Saying goodbye

10/28/2019

It’s been a little more than a month since I left Alaska. I’ve been putting off writing a final post, because that makes my time there seem truly over — hopefully not forever, but still for now — and that’s hard to confront. And also because my experience there seems so much more dreamlike and detached from reality the farther away it gets.

It was a magical summer. Instagram makes everything appear through a rose-colored tint, and yet, most of my time in Southcentral Alaska actually was wondrous, as obnoxious as that sounds. I loved baking hundreds of loaves of bread, reporting for a local public radio station, volunteering on outdoor education expeditions with local kids, running on trails through boreal forests, going to sleep bone-tired to the sound of floatplanes taking off in the striking summer sunlight, waking up sore with the early Alaskan sun, reading book after book by Alaskans or about Alaskans, writing cheesy postcards, eating locally, living fully.

Before my move, I knew summertime Talkeetna had the outward reputation of being a quirky tourist stop, as well as a bit of a party town for seasonal workers and a scenic jumping-off point for Denali-bound climbers. But working at 5 a.m., in a kitchen full of women, gave me a glimpse of a different patchwork of lives and experiences. It’s a supportive small town full of strong leading ladies, who gut and filet fish faster than I can comprehend, sew hardy fur clothing, and chop and stack firewood, plus lead thoughtful group meditations, skinny-dip with strangers at secret lakes, and share blueberry hideaways. They are some of the most beautiful women I have ever known, and I didn’t notice the near-universal absence of makeup until one night when I looked around, awestruck and giddy at the late realization. They are true renaissance women, and I received more than my karmic share of kindness from them this summer.

From experiencing that sisterhood, getting to know so many other open and helpful local folks and businesses, and rediscovering my own personal balance of activity and introspection, I came to really love and admire small-town living. Granted, I was an outsider looking in. The drawbacks — the long haul to a grocery store, the volatility of having a weather-reliant livelihood, the talebearing nature of a small social circle — were temporary for me. I ended the summer feeling lucky to have gotten to witness so many creative, ambitious, do-it-yourself, hardy, generous, and purposeful ways of life. I’m yearning to incorporate those lifestyles and habits into my current day-to-day, and feel myself realigning the future I want with those goals and attitudes.

And my months there would have been much more lonely and much less fulfilling without the two strong young women who befriended me in my first week. All at transitional moments, hailing from across the lower 48, we bonded over community film screenings and concerts, local beer and cider samplings, early summer days on the farm’s teeter totter-like planter, morning baking shifts, farm fresh barbecues, late summer days spent dodging bees and plucking kohlrabi, car repairs, map-less trail runs, lake swims, and so many more experiences I will continue to treasure. Emily and Rachelle, my meager offerings of bread and hot showers paled in comparison to your overflowing generosity, and my withering sense of confidence and purpose was rejuvenated by your fearless pluck. I never would have hoped to forge such friendships during my time in Alaska.

It wasn’t all rom-com-esque moments, of course. The romantic sheen relayed in most of my posts and pictures doesn’t do justice to the fortitude of Alaskans through hardship, or the times that I stumbled in the face of that hardship. I kept a list of the harsher realities in my journal, like dealing with dead voles, rationing propane, or depending on Facebook-circulated updates as a wildfire crept closer to town. I still don’t know if I’d be cut out for their winter, or even for a normal summer; this one was their hottest and driest on record, and I selfishly enjoyed the endless, rainless, frostless summer days.

Things change so fast there. The sun rises five minutes later every day after the solstice, the weather can drop 40 degrees overnight in autumn, the cabin next door to mine was there one day and on a trailer headed out of town the next. I had always planned to leave, to return to D.C., but as more and more people tempted me with ideas for how to stay the winter or other-worldly descriptions of break-up in the springtime or their own romantic tales of turning into true, year-round Alaskans, it was hard to shut off the “what-ifs.” It helped that most summer employees had packed up even earlier, moving on to a ski resort or warm weather locale for another seasonal gig. By the time I finally joined the exodus, departure seemed like the natural way of things. 

I stayed long enough to run a cathartic farewell trail race, and spent 16 miles connecting all the trails I had run during the summer in one big loop, starting and ending at two places I had come to know so well. My workplace, the Flying Squirrel Bakery, was the gathering point, and then we took off down ATV trails next to the highway to the familiar 9-mile Talkeetna Lakes loop near my little house, before tromping uphill to some overlook trails by the town’s swanky lodge, successfully conquering a Devil’s Club-laden connector trail that had defeated me earlier in the summer, and winding through some unmapped but well-marked trails down to town to finish at the Northern Susitna Institute, where I had helped out a bit earlier in the summer and gratefully leeched off their WiFi, too. Through the stomach spasms at the beginning and the thumping knee pain at the end, I said goodbye to my northern paradise and then jumped in a packed car to see another small percentage of the massive state. A week, three towns, and a handful of kind and interesting strangers-turned-friends later, I flew from Juneau, in southeast Alaska, to the East Coast, and into the waiting arms of my eternally supportive boyfriend.

Coming back to D.C. has been a bit mind-boggling; the overriding feeling is that time warped, that everything and nothing has changed at the same time. There are 200 percent more WaWas in my neighborhood than before, the little girl I tutor seems to have grown a foot, and it feels like half of my friends accelerated up a level — personally, professionally, financially, romantically — or moved out of the city. My Streetwise seller doesn’t know me anymore. I don’t recognize some of my old haunts, or know of the hip new ones. 

I left D.C. two weeks after the Mueller report dropped and came back the same week the impeachment firestorm commenced, and even though there were likely a thousand political outrages in that interim, I have very little idea of or interest in them. I still see the same eyerolls, witness the same outrage, hear the same small talk. Now that I’m back to being inundated with national news headlines every day, I desperately, self-isolatedly miss having a true local paper to page through every morning. Logging off Twitter, turning off news notifications, and unsubscribing from the plethora of Politico newsletters re-introduced me to media as a normal person: finding out hours later about mass shooting after mass shooting, choosing not to watch the graphic videos in their wake, being very unconcerned with who broke what story or got what interview, and tuning out the day’s hearings, viral soundbites, Twitter skirmishes, and press conferences. Actually hearing what people talk about “around the water cooler” made me both disheartened in what I spent my last three plus years doing and also gave me a glimmer of hope into how much power simple conversations can have on a person’s perceptions.

Perhaps I had a radical experience. I didn’t have WiFi at the house I was renting, and even cell service was touch-and-go. And when that worked, my “unlimited” plan slowed down data so much that there was no choice but to be out of the loop and let the algorithms of Twitter, Facebook, and all the social media news filters catch me up when I logged in at the library or during my work break. But that extreme experience made me see how easily false information can integrate itself into your world and psyche; it takes too much time to factcheck everything when news is a peripheral concern. And with so many news sources constantly bombarding timelines, feeds, and inboxes, I can’t blame those who check out of news entirely, or who only believe the headlines that fit their worldviews. I did that sometimes this summer, too.

Now that I’m back in a fast-paced urban center, I find myself seeking out more trails, near and far, for my runs. Sometimes I can only find a half mile of unpaved earth on a dusty, root-filled incline to work into my route; others, I drive embarrassingly far to lope over sun-filled fields and into forests that remind me of Talkeetna, albeit without its knobby birch and stunted spruce. I’m trying to preserve the feeling of possibility brought by wide open spaces, even if that just means making sure I have open days on the calendar to find a release from the pressures of productivity. The challenge is invigorating and I am glad to be here. Still, the transition is hard. I’ve lost my keys twice and my wallet once, forgotten my bike lock half a dozen times, felt deeply lonely on crowded trains packed with phone-obsessed peers, and found myself losing my cool in logic-defying traffic more often than I’d like. I’ve failed to implement the “loving kindness” lessons I gleaned from meditation in some of the trying times since I returned, but I’m going to keep endeavoring to be forgiving and flexible. It’s ok to try new things and not like them, to renew a commitment to good habits time and time again, to change direction, to fail, to begin anew.

My (very) new day job here is baking bread for Le Diplomat, at their offsite bakery in the wee morning hours. Everyone on their bakery team has much more experience than me, and I feel like a dry sponge, soaking it all up. My first week has been more exhausting than any other job I’ve ever had. I don’t know if being a bread baker is my end-all and be-all, but it’s what feels right for right now. I’m incredibly lucky and knowingly privileged to have the support to make the difficult hours, meager pay, and lack of benefits doable. Thanks to my parents and policy wonk friends for hounding me about health insurance, my boyfriend for reassurance every time I voice my doubts, and all the bread lovers out there creating, sharing, and buying good bread. I’m not sure if I’ll be blogging after this, and if I am, it’ll be in a new format. Hosting this on my personal portfolio website was a way for me to easily find an ad hoc outlet for all this change and growth, and it’s been incredibly fulfilling and fruitful in ways I didn’t expect. All the outreach, support and comments have been so deeply appreciated. I hope you all find your own Alaska, too.