How do you break up with someone that you love dearly, but you know no longer loves you?
It is hard, after near on three decades of life together to come to the conclusion that you are no longer loved. What once was a beautiful relationship, so full of light and promise has slowly, over the years degraded into a cruel, abusive, one-sided love.
Alaska no longer loves me, and I’m afraid I am going to have to break up with her.
This place, this great land that once held me so very captivated, so enthralled at every turn, she has turned her back on me, and while she was once so very good to me, she now assaults me daily with her cold barbs, dry and arid humor, and her sharp and crusty edginess.
Now SHE may say I’m just being a whiny baby.
SHE may say I’m a wimp.
But here’s the thing: I’ve put in time and heart and soul loving her.
I’ve given her a fair shake and the best of me; over half of a lifetime I’ve been hopelessly devoted to her, in fact.
When we moved here in 1997, everything about this place was dreamy. Even the winters. Mountainscapes at every corner, trees for miles and miles, vast swaths of ocean and quietness…I never wanted to leave Alaska. I knew I had found home. My husband and I had chosen the right place, I just knew it.
Once our children started to come along, we became even more sure that we were right. Our roots sunk deep into the ground of Alaska that grows only weeds and houses oil, but the soil of our faith and the family we’d created was rich.
And now, some twenty years later, to find that this place that once held me so sure and solidly has turned her back on me…it’s a betrayal.
I have defended you, Alaska!
I have taken up for you, and bragged on you, and told of all your virtues and beauties, and I’ve invited people I love to come rest in the bosom of your greatness.
I scoffed at people we knew who’d leave you during the cold months, thinking of them as not TRUE Alaskans, but old and soft, lukewarm northerners in their need to eschew your harsh, dark winters, all while thinking of ourselves as rugged and devout, willing to sustain the long months of short days and deep snow and temperatures dipping below zero for weeks at a time.
The trade-off I told myself, for roughing it, was the reward of the sudden blast of summer, endless sunshine, temperate days that ended around a campfire dinner at who knows what time. Was it 6 pm or nearly eleven? The onslaught of midnight sun bringing bursts of energy lasting twelve beautiful weeks, after which we’d once again see the stars we’d so missed as darkness began to slowly return to us; a sky full of lights burning on a vast and endless tapestry of space and we’d watch in amazement as though it was the first time we’d seen those familiar constellations and aurora borealis that make the skies dance at every turn.
I have loved you, Alaska, with every fiber of my heart and my body and my soul.
I have raised a family here, and animals here, and purchased plots of your land so that our family may always have a home here, a tiny chunk of your majesty to carry into generations ahead.
And now…now that middle age is firmly upon me, now that my family is almost raised, now that my children belong to you and love you with ever fiber of them, making your landscapes their huge hometown of a state that has spoiled them for any other place on earth, you turn your back on me and have made your once-perfect climate now uninhabitable for this body that carries me around.
You have gotten cold.’
You have gotten cruel.
You have gotten mean and hard and hurtful to my very bones.
Alaska, you have made me want to break up with you.
Now you might say, as only a scorned lover will, that it’s MY fault.
That I was the one who stepped out on you, not the other way around.
That I am the mean-spirited one who pursued other lands and slowly came to love that other one more than I love you.
I will admit, though not with shame, that yes, I indeed did seek out the warmth of climates more temperate.
That I did join those ranks of people I was once cynical of as I began to leave your bosom during the coldest parts of your winters.
Yes, I do admit that.
But you see, Alaska, it was YOU who drove me out.
It was YOU who continued with your relentless, driving force of your climate that wears a body down, year after year, winter after winter, until one day, after all the kids are grown and a decade and a half of farming has passed, that a young woman wakes up to find herself round about the fiftieth year and discover she is freezing.
She discovers she is sick and tired of walking in the crunching ice and deep snow all while having to wear closed-toed shoes that make her feet feel constrained and straightjacketed outside of their preferred footwear of flipflops.
She realizes that she will never, ever, not in a million years obtain enough Vitamin D from you to reach the bottom of the recommended range, let alone an acceptable midrange amount to keep her body functioning and happy. Not even when she supplements heavily.
She wakes up one day just plumb exhausted with the cold and the dark, and the knowing that there are still months of it ahead.
It was you, Alaska.
It was you who made me love the journeys I’ve been able to take to my other land, that place that welcomes me with tradewinds and warm sand and blue-green water that feels like a bath even on the cold days.
It was you who woke me up to the realization that the other place leaves me rejuvenated and fresh and feeling young again, almost like I could once and for all throw the thyroid medications in the trash and overcome the metabolism slump that has taken over my mid-life years.
It was you who made me realize how dry my skin and nails and hair all are when I winter in your climate, and how vibrant and healthy they are when I am in that other place.
It was you, Alaska, and now, now that I have realized all of this, I am stuck figuring out how I can break up with someone I have loved for as long as I have loved you.
How do I divorce and split custody of myself between you and my warm, tropical mistress?
How do I forget thirty years of never wanting another place and come to love a place outside of you as fiercely as I’ve loved you?
How do I leave you behind?
Can I maybe have you both?
Would you agree to sharing my heart? Would you be alright if I thought of her when I closed my eyes? Would it wound your bigness if I spoke of her once in awhile, and shared some of the aloha and sunshine she has given me, sprinkling it amongst your people here?
Would it be okay if the people I’ve met there become just as dear to me as the people you’ve given me here?
Those flipflop-wearing peaceful ones like our Jeep friend who hugs us and calls us Bro and picks us up and shuttles us around and treats us so much like Ohana that I send leftover groceries home for him and the kids and wife I’ve never met, but who are all like family?
Or those we’ve come to worship with, that group that meets in an open barn, birds flitting in and out with the music, praise raising the roof while the tradewinds blow in the scent of plumeria?
And would it please you to hear that we speak of you often, Alaska? That as we come across folks who share of their home states, your name will eventually come up, and even then, even as we soak up the sun and the heat that you don’t provide us, we speak of our love for you, of your majesty and your mountains and your wide open wildness that is so much like that warmer place.
See, Alaska, it isn’t that I hate you.
I’m quite fond of you still, really.
I brag on you wherever I go.
I quietly delight with pride how people react when we mention our ties to you. How they look at us a little bit differently because we know you.
A bit like a relative of a celebrity, we raise a bit higher in status just because we bear your name.
And once, that was enough to make me so proud to be yours.
But that was long ago before my bones got cold and before menopause took over my life and before my hair started to thin.
I don’t want to leave you, Alaska.
I just want you to be a little bit more like that other land.
I want you to let me wear flipflops every day.
I want you to be kind, and gentle, and breezy and not so cold-hearted and mean.
I want you to be more like her.
I know I am asking a lot of you, dear Great Land.
And I know your quiet, patient mountains sit and wait for me to take in their glory like I used to before your long, dark winters wore me down.
I know your history and I love and have so much deep respect for your eons of stoic, strong presence, holding up this end of the nation with such reverence and regard to all of those who came before us.
I really do love you, Alaska.
I just have to figure out how this can work, me loving both of you, because see, I am an all-in kind of gal, and I don’t like to split my heart in two.
I want to love you with my whole heart like I once did so many years ago.
I don’t want to think of any other place that I might love just as much, or surprisingly, even more than you.
So I have come to the realization that you and I need to break up, or at least take some time apart.
I have decided that if I can’t love you as I once did, I am left only to love your people.
Much like our Jeep friend, much like our tropical church family, and much like all of those we meet who, like us are just chasing down some extra Vitamin D to get through the winter, I have people here I cherish too.
Those people who started as friends and quickly became family.
Those folks who anchor us, who tie us here on those days where we might just be inclined to fly away and let the tradewinds blow us toward the winter sunshine.
Those brothers and sisters and neighbors and friends and children…those who have all become so much part of our hearts that to leave them would be like ripping those hearts out of our cold and shivering bodies.
I have to think of them now, Alaska, and not so much you.
For the sake of our relationship, that is what I have to do.
And for them, I’ll stay with you.
I will check back in with you after we’ve had a little mental space.
Around about May, Alaska, I promise that I will look up from my work; I will glance out the window, I will turn my head once again toward your mountains and your seas, and maybe, just maybe…
I will decide that we should stay together after all.
~
In the Caribou Tundra,
in the wild barren land,
on the fierce arctic ice,
where the polar bear stands,
where the trail of the Eskimo Hunter is worn,
this is the country where legends are born.
Where the Northern Lights blaze
above a cold arctic haze
and caribou come to an old shaman’s drum.
In saloons and in dance halls
they talked of the gold,
there were stories of fortune
and stories of cold.
The trail of the weary gold miner is worn,
this is the country where legends are born.
-Jim Varsos, Alaska’s Balladeer, Hobo Jim, This is the Country Where Legends are Born
Cassandra Rankin 