Today, a little three minute video of Aiailk bay popped up in my facebook feed from my old kayak boss who has his own outfitting company in Seward, now. Some clients of his put it together, and it captures a perfect bluebird day heading out of Resurrection Bay, passing breaching whales, sea lions, and sea birds, kayaking past towering cliffs, tidewater glaciers, and rookeries. Watching the clips, I was reminded of all the perfect days I had the summer I guided, the icy cold breeze on my cheeks in the mornings, taking a boat across the bay with a load of kayaks and tourists. The slow burn of paddling for eight or ten hours along the shores and into coves looking for wildlife and pointing out hanging glaciers in the mountains above. The acrid smell of wet neoprene, used for too many days, wafting up from a pile of gear on the shore. The cold trickle of arctic water on my hands, escaping over the little o-ring around the paddle shaft. The weird heat of the inside of the kayak as I stuck my head in upside down to adjust foot pegs for client after client for weeks and months on end. Watching a family of mergansers grow from tiny chicks to gangling adolescent birds over the course of the summer.
It is easy to remember the idyllic pieces of that season, especially looking forward to my own return to Seward in a week or two. But the hard parts of that summer, and of that job, seem buried a little deeper than the good ones now that that more than ten years of road separate us. The owner of the company I worked for was downright crazy, hiking into the woods where I was camping in the middle of the night to rattle my tent and accuse me of stealing her new puppy, firing employees on a whim in front of a boat full of clients and threatening everyone else’s jobs daily. Tourists could be cranky and stingy, festering family conflict bursting out in the open once they were stuck in a kayak together. Everything I owned molded in my tent, and when I moved into a tiny shack on the other side of town to put some distance between myself and the high proportion of crazy at work, it was literally falling apart around me and rats went through my food in the cabinets at night while my dog and I cowered on my cot and I threw shoes towards the noises in the dark. I was a lonely soul that summer, not cool or confidant enough to hang with the other guides. Enough of an introvert that I didn’t mind the social isolation for the most part, I still struggled to fit in with a crowd that was wilder and more party-prone than I am and mostly ended up on my own on my days off, wandering the town and local trails, avoiding my place of employment and residence, both.
Thinking about pain yesterday brought to mind the variable flagrancies of memory. Sometimes I can’t even remember the specifics of conversations I had yesterday, much less the details of ten or fifteen years past. And yet some of those things are burned into my memory, little images and moments that come unbidden some days and flood my mind when I let them. And that summer was certainly one for creating indelible impressions. But it is the darker side of these remembrances that make me anxious about going back, make me question the bright sunny days in my memory, the competence I thought I had much younger in the world. I am more aware of my own vulnerabilities now, and more unsure of my place in the lives and circles of others that I have not encountered in years. I wonder, tonight, how this place so long imagined after leaving her, will stand up to my memories once I’m on the ground. 
entelechyproject 