The Beast

Old Valdez.
275 sq. miles. Second oldest
white settlement in Alaska.
Captain Cook 1778
1794 Bligh Island
Spaniards 1798.

1800s whaling. Copper mined.
Route to the gold fields.
Blue fox farming in the 1920s.
Iron Trail by Rex Beach set here.
Young Miss Miller marries
the Maharajah of Indore.

New Valdez.
Rebuilt after quake on a new site.
Voted All-American City 1965.
Valdez rhymes with "ease."
South Terminus of Alyeska's
pipeline from Prudhoe Bay.

Wrathful Alyeska
auger in one hand
marshprobe in one hand
geo-stick in one hand
polaski in another

I take soil samples
along the surveyed route
from Valdez to Tonsina.
I follow the Lowe River
through alder swamps
across marshmuck to bogmire.
Streams rot with salmon.

I follow a bear trail
to the cutline where I auger
twenty feet to bedrock.
I sidetrack near Kendal Cache
to collect lichens and weathered
telegraph insulators.
I note the conglomeration
from a glacier deposit.

Along glacier benches to bedrock
across rivers to bedrock
to bedrock under ridges, under
boulders, under cobbles, under sill
under sand, under volcanic ash.
I take a rest and get sick.

A caravan of Winnabegos passes.
A woman points to a dead salmon
and exclaims, "Someone should do
something about that." Cheechakos.
10% chance of rain in a rainforest
means 10 inches of rain.

At Trans Alaska Pipeline
Point on Ground TAPS PG=361+68
I join my copter pilot.
Mustachioed Vietvet with shades
his scarf trails in the breeze.

He drops me off on a sandbar.
There's a field of devil's club
and a jungle of alder hanging
from granite cliffs between me
and my testhole.

King crab to Otterman:
glacierized graywhacky
sandy sill
silly sand
gravel
cobbles
Indian love stones
fucking rocks
over

Otterman to Kingcrab:
reading you
alluvial fan
metamorphic composition
zone theory
montage effects
colluvium
colluvium
colluvium
clear

Dall sheep graze below me.
As the Alouette lands, a bull moose
into the brush.
Up the line, a grizzly and her cubs
into hiding.

From the Arctic Ocean
at Prudhoe Bay, over
the Brooks Range
across the Koyukuk River
across the Yukon River
and the Tanana, stretching

Across the Alaskan Range
this in temperatures below zero
for more than one hundred days
below forty below for weeks
dropping to eighty below
in arctic winds

From Thompson Pass
down a glacier moraine, the pipe
slouches into Valdez.