside me.
It knows life’s sorrow and desolation,
even today, this day in June,
punctuated with such impossible sweetness.

Bears

From the undertow of sleep,
noises on the porch,
I grab my glasses and a bear head
comes into focus at the cabin window.
We are face to face
eying each other.
My heart leaps, then settles
as she drops to all fours
and scoots down the driveway,
with her two-year-old in tow.
The city is distant
as they scatter into the sea-green willows.

On Polychrome

Rams
ahead of us
on the trail
slow
us down
while the sky
fidgets
blue,
then gray.
Just as
we reach the top
wind smears us
with cold rain
and hail.
We’re
not as unconcerned
as the sheep.
Lightening cracks
close, silhouettes
our shivering,
as we skitter down
the mountain.

Lupines

When the blooming begins
I stare at them
sprawling on the river bank—
a blue mat
spilled into by violet
and lavender.
I don’t know this color,
will never know it,
but it preoccupies me
like a dream
written in code.
The color unfurls inside me
aching like an absence
I am reminded of
watching the wind
in the leaves.
The way I remember them
each flower spike
claims its space,
maybe the whole sky.

For the Windflowers

I bow my head
MMM with the windflowers.
For their white petals
MMM tinged with blue-gray,
for their stems
MMM curving in unison
toward the earth.
MMM Like a symphony
for this place.

Denali Sojourn

I give myself up—
MMM the woman who gardens,
the wife,
MMM the brooder.
Sitting at this wooden table
MMM looking out the south window
at the mountains,
MMM I am deep in the spell
of those who stayed here before me.
Sometimes my mind goes blank
MMM staring at it all—
all the land,
MMM all the quiet.
Other times
MMM this place is
an opening,
a door
MMM I step through
where orange lichen
MMM bursting from the rock,
or a white-crowned sparrow’s melodious song
can suddenly be alien or heartbreaking.

A Meditation

Red buds poke out of the shrubs,
silvery leaves lift
from their wrappings,
patches of yellow poppies
umbrella the hillside.
Even the carnivorous bog violet
sends up a purple bloom
while still devouring insects.
By sun they are washed,
by sun they hurry into bloom.
We have that too,
the love of warmth,
Spring’s intensity.
Even when no one
is watching.

Linda Schandelmeier is the author of Listening Hard Among the Birches, a collection of poetry published in 2002 by Vanessa Press, Fairbanks, AK. Her poetry has been awarded numerous prizes and distinctions, including a Rasmuson Individual Artist Project Award in 2007, and an Individual Artist’s Fellowship from the Alaska State Council on the Arts in 1984. Her poems have been set to music in three song cycles, one of which, “Poem Against the Cold,” by British composer Corey Field, was performed at Carnegie Hall. A retired biologist and elementary school teacher, and an active master gardener, she lives near Fairbanks, AK.