The First Frontier

I’m back to where I was when I was wild. When my brain didn’t know what being in love was or wasn’t. I’m back to that blank slate, grayness with bright white all shining, soft, and severe.

I believe the longer a relationship, the more deliciously rich and complicated it gets. I also believe that this is true for a place, a home, because that is a relationship. We hug our doors goodbye as we walk out into the open. We run our hands through our banister, pick splinters from our feet of our unfinished floors. We ground ourselves by staring out at the tree that stares back at us over our kitchen sink. We go to our favorite restaurant on our favorite street, the same booth cradling us like always.

I remember a specific day I came home from high school. I threw down by jacket and ran to every room downstairs. My mom was in the kitchen. I looked up at her and said that I was sick of everything in the house. Just sick of it. I didn’t say it in anger, but in a state of confusion. She snapped at me that I should just go to me room.

If I could explain that moment better, I would. But that feeling has only intensified as I move around. I get sick of a certain resident that keeps forgetting to put in the PCA order. I can’t stand that stupid tree that blocks my view of downtown. I can’t fucking stand watching the last episode of a show that I’ve been binging with the guy I’ve been dating. I’m itchy and angry, and slightly aware of my comfort. Contempt for being content. I’m looking from the outside in, stomping my feet like a child.

But for every time I feel like that and run and change and become uncomfortable, it feels like none of it ever existed. It feels like every day flies me further from that place. I feel the tree start to disappear, the backdrop of downtown as well. It slips away slowly then drops off like a precariously placed cup. No matter how carefully I place the feelings and memories in my brain, they teeter and tip. They fall away so that I’m not sure if they were mislabeled as love, life, and worth.

I just moved to Alaska about a week ago. I had been living in the bay area for almost a year now. Like a plant, I had little control where my seeds and roots may fall. My season hit and without warning, roots started to dig deep.

It hurts to yank those things out of the dirt. We really don’t give plants enough credit. They commit, usually without much contest. Me ripping my roots is all anger or goodbyes without saying goodbye. Landing in that grey bubble that was Alaska that Monday morning felt all too appropriate. Transplanted to a place where precipitation lay promised in the sky. Water for new roots.

Those clouds were a truth and a lie at the same time. I looked up from my uber my second day of exploring to see mountains. Mountains in my face with little evergreens trying to guard them, to hold them back. The clouds had parted and mountains were in my back yard.

And later on there was the drive. The drive from Anchorage to Talkeetna. The roads white. The sky white. The trees looking like graphite scribbles that escaped a blank sheet of paper. White lay on top where erasers had blazed paths. My mind white with scribbles, too.

The frontier. The furthest reaches of my brain back to when romance was on the screen and not splattered across my heart, shrapnel ripping and scarring. My blank and beautiful mind. I once wrote about the time I saw my five year old self, begging me to love her and play with her. Now, she stood next to the old man hitch hiking in the blizzard I passed on the road. She threw her thumb up, not asking for a ride. Not asking for anything other than my happiness. She approves.

She approves mostly because she watched Balto multiple times in a row as a child. So I’m planning on delivering to her, because who ever wants to disappoint a child? That’s why they make fancy barbie car beemers for children. Something I only know because I lived in the bay area for almost a year, where spoiled is so common, you reserve its use only to describe milk or else it would have to be a prefix provided on official documents.

So far I am feeling like I’m spoiling her all over again. I stayed in a hostel in Talkeetna called the Road House, where a bakery full of pies was only a room away from where we slept. I let my roommates become newfound friends, adorning my face with glitter and calling me pretty. Dancing without abandon at a local bar playing music in the style of 90’s Barenaked Ladies and matchbox twenty. I wish I knew what the fuck genre that is, but regardless it always makes me laugh.

Make-outs, feathers from the boa around my shoulder in my mouth. Laughing as I try to climb up to the top bunk where the space heater has formed a cloud of heat from hell. Forgetting modesty and sleeping in as little as possible with people who knew me as little as possible. Feeling that glitter was covering enough of me to hide what needed to be hid.

And it was. Sometimes we really do need to fake it until we make it. Broken hearts and sleep be damned. My inner child shaking me awake after a late night just to eat biscuits and gravy and bundle up to go mushing.

I talk about including and humoring my five year old self, but I became her when I went mushing. Sun Dog Kennels picked me up in front of the Roadhouse, dropping me off in my version of heaven. Fifty seven barking dogs running circles in the snow, happy to see me.

I was fortunate enough to watch a sprint race called the Fur Rendezvous or Fur Rondy in Anchorage a few days prior. It left me conflicted. The dogs were skinny hounds, not malamutes or huskies. They were picked up like dolls when hurt, placed in small crates of a car.

This experience put my mind at ease. These dogs were begging to run. Full furred, jumping. Malamutes, Huskies, Eskimo dogs, and more. I was given the same suit that the child wears in A Christmas Story, where he can’t put his arms down. I asked how I could help and I was given the job of petting Crimson, the lead dog. Barking flooding my ears in a rhythmic way. Can I always be five?

I was then basically given no instruction other than stand on the runners and hang on. Within the first minute, I fell off, bouncing in my twenty pound down suit from side to side on the trail. My guide, J. didn’t notice, so I was running after him much like the child in A Christmas Story. He finally stopped about 100 feet ahead of me. Can I never be five again?

He urged me to hurry up because the dogs were eager to keep running. I jumped back on, hair falling back into my face, me ignoring it this time. The wind blew the hair out of my face and the noise from my ears. The silence that followed rang in my ears after hearing dogs bark nonstop for twenty minutes. The occasional dog swinging its happy head to chomp snow to hydrate and cool.

We passed trees tenderly holding hunks of snow. The path marked up by snowmobiles and past sled rides. On both sides, pristine snow smooth like generic china cups tipped upside down.

After sitting in that moment, I fell back into my chatty self. I asked my musher about a rumor that I had heard in town that he had rescued four people from a plane that crashed into a frozen lake. To respect his humble spirit, I can only say that it is true and not much else. But he went on to tell me about an experience he had that I do feel is appropriate to share.

He told me about a time when he was chopping down a tree and it landed on him, fracturing his skull and pinning him to the ground. He said it threw him out of his body. That he floated above, looked down, and thought how he should try to help that person below him. He woke up, pushed the tree off, paralyzing his arm, and snowmobiled to get help for himself.

He was in the ICU for three weeks, trying to unscrew the halo pins from his head. Getting tied down and then retied down, using physical therapy to help him escape. He was like any patient I have ever had, except I was able to talk to him and see him years after his accident. Talk about an out of ICU nurse experience. We usually only get to see the struggle, not the victory.

Not just as nurses though. I’d been living in my struggle all week. My ripped roots, my broken heart, my cool, numb head. I think that it had become so intense that I was out of my body a lot of that week. Experiencing what I could experience, while my body still felt pinned to California. Aching for the familiar that sometimes embraces like a lover and other times suffocates like a boa. No feathers, all scales.

I came down that day. I came down into my fluffy suit, my frozen toes, my tightly gripped hands. After nine miles, I hopped down and thanked each of the ten dogs that had pulled me through my thoughts, towards my victory.

I visited with my guide. He showed me his many bibs and medals from the thirteen Iditarods he had run. His best place was sixteenth. He had once finished with six dogs, down from sixteen. Averaging 130 miles per day with two breaks built in to be just long enough to let the dogs rest.

I think that somedays or times in our life we give ourselves those same kind of rests for fear we won’t keep moving forward. I’m trying to find the in between, but for now, I’m just happy I’m back in my body, holding hands with my five-year old self. Ready to explore the frontiers of my mind as well as the land.