Hardwoood Hearings

Remind me, sky, of my tilted footprints beneath your drenching upset stomach bound to the brim of my ball cap. 

Spit back out each smile that accompanied the atmospheric rivers who thrust castaway driftwood upon the sandy barrier beside the Bay.

Controller Bay, Alaska is not a place for electronics. The wind and rain is a deadly combination when wet sand gets plastered to the viewfinder.
(Photo by Brett Richard/River News)

Make me miss every pebble and primitive panic revolving around the nonexistent sun. 

Help me recall the reds and knots that give my tattered memories a vintage heartbeat. 

Distribute a mind wealthy with memory across the voids that crack our jagged tomorrow. 

Carry the tantalizing trumpets of grand waterfowl back across the treetops that dance in downpours. 

Loop the lupine back around my damp palms so the days that follow can migrate and mingle with the rest of our regurgitated world. 

Controller Bay, Alaska: where Georg Steller and Vitus Bering, old enough to only be oil painted, first made a name for themselves in what we now call the last frontier. 

To write for its full weight consumes my notebook when it crosses my mind every now and again, swelling and subsiding  with the seiche. 

On a rare calm day, the sheetwater reflections would take all my photographic attention.
(Photo by Blake Richard/River News)

More often than not, I’d wake to drops dripping on my tent when I camped in Controller Bay as part of a red knot abundance and prey availability survey with the Alaska Department of Fish & Game (ADF&G). One time it was snow, but the nearest inhabited town, Cordova, sees roughly 160 inches of rain annually. There is no question rain was the name of the slippery game.  

The sky would suppress the sun with grumbling clouds and salty spray, nearly always whipping wind across the microtopography of Controller Bay’s sling-loaded sediment flats.

If it wasn’t the rain, it was the wind, but it was usually both. Sunny and calm was simply an imagination alive on dreams. 

The ADF&G survey crew would get sandblasted as the exchange of air intensified along the ocean. Calm air would still produce a distant crash of surf, one you could only hear if the wind inside the Bay was nonexistent. 

The sky, dwelled upon by the many birds, would transfer their calls from feather to forest and capture them from air along an avalanche. 

Kinglets would canter from spruce to spruce, snow geese would shred grass along the sloughs, and snipe would sail over camp as they winnowed above the howling wolves. 

The wolves, with their arctic prints and hungry intents, venture the criss-cross streams and cinematic salmon runs. 

Moose and bear, coyotes and beaver, wandering through the willows beneath the bald eagles would question, just like me, all the explanation of strange skies. 

Movements, memories, and remnant recollections all brought back by looking up at the heavens transplant my tilted footprints back to the broken raindrops of Controller Bay. 

Blake Richard may be reached via email at [email protected].