How do I describe the last week of my life?
Busy? Yeah. Crazy, too. With a dash of foreboding, and a healthy dose of fun as well.
I said goodbye to old friends leaving on a trip, and hello to old friends returning, and even hello to a new friend/roommate/coworker. I spent a lot of time at the airport. I went out with some friends to catch fish, and instead watched a walrus lumber around in the water on the East end of town. We went for a hike on Anvil Mountain and watched a herd of musk ox and their little calves. We collected qiviut from the brush. Laura and I baked ninja gingerbread cookies.
So many photographical moments, and not a single photograph taken. If the photographic evidence of my life in Nome were charted on a line graph, it would look something like this:
You could say I’ve developed something of an aversion to carrying my camera around. Sure, sometimes I just forget and shrug my shoulders. Oh, well. I’ll get some cool shots next time. Other times I blame practicality: why risk it falling into the river or cracking against a rock? And who even knows when I charged the battery last.
But more and more I find myself resisting the urge to photograph. It’s starting feeling like a reminder that my life here is supposed to be temporary. I have to catch the moment or it will be gone forever and then how will I tell the story later on, when I’m not here anymore? But I’m not a tourist here. This is where I live. I go for walks on the beach all the time. I go hiking or biking or walking somewhere every weekend. Why document my life so intensely when I live it every day?
It’s been a re-training process of sorts. Where once I thought, Get out the camera! now I think, Remember to tell Mom and Dad about this when I call. I try to record the details in my head so I can explain it just right: the funny little jumping way musk ox calves run to hide behind the adults, or how I found qivuit stretched so thinly between willow branches that it looked like the spider webs that cover the ground in the summer in Ohio. There has to be a way to share it in words and expressions and laughter, right? I’ll save the camera for the random day I feel like taking photographs, and the rest of the time I’ll just remember to remember.
Of course, the odds are usually good that someone nearby has a camera ready to record whatever little wonders crop up.
