Neil Young’s song wasn’t really about the aurora borealis; it was about indigenous people being shoved from their land and their tribal ways. My dad was known on the base for being an outdoorsman, a guy who got so excited at the miracle of salmon spawning, a guy who knew just where to be to watch the bears fishing, a guy who could lead the trackers as they searched for the forever-lost man. And so one morning someone woke him very, very early to say there were Inuit in a boat asking for Beard, and when he dressed and went out, they said they were there to take him to watch the annual seal harvest.

“Honey,” he told me, palms upturned. (It was always the same.) “It was an honor and I couldn’t say no.” So he went with them. Once I told him I was planning to see a documentary in which there was footage of baby seals being killed. He said, “Don’t watch that.” Uncharacteristic for him to say don’t anything. When I pressed him on it, he said only, “It’s very, very tough.” So I didn’t watch. But he had, all those years ago, 1940-something, and felt privileged to do so and then ill afterward.

“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.