In AK---or Not

All that has happened so far is nothing less than what is needed for all that is to be.

Outside my office window four men are taking shingles off of my neighbor’s roof. They are working hard and quickly, removing first the old so that they can add the new. They take a pitchfork and poke under the pieces, pull them up with gloved hands and throw the pieces in the waiting truck. The roof is steep and peaked but they walk easily and quickly. In just a couple of hours the roof is laid bare to its tar paper covering.

I’m working too this morning, sending messages to students in Illinois and Colorado, Rhode Island and California, Minnesota and Missouri. I’ve placed them into small groups where they will meet one another in virtual communities. I’ve reminded them of deadlines, checked on rosters, made appointments to see people on Skype. My work moves across the distance that separates me from much of the rest of the world. But it does not lessen the actual space. This fall I find myself struggling with living on the great land island of Alaska—so vast, so incredibly beautiful and yet so isolated.

Something of me longs to be like those roofers who know the immediate work that is here in this place—in Anchorage, Alaska—tearing the roof off of a log house—and finding it to be enough. I know that true Alaskans do not yearn for the outside but find the satisfaction of the work to be done here on the inside.

An Alaskan friend told me that she and her husband thought for a long time that their stay in Alaska was temporary, that they would surely move to Washington sometime soon. But the sometime soon never happened and they raised children and now grandchildren who are native Alaskans. Now they wouldn’t think of living anywhere else, knowing that their place here inside is home. “When my husband and I realized that we were not going anywhere but staying here for good,” she said, “our attitude shifted not just about where we were, but who we were.”

This week my sister is visiting Alaska. And I talk to her as if I am someone who has been here always. I warn her about the mudflats and the bore tide. I tell her about the moose that I see on my bike rides on the Chester Creek trail and the Tony Knowles. I talk about the relentless light of summer and the slow lessening of light as the sun hangs lower in the sky during the five hours it is out at all. I name for her the five types of salmon as we watch the reds travel slowly upstream, and the tired maluksuks find a resting place.

But this is a second language affected for the sake of the one who visits. Impressive in its own way, it says nothing about where my soul rests. Even though I wear the kuspuk and it fits me well, it is an outer garment. It says something about where I am, but not so much yet about who I am. Like the salmon who swim upstream, l fight a current that pulls me backward at the same time that I want to move forward and find a place to give birth to what will be.