It was a life of screen doors slamming, dogs barking, and ringing phones. There were endless errands to run, car pools to drive and the appetites of four growing children to consider. When I got the chance, I ran and gardened and fed the homeless on Thursday nights. There were few moments in a day to hold close, empty of demands. Like everyone I knew, I was busy. Now, I made noise about changing this--to drop the obligations, say no to the uncountable claims on my time--but it took a sizable stumble and thump to change things. It took the mythic dimensions of Alaska to stop me in my headlong tracks.
My husband Greg works the Bristol Bay salmon season every summer. For years Greg had urged me to join him with the kids, and when our youngest turned three I said yes. I imagined six weeks in a cozy cabin with a lush landscape outside our door. The kids and I watched the movie ‘The Wilderness Family’, and saw a happy clan sawing logs and saving a baby cougar. Adventure beckoned! With anticipation we flew to King Salmon, Alaska.
Greg arrived at the airport in a battered truck. Wedged together in the cab, we bounced down the highway of potholes--formidable potholes-- that turned the drive into an endless polka of body sways and head thumps against the truck roof. The tundra stretched before us flat and peculiar, the sky a vault of scattered clouds. There were no discernible features to orient ourselves. No rise of peaks, or spine of hills to navigate with. My eyes slid uninterrupted to the wide horizon. I drew a breath and looked away.
We pulled into a rutted drive and lurched to a stop before a structure that looked something like a trailer if you glanced at it sideways real fast.
“Here it is!” Greg said, “Here is home! I have to get back to the boat, I’ll see
you in the morning.” He gave big hugs of encouragement, and extricated himself from our arms. We stood in the dust with our bags and watched him drive away.
Home was a truck container. Someone had cut windows from the sides, called it a trailer, and set it upon a scraped off patch of tundra. We stepped gingerly up the plastic fish box that comprised the threshold to the door.
“This can’t be it!” our nine year old daughter cried. “I could never, EVER, live here!” I felt a slow slide into an unnameable place reserved for car accidents and broken bones.
It smelled like a swamp on a warm day. Greasy towels hung on a rack, the faded sofa was missing a leg . The water ran tea colored from the faucet, and to our horror we discovered a strange trumpet-shaped lichen growing from the carpet of the bedroom. Home.
I rolled up my sleeves and went to work while the the kids threw themselves outdoors to dig rivers and channels in the dirt.
The days unfolded endlessly, unpunctuated by dark at this latitude. The light did strange things to our appetites, to our sleeping habits. Bedtime became a battle when the sun called my children out to play at midnight. I lurched from one problem to another. A water pipe burst from its joint under the trailer. Squalls blew in and to the kids’ delight, filled their river world with currents of water--joining mud, skin, clothing and children in a happy marriage of mess. The mosquitoes drove us like cattle from tundra to trailer to car. In the evenings bears nosed around the margins of the trailer searching for garbage. Twenty hours of available light to see what my Wilderness Family had come to: a place of mud, mosquitoes, and bears; to a dirty tribe of dislocated travelers.
One sun filled night I hung clothes on a line strung between scrub alders, then sat down to watch the kids play baseball with neighboring
children. They moved the bases around in the dirt until they were satisfied. The three year old was allowed 10 strikes, a girl declared, older boys could hit only within the base lines or they were O-U-T out. She glanced over at me. “You wanna play?” she asked . I shrugged thinking there was something else I should do, like pick the lichen that sprang daily from the bedroom.
“She’s a good player!” my son cried. I smiled. I hadn’t played since high school. I hefted the bat and considered. “Batter... UP!” the girls shouted. I hit a home run deep into the tundra. “NEW RULE!” a boy screamed, “Mothers can hit to base lines ONLY!” I was in league with the big boys now. We played for hours under that midnight sun, laughing and shrieking, changing rules, shaking the dust from our bodies in charged halos of light. Suddenly I was a girl again, unfettered and breathless with the crazy fun of it all. Something shifted inside.
I changed the rules: The days would be governed by the urges and appetites of our bodies, not the clock. We began to rise at whatever time we woke, eat when we were hungry, and sleep when we were tired, even if that
meant dinner at ten and bedtime at two. Problems that seemed overwhelming fell away, and the weeks stretched long, empty of duties. We called it Alaska Time.
With Alaska Time I became an available lap, a willing ear for listening to worries and dreams. I was idle arms for holding, for pouring plaster in bear tracks, for throwing a baseball. I was newly opened eyes to see the treasures available to children: Mud. Boundless light. Midnight drives to watch caribou graze and eagles wheel in the sky.
There was no turning back. The journey to Bristol Bay offered a touchstone to measure our lives against. Alaska Time. In a walk after dinner; in dropping everything to play ping pong. In watching a radiant sunset, and naming the stars that bloom in the sky. It is Alaska Time when the rules change; the dishes wait; the phone goes unanswered. Alaska Time in the words---Yes, I want to play.
hi :-)
just wanted to say thankyou, i love reading your stories and ideas. i totally agree and aspire to having more alaska time with my three precious children. life is too short to fill it with forgettable tasks.
manda - enjoying some mud here in australia:-)
Posted by: manda | June 25, 2005 at 04:02 AM