October 1st

I am exhausted.

I’ve been hunting every day after work for six weeks, stumbling into the house after dark and hoovering a quick meal before I collapse onto my bed. My wife and her friends call themselves “hunting widows” for the six weeks that comprise moose and caribou season, and I’ve hardly seen her since the end of August.

But I’m not done yet. The greenhouse and much of the garden need to be harvested. For the last month, a pile of wood has sat on the lawn waiting to be split and stacked. Garden implements and my kids’ belongings are scattered throughout the yard. The vehicles need their snow tires put on. I look anxiously at the snow adorning the tops of the nearby peaks and check the forecast for the fourth time today. Can I get all this accomplished before the first snowflakes mark the beginning of our six-month winter?

Summers in Alaska produce a mania among its residents. From the moment the soil is visible in April until the first snows of September or October, many Alaskans tend to fill their days with activities to get them through the winter. Not all of these activities involve storing food or firewood. In our brief Alaskan summers, the land blooms with life, and Alaskans take full advantage of the myriad options for recreation. After all, the winter is long and dark, and biking, backpacking, gardening, and kayaking will be a faint dream by the time January rolls around. Alaskans are as passionate about gathering memories as they are about gathering blueberries. With no darkness in the summer month, we run ourselves ragged chasing caribou or peaks or memories.

William Wordsworth, an English Romantic poet, wrote about this harvesting of memories in his poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles from Tintern Abbey.” Having returned to his favorite “nature spot” after a five-year absence, he reflects upon how these memories made in the mountains will feed him:

While here I stand, not only with the sense

Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts

That in this moment there is life and food

For future years.

I often think about these lines when I’m in the mountains and how the memories made in our brief summer will provide the “life and food” to get us through the dark months of winter, where days of daylight and green vegetation seem like a half-forgotten dream.

This year has been unusual. The summer started with cloudless days and unseasonably warm temperatures. The garden exploded with life, and I think fondly of our gold prospecting trip where us dads hovered over 5-gallon buckets of gravel, expectantly waiting for tiny specks of gold to slowly appear. The kids laughed and played as they floated down the frigid creek in an intertube fashioned from a garbage bag and an abandoned tire. The wives humored us.

This year’s memories will also include huddling under a spruce tree in the driving rain, hoping some moose with more curiosity than sense will walk towards our comically-bad attempts at sounding like a cow moose. The rainy season came early this year; the rain started in mid-July and has been relentless since. My soggy garden, my chilly honeybees, and I are all a little grumpy that our short summer, our season to harvest memories, was marred by record-breaking rain.

It is with these thoughts in mind that I greet October. I’m depressed that a fruitless hunting season is over, but I’m relieved too. I’ll miss traipsing through the woods like a carefree teenager every night and every weekend. I’ve dropped twenty pounds over our manic summer and I’ve seen some beautiful country during the height of our too-brief autumn. But my knee hurts, the to-do list has only grown since hunting season began, and I miss my wife. Six months of manic activity have caught up with me, and the idea of reading a book next to a woodstove as snowflakes gently descend sounds really appealing right now. And at least for now, I pretend like I won’t resent winter in February.

The freezer and pantry are full. Honey, apples, beets, and salmon have been harvested for the year. More importantly, a couple of dozen sweet memories of a summer full of family, friends, and adventure have been neatly packed and stored in my mind. Hopefully, in those memories, there is enough “life and food” to get me through another winter.

Leave a Comment