I remember

Life for me is mostly composed of the present. The present can be relentlessly demanding in fact. There are bowls of Apple Jacks to be poured, quesadillas to be made, animals to pretend to be, bathrooms to clean, weeds to pull, husbands to talk to on the phone, sinks to pull my one-year old away from, kids to put in time-out, doctors appointments to be made, kids to tickle, bills to be paid, gestating babies feet to be forced out of ribs, meals to be made for friends in hard-times, piano lessons to give, neighbors to chat with about flooding yards and on and on. Memories of the past simply don't have sharp enough teeth to bite themselves to the forefront of my mind...usually.

But a week ago I promised my animal-loving boy that I would find and watch a video about Orcas on the computer with him. When his sister and brother were down for naps we cuddled on the couch hunched into my computer. I expected to come out of the experience feeling good about myself for giving my Bub some one-on-one time and with more Orca facts than my brain would have room to retain. Instead I came out with an odd twang in my heart.

I was surprised by the immediate response of my internal organs to the sight of an Orca's fin cutting the water of the southeastern coast of Alaska. The first glimpse of gray mist twining thickly through giant conifers on a layer of jagged rock and my heart was lost in the bottom of me. I didn't need to be told where the killer whale was swimming. I spent a summer in Gustavus, AK and I loved the place - the trees, the washboard roads, the people, the sea lions, the whales, the lupine, the two stop signs, the moose, the cars with 1978 plates, and the rocky, tree-choked, misty shorelines. Part of who I am is tangled up in having been there.

John Muir explored Glacier Bay in the early 1890's, the Bay that Gustavus sits at the bottom of, the Bay that thousands of cruisers tug up and down yearly, the Bay full of pieces of land that nobody has ever put a foot on, the Bay that felt kinda like it was mine for four months in the year 2000. When he first came he spent days in hopes of the fog clearing so he could get a true view of the place he had come to until finally the clouds parted and he and his men witnessed the mountains' "baptism in the down-pouring sunbeams." He went on to describe the experience, "Beneath the frosty shadows of the fiord, we stood hushed and awe-stricken, gazing at the holy vision; and had we see the heavens opened and God made manifest, our attention could not have been more tremendously strained." One of his men later remembered, "Muir would break out, after a long silence of blissful memory, with exclamations: `We saw it! We saw it! He sent us His most glorious exhibition. Praise God, from whom all blessings flow!'"

I remember now. I saw it. Praise God.