Tag Archives: Alaska

Snowbirding and A hui hou…Until We Meet Again

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We first moved to Alaska and I’d hear people talk about leaving during the winter. Snowbirds, they said. I was incredulous. Why would someone ever want to LEAVE Alaska?

We arrived to AK in 1997 at the height of summer, the season where Alaska shines her best, literally, —we covered our windows in aluminum foil just to have enough darkness to sleep at night—but after that never-dark summer, our first winter was almost magical.

Winter landscapes in Alaska are other-worldly. Fairy tale and history book, geography maps, and a coffee table tome, full-page landscape portfolios…all at the same time…that was Alaska winter…sheer magic.

So those “snowbirds”…I thought of them as fake Alaskans. Half-Cheechako, even as I, less than six months Alaskan, was a full-blooded Cheechako*.

But I thought I knew Alaska.

We’d come from snow country after all, mid-westerners…moonboots and snowmobiles part of our everyday life…soaking up summer before winter came on fast and furious.

What I didn’t know in my Cheechako state was that moonboots in Alaska won’t make it til November, snowmobiles are called snowmachines, and winter comes on faster and more furious, lasting wayyyy longer than I’d ever seen it last in my whole two-plus decades of being a born-and-bred lifelong Michigander. And don’t even get me started on the dark, even though we’d made one of the lightest places in this state our home.

But I learned quick that summer was the elixir that kept us all planted right here in Alaska, and that there is nothing, nothing, like high sun at 11 pm while a campfire burns and hotdogs are roasted for dinner. Or how waking at 5 am feels normal, coming with a full energy store for the day ahead. Or how the mountains look like they are in full rejoice mode from May on, flush with green and large arms raised to Heaven, trying to touch the sun who, in full summer flirtatiousness, never quite reaches low enough to grasp their fingertips.

I love you, Alaska. There is none like you.

But after spending thirty years as one of yours, I get it now.

I understand why people leave. Decades of trudging through your six-month winters—split up over the years, I’m shocked to say it’s been a decade and a half of my whole life that has been spent in your cold, winter months—I get it now.

I get why people snowbird.

Hauling water to troughs at twenty below…days-long power outages from high winds or heavy snow on electric lines…transformers blown because an old tree couldn’t stand up under the weight of it all…trudging through knee-high snow…cold bones.

Cold bones.

I get it now.

So, since that 2021 year that my beloved almost died, held hostage here by distance when the whole world went haywire…ever since, we’ve sought out the tropics to warm bones and melt the freeze of our Alaskan grit…just a little.

I get it.

Five years since that frigid time, we’ve come to this warm place we love, every year since, various clumps of us, each time thawing in different ways, and now, I just want to come here every year. Longer each time.

I want to be a snowbird.

My roots are in you deep, Alaska. You are part of me. My children hail from you. I am proud. You built us and strengthened us, and you’ve formed us into something more we ever would have imagined we would be. Or could be.

But this warm place has such a piece of my heart, and now, I can never go back to just belonging to Alaska all year long.

I can’t afford it on the island. We are blue-collar. We are not rich like the millionaires who have two homes and jet set across the ocean on a whim. It’s unreachable. We are just working to retire in peace someday and maybe leave a little to our kids.

But I just want to snowbird. I want to love my Alaska but also come to Kaua’i and soak up the beauty of this place. The history. The quiet. The aloha. The people. The warmth.

This place reminds me so much of our Alaska…rugged. Off the beaten path of the other 48 states. There is one road in Alaska, here too, on the island.

Try the Big Island. You’d love Oahu. Maui is our favorite. My Alaska friends advise me on all the best places, their favorite islands.

Why would I go anywhere else when I know how much I love it here?

It’s like someone telling me I should try to live somewhere other than the north road. Why would I? Our North Road is home.

And Kaua’i is home.

Our last day, just two short days ago, I buried the remainder of the little supply of my mama’s ashes I had taken over on the plane. Matt and I made a list: thirteen of her favorite places on Kaua’i. Just a little bit here, a little bit there.

Nothing intrusive or dramatic, she wouldn’t want that. But for one whole week, my brother, my kids and I, we all left little pinches of her earthly remains on this place she loved. Sometimes we did it sneaky like, other times I’d pinch some out of the window of the Jeep as we flew down the road —once forgetting there was a passenger behind me with the window open, that was a funny moment—but most times we’d just each take a casual turn with her urn and have a moment to think of her.

The second week of our time, just Matt and I, —having put everyone on a plane back north to jobs after an acceptable vacation—we stayed behind for a few days of quiet us older ones—her urn stayed with us in the cupholder or my pocket, and we crossed off three more of her favorite places before my little 1/2 cup or so supply was almost emptied. Our last day, I put what was left in the sand at the roots of one of the big trees at her favorite beach. When I’d finished and her urn was empty, I realized I will never travel to this island with my mama again.

I’m so thankful for the trips I took with her. We never had any money when I was a kid, but my mama would take my brother and I on little trips all of the time: to the zoo, to amusement parks, camping, to musicals…whatever she could afford…and what an honor it was as an adult, her in her sunset years, to take her to a place she fell in love with so immediately…head over heels in love to the point her favorite flavors became pineapple and coconut…and every single time she’d say…oh, it just tastes like Kaua’i.

She is part of that island now forever, and I can’t explain what that does to my soul. I cried a little when that urn was emptied, but as we traveled our final day, I felt the magnitude of it too, and now, on this first day back in our frozen north land, it makes me feel a little bit warmer to know there is part of her there forever.

And I need that, this first day back in which the snow is deep, and my feet slip into fuzzy Crocs and not the flip flops my feet prefer, those slippahs these toes wore for two weeks straight…the day that warm pants go on under the muumuu instead of just a swimsuit…

I want to be a snowbird. I want to live aloha and be hot at 8 am and watch the sunset at 6:10 pm and then see stars come out bright and not have to wrap up in a blanket to stand outside to see them. I want my bones to be warm and my skin to be tan and my nails to grow long because my body is making Vitamin D like it’s collecting an overtime paycheck. I want to go to sleep at 10 pm and wake up at 6 am feeling refreshed, ready for the day, no alarms, no waking up freezing or sweltering or being groggy when I know I’ve overslept but have no idea if it’s 8 am or 10 am because it is still pitch-black. My body thrives in the tropics. I told my husband, I don’t know what it is, but I feel 15 years younger in this place.

I love Kaua’i, and like Alaska, it holds my heart.

Sweet Ms. Melanie who made my lunch sandwiches…She works three jobs just to live there and help support her family in the Philippines. Aunty Nancy at the gas station, we’ve struck up a sweet little relationship over these few years, and even though she meets a million people from all over the world, we talk each time…she knows the cigars I like to grab with my Diet Coke and she says there is no way I am fifty-two or old enough to have four grown children. She had her first child at the age of thirty-eight and her silver hair is like a crown all combed back, looking like a Polynesian queen. I love her.

Our Jeep guy…as long as he rents out Jeeps, I will never have a need for a private company…he hugs us all and sends lists of the things we need to do and places we need to explore…we bring him fish from Alaska my boy caught out of our wild oceans and his wife becomes an immediate sister to me, and I miss her already.

The sweet couple we met bowling, so fancy in their gear and their bowling stance and scores, realizing they know someone we do here in the 49th and that we could be on a league with them because we have developed a love of bowling like they did…and don’t get me started on Ms Rose at the airport who only wants to come to Alaska as a bucket list trip and go fishing, or Ms Krista at the property rental place who lived in Girdwood for ten years, or the sweet Aunty at the grocery store who once traveled too to Girdwood to promote Kaua’i and did the hula and came home with some walrus ivory…I could go on…the people…man, what a little island in the Pacific has in common with this crazy state way up here off the beaten path…It’s such a small world and I just want to live there, even a few months out of each year.

Just the hardest months.

I’m not an expensive traveler even. A couple lunches out, but mostly picnics at our favorite beach, grocery shopping for dinners in at our low-end condo overlooking the redneck end of the fancy golf course…that’s my kind of travel.

The backside of the fancy golf course was overgrown this year —budget cuts maybe?—and while my husband sleeps in each morning, I got to know who walked their dog early, who power-walks/combo-jogs the overgrown trail, and who sneaks off into the woods with a backpack full of beer, making the stash of empty cans Matt found when he went on an afternoon stroll to explore the little pond across the way that families came to fish out of. Tilapia maybe, and a catfish or two, but I wouldn’t eat anything out of that pond…I think it’s overflow like at the refinery back home. He’s an Alaskan salmon snob, you’ve spoiled us, Alaska.

We ‘d putter into town to grab lunch and take it down to the beach, maybe do some souvenir shopping or people watching, then come back for a lanai sunset and watch the 4:30 convoy of golf carts roll in —nine was the largest count, five the smallest, all in tandem— we surmised there is some sort of daily lesson that happens here on the hillbilly side of this golf course, maybe where they bring those who, like us, obviously have no business being on a world-class course and who would probably have more luck and more fun at the putt-putt course up the road, which we did, and which we loved. An afternoon well spent, full of memories.

Then, just as though they’d rehearsed it, twenty minutes later, they roll out, one right after, forming a single-file line, and just like that, they are gone until the next day’s 4:30 band of misfit golfers.

Shortly after them, almost like clockwork, we’d watch a fancy red quad cart roll up into the middle of the field, and a white-blonde dog would hop off the back seat as the man of the trio whizzed a ball from a Chuk-It —two times precisely— before the female would finish up on her cell phone and hop off the cart, bringing two baseball gloves with her.

The man and the woman would commence to tossing a baseball, —maybe a softball, we can’t tell from the lanai, and we kept forgetting there was a pair of old K-Mart binocs in the top drawer of the condo next to the fish scale—and they’d chat through the tossing…his mom, work, kids…and every now and then, they’d break the rhythm of tossing to heave a ball from the Chuk-It to the dog lying patiently in the grass. We learned after Day 2 the dog’s name was Boyd.

I’d sit lazy in the sun watching it all, plowing through the book I picked up at the little donation-only library at the outdoor mall when my babies were still with us the week before. My youngest, that tall, long-haired Alaskan, he gently helped me find the money box for books nailed to the wall, white and stained there with red dirt and salt water, and I slipped in the four dollar bills I had in my pocket.

That baby, not having his Real ID yet, just a paper copy, I put him on a plane with his big siblings and his uncle, and he’s never traveled without his parents…tall and broad-shouldered as he is, his mama worries nonetheless, so his big sister, that firstborn daughter, she stands on tiptoes inside TSA after they’ve all been through, and knowing with instinct my worry, she finds my face just outside the boundaries, and she gives a me a shaka wave, her in her Carhartt hoodie, sweating there in the tropics but preparing for cold. It’s only her third time here but she loves it like her mama does, and how precious is it that my Alaska babies slip so easily into island life, them with their flannel shirts and knee-length socks-with-crocs, bringing their ruggedness, familiar somehow with this place that is so different from all they’ve known, but so similar too in the and I-don’t-care-what-people-think, odd-man-out kind of way of not caring,

They left and it was just us for a week and I wrote. I wrote a lot. I wrote to the point my professor had to say it was okay for me to say he loved my grasp on the meaning of the literature we were reading as a class but that it was okay to stay within the word limit. My husband laughed at that one. He just doesn’t know you yet,

He chuckled, even after he spent a whole afternoon with me over one of our picnic lunches, giving me good ideas for the piece that was due, and listening to it over and over as I edited it to being just right. He knows how much I love this place and he knows how much I love to write.

He doesn’t even like the beach, but he was a little sad and grumpy our last day…just thinking about all that is waiting for me back home, he told me.

But I knew it was this place. He’s come to love it too.

I’m not ashamed to say I’ve gotten soft. About this Alaska, Kaua’i.

Re-entry has me whining —every single time— and my kids roll their eyes, those tough ones. Rugged, they are. And Matt, knowing how tough I really am down deep, he just lets me go on and moan about him bringing me to this frozen wasteland and choosing it for us, even though we both know it was me prodding him to follow his dreams and drag me along all those years ago.

And I know what a blessing it is to even be able to take a vacation. And how entitled it sounds to be sad and whiny when it’s over. It’s not lost on me that the kids Matt and I once were —still are, most days in our hearts—could have never ever dreamed of taking an actual vacation, especially one to the tropics…completely out of our realm of possibilities,  and once the kids came along, forget about it.

Our vacation was packing up all their 4-H animals to spend the weekend at the fair. Precious memories for sure, but it wasn’t until he almost died and the kids were all late-teens and he had a hefty work bonus on the table and he said, You know what? We’ve never taken an actual vacation and they are almost grown now and this life is short and I think we should go somewhere and show them something outside of Alaska.

We packed them all up and my mama too, and we came to this place I’d come to so many years before, without him and before them, and they all loved it every bit as much as I did those two decades before, and my children slipped into island life like they were born for it and my mama felt like a tropical princess, and it became our home-away-from-home, and now I slip every bit of extra I can find into the place I reserve in my heart and our bank account for…this island that fills our tanks.

It’s not lost on me what a blessing it is. To have vacation time. To have a little extra each payday. To have grown children who can fund themselves now, and who like spending time with their parents, their siblings. To make it a priority. I don’t take one bit of it for granted.

But I learned this trip that somehow, someway, I need to find a way to make this regular. I’m a slow learner when it comes to me, and six trips to Kaua’i and laying a little bit of my mama to rest there has made me realize that this place is such a part of me that I need to be there more than what I am now.

I’ve learned it’s okay to want to be a snowbird. That there are folks who seek out the sun…that just NEED the warmth.

I met a mama at the airport on the way home; she’s from Idaho and had her brood with her. Everyone was tan and happy, but she was sad to be going home. We talked long about how getting cold gets harder as we get older and how our spirits just crave the warmth in order to function at full capacity. She gave me the term: solar-powered.

So I’ve become one of those Alaskans now. Who want to leave.

Who would forsake this magical, majestic northern place for a fraction of each year just to recharge her solar station and keep all systems operational.

I am solar-powered.

We flew through the night, and we met fellow travelers, and I counted up that it takes nineteen hours to get to the warm place I love, and nineteen hours to get back to the cold place I I still love.

When we left Michigan in 1997, it was 4000 miles to get to the land where we decided to put down roots. When we began taking our family to Kaua’i in 2022, it took 4400 miles to get to that land my heart yearns for. It is 4400 miles from Kaua’i to our home start in Michigan. A perfect triangle of miles, 12,800 in all. The place that started us; the place where we raised our family; and now the place that holds my heart.

I am a simple girl and don’t need much. I work from home, diligently and faithfully. I pour into my job, my community, the families I serve; all as I keep watch over mine and the farm they’ve placed under my care. I pluck away at the college courses I’ve handpicked to serve me as a writer; to make my family proud of me and accomplish the goal I set for myself thirty-five years ago.

I love my community and I wouldn’t change one thing about the decisions my husband and I have made since sinking ourselves in here almost three decades ago. I wouldn’t change one thing.

But now, I want to be a snowbird.

I love you, Alaska, but I want to be a snowbird.

Alaska, you have my heart and my soul forever. But so does Kaua’i.

And now, I get it. You’re not a fake Alaskan if you’re solar-powered.

You just get older and this cold place wears you down, chills your bones after years and years of winter, and all of a sudden, you need the warmth of warmer places to recharge and operate and to keep on.

You don’t want to leave. You would never dream of leaving a place that is so much a part of you. You just want to be warm. You just want to be a snowbird.

Our Jeep buddy, Brent, he taught Poppy and I the first year we traveled there as a family and had to leave…he’d hugged us all at the airport and made us feel as though we were ohana (family). We shook hands after hugs all around and kisses on the cheek, he said a hui hou. I smiled and said thank you. He said, you know what that means? And he held my hand and said it slow for me: a hui hou…ah hooey hoh…it means, until we meet again.

And now, each time I leave my beloved Kaua’i, I say it to him, to whichever house we stay, to whichever beach we leave, whichever tree I leave my mama’s ashes under.

a hui hou.

All the time, and I love my Alaska, but my winter bones and my winter heart are there where you hold me warm.

I miss you, Boyd.

I miss you, Kaua’i.

Until we meet again…

A hui hou.

*Cheechako is a term for newcomer, tenderfoot, or greenhorn in Alaska or the Yukon, specifically referring to someone who has not yet survived a winter there. Originating from Chinook jargon during the Klondike Gold Rush (c. 1897), it distinguishes inexperienced arrivals from seasoned “sourdoughs”. 

Dear Alaska: It’s Not Me, It’s You

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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

North to Alaska

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Our July is usually so busy I want to run away when I get to the end of it.

I’m totally overwhelmed, drained of energy, and ready to up and move to a place where there are no farm animals, no fishermen, no motor homes, and no boats.

But every July, on the 27th, I remember…

I chose this place!

It was nineteen years ago today that I rolled into this amazing place that became my new home.

It had been a boyhood dream of my husband’s to move here after high school with his best friend, but meeting me changed all of that.

When, years into our relationship, he told me of his past plans, I chastised him for not telling me sooner and told him I would’ve gone with him.

Thus began the planning and the saving and the letter writing with his friend, who’d long since settled in the land the two of them had talked of.

And when his friend came back for a visit and his folks were planning a haul of goods up the AlCan, we took our dreams and we hit our knees and we asked if now, right now might be the time.

Those good folks were thrilled to have another driver and they packed their goods and they packed my husband and I sent our valuables in the valuable trunk he’d built on our first Christmas. His Daddy shook his hand and told him he always had a home to come back to and we all stood and waved goodbye as the tooley fog lifted off the cornfield that June morning.

the bridge

I talked to him every night, but one afternoon he called in the middle of the day and a call at work meant something big and the big thing was a job and a job was the go ahead for me to give up the steady paycheck that tied us to somewhere secure.

I hung up the phone and went to my boss and gave her my two weeks’ notice and that night I started selling all that was left of our stuff.

I was Alaska bound. Even though he was already there, WE were officially Alaska bound.

On a humid July morning, my mom and I rolled out of the only state I’d ever lived in with my big brown dog and my little tranquilized cat and all I owned on the top of my red four-door sedan.

We rolled into Alaska six days later, and on the night of the 27th, when I’d made it to our new town and stopped at the first gas station I found for a pack of cigarettes and a Diet Coke, I knew I was home. I knew I would never want to leave this place.

And I haven’t.

Oh we’ve flown out a few times for family trips and the occasional vacation, but this place is a place that holds a person. When we think of how much easier it’d be in the Lower 48, how much more affordable it is in other places, how many more people there are for our kids to know…

…we come back to the fact that we’d have to leave Alaska.

I lost the cigarettes and my ability to drive in big cities and freeways.

But I found the Lord.

We came up not knowing one another that well.

But we wrestled our way into being best friends.

The two of us didn’t have any furniture.

But now we have a house full of it because we have all these kids.

We only knew one family and held them close.

But now we know many families who hold US close.

Nineteen years.

Not long at all.

And when I look at my calendar and the crazy amount of writing on all the squares this month, my eyes fall to today’s and I remember that I really don’t want to run away. I already did that nineteen years ago and every day since…

I’m home.

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OCTOBER 2015 360

 

This Shifty Week

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Today is Saturday.

I mean, technically it’s Wednesday, but it’s my Saturday. That’s because yesterday, which was Tuesday, was really my Friday.

But every-other week, Tuesday is my Monday.

If you’re nodding your head right now, you are living and breathing among the wild ranks of shift workers.

If you’re scratching your head right now, you’re a nine-to-fiver.

I once made the mistake of saying out loud to the person I was talking to on the phone that it was Monday. Except the calendar said it was Thursday.

He called me crazy.

That’s okay.

It takes all of us.

And us shifty folks, well, there might be a little truth to the You’re Crazy statement.

Because the crazy truth is, there are a lot of us crazy folks beholden to live life on a schedule of weird and wacky shifts, and it takes just a touch of crazy to make it work smoothly (and yes, I just snorted a little when I wrote “smoothly”).

In spite of the crazy, or maybe because of it, our family is one that has made shift work work for them, and here are some things I’ve learned along the bumpy and every-other-week way.

1) Your schedule will never be “normal” again. Ever.

Normal, in the M-F, 9-5 rest of the world sense, is gone from your life forever. Oh, you’ll strive for it, and you’ll look curiously at the bankers with their hair all done-up in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, but you my dear, won’t ever know that sense of daily regular, because in the middle of your Tuesday afternoon, you’re either working like a dog for the twelvth day straight, or partying it up like you’re on Hawaiin vacation. Kiss normal good-bye. The sooner the better. Don’t fight it; that will just add angst and turmoil. But more about that later.

 

2) Be prepared for odd looks should you be a) working like a dog for the twelvth day straight or b) partying it up like you’re on a Hawaiin vacation in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon.

These odd looks stem from one of two reasons:

a) Tuesday is still early in the week. You should be looking early-week fresh and not like you do: wild and crazy-eyed with all your hair sticking straight up and your FR shirt wrinkled and stained like you’ve been wearing it for 12 straight days (which you have) while your safety glasses frame your nutty mug like a pair of goggles that are permanently affixed to your crazy face (they are). OR…

b) your shuffle through the grocery store for popcorn and jalepeno cheese dip has you wearing your Saturday casual while your sloppy bun frames your slightly puffy, make-up free face…puffy only because you stayed up past ten o’clock the night before which was your Friday (Monday)… and this casual package implies that you’re an unemployed slacker mom who’s mooching off the rest of society, doing nothing but slogging around in pajamas and eating junk food for all your days. I promise you, it’ll happen.

 

 

3) You will very quickly learn all about yourself.

Namely, the depth and level of your strength. Whether you are a mama of littles holding down the fort while your man is on his four-weeks, or whether you’re a hard workin’ husband who hasn’t held his baby’s chubby hand for too many days, or who has gone to sleep without the warm hug of his wife for too many nights, you will soon learn just how strong you can be when you have to be. Something inside of you will take over and the ache of lonliness that once would’ve threatened to crumple and cripple you will become an entity almost separate from yourself and you will only allow yourself to take it out and inspect it in the few quiet moments of the day when there isn’t more work to be done.

It sounds dramatic but it’s true.

You will become strong. Very strong.

4) This strength will serve you well when everything in the whole wide world decides to break down/fall apart/turn to crap as soon as the shift begins.

Oh, it will happen. It’s the law of the shift worker that at least once, -but more often, many, many times- as soon as you go away, everything turns to youknowwhat. This either a) causes the one who is back home to carry a heavier-than-bearable burden, threatening the above-mentioned strength or b) cause you an immeasurable amount of stress as you try to handle break-downs and crises back home between break time and lunch hour at the job job and you’re trying to do your very best to balance both. This part is stressful. Verrrry stressful.

 

 

 

5) Your life will alternate between two conflicting personas.

This ties into Number 1 but it needs more words because this is a definite issue in our home and one that I’m assuming other shift-workers and their families struggle with. This one is the hardest for me.

The on-week, we’re all about nose-to-the-grind…keeping the train on the tracks…workin it to the bone. On the off-week, it’s like one long, constant string of Saturdays, a manic seven days of fun and field trips and projects with nary a routine or schedule. You will relax, you will soar with the family time, you will so enjoy the lazy days…the productive days…the full days…the free days…and then…

BAM.

It’s time for the all-too-quick SNAP back to reality when it’s time for the on-shift to begin again.  No amount of preparation or mental talk has been able to help this transition for me. It can seem like a constant flip-flop, flip-flop, and have a tendency to feel like working two full-time jobs with no weekend in between.

Unless you just let go and run with the party feel. And if you do, the one who’s at home is left with the aftermath of the seven-day/two-week/four-week manic fun-binge, and the one who’s back to the job site starts the hitch tired and hung over on family and fun while EVERYONE reels from the blunt transition to “normal”. It is a constant angst for this family. I’m sure there are folks who navigate the back-and-forth better than I, but after years, every change-out still leaves me a little shaken and trembly as much of my effort goes into making the transition smooth. (There’s that word that makes me laugh again.)

6) You will soon become an expert on things you never knew you would need to know.

Writing letters…hauling a horse trailer…running an ice auger…eradicating scads of gypsy moth larva sacs with a blow torch…Skyping…cleaning up the vomit/pee/poop…all the things your other half usually does, -or would normally do- those are yours now. You’ll get really good at them too. And one day you’ll quit wondering how it happened that you’re doing all this stuff you never wanted to know how to do. It’s that strength thing again. 

 

7) You will learn how to argue quickly.

Notice I did not say “you will quickly learn how to argue”. While shift work CAN cause an increase in arguing for some folks, I’m talking here about the actual time spent on an arguement. You will get very quick with your disagreements. When it’s on-shift time, work is the priority and could interfere in even the briefest of conversations at any given second, so discussions are short, quick, and to the point. No one wants to hang up mad, so you’ll learn to settle disagreements quickly whether it’s by voice…or by emojis. 🙂

When it’s off-shift time, peace is priority, so discussions/disagreements/arguments/fights need to be put to rest quickly so that the fun can be gotten to. This can make for a little bit of a bipolar-type day, explosions happening one moment, happy schmoozy family times happening the next. When time is short, arguments need to be short too. Ain’t no one got time to let things drag out when there are days-long projects and fun to be had.

8) The one-who-works-away will miss half a life.

This is especially true for those men and women who work off-shore/on the Slope/overseas. Being physically removed from your family means you will not be physically there for your family. It is a simple fact, and for the shift-worker and their family, it is a part of their life that they carry around always. They are very aware of the sacrifice they are making. For the family man, it is a huge sacrifice. Some may call him selfish. Some may wonder why he doesn’t just find a town job or something closer to home. More on that later, but being away half the time cannot be discussed separate from the flip side of the issue.

North Slope photo courtesy Tristin Martinez

North Slope photo courtesy Tristin Martinez

 

Which brings us to number 9…

9) The time off can’t be beat.

Many families here in Alaska work a two-week on/two-week off schedule, referred to as a “2 and 2”. In our family, we’ve done the work week that consists of four, ten-hour shifts (4 tens), the 5-day, 9 to 5 week (town job), the five, ten-hour-shifts week (5 tens), the 7-days of 12-hour shifts (7 twelves), and we’ve done the four weeks on, one week off away from home job (4 and 1, which usually turned into 6/7/8 on but that’s another story).

While being physically gone half the time is hard, there is nothing, no thing, that beats having the family together for long stretches of hours and days and weeks. Nothing.

Having the family together for a long string of days brings such a quality of life and memory-building opportunities, it makes the time away more bearable and understandable. It allows the one-who-works away to immerse him/herself in the day-to-day life of the family in a way that usually isn’t possible with a 9-5, and it lifts the weight of the home management responsibilities off the one-who-stays-home while the whole family carries the load together during the off-hitch.

Vacations can be lengthy, times of rest can actually be restorative, staying up late can actually happen, sleeping in can be a reality. The off time can’t be beat.

 

10) You will be criticized.

Yes, really. People will criticize you for your job choice. People will call you selfish, say you are sacrificing your family for the money, and they will think you are a overtime-hungry, materialistic bachelor-type.

Really.

But just like teachers don’t choose their profession just because of the summers off, or surgeons don’t choose their field for the long hours away from their family, the shift-worker hasn’t chosen their profession just because of the schedule.

My grandfather worked 20 days on/eight days off for over thirty years to raise his children and his grandchildren. My husband’s dad was an over-the-road truck driver for decades, raising six kids on a job that took him away from home for weeks at a time.

Shift work is simply a job.

Shift workers have chosen their profession because it puts food on the table. They’ve chosen their profession because it fits their skill set. They’ve chosen their profession because someone hired them, it’s a career, it’s a way they can provide a living for their family and a resource for their world.

It’s a job.

And to those who think, -even if quietly in their minds- that the shift-worker really should find another job, one that is easier on a family, I’d like to say this:

You go find another job.

How easy would it be for YOU to switch careers?

How long would it take you to put together a resume…scour the help-wanted ads…go through the interview process? How would that look for you to learn a whole new skill set…make a career switch…try to find something outside of what you know or have been trained for? Maybe go back to college to get a degree, or go back to college to update your current degree. How easily would that work for YOU? Especially when you have a good paying job that provides for your family right now.

 

 

People who work odd shifts are not a special set of folks who secretly yearn to spend their nights away from their family. They are not an elite group of people who have special demands, needs, or desires.

They are simply folks like everyone else who saw a path toward a paycheck, started walking it and ended up in a job that requires round-the-clock employees. Whether that job be a police officer, a nurse, a lineman, an oilfield worker, an airline employee, a bartender, a night custodian, or any of the other hundreds of jobs that call for shifts…it’s a job. It needs doing. The folks who work those jobs are providing a service to people, to their communities and to this world, but most of all, they are serving their family.

It’s a job and jobs are hard to come by, especially in Alaska right now as having hours cut, being sent home, getting laid off, or having positions eliminated are all becoming more of a reality for far too many in our slumping economy.

Shift work is just a job like any other.

And yes, shift workers keep nutty hours and crazy days.

(Getty Images)

And yes, you may get very confused when you talk to them about work schedules and calendars and what day of the week it is.

You may even be a little jealous when they stroll into the bank in their Hawaain shirt and Saturday afternoon attitude when it’s only Wednesday at noon, or irritated when they look like they just rolled out of bed even though it’s 3 p.m.

But the next time you see a gal in a work boots and a high viz parka turn away from you on the airplane and pop her earbuds in, making it clear she doesn’t want to talk to you or anyone else, don’t think the worst of her.

She may be leaving her family behind to go work a weeks-long hitch at a job thousands of miles from her loved ones.

And the next time you see a wild-eyed guy in an untucked FR blue shirt grabbing sandwiches in the deli department at 8 a.m. and he’s got a grimace on his face and a Rockstar in his dirty paw, don’t look at him disapprovingly because he’s not wearing Tide-fresh clothes or his hair isn’t brushed.

Smile at them. Because even though their schedule is different, they’re just like you.

Smile because even though it may be your Friday, it’s really her Monday.

Smile, because today may be his last of twenty-one straight days on twelves.

Smile…because now you know.

Smile…these folks are shift workers.

Every Summer…

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There are times, when nearing July…

a couple yearns for rolling land and sand and grass…

and fireflies.

The song of the Midwest yowls and the people pull and it somehow all begs them…

Just bring the babies to run and laugh and chase.

But then they remember…

Alaska.

The mountains so patient.

The beaches so long.

The trees so tall and the salmon so many…the people so fierce.

Why would we ever think to leave?

And the annual tears fall…

Danger Day and the Gas Station

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We met her on Danger Day.

A Tuesday.

We’d left home on Saturday morning, the tires on the rental crunching the driveway gravel while the kids ran alongside the car and my mom waved from the porch.

The first time in ten years.

A vacation. An actual, real life, bonafide, just the two of us vacation.

Between pregnancies, babies, breastfeeding, and toddlers, vacation wasn’t a word in our vocabulary. And truthfully, even stepping out of those years and well onto the path of homeschooling, one income, and the farm…it could be another ten years.

We let the sun melt the frazzle as the ferry took us across the Sound. That night we puffed into the harbor of sleepy little Valdez, as far away as we dared to go to keep our checking account positive and our kids and home fairly close.

And it was magic.

It rained of course. But we didn’t care.

We fought of course. But we didn’t care.

Because after we figured out how to just be us again, there was no more of that and a quiet peace settled over our time.

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The plan was to relax and explore for a couple of days then take the rest of the time to meander back home. I had our stops all mapped out. Except for Tuesday.

That was, in his words, Danger Day.

“I don’t want a plan. I just wanna go with it.”

When a true and faithful husband wants a little “danger “while his wife is hanging on his arm…you let him go with it.

I smiled at his grin when he pulled us out of the motel, squealing the tires a bit on the Taurus before we put Valdez in the rearview.

And I held his hand across the console and flipped on the radio as we dared off into the wilds of not having a plan.

To say we didn’t know where we were going is not altogether true. Here in Alaska, between towns, there is literally one road. He had an idea of our destination, but by not telling me, and me not asking or fussing over the details…we were dangerous.

We were footloose. Fancy free. Young again and not even thinking about what to make for dinner. Our car could’ve been a cherry red Charger. Or a Harley. Or the big blue Ford truck he picked me up in on our first date.

He opened the sun roof and let the hair blow free over his bald spot.

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Danger Day wasn’t the destination. Danger Day was the ride. The mountains.  The snow on my flip flops at the middle of nowhere pull-out. The waterfalls as tall as a hotel. My babies with their grandma. A clean rental car. Sunshine with my love.

The first vacation in ten years.

We do date nights when we can. And once a year we pay a babysitter for a weekend away to celebrate our marriage. But a whole six days? Never. Be still my matrimonial heart.

Five or so hours out, he pulled us into a crossroads gas station. It was like most places in our great state, rugged, homesteady, tough, Alaskan.

That’s where we met her. BJ.

She rung us up and she looked a little like a mother and a little like an aunt and a little like a longtime friend who comes to visit with your mom on Saturday mornings while you watch Looney Toones and listen in from the other room as they talk and smoke Virginia Slims and drink Tab on ice.

Her smile is big behind a rugged worry and her brow furrowed in a way that’s seen on the faces of folks who’ve worked hard and come by things rough all their life. She shines her eyes at us. Tired, but shining.

Her hair looked so pretty in her updo.

By the looks of her little store, we were the only ones who’d been in for hours.

I wanted to stay all day. I wanted to drink a Tab and even though I quit years ago, I wanted to crack a pack of Slims and sit down with her, just our jelly jars of soda with the ice clinking and an ashtray between us while we start up a game of Yahtzee and sit and visit the afternoon away at her little table behind the counter.

Instead I browse the shelves of handmade Alaskana and make small talk.

My dangerous husband perused her display of pamphlets.

“We’re thinking of going to the mine” he tells her.

So that’s where we’re going on Danger Day.

It’s pretty late in the day. You could go halfway in and stay the night with my friend up the road. She’s got a great little B and B. Cabins at the halfway point. I’ll call her and make sure she’s got one open.

She pulls out a paper and starts dialing her phone that’s on the wall behind her counter.

We keep browsing and she keeps talking and its quiet here and her Alaskana is so Alaskan and don’t the most peaceful moments happen when you don’t plan them?

She hangs up and it’s all set. We have reservations if we want them. If my tour guide gets really dangerous and we take another route and sleep in the car, fine. But if not, her friend Kayane will be looking for us later tonight and if we want it, we’ve got a place to rest. If we do come in, just stop at the main house before we go back to the cabin and her friend said she’ll send some bread with us for a snack and isn’t that the Alaskan way?

Everywhere, a friend.

Full up on danger for the day we mosey in slow and take hundreds of pictures along the way and when we arrive late we’re treated to a cabin in the woods and a camp shower by the roaring river. She’s not able to take Visa and just shrugs come payment time.  Happens all the time. She assures me.

Just stop at BJ’s tomorrow on your way back through and leave some cash in an envelope if you want. I’ll pick it up on my next trip in. Or mail me a check when you get back home. Either way.

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And she hands me a loaf of warm homemade cranberry bread. I’m in rugged heaven and we become fast friends with Kayane and her dog, and enjoy her tour of the little storage shed turned gift shop filled with handmade items.

I just keep some here so customers can shop. And then of course BJ lets me put some up at her store too.

That’s really how it is here in this place we call home.

I find steaming hot coffee in a thermos on the porch when we wake in the morning and we pray together and hug as we leave, promising to stay in touch. Then we venture forth, my husband and I, him having claimed a second day now for a Danger Day, and me being just fine with that, well rested, heart full, and loving to see him so relaxed and at ease because we’re not on any set schedule.

Our day is spent exploring the mine, dangerously not taking the tour. We venture on our own, enjoying the old quiet of a place steeped in stories and history and age. It’s just enough to explore and find a bit of copper before starting the long trek back.

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By dinner time we find ourselves back at BJ’s, Danger Day 2 wrapping up and us needing to get back on the meandering path to home.

But I want to leave money for our stay at Kay’s cabin and tell BJ how right she was. That her friend’s place really is a slice of Alaska heaven. Tell her thank you for sending us. Get another Diet Coke for the last long stretch of the day.

My husband finds us a Klondike bar and as he looks around I visit with BJ and I suddenly have an urge to buy something from this woman who makes me feel like I’m eight again in footie jams, but who also makes me feel like a grown woman…a mother and an auntie and a proof, a womanly proof that we are all connected no matter where we live or what our job is or where our path in life looked like before or where it’s brought us now.

She makes beauty in her art and she lines her shelves carefully and it shows the people who grace her store that even though life may be rough and the road may be long and friends might be few and far between, there is beauty, always beauty in this world and it is important to take time to make it. Because sometimes, that’s just what a wanderer’s eyes need to see and what a friend’s heart needs to feel.

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I pick up one of her birch bark baskets. I decide. I’m going to take it home. I want to have a piece of this place to remind me of BJ and her homey little gas station gift shop on this side of the state. Remind me of the smile she offers to the strangers-who-are-not that come into her corner of the world.

Alaskan art isn’t cheap but BJ’s got hers priced to sell. Even so, our trip budget is dwindling, and we’ve got one more hotel stay before home.

I expect my husband to remind me of that when he comes to check on me and sees me standing there with her birch bark basket in my hand. I expect him to tell me that I can get one later. I expect him to remind me that I have several friends who do birch bark art and that I could get something exactly like this one back home any day of the year.

But I say it anyway and I say it soft so she won’t hear. And I say it firm.

I want to buy one of BJ’s baskets.

In the pause I hear what I think he’s thinking so I go on.

She makes all this. This is her art. She’s over here in in the middle of nowhere. How many people look at her stuff? I want her to know it’s beautiful. That someone thinks it’s wonderful enough to take home.  I know what it’s like. When no one sees what you made. She creates this. When you create you just want to put a little piece of yourself into someone’s heart ya know? She works hard on this. I want her to know it’s beautiful. I know we don’t have much money left but I’m buying one.

I prepare for his irritation. Except there is none.

“Okay.”

And he helps me choose one we can afford.

It’s a treasure to me before I’ve even reached the cash register.

We get ready to check out. He pulls out his wallet and I pull out my hugs and we tell BJ good-bye.

Thank you for sending us to the cabins. And thank you for this basket. It will always remind me of this trip.

She hugs me tight, smiles that beaming tired smile.

After our goodbyes, I leave my basket and my Diet Coke on the counter, ask BJ if I could use her outhouse before we push on to the next town, tell my husband I’ll meet him back at the car.

The sun frisks the horizon and we pull out, a happy sadness filling the car.

When you look for beauty, you’ll find it every time.

When you set the schedule down, you’ll find yourself doing what you never knew you were wanting to do.

When you allow yourself a little danger, you’ll find safety in the joy of life.

Telling her goodbye reminds me of all that.

I grab my husband’s big hand, smile at the land stretched out before us.

I sure liked BJ.

He pauses and the road hums under us, no cars to be seen anywhere.

“You know babe? I think BJ sure liked you too.”

Yeah. Ya know, I’ll probably never see her again. But I felt like I just made a new friend that I’ve known for a long time.

We’ve not turned the radio on and he’s quiet for another half mile or so.

”I betcha if you look in that bag you’ll see that she feels the same way too.”

What?

I reach in the back seat to find our bag and open it. There, wrapped in tissue and on top of my Diet Coke is the birch bark basket.

Except it’s not one I’d chosen.

It’s one that’s filled with intricate stitching and elaborate caribou hair tufting.

It’s one that would’ve taken her a very long time to make.

It’s one that served as a prime example of her pride in being an Alaskan.

He tells me she’d rung his items up, gotten a bag ready and that she’d gone over to the basket table and placed the one I’d chosen, the one he’d just paid for, back on the shelf and replaced it with this one.

I flipped it over in my hands as my eyes began to water, running my fingers over every inch of soft Alaska…the love…the care…the beauty…the friendship.

The tears touched the corners of my eyes and rivered over when my hand found the price tag she’d forgotten to take off in her rush.

She’d chosen one for me that cost three times as much as the one we picked to fit our budget.

She’d chosen one for me that was from the most expensive on her shelf.

“I think BJ really liked you too honey.”

The tears fall down my chin and slide into my lap.

And the glow of the midnight sun shined into the rearview and straight through my heart.

BJ’s basket sits on the window ledge in my kitchen to remind me.

It really is true.

Everywhere, a friend.

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