Today I am back by the river seeking them out. I find myself needing reason in a world which has temporarily and suddenly lost almost all such commodity. The Yukon flows as inevitably as ever and today the blue skies are returning. A swallow turns sharply and flies directly at my head followed by another, hot on its tail before they fly off, continuing their dogfight. These actions are likely a warning but I greet them with a grin, travelers acknowledging each other as they pass on a country road.
Years back in Wainwright, with the same smell in the air, I sat on the hull of an Armoured Personnel Carrier eating jam on stale crackers watching the long grass bend in agreement with the wind. The swallows were out flying low and fast, again upstream in the river of prairie grass. I followed one with my eyes, straining to pick it out as its form shrank into the distance and thought to myself, “I remember this feeling, remember being a swallow.” That twenty-year-old version of myself, almost impossible to see in me now, was often filled with rage, booze and frustration. On that day though I was imbued with a joy borne of absolute certainty.
Myself at twenty is now twenty years behind me and as I settle into this new decade I vainly hope the swallows of Dawson, like their Wainwright cousins, might offer a righted view of the world, a world which seems to have slipped of its axis.
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Tonight the drunks of these two towns will stumble into the streets, mimicking a slow motion version of the seeming randomness of the swallow. Their worlds will take on the tilted, comforting haze of the immediate.
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