“It was the boat,” he told me.

I think of it now, that documentary that I never saw, in the same way I think of the Normandy boats and the private faces of the privates—some things belong only to the people who are experiencing them. And by people, I also mean seals.

Lunch tastes better when you’ve been writing. Same hummus as yesterday, same baby carrots, same unacceptable thing that I don’t like to tell people I eat. And yet it all tasted delicious like the way food tastes when you’ve been hiking all day and finally figure out how to get the stove to light without blowing yourself up and you make the freeze-dried plate of slop that you bought at REI and even though it’s unidentifiable vegetarian gore, it tastes ravenously delicious, and then you toast marshmallows that have been smashed flat in your pack but slowly, through the first course of the meal, expand back up to near-normal proportions so you can char them on a stick and eat the golden-black crust and then char them again. That’s what lunch tastes like when you’ve been doing your writing.

Pringles are the thing that I usually don’t admit to.

I don’t know how long this should be, but I could keep going forever, linking one thought to the next, one image to the other. Ha—I can see the faces three weeks in the future and the collective look of horror at the idea that the speaker’s sheaf of papers might be endless, self-perpetuating. The sheaf is not, but the story is. And I hope you’ll notice also that there is no story. It’s simply thinking, focused thinking, with words attached to memories attached to images and the images linked to form the elusive, still-blurry idea at its core. I can’t yet separate it from the background.

Once at Yellowstone I sat on the ground to focus my scope on a pack of wolves off in the distance, and one of the scientists I was there with said in a snobby, disgusted voice, “When you’re on the ground, to a bear you look like an animal struggling.” Same shitty guy who acted surprised when I was the only one who could rock their Jeep out of the snowbank. Just because you live in New York doesn’t mean you weren’t born in the Midwest, fuckwad, where the wind is so cold you scream silently walking from your house to the car, battery under your arm, between snowbanks as tall as your tall father.

And there we are, back to the subject at hand? My father, telling me about the Kodiak bears, how he and his buddy saw them using their claws to spear a fish and then sharing it, back and forth. “Claws this long, honey,” he said, crooking his finger.

Weren’t you scared? I asked him.

“Well, we had our guns,” he admitted.