Alaskan Gift
Separating Infinity’s Tiny, Miraculous Pieces
written by: Jay Schwartz
Sometimes, the only thing the horizon shows is what we know to be there.
I stand on a craggy, Alaskan beach watching the waves lap up the shore in their swallowing, salty mouths. The view is jagged, watery, cold, and unending: the skyline is too vast to locate any true points of reference, so the dolphin, orca, and whale blur together in a great collective.
My mom started working up here recently, preaching to a little church on Juneau’s hillside. Her congregants—kind, reserved—have us put up in a temporary parsonage much like the city itself: grey; it’s a creaky, older building, and the steps of our fourth-floor walk-up lead to a threshold where my boots rest wearily. My room is small, cozy; from my narrow window beneath the slanted roof, I can see the light of our neighbor’s kitchen. The light is always on and always warm, battling the city’s twilight.
Quickly, my mom busies herself in talking to the city’s locals: about the crab, the habits of the politicians working in the Capitol, and the buying process for salmon on the docks. These conversations mention how the seafood is always sublime and the city is always enveloped in blue light; how the hawkers in the tourist district give us a bad reputation but how the ships that deliver the crowds will be gone soon enough. As she commutes the messages back to me, we learn much: about the species, people, and the traditions of Native groups—tribes here believe that time is non-linear; it’s cyclical, spinning cosmically through these natural seasons and patterns.
It’s easy for me to see how that faith comes to be, in this wild, silvery place. This land carries glaciers which carve new inches of valley each day, it holds wide-winged crows that flutter eternally around the docks, and it nourishes the dandelions that spend in the summer months reaching higher and higher for the sun. Here, patterns of life are unavoidable—they’re familiar. The seasons circle as do the eagles in the sky and the fish in the bay; the water runs cold and we know that winter will come. Thin spaces, the in-betweens, they’re inevitable in this place, at the crossroads of life and wild rawness. Even in the city, the tourists come and go methodically, in three-day patterns: boats bear new people carrying little shadows of our old friends, and they, too, depart. In Juneau, life surrounds one so powerfully that ghosts, revenants, animals, and spirits cannot be fiction, but a part of this moving life.
Drifting amidst the predictability of the future and our stories of the past, life follows us in cycles. I sit here, waiting amidst the freshness, amongst the never-quite-finished, the shifting winds, the restless life, and the ever-developing, growing forest wilds. My life moves by some hand which is not my own human behavior: I flow, like all life here, through the green and the ice, through the rain to the rivers to the seas. My only true conviction is that of eternity: patterns of life, my own reflection, and the ground’s salt: Alaska reminds me that I am another particle of iodine in this briny, briny seashore—I, too, come and go; I, too, am in a manner of endlessness.
The sun is coming out. It’s expected; sublime.
- Alaskan Gift - July 28, 2025
