i remember my island (not mine—my island in my memory). i remember talking to my father as he lighted the grill about psychogeography, i was thinking about the island i think, but i don't know when it was, i was talking about the spirit of place. i feel like he sort of knew and sort of humored me as he lit the charcoal funnel. now i put that with the memory of my brief self-exile on the island, when i camped on a cliff point in the wind with a twisty old arbutus anchoring me. i felt the spirit of the place, and down below the little island that was only an island during high tide. i was escaping my uncle. i didn't belong there. i wasn't even in my birth country. i think now of when a fellow fell off the same point and died, walking over the spot i felt an updraft. and when my neighbor died and we burned 4 meals for his spirit journey i remember the ravens circling. they came to get me the night he died and i did hide. i might have belonged if i could have tried. if i had i would have explored the mysterious rock carvings and kept a record, but that's now—i wasn't keeping a record then, and i would have dreamed at night and studied them by the moon, the creatures with antennae and wings, and other unidentified flying things, and eventually, as i heard, i would have grieved the encroachment impending even then, and it's not so different feeling the encroachment here, almost feeling an island feeling, almost 40 years on.

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the physical landscape is baffling in its ability to transcend whatever we would make of it. it is as subtle in its expression as turns of the mind, and larger than our grasp; and yet it is still knowable. the mind, full of curiosity and analysis, disassembles a landscape and then reassembles the pieces—the nod of a flower, the color of the night sky, the murmur of an animal—trying to fathom its geography.

                                                                                 —Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams