For most of the two weeks I was in Fairbanks, I walked the same trail to the yurt every night.
I've walked that trail a bunch of times. It changes depending on the time of year — what's growing along the edges, how much you can see into the woods, how much light there is.
At the beginning of this trip, when I took the trail home around midnight, it was still light outside.
The first morning, I paid attention.
Then, over the next several days, I stopped.
Not consciously. I didn't decide, this is safe now.
I just knew the trail. My feet knew where it turned. I knew how long it took. I knew where the yurt was.
And because the time was always the same, I think some part of me assumed the conditions were, too.
They weren't.
Over those two weeks, Fairbanks lost a substantial amount of light.
The time stayed the same.
The light that went with it did not.
By the night I met the moose, it was pitch black.
And I didn't have a flashlight.
Normally, when it's dark outside, I know to take one.
That night, I was relying on what I knew about the walk instead of what was actually in front of me.
Then something large moved in the bushes to my right.
I heard the rustling first.
Then I saw something move through the darkness.
I didn't know what it was.
I ran.
Back toward the house.
When I got there, I told my daughter I wasn't walking to the yurt alone anymore.
The next night, I interrupted everyone in the middle of our last evening together, as the sun began to set.
"I'm not doing that walk by myself in the dark."
So my daughter got a giant flashlight and walked me back.
We didn't take the trail.
We took the longer way, along the driveway, where we could see.
Two minutes instead of one.
And what I kept thinking about wasn't what had been in those bushes.
It was this:
The trail hadn't changed.
But the conditions had.
And I hadn't noticed.
That's what familiarity can do.
We call it knowing.
I know this person.
I know this job.
I know this relationship.
I know how this conversation is going to go.
I know what happens when I say this.
I know what happens when I don't.
But sometimes "I know" doesn't mean we're seeing what's actually there.
Sometimes it means we're carrying forward an old version of the conditions.
The first night, the trail had been familiar and visible.
Night after night, nothing happened.
So the next night felt safe.
Then the next.
The time stayed the same, so I kept treating the walk as though it were the same walk.
It wasn't.
The darkness was changing.
I just wasn't looking for it.
And that, I think, is one of the stranger things about familiarity.
It doesn't just make us comfortable.
It lets us stop checking.
Which is useful. Necessary, even.
You can't live your whole life at full attention. You can't drive to the grocery store as though you've never seen a road before. You can't wake up every morning and reconsider your entire marriage, your career, your family, your life.
Some things need to become automatic.
That's part of how we make a life.
But automatic is not the same as current.
The better I got at walking that trail, the less of me the walk required.
And meanwhile, the world around me was changing.
Then, while I was in Fairbanks, my daughter's partner Mickey was driving to Anchorage.
He's thirty-five. He's made that drive countless times.
About twenty minutes before he arrived, a moose stepped into the road.
The one-ton truck we'd been riding around in all week hit it.
He was fine.
The truck was totaled.
And I'd spent the whole trip eating moose.
Tacos. Enchiladas. Quesadillas.
In Alaska, there is an actual roadkill salvage program. In many parts of the state, people can sign up to be notified when a moose killed on the road becomes available for salvage. When a team gets the call, they have about thirty minutes to respond and are responsible for removing the entire animal. The meat is for personal use.
My daughter's turn came a few years ago. She and three friends stayed on call around the clock waiting for it.
So a moose on the road in Alaska isn't some unimaginable event.
People know it happens.
They plan for it.
They eat it.
And still, twenty minutes before he arrived, a moose sprinted into Mickey's path.
And suddenly I had two stories.
In both of them, something large got into the path of someone who thought they knew where they were going.
But they aren't the same story.
I had stopped noticing that the conditions had changed.
Mickey was driving a road he knew. He knew moose were there. He knew this was something that happened on Alaska's roads.
And still, a moose sprinted into his path.
He could have been paying perfect attention.
The moose still could have appeared.
That's the part I don't want to turn into a lesson about vigilance.
Because there is no amount of attention that makes uncertainty go away.
I could have taken a flashlight that night and still encountered something unexpected.
Mickey had been watching the road perfectly and still he hit the moose.
There is a difference between something being unseen and something being unknowable.
I think we confuse those things all the time.
Sometimes we haven't noticed what's changed.
And sometimes nothing has changed that we could reasonably have noticed. Sometimes the thing that changes everything simply wasn't there yet.
We know marriages change.
We know people leave.
We know children grow up.
We know our parents get older.
We know jobs end.
We know bodies change.
We know the life we have today will not be exactly the life we have tomorrow.
And still, we build our days around what happened yesterday.
Because yesterday is what we know.
Sometimes that's because we've stopped looking.
And sometimes it's simply because we're human.
We cannot see around corners.
We cannot know which ordinary Tuesday will contain the thing that changes everything.
So I'm not interested in becoming more vigilant.
I'm interested in becoming a little more honest about the difference between what I know and what I am actually seeing.
The person I know may be changing.
The relationship I know may be changing.
The work I know may be changing.
I may be changing.
And sometimes I need to look again.
Not because something is wrong.
Not because familiarity is dangerous.
Just because the conditions may have changed while I wasn't paying attention.
And sometimes I don't need to look harder.
Sometimes I need to accept that there are things I simply cannot see yet.
The night after the moose, my daughter walked me to the yurt again.
We took the long way.
Her flashlight swept across the surface road, and I remember thinking that I'd traded a one-minute walk I couldn't see for a two-minute walk I could.
It felt sensible.
It probably was.
But I keep thinking about that trail.
The time hadn't changed.
The conditions had.
And I hadn't noticed.
Knowing isn't seeing.
Sometimes knowing means we're carrying forward an old version of what's true.
And sometimes seeing means admitting that what's true today may not be what was true when we first learned the way.
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