The Dalton

A Wild Plea

Dear Friends and Family,

For four days, I have camped out at Coldfoot, mile marker 175 on the Dalton. For four days, I have waited for words to come. It was not until the lonesome howl of a pack of wolves from the yonder trees moments before midnight last night that words began to appear. And still they are few.

When words won’t come, we are naked. We come into the world this way, and this is how we are in our most intimate moments: naked and wordless. I have been this way since Deadhorse and the kiss of the Arctic waters on Monday.

It is as though silence itself is word.

The tundra is silent. A glacial lake is silent, and so, too, a granite bald where ice once draped like a blue blanket over eons of geologic time. The morning mist is silent. Shafts of sunlight breaking through a dense fog are silent. A shadow appears as silence itself. But nowhere has there been a silence like that of the Musk Ox who stood to the west on the near edge of a tundral plain as I was heading out of Deadhorse…