This city is made of stone, of blood, and fish. There are Chugatch Mountains to the east and whale and seal to the west. It hasn't always been this way, because glaciers who are ice ghosts create oceans, carve earth and shape this city here, by the sound. They swim backwards in time. Once a storm of boiling earth cracked open the streets, threw open the town. It's quiet now, but underneath the concrete is the cooking earth, and above that, air which is another ocean, where spirits we can't see are dancing joking getting full on roasted caribou, and the praying goes on, extends out. Nora and I go walking down 4th Avenue and know it is all happening. On a park bench we see someone's Athabascan grandmother, folded up, smelling like 200 years of blood and piss, her eyes closed against some unimagined darkness, where she is buried in an ache in which nothing makes sense. We keep on breathing, walking, but softer now, the clouds whirling in the air above us. What can we say that would make us understand better than we do already? Except to speak of her home and claim her as our own history, and know that our dreams don't end here, two blocks away from the ocean where our hearts still batter away at the muddy shore. And I think of the 6th Avenue jail, of mostly Native and Black men, where Henry told about being shot at eight times outside a liquor store in L.A., but when the car sped away he was surprised he was alive, no bullet holes, man, and eight cartridges strewn on the sidewalk all around him. Everyone laughed at the impossibility of it, but also the truth. Because who would believe the fantastic and terrible story of all of our survival those who were never meant to survive?