Explication

5.

No one taught me to give birth. My body just did it. Nature, wilderness, place, instinct, it was always there inside me. The exact knowing what to do. The particular grunt right at the beginning of pushing. It doesn’t matter that her fist was up in a Supergirl salute. I figured it out not because I had to, which I did, but because I already knew what to do. Like all the women before me. Like all the mammals before me.

Nature appears in the body, in relation to other people—one person who was being born, others who were trying to help me survive that birth. The birth I almost didn’t survive. Or I only survived because they helped me.

Even in almost not-living my body knew what it had to do, and if it had to die for the baby it would have. I did not have to go somewhere alone, depart, cut ties, build a house, and listen to owls to learn this. I just knew.

Haines posits wilderness as a single door through which only one soul can pass.

Living in Fairbanks, I can see Haines’s door every day. Wilderness, yes: moose in the garden, a green-and-purple aurora, the crunch of snowshoes at twenty below.

There are other doors. Even some we contain.