I've been delinquent (and feeling really guilty about it!) in keeping up the entries for the past three days. Over the weekend, Roommate and I went on a road trip to a little town called Kenai on the Kenai Peninsula, so I was computer-less then, and then last night I just HAD to sleep, so I skipped entrying to do that. It was very, very needed.

The trip to Kenai reminded me why I came to Alaska. Anchorage is nice -- a cozy city with its fair share of little gems -- but no one comes to Alaska for the cities. There's only one road to Kenai, but you get a little bit of everything. After hugging the coast for a while, we drove through marshes and groves of dead spruce trees. The spruces are victims of a devastating beetle infestation that is on its way to killing every spruce in the state. Bill, our impromptu guide around Kenai, told us that two or three days after you see the holes in the tree, it goes gray and dies. The freshly dead trees are ghostly, surrounded by healthy green trees of other varieties. The long dead ones, like the groves we saw in the marshes, stand stripped of branches, tall gray poles of death.

After the marshland comes the forests and the mountains. Oh, lord, the mountains. The Kenai River, turquoise with glacial sediment, flashes suddenly into view from the highway at some point. There are lakes with no one on them, set off by mountains that are as green as Ireland at their base, but still snow-capped. We stopped at one place and smiled our way into a $9 parking lot for free, to watch all kinds of people lined up in the river fly-fishing. We saw two men cleaning off their catches -- huge silvery fish, easy 20 or 30 pounds.

Our landlady owns a little house in Kenai (and I do mean little -- probably no more than 1000 square feet). She just bought it from a couple who lives down the street, whom we called after we arrived and found there was no water. The man who answered the phone said, "Yeah, I'll turn it on for you. In the meanwhile, you can come over here and use my bathroom and stuff. I'm right around the corner."

In a few minutes, though, an enormous red pick-up truck rumbled into the driveway, and a mustached man stepped out. The white dog with black spots that was tied in the back whined as the man moved away from the truck.

"Hi," I said, taken aback. "Are you Bill?"

He said yes, shot the breeze for a few minutes, and then disappeared in the crawl space below the house. He emerged a little later and said he needed some things at Home Depot, and asked, "Well, what were you planning to do?"

"Um, drive around and see what there is to see, I guess."

"Well, hop on in."

So we went to Home Depot. And to the beluga lookout point (Kenai is on a bluff overlooking the juncture of the Kenai River and the ocean, and during salmon season, beluga whales sometimes swim up quite close to eat the salmon). And to dinner at Ski Mo's (home of a fine cheeseburger and beer). And he told stories.

He told us work stories. A carpenter by trade, he works now at Red Dog mine (lead and zinc), not far from the Arctic Circle, but he's been all over the state.

He told us a long, long story about how his wife suffered a collapsed lung as a result of playfully wrestling with their son, and how the hospital screwed up her treatment so that it took her over three weeks and $30,000 to heal.

He told us about putting up a building for someone and hearing brakes squeal and something white flying through the air, finding his dog on the ground and a panicky driver, commanding his friend to drive the truck as he knelt on the cab floor and held his dog (miraculously, the dog only suffered a broken leg and is now referred to as Nic, the Broke-Leg Dog).

He told us about his ex-wife, who, on the day he had packed up his things to leave, grabbed two knives he'd sharpened that day, and in the ensuing struggle, stabbed him in the chest. The only thing that stopped her from gutting him was the fact that she was holding the two knives in the same hand, and the shorter one hit a rib.

And while he was telling these stories, he drove. He drove us out of Kenai, actually, and into the next town over, and then he turned off the street and onto a graveled road into the forest. And it struck me that, gosh, I don't know this guy from Adam, and these look like woods that a realtor would reserve for showing to serial killers, and dear lord, what have we gotten ourselves into? As he talked about the property he hoped to buy, he turned into an even smaller, cramped path through the trees. Around this time, as I later found out, Roommate started looking for hard objects in the truck cab to use as a weapon. I started looking carefully at the wheel to make sure I could drive the truck away.

The property he hopes to buy is on a small lake, which was mirror-still. Bill excused himself, and I promptly thought, "Dear lord, he's coming back with an axe, I know it." And started estimating how far the other side of the lake was. Roommate, as she later revealed, was looking around for fist-sized stones to hold in her hand as she swung.

But Bill came back sans axe or other instrument of murder, and cheerfully submitted to pictures of himself in front of his (hopefully) lake as mosquitoes went to town and lunched sumptuously. He drove us back into town, still telling stories.

After he dropped us off, I suggested to Roommate that we buy him a six-pack, since he (1) bought us dinner, (2) drove us around town, and (3) didn't kill us with an axe and then throw us into the lake. We brought over a Boston brew and of course he insisted on inviting us in. We watched a promotional video about Red Dog mine, which was oddly fascinating. Bill politely said the beer was good, but I noticed he didn't drink much of it. Nic the Broke-Arm Dog drank more of it than he did.

At around 11 pm, we thanked him and left thinking we'd been very, very lucky to meet a real Alaskan with a real life. Because Roommate and I are living fake lives here (kinda true).

Roommate, being a writer, wanted to update her journal on the back porch, so we bundled up and sprayed on the Deet, and wrote while the dog (we're taking care of the landlady's bichon frise, and took it with us) looked disconsolate on the side of the house. A little while into the journaling, I noticed that George (the non-broke-arm bichon frise) was standing on his hind legs looking at something between the houses.

"I wonder what that dog is looking at," I mused, and got up to look.

"What is it?" Roommate asked.

It took me a second to get the words out. "Moose," I said, still not really registering it. "He's looking at moose. Across the street. Holy mother of god. Moose."

Now, all the guidebooks say, don't be stupid -- don't approach moose or bears or other wildlife to take pictures. A 600-pound moose can do a lot of damage to a soft and silly human. Despite this, I said, "I'm going to walk around to the front of the house to take a better look."

So Roommate and I crept around to the front and tried to take pictures with the cameras we'd grabbed, but cars and a tree were in the way, so it was frustrating, because not only was it a moose, it was a mother moose and her two mooselings. "Damn," I whispered, "I wish that car wasn't in the way."

And then the moose started moving our way.

"Holy mother of god," I blurted out for the second time, "we gotta get out of here," and we amscrayed to the back and were both almost inside when I remembered, "Shit! The dog!" and crept outside to grab the dog and bring him inside. Where we stayed for the next 10 minutes as the moose came up to the FRONT YARD and started munching on the shrubs in THE FRONT YARD and then started walking away, except the littlest mooselet couldn't negotiate the string dividing our front yard with the neighbor's so the mother came back and started walking TOWARDS OUR WINDOW and lumbered by the side of the house, finally disappearing into someone else's back yard, along with her kids.

Roommate and I kind of slumped to the floor after that. "Omigod, we just a a moose. In the front yard. Like, 3 feet away from us. Omigod."

Now all we need to do is see a bear. Which I could personally live without. Seeing as how black bears will attack you for fun and all. Seeing a bear from the comfort of your kitchen, however, would be just fine.

Holy moly!

So after the weekend, I was pretty revved up about being here. Everything was so beautiful, and Bill the Alaskan Carpenter was so nice, and we got to see moose in the front yard, for crissakes. Going to work on Monday was hard, but I fueled up on caffeine and got some research done, and it was only after work that the fatigue of driving and not sleeping well caught up with me, and while I was walking away from a memorial statue of Martin Luther King, Jr., I suddenly thought, "My GOD, what am I doing here? Why am I doing this job? What was I thinking going to law school? This isn't me. This isn't the life I should be living. I feel so LOST."

I got some sleep last night, so the desperation of that moment isn't quite so fierce. But the question still remains.

I guess it doesn't help that I feel like I keep fouling up assignments at work. Legal research is such a bitch. It's so boring, and so important, and Supervisor said, "I talked to Other Attorney, and he said he didn't think this was a task you could finish doing, so let's just stop the research now and start writing." Which is good, because Supervisor wanted to know the law about a certain issue in every damn jurisdiction (every state), which Co-Intern, when I told her what the task was, said, "Wow. I would need to set aside three weeks to do that." But I still feel like I'm flubbing the research assignments. Supervisor has assigned me to write part of the reply brief going before the Alaska Supreme Court, and I'm mildly terrified of failing again. He's all into the pedogogy thing and providing opportunities for me to learn and grow. I'm all into starting small and having a hope of succeeding. I'd make a good corporate law firm drone, I guess. God.

Or as he would say, "Duuuuude."

Anyway, tomorrow I attempt and hope not to fail. Also tomorrow, the Ringleted One arrives for a visit. And so the summer rolls on. Now. it is nearly 1 am and I MUST GO TO BED. Aaaaggghhh. I will be sleep deprived forever.