A Letter From Denali

(To anyone who has ever loved a place with all their heart.)

Welcome new subscribers! I am truly delighted to grace your inboxes. I do not take a single one of you for granted. There are so many amazing publications here on Substack- I’m delighted you chose to sign up for this one.

I am right in the middle of serializing a memoir but have taken a few weeks off to recalibrate and center myself. If you’d like to catch up, the first nineteen (!!) chapters can be found here. If that feels daunting, please know that they don’t need to be read in order to be understood. Each is a standalone story, so you’re welcome to jump in at any point and swim for as little or as long as you like.

I was inspired to write today’s essay by the incredible

Holly Starley

, who recently shared a letter on her Substack written from the perspective of her beloved van Ruby, addressed to her new ride, Vivian. It’s an absolute stunner- you can read it here. I was moved to tears by the relationship she shared with her van (Holly is one of my favorite writers anywhere), and I realized that I wanted to write a letter from Denali before I sat down to my next memoir chapter. It was just as cathartic as I hoped it would be. Maybe it will heal something in you as well.

Dear Human,

I know there is a place that you are homesick for. A place that you have grieved the loss of the same way you might yearn for a person who you can no longer touch. A place that has carved out a canyon of longing inside of you, like a glacier moving through soft shale.

Would it surprise you to know that the place itself most certainly feels the loss of your presence as well? Humans tend to think they are the only ones that grieve, and it is true that the way you process loss is uniquely disorienting, but we all lament separation where once there was connection, even those of us who you bipeds consider distant and indifferent.

I may be ageless and ever changing, but I carry memories of all that I have lost in my cells and my connective tissue, just like you do. Sometimes I wrap myself around the bivalve shells now buried at the top of the highest peak on my skin, the one called Denali, and I dream about the shallow seas that once bathed me 100 million years ago. I can still recall the warmth of the cretaceous, the heavy footfall of the hadrosaurs that wandered through the inland lakes and ancient alluvial fans that bloomed across my landscape. The ghosts of those prints are still visible on my skin, all these years later, just above what remains of the frozen marrow that you call permafrost, a cold so old it remembers the mammoths. It’s melting now, too quickly, and I am as powerless to stop its departure as a weeping mother whose baby has come too soon. I know grief, even if its texture is different than yours. The seasons of my life are written on my body, no different than a human’s. Wrinkles, scars, strata, striations- these are memories marked on skin, and I bear more than most.

There are currently 1.794 caribou here. I know the distinct sound of this one’s heart.

Some of my recollections are epic and sweeping- incomprehensible to creatures that live less than a century- but I also inhabit the particular, much like you do. I am intimately aware of the tiniest blooms in the unlikeliest of places, every birth and death that I midwife, the way laughter and wolf song is absorbed by the moss but echoes exquisitely off rock faces. I can taste each salty tear and drop of blood that soaks into my soil, I know that sadness has a different flavor than wonder.

Kendall cried both kinds of tears on my land. She bled and she sweat. For a time, her feet were as familiar to me as every marmot or lynx or porcupine that has ever graced my tundra. I miss her calloused soles. I miss the cadence of her thoughts, the way she delighted in me. I even miss her anger; the fury she directed at me when she believed I had betrayed her. She was a person that felt things very deeply, just like I do.

Kendall and I never got a proper goodbye, and she’s struggling with that right now. That’s why I’m talking to you. It seemed like the right thing to do. She’ll be back with you soon, but she’s at the point in her memoir where I enter the story, and every time she sits down to write about me, she gets all teary and bound up and dramatically slams her laptop shut and her emotions spill out like the white fury of an avalanche, and she closes her eyes and feels like she’s drowning in a storm that has no room for clumsy, limiting words.

Writing must be hard. I wouldn’t know- this is my first attempt at communicating in symbols. I speak in birdsong and riverlow and whispering wind and, if you listen closely enough, various astral languages that most humans have forgotten how to hear. The stars and the aurora sing, did you know that? And the mountains have their own ancient tongue, of course, but warm-blooded animals can only perceive the low rumble of rocks in their bones, and only barefoot at that, so humans often miss it.

Not Kendall, though. She loved to take her shoes off when she stopped to eat her lunch on my peaks and in my valleys. She always did that, unless it was pouring rain or she was in a hurry to catch a bus back to Kantishna. She would find a nice, soft patch of moss (not sphagnum moss, of course, as she would have soaked her pants right through in that squishy ground cover, and humans are funny about getting wet), and as soon as she removed her pack she would untie her boots and sometimes peel her socks off and she would bury her feet in all the textures of my tundra. The combination of lichen and moss-covered rocks is a treat for the toes, you know. Rough and lacy and spongy and ridged all at once. A sumptuous meal for tender flesh. And then she would sigh and listen to my voice and close her eyes and her thoughts would rise up like snowflakes in the wind and I just know that she was picking up the deep murmur of the mountains, though she never told anyone her secret.

I watched her grow comfortable with me over the years. The first time she hiked through my hills, she was convinced she’d be mauled by a wild animal. You should have seen the furtive, jumpy way she walked alongside Moose Creek! She pressed her hand to a fresh grizzly print in the mud, eyes wide as saucers as she raised them to the banks, expecting the bear to come hurtling out of the willows. I should let her tell you about that, though, or the time she really did have a close call with a big male, years later. She does love to tell you about the animals.

To be fair, it was a rather large print.

Mostly, the bears didn’t bother her much after the first summer season. Not once she fell in love with me. Love always softens the edges of fear. Love and familiarity. If you sit and watch anything quietly and for a long enough, you start to realize that separation is an illusion. The brown bear across a river valley stops being a distant, threatening spectacle and becomes an intimate companion. If you get very still, you can actually taste the blueberries exploding on her enormous tongue, and if you press your hands to the earth, you can feel the ponderous, rhythmic sway of her shoulders as she moves across the landscape. If you want to know what it feels like to glide on land, you can run with herds of caribou up steep inclines towards lingering snow patches that promise relief from the irritating mosquitos in the lowlands, or if you’d rather be small and inconspicuous you can press your body into a rock crevice like a pika, whistling a warning to your neighbors as a goshawk casts a shadow on your small body. This is how you remember that you are a part of every ecosystem you’ve forgotten you belong to. You return to your knowing when you stop perceiving your skin as a barrier, and you remember that it was only ever a doorway.

Claws for digging up roots, and lips for picking berries. This one was no threat to humans.

I am writing to tell you with as much love and urgency as I possess that although you feel homesick for places that you cannot return to- as places are always and forever changing- please reconsider how you think of these things. Because the truth is, you never really left. No matter how far away you are, you are never out of our reach. The mycelium beneath our skin reaches ever outward and is even now tangled up in the ground beneath your feet. Close your eyes, go barefoot into whatever soil is outside your door right now, and stretch your heart down and out. Can you feel us there? The places you long for? Can you feel us in your cells, in your very breath?

One last thing before I go.

Kendall, my love, this bit is specifically for you. I know you don’t want me to talk about KC’s death. I know. I will honor that. But let me say this: I was with you today, when the thing happened with the bird. I saw. It mattered. Your cat tried to bring a little finch in through the cat door, and you stopped her, and then you heard it screaming. Your first impulse was to squeeze your eyes shut, to turn up the music so that you couldn’t hear. But your eyes kept flicking to the window, and you saw that your cat was playing with it, that it was suffering. Your throat closed when you saw its broken wing, its tiny heaving chest. The music couldn’t drown out your noticing. Nothing could. And so, you did the thing you really, really, really didn’t want to do. You walked out the back door, barefoot, heart pounding in your ears, and you picked up a rock and you weighed it in your hand, making sure it would be heavy enough. And then you knelt by the frightened, injured creature and your cat stepped back and sat down and watched you with large yellow eyes while you brought that rock down on the skull of that little bird. Again, and again. When you were sure that it was dead, you dropped the rock on the ground and sat in the dirt with your head in your hands and you wept. You wept for all the suffering and all of the brokenness in the whole wide world. You went inside and your hands shook as you washed your coffee mug and you kept saying, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, and I wept with you.

And later, I watched when you were vacuuming, when you startled a little beetle from under the baseboard. You immediately thought how easy it would be to suck him right up, but then you remembered the finch and you silenced the machine and you knelt down and picked it up, ever so gently, and said, you don’t belong in here, little buddy, and cupped it in your palm and went outside and placed it on different rock, a refuge this time, and you watched its staggered gate as it walked away, and then you cried again, for entirely different reasons.

Sometimes compassion is a crushed skull, my love, and sometimes it is a proffered palm. I cannot tell you why some things die too soon, and some escape unscathed. But I can tell you that at the end of your friend’s life, I was there, holding her, just as you held the bird and the beetle. I wrapped myself around her broken body and I did not let her last breath go unnoticed. She was my beloved as well, you know.

It is a very sacred thing to receive the suffering of another without turning away. Even if you feel you might break. Even if tears fall like rain, even if you shake and tremble. Your attention is your greatest offering to the world. Never forget that.

Thank you for giving me yours for as long as you did. I’m not going anywhere. There is no such thing as goodbye, my love. Press your bare feet into the soft soil and feel the wind in your lungs. I’m always that close.

Yours,

Denali

You, noticing me, noticing you.