The back of the Subaru looks like someone gathered their life story in objects, shoved them hastily together in the least Tetris-like fashion imaginable, and gunned it towards a new kind of life. We look like we’re moving across the country or beyond the apocalypse, I’m not sure which. And I have a new-found hatred for shopping after Costco, Fred Meyer, two thrift stores, the yarn store, the tea store, the health food store, Walmart (homage to small town Midwestern roots?), Costco again (10lbs. of cheddar!), a cappuccino, snacks, things, stuff, meaningless objects that we spend time and money and resources on and this world is full of terrible materialism and I never want to enter another store and Oh My God I’m going to miss ice cream and go. We’re off. We’re running. We’re ice road trucking. We’re going home. I think. Home. Yes? Where else is home? Yes, I’m going home. Home past glaciers and mountains and feet of snow and an 8-hour driving time with so few cars I can count them on two hands. Through muffled quiet and trees burdened with layers of ice and snow and ice and snow. They are bowing to something; not us. This place is not about us. It is so wild, so entirely its own, that we wouldn’t dare try to give it a shave and a haircut and throw it in front of a computer in a cubicle where things are always the same and things are always safe and clocks tick as if clocks exist. No, something else is bigger than we are and that’s why we love it because we are a part of it but not in charge of it; small spectators staring out the window to blink and wonder and never fully understand because we are human and we aren’t that kind of wild. Not anymore at least. Gasoline in a place called Chitina, a town where no one is outside, and I feel like a ghost. I almost want to whisper because nothing feels quite real and then we’re threading the needle to put tires to dirt road except right now it is ice and snow and quite smooth and without the summer washboard-pothole rhythm dance to avoid popping a tire. One, two, three: road glacier (what the hell is a road glacier?). Now we have a new dance, a road glacier dance. Stay high, don’t break through, don’t stick, don’t slide, just go, go. Barrel on home, the whole 60 miles. Bury yourself in the woods and the wilderness. Feel like a child again. My cheeks keep scrunching up in a smile. The mountains look taller when they wear winter clothes, so I feel smaller than normal, in a good way, and I turn up the music and close my eyes, and we are road tripping up our own driveway. Mine? Is this place mine? Probably not, but that’s not the point. It’s where I choose to be, and it feels so obvious that I’m not sure why I ever left, even for a hot shower or sushi or good beer. And even though we have to walk down the trail in the dark and haul the mountains of Costco supplies with the snow machine and I can see my breath inside and everything is frozen and it smells like vinegar because vinegar sometimes explodes when it freezes and I forgot and it takes five hours for the heat from the wood stove to reach the bones of the house and the bed is so hard it feels like I’m sitting on a concrete slab and all of our water is frozen so I’m very thirsty; even though, I still feel good in my down jacket and I laugh and dance around the 8-foot strip of walk-able space. Mostly because home means something more than safe, warm, cozy, and comfortable, and I’m starting to uncover its definition. I think it’s a kernel of personal identity speaking a vernacular that I understand without thinking and an environment that absorbs my conscious and subconscious being. But it’s something else too, and I don’t have to define it with words because I’m beginning to see, smell and feel it, here in the middle of the woods in rural Alaska. Who would’ve thought? I wouldn’t have. But that’s one of life’s biggest lessons that I am just now beginning to learn; we cannot see what it is we are looking for until it finds us. Writing from a postcard: Erin
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Meet ErinJournalist, adventurer, writer, musician, dancer, linguist, and cook, ready to tell you about her ridiculous attempts to live in the Alaskan wilderness without running water and live beyond the woods Archives
April 2016
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