Don Kuhl again - The Monday Morning Memo

“They have so much time, these old folks. They stroll their grocery carts down the middle of the narrow aisle in the frozen food section looking for nothing in particular. These old folks wait to locate their purse or wallet only after the checker has totaled and bagged their three items—like it’s a big surprise they will need to pay.

No one in line cares that their son Billy is visiting from Portland and will stay through the weekend.

Maybe if I invade their personal space a bit more, they will mosey on.

That was me right behind them when I was 33 years of age. I was in a hurry to do a lot of important things.

Now, 40 years later, I’m in the same frozen food section looking for…what was it again? And what did I do with that grocery list?“

– Don Kuhl

“Insofar as the dry valleys of Victoria Land are known to the rest of the world, they are known for their similarity, it is believed, to the rainless deserts of Mars (the Viking Lander would have found no life on this ground either); and for a scattering of mummified creatures on the valley floors, mostly young crabeater seals and, rarely, a penguin or skua.

No one is certain why the seals come up here. A good guess is that they are inexperienced. They wander up from the coast, sometimes traveling as far as forty miles inland, hunching their way over the gravel fields with — to judge from the few, fresh trails that have been found — intractable determination. But it is travel utterly in the wrong direction.

They succumb eventually to starvation on these errant journeys, but an animal dead for a decade may be so well preserved that it looks, as one approaches, as if it might move off.

The taught skin of these dessicated animals feels smooth under the hand and hard, like water-polished stone. The wind freeze-dries their flesh. No predator bothers them. The faces, if they can be said to have an expression, are distraught, catatonic with a sudden, horrible misunderstanding of geography.

Whenever I encounter one of these animals I found it difficult to leave them. And when I left them, often as not, I turned back. They were inconsolable. They had made an error. Their lips parted in some final, incoherent noise. They had, most of them, died alone. Some lay with the clouded eyes of the blind, preserved for years in abject disbelief.”

- Barry Lopez, "Informed by Indifference," Ch. 4 in About This Life

– Don Kuhl

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