I look out over a rugged, Alaskan landscape; the sun is rising, and the side of the mountain is dusted in a warm pink light. There is something in the sky, what looks like a daytime moon or an explosive, freshly detonated. My father made this photo some fifty odd years ago, then the age that I am now. It's only surface damage, I tell myself. Time and weather have aged this old photographic slide, and the larger collection of slides that document this decade of his life. It's a speck of dust that sank in, spread its arms, or are they wings? They beg to remain a mystery. Visible deterioration become fodder for imagined cosmic phenomena, or conspiracy—why not a UFO, a comet, a military testing site? For a decade between the 1960s and 70s, my father worked as a hunting guide in the Alaskan wilderness, and so my childhood is embedded with myths and legends of this place. The images that document this time are some kind of epic; some trace of that frontier-era push west, into wild lands and untapped resources. Among these images are ones that I almost chose not to scan, ones almost thrown away; overexposed, scratched, cracking. At night, when we were young, he would recite the ballad poems of Robert Service. Like the sing-song of a lullaby, they rock you to sleep, those stories so magical and hard. Men frozen to death in the icy winter; the hunger pangs of loneliness; an indescribable awe induced by a land untouched and silent. Repeating patterns spread like cells that reproduce too fast, an epidemic. Time has changed these images, and in a way that seems to speak with more honesty to the experience of the land, the hardship and hardness of the people. A world changing then, and still, with unending expedition. Warped, faded, mistakenly cross-processed, the backs of the musk oxen glisten under a sky so blue it must be the beginning or the end of time. They were one of many creatures hunted to the brink of extinction. Meanwhile the railroads continued to be laid, cut through mountains, and many died along the way; martyrs to the beast of industry. What kind of myths can we dream of now? In these images, the physical deterioration of time is a metaphor for the flexible and fallible nature of memory; a poetic illustration of a “wild” landscape that is itself in a continuing state of rapid change. Here, the wild is tamed, decapitated, discolored, sliced open like a dystopian record of the results of colonial ideals. This is a space where memory turns to mythology, mythology turns to memory, and aspects of our identity are built around fragmented notions of experience and ownership, and the God that we continue to seek.