The pack of wolves in their radio collars, picked off one by one in the shoot-shovel-and-shut-up atmosphere outside the park. My own father, heading out each winter on a daylong hunting expedition with our dog, a little terrier otherwise found sleeping on the heating vent. Coming back with rabbits and squirrels, turning me into a vegetarian at a very young age. Once he fell through a lake that he thought was snow. We were round-eyed, listening to the story of our dad dropping through the ice, the terrier barking wildly at the hole, bubbles rising and him reaching upward for the edge and hauling himself out, building a fire and stripping naked—our dad naked! outside in the snow!—to dry himself and his clothes before he could make the long walk back to the car, carrying Yimmer, as always, because she wore out halfway through. And then another time, a few years later, him coming home from hunting and handing the gun to my mother. “You might as well sell it,” he said grimly, “because I’ll never use it again.”

What happened that day that was so terrible he never hunted again after a lifetime of hunting? Something with an animal, we knew that, but when we asked our mother, she said to drop it, and the gun went away, and my father became the man in the neighborhood who had squirrels as pets.

“Ope, there’s my black one,” he’d say, getting up from his chair to go outside and hand it a peanut.

Okay, I’m drifting downstream now on what seems like an endless supply of words, memories, waiting to catch a branch. I should stop and read the Denis Johnson story that my partner keeps telling me to read before Alaska—I listened to him laughing in bed one night while he read it, and I like funny, but I loved Denis Johnson, and right now it’s too soon for everything but “Now,” which, if you don’t know it, is a Denis Johnson poem that describes soul-examining depression, triggered by hearing middle-of-the-night foghorns on the San Francisco Bay. It begins:

Whatever the foghorns are

the voices of feels terrible

tonight, just terrible, and here

by the window that looks out

on the waters but is blind, I

have been sleeping,

but I am awake now.

In the night I watch

how the little lights

of boats come out

to us and are lost again

in the fog wallowing on the sea

I used to read it to my students just to remind them that there is beauty in darkness, but now (“Now”) it just makes me think of Wesley, my beloved writer friend, standing on the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge holding a cable stretched high above the water. The fog wallowing on the sea, the fog of war that made the man step off the Kodiak cliff, carried away without his musette bag, alone. Wesley alone, trembling.

And so does my life tremble,

and when I turn from the window