primal

Two years ago this month, while house-sitting in Homer, Alaska, I woke up at 5am one morning to let an insistent Nyssa out. It had snowed the evening before, and as I walked out on the back porch from my room, I was groggy and more than a little annoyed at her timing. I looked out over the yard as she bounced around in the snow, snuffling about for that elusive perfect deposit-spot. I slowly became aware of strange, dark pockets in the snow crossing the yard. I could not see what they were, blind as I am without glasses, but something inside me snapped, my heart began to pound, my stomach sank, and I fumbled back inside for my glasses. I returned to discover a set of deep booted footprints, thrown into shadowed relief in the bright moonlight. They came out of the woods and towards the house, onto the exposed porch and right up to the window above my bed, where the shade was wide open. They became a tangled mess in the little dust of snow there, then turned and crossed the porch and yard, disappearing again into the woods where they emerged.

The simple intuitive wrongness of the scene now fascinates me. I could not see what the shadows were, or how creepily close they came to where I slept, before I returned with full vision to inspect them. But the fear I felt began in that first moment. I knew something was wrong, before I could see it or identify it. And something was very, very wrong.

A few weeks into our tenure in Fairbanks this year, when the darkness was finally full enough and the bright northern moon had waned a bit, Peter shook me awake at about 3am. I stumbled downstairs and into boots, then out onto the porch. The Northern Lights - which I had never seen in my time in the southern costal climes of Alaska - were out in full glory, dancing green and bright across the sky. Before I had even looked up, I felt an unfamiliar terror building up in my chest. My heart began to pound. I leaned against the cabin wall to stay steady. The lights were incredible and beautiful. The dropped out of the sky, deep green against the black and the stars, a sweeping, undulating sheet of light that spun out, folded in on itself, dropped and pulled back up into the night. They seemed close enough to set the cabin on fire. Although I know what the Aurora are, I have seen pictures and videos of them, read explanations of their cause, know that they are miles and miles above us in the very outer atmospheres of our earth, some deep part of me was profoundly disturbed by this first sighting. So much so that I had trouble sleeping the rest of the night. Yet here is the crux of it: there was nothing to be afraid of, and I knew it.

I do not consider myself a particularly fearful person, on this basic sort of level. My friend Ben and I even had a term for the sort of behavior one engages in, in order to face and conquer those fears: The Glass Elevator Syndrome. It was dubbed so, after the act of repeatedly riding glass elevators while looking straight down, in order to overcome that sinking stomach fear of heights. The sorts of things one might do, in order to display Glass Elevator Syndrome, may include learning to paraglide or BASE Jump to overcome a fear of heights, forcing oneself to get back on a horse after a bad fall, signing up to volunteer at literacy program, a nursing home, a homeless shelter in a bad neighborhood, or to go door-to-door for a volatile political campaign of some sort (imagine the good this would do for a people-pleasing introvert like myself!)

Some fears, like my terror at discovering footprints at my window, or the sudden gasping adrenaline rush I felt the first time I rode over a 7 foot swell in a kayak, the hairs at the back of my neck prickling when Nyssa raises the alarm that someone besides Peter is approaching the cabin after dark, are good and healthy and the sort of instinct that keeps one alert and alive. Others, like my primal reaction (as Peter identified it) to the harmless Aurora, or my near paralyzing fear of going to parties where I don't know a soul, or of having to eat something with too much onion in it - these are fears that, though perhaps born from some legitimate intuition, should be pushed through when one knows the fear is baseless, that the end will be good. I know there are no monsters in the dark corners of the house at night. I go outside to see the Northern Lights, and enjoy them until the cold creeps through my boots.

polarity

Going back to get a teaching certificate has pointed out the many shortcomings of my liberal arts education – particularly in the math and science department. I am happy to return for the science (although I will repeat ad-nauseam that I do not appreciate having to take advanced mathematics in order to teach fifth graders how to divide a pizza into fractions.) Despite my literary leanings, Biology has always whispered her siren song from the horizon.

Last semester I was excited to take an Environmental Science course at our local community college in Pennsylvania. I was horrified that first evening to find the professor, an elderly semi-retired man, not only spewing shockingly derogatory untruths about the third world (my blood begins to boil, here) but that his experience in noted countries where he claimed “expertise” added up to hardly more that a couple of extended working vacations thirty years before. Although he took one class session to “introduce” us obviously culturally deprived Community College students to Thai culture by a visit to a local strip-mall restaurant (yum!) his shamefully bigoted treatment of the staff and owners ruined the experience. Our dear professor could not communicate to save his soul. After a few abortive attempts to clarify the tangle of information on his syllabus, during which he became enraged that we might insinuate any shortcomings therein and proceeded to blame our corporate confusion on our own inadequecy as students and humans, nobody dared ask questions. The second week, one poor girl answered a question correctly, but without including an obscure vocabulary word that he had, ten minutes before, defined so poorly I was actually embarrassed for him. He pointed and screamed, “PITIFUL! PITIFUL!!” until she left the room crying and did not return to class that evening, or the next. The situation only deteriorated from there. I would leave class so worked up I could hardly breathe. I felt awful for my classmates, mostly working mothers going to school at night for their associates degree, to have to struggle through his enigmatic quiz questions and incomprehensible lectures. One woman lost her scholarship. He threatened to fail a woman who’s baby was due on the day of the final exam – after allowing another to take it early because of a sports team commitment.

I was so happy to be rid of that class, and that horrible man. We moved to Alaska, and I enrolled in a few more required courses at UAF. One such class was an evening course on Geography. After some initial confusion, I found that this class did not take place on campus, but on the Air Force base south of town. I spent hours on the phone with the university and Air Force personnel, trying to ascertain the location of the class on base (nobody knew) and my own ability to get on the base at all (Your name needs to be on a list. No, I’m not sure who you need to talk to … ) It was with some relief that I showed up on base, was allowed past the imposing concrete blockades and lines of armed soldiers at the gate, and found my way to the correct building, the correct floor, and finally the correct room.

I walked into a room of four young enlisted men, three young army wives, and an old, should-be-retired looking professor. He was giving a lecture on Adam and Eve. Let me pause here to remind you that UAF is not only a public university, but a Science School. After ushering me to a seat in the front row, he continued his lecture, explaining excitedly how Eve had populated the entire earth by having one baby every year for a thousand years. “You never thought of that, did you? You never thought it was possible! Ha!” We moved on to Abraham, who’s father was a idol worshiping heathen worthy of damnation, Abraham, who was schooled in the faith by Ham the Prophet and Son of Noah, Abraham who’s antics with Sarah’s handmaiden was what caused all these “A-Rabs” to think they had some kind of right over a middle east that had clearly been given to Israel. They do not! They are Illegitimate Sons! They are Not The First Born! They created Islam to control the minds of terrorists, to blow up your friends, our young men! To destroy your families! To tear apart our country! Why else would they pray so many times a day! They are Illegitimate Sons! They are Not The First Born!

Geography Indeed. And I thought my blood had been boiling in Pennsylvania.

I managed to keep my seat, and a blank face, as he sputtered and ranted to the small crowd. After awhile he paused, adjusted his hearing aide, and began a second stream of thought. This one was on the importance of getting an education. How are you going to support your children on a McDonald’s Salary if (God forbid) something happens to your husband? he gesticulated at me. You must think about these things! I tried not to duck. I looked around me. The women were nodding and smiling and taking notes. He told us how he was on our side – he would make sure we passed the class, he would be sure we got through! He begain a convoluted insinuation that Global Warming was a scam, put on a video about the Northern Lights “so you can tell your family back home about it, so they won’t think poorly of you,” fell asleep and snored loudly until the credits rolled.

The next morning I went straight to the registrar’s office and switched to the day-time geography class on campus. Two days later, after sitting through a fascinating (I am not exaggerating for effect here, I was truly sad when it was over) lecture on earth’s seasons, solar radiation, map projections and UTM grids, I got a call. It was the Air Force Base Professor. He wanted to know where I was, why I had skipped his class, didn’t I know how important education was, that he was on my side? I carefully explained that I hadn’t realized how far the base was from us, that we only had one car, that my husband’s new job caused transportation conflicts, how the UAF campus was biking distance. All true. He cut me off. He reminded me that the professors at the university did not have my best interests at heart. He told me transportation could be worked out. He told me to come back to his class. He lectured me on McDonald’s salaries. He offered me several study from home options. He offered to let me attend class once a week, and still pass me. “They don’t have your education at heart. I am on your side!” I pulled my new “gotta’ clear this with the husband” trump card, and hung up.

I was conflicted. Not about which class to attend, but about the professor. Our telephone interaction was strange. He exuded concern. He really did, in his mind, have my best interests at heart. He was going to bat for me! Yet he had not asked a single question about me, or what I needed, or why I hadn’t returned. He hadn’t even let me finish my diplomatic explanation for switching out on him. As far as he knew or cared, I was a maybe-high-school-graduate military wife in desperate need of his care and encouragement to make it through an associates degree. And on behalf of those women, I was glad of him, of his obsessive concern. But I am none of those things, and for myself, I saw the well-meaning and yet insidious and manipulative jargon's other side. I didn’t – and don’t - know how to feel about him. He continued to call our house for a week. I stopped answering the phone.

The following week, two ROTC men came and sat in Geography right in front of me. As our professor began explaining the physical dynamics of the greenhouse effect, research and projections about global warming, they peppered him with confusing and unrelated political quandaries and science channel inconsistencies until he had completely lost the train of his lecture. They argued and hedged. The professor became more and more flustered. The session ended with almost no lecture notes. The ROTC students have not returned.

I wonder about polarity I see in this country, and in the microcosm of this strangle little town so evenly divided between the Academic and the Military, the Democratic and the Republican.

I wonder, but I don’t know what to think.

memo

We have been in Alaska for over a month, but the sheer volume of potential material has overwhelmed me to this point. In the midst of narrative paralysis, I have decided to divide and conquer. I will continue to post signature rambles here, and send you to Solar Cabin for tales of our travels and life on the taiga north of Fairbanks.

That means I will post again soon. Really. I mean it. I will.

flood

As we drove home to pack, we drove into a rainstorm. The deluge started as we hit the DC beltway, and it was the worst rain I have driven through. One of those times where, looking back, you realize you should have pulled off the road and are lucky to be breathing with all four limbs attached and working. We were listening to Bryson describe the hot, murderous climate of the outback deserts of Australia, and perhaps this canceled out the flooded road somehow in my mind. The northeast was flooding. We even made the BBC International front page. The mighty Susquehanna river, which runs just a few blocks from our little abode, has broken her banks and is washing through the lower floors of houses by the river. The arches in the stone-arch bridge are almost covered completely, and we are officially in “flood stage” and rising although the flooding and damage is miniscule compared to the devastation upstream. To add to the trouble, the water treatment plants along the river were knocked out, so there is no longer potable water running from our taps.

(It bothered me that this minor inconvenience annoyed me so, since I have lived in countries without readily available drinking water, and cabins without hope of running water at all. However after a little thinking, I realized that my annoyance was because we weren’t set up for water-unavailability, not at the lack of water itself. Anyway, back to the flooding.)

The deluge and rising water brought to mind, as we began to dismantle our living space of the last ten months, the ancient flood accounts. Flooding in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible are the two most readily at the tip of modern consciousness, but nearly every ancient civilization that lived in river valleys, or near the ocean, have tales of rising waters and ensuing destruction floating through their oral and written histories. These stories talk of the terror of rising waters, the destruction that follows, and the return of survivors to a cleaned landscape, traditionally purged of vice and sin by an angry god. These pilgrims start over in a world devoid of friends and family, devoid of the civilization and culture that was washed away by the water. But in these stories, the survivors bring human character into their new life and land, with the triumphs and failures those strengths and flaws necessitate.

It seems appropriate, as white walls expand behind posters and tapestries rolled up and packed carefully away, as stretches of carpet not seen since we moved in last September are bared and vacuumed and loaded down again with precarious mountains of boxes. (I am startled by how much space we, who own no furniture, no expansive Thomas Kinkaid/Precious Moments/Beanie Baby collections, no major appliances, have managed to fill with heavy boxes and Rubbermaid tubs.) We are moving into a new life, with almost no previous context and no good idea of what we are getting ourselves into (we love Alaska, and know her coastal climes, but have never lived in – and only briefly visited – the interior). We are hopeful and nervous, starting over with just our car, the dog, and a small shipment of boxes from our previous life. We don’t know where we will live or work, and we have a whole city to explore and learn anew to meet our needs for food and water and WiFi. Our life here is flooding out, and a new one awaits us when we land in the White Mountains at the end of July.

For now, we are full of boxes and tape, brooms, vacuums and Simple Green, trash bags and runs to the Goodwill. We ship Monday, and then begin a very circuitous route North (through South Carolina, Texas, New Mexico and Death Valley before settling on a more thoroughly Northward path up the Cassiar & Alcan to Fairbanks.) North To The Future, Ya'll. Or as the tourism industry encourages - Alaska: Before You Die!

solstice

Back in the early days of Globalization, Europeans (who don’t have to drive far to hit another country, you’ll recall) came up with a nice, simple way to give a shout-out to their home turf, or keep a public record of their motoring adventures. They had a system of simple, black-and-white (or patriotically colored) oval bumper stickers bearing the familiar and universally recognized initials of the country (or countries) in question. Unfortunately for all of us, this oval-bumper-sticker trend has since caught on in the United States with a vengeance, and true to form, we have managed to shred any meaning from this simple continental trend.

Every time I drive somewhere in the traffic nightmare that is sub-and-urban living, I see European-style bumper stickers with their requisite two or three letters. However the letters don’t have universal meaning any longer, watered down as they are with our national allegiances to a million different places, teams, hobbies and events. Regional holiday spots, local football teams, favorite computer brands, local bands and political sways have been compacted down into three-letter obscurity with a peculiarly American marketing savvy. I found myself tailgating offending SUVs (another unfortunate American trend, this one now being exported to Europe at an alarming pace … but at least their petrol taxes, good sense and tiny country roads are holding that at bay) to read what obscurity might be referenced this time.

(Go Bears not Great Britain, Dance Addict not Denmark, Grave Diggers Reunion not Germany ... the car below boasts Stone Harbor, Beach Bum and Avalon. I will admit I am a bumper sticker snob, but I believe this snapshot, taken at random this week, seals my case nicely.)

One acronym I noted with increasing frequency during my sojourn into east-coast traffic has been OBX. I finally came to read that this referenced the Outer Banks, but this was meaningless to me since I can draw a more accurate map of Southeast Asia than the United States. I later gathered from Peter this was a popular summer destination on the coast. After much ridicule of this frequent entry, it was with some chagrin that I realized these very Outer Banks were our destination for a late-June, pre-move family shindig on the beach.

As we approached the single road heading down onto the small, sandy strips of dunes and salt scrub that make up the costal barrier islands that are the outer banks, I began seeing the OBX acronym on more and more cars, trucks, SUVs and boat trailers. It was not hard to miss, as traffic piled and slowed until I felt like we were driving into New York City rush hour, and not out to a placid week of sun and sand. Only the back windows packed with beach towels, sun block and sand buckets, and boogie-boards on roof racks trailing their shredded leashes in the breeze gave me confidence we were headed in the appropriate direction. On some level, I felt like I was taking part in a truly American Cultural Phenomenon for the first time. Here I was, stuck in nose-to-tail traffic with thousands of identically packed cars, heading for respite from the heat at the coast on a hot summer’s Saturday afternoon. I was living a Don Dilillo novel. Delightful!

As we drove south, the traffic thinned. Eventually, we made our way to the house we shared with Peter’s family for the week. It was a wonderful week, full of sand and sunburn and pruned fingers. We slept with the sound of waves crashing through the windows, and nearly lost breakfast to gulls on the deck. Best of all, Peter and I rented two sit-on-tops for three days. I have been chomping at the bit to introduce him to the addiction that is kayaking, but finances (mostly) and situation (landlocked) have kept me at bay. We tried them out as soon as we got them back to the beach house. I gave a mini-tutorial, and we launched, paddling into a nasty headwind along a thin stretch of island next to the highway. We were primarily over a very shallow sandbar, the car drone was constant, seabirds nowhere to be seen, and the heavy wind (and Peter’s recently broken glasses) made the whole affair a rather miserable introduction.

I was, to put it very mildly, disheartened. Peter carefully noted that he wouldn’t mind all the other things if we weren’t paddling next to cars and houses and power lines. It didn’t help. I had tried to introduce my best friend to the thing I love most besides him and the hound (who, for the record, has been kayaking several times and hates is almost as much as she hates being *in* the water) and it was a spectacular flop.

The next day, I was determined to make up for it. We loaded the Kayaks on Annie (my faithful Subaru wagon … and I get plenty of flack as it is for naming my cars, thank you very much) and headed north, to the hope of better paddling. We drove right into a torrential downpour. My heart began sinking, and did not stop for over an hour. We plodded up and down the One Road, looking for put-ins or interesting coast line, dreading the cold drizzle but determined to try. Eventually, we reached the bridge at the end of the island. Instead of turning around, we drove over it to get gas in the next town. From the bridge we could see (on the far island) a wonderful network of channels between pockets of salt-grass, full of birds and possibility. We drove to the gas station, and while we pumped, the rain let up, sky cleared, and a beautiful evening followed the clouds down the coast. We booked it back to a public boat ramp we’d passed near the bridge, unloaded and slid into the water.

It was a perfect evening. The sky was clear, there was just enough breeze to keep the shore-bugs at bay, and the channels near the inlet were packed full of birds, fish and (apparently) a water snake. Peter took to the rhythm quickly as we covered the ground from the dock to the bridge. We explored as much as we dared as the sun set slowly over a continent we could not see. It did not take long for Peter’s face to take on the giddy, peaceful air that comes with being on the edge of the world, paddle dipping into another realm altogether, sliding silently up on birds with impossible colors and beaks, watching a small heron scoop a fish from the water yards from our bows.

When we finally caved to the dying light and began paddling back to the docks I realized, with a sweep of contentment, that our evening had fallen on summer solstice: the most generous of them all.

(annie on the ferry)

aupair

Today was the last official day of nannying. We still have a week of beach time with the twin tornado, but this is the beginning of the end. Friends of mine reacted to the news that I'd be nannying this year by passing out or laughing hysterically before intoning with some concern "you're kidding ... right?" I've never been a baby person, and I'm not much of a sentimentalist, but I totally busted out crying today while changing diapers. It's official. I've dealt with chicken pox, coxsachie, flu, ring worm, heat rash, sick-and-well-baby check-ups, up-every-two-hours nights, vomiting, spitting, biting, car seat installation, all manner of poop, rehydration-by-dropper, enough baby einstein to incapacitate any previously sane adult, and lived to tell about it.

I'm going to miss the little buggers. I have totally fallen in love with them, and it rips my heart that by the time we get back down for a visit, they won't remember us at all. But I know my little monsters are well on their way to growing up big and strong like little boys do ... and one day they'll come up to Alaska to visit us, and we'll be sitting around the yard with some sweet little girl from down the road they've made friends with, and I'll say ... "Turtle, you used to spit your food back out of your mouth at me, and I'd scoop it up off your chin, and turn around with the spoonfull of spit-up-goopy-baby-food to Monkey and say 'yummy! open wide ...' "

What a good terror of an Aunt I'm going to be.