The Seen: From Alaska

Hello The Seen readers. This post is being written from a tent pitched somewhere near glacierview, Alaska. I meant to post this before I left, but that didn’t happen. And it seems somehow fitting to be doing this from on the road.

I’ll be taking a break from the seen this month as my bicycle and I are doing some wandering up in Alaska. So I wanted to do one last seen post that was about both the geographic location I am in, and the notion that rememberance usually focuses around beginnings and endings. Middles are often lost in the tumult, perhaps because they lack the dramatic punctuation that allows for specific memories to take on the quality of myth.

Take, for example, Grizzly Man. I know almost nothing about what his life living with bears was like; all I know is that he got eaten by them. And thus everything about the long period on which he actually managed to cohabitate with bears is reduced to static: his story is eclipsed by its own ending.

And with that, dear readers, I’m going back to radio silence. I’ll be back in August with very strong thighs and very funny tanlines. And hopefully a still-full canister of bear spray.

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