Alaska was Never Going to be Forever

Alaska, Then & Now

Alaska, Then & Now is a series published in four parts: then (Kelsey), then (Jenna), now (Kelsey), now (Jenna). This is part two. Thank you to Jenna Kunze for hosting us in Alaska five summers ago, and for suggesting this project. Here is a previously published photo essay about our trip (then).

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Haines, Alaska, September 2019:

I text Jon and ask if I can use his washer dryer. He’s leading a rafting tour down the Klehini so the message goes green, but I know he’ll answer on his satellite phone later. I strip my bed, ball up the dirty sheets, and throw them in the plastic laundry basket where my own clothes have sat piled, waiting for such an opportunity. I run the red bulky vacuum, on loan from Jon, over the ropey carpet in my bedroom that’s often inexplicably dotted with pine needles. Jon texts back: sure and I can picture him on the water, his clients gone quiet in waiting while he’s trailed off mid-sentence, paddles jammed under his armpits, squinting down at his phone. I’ll bet he expected a message from his teenage daughter, but instead found this request from his needy tenant.

I’ll give my guests the bed, which is to say a single dingy mattress on the floor in the lofted bedroom of the cabin I rent. 

In the stooped position that the low ceiling demands, I begin a backwards descent down the staircase, precariously holding the laundry basket out in front of me far enough that I can see my feet. At the landing, I’ll open the little wooden door that shuts with one of those circle catch latches and I’ll walk ten paces across the gravel driveway to Jon’s front door, left unlocked. I follow up: Thanks! Also can I borrow a sleeping mat?

Also on my preparation checklist: 

☐ empty compost toilet (I use both hands to lug the five gallon Home Depot bucket underneath my outhouse off the back porch, down a short stone path to Jon’s compost pile. I upend the sludge of human waste and mulch that descends slowly, then with a thud. Taking five steps backwards, I position the hose and squeeze the handle. Jon makes his own compost, which he feeds to the adjoining garden, which in turn feeds me. I marvel at the clean line of living, the easy circle, here in Alaska. I suddenly and not at all ironically identify with the organic food movement in a way that would make my Jersey parents roll their eyes. The spray of the hose on plastic is a hard rain sound, or maybe more like a car wash whooshing, and flecks of waste sometimes spray back at me. I make a horrified face each time, like ewww, but feel hardened with a toughness that comes from participating in the manual labor of everyday life.)

☐ wash dishes (Or dish? There’s running water from the faucet in my kitchen from June through September, which are the months that I live in this cabin. I don’t know how to communicate size in square feet, but the cabin is tiny enough to comfortably fit the definition of tiny home. It’s small enough that, if I were to do lunges from wall to far wall downstairs, I’d do two lunges. Three, max. I have one aluminum pot that sits askew on my gas stovetop, in front of raw bark that’s serving as wall decor. That’s the one I wash off last week’s pasta sauce.)

☐ go for a run. (This one is more of a suggestion, though I’ll feel bad if I don’t do it. I haven't maintained a regular exercise routine in years, and it shows in a roundness of my face that genuinely still shocks me every time I see myself in photos. I struggle to let regular hiking, the one-off mountain race, or infrequent exercise classes at Marnie’s workout studio in the old firehouse stand in for what was once a daily running routine. But my full time job and the sun’s winter absence here in Alaska have made it so. Which is why, when Haines is in her prime in June, July, and August, I feel a manic compulsion to photosynthesize in nearly 24 hours of daylight. I heel into my sneakers with the pull tie laces and head out towards Chilkoot Lake along the river, scanning for breaching whales, listening to A Star is Born.)

Kelsey and Andrew are my third guests in this small town in Southeast Alaska, but they’re coming at the height of my ambassadorship. I moved to Haines last September with two fifty pound suitcases and my first professional job title: reporter, at the Chilkat Valley News. I’m one of two people (the other, my boss Kyle) to report the news, and then also deliver it. I go on foot to local businesses, a stack of newspapers inking my hands, after the papers are flown in from the Juneau printing press on Thursday mornings. I refill the plastic newspaper box or, at the liquor store, the bookend stand at the cash register. Papers in? What’s the news? Doug will sometimes ask from behind the checkout at Oleruds, and I’ll thumb out a paper and place it in front of him. His photos—taken with a telescope-sized lens— often make the front page.

You know when people say they ended up in a place by throwing a dart at a map? That’s not how I ended up in Haines, but it's close. It won out in the pro/con list over another small-town reporting gig I found on Journalismjobs.com. Among the list of pros was its location, the Last Frontier, which felt just foreign enough to my New Jersey to work. My brother’s wedding brought me home from a two year stint in Asia last July, after I’d moved around enough that my World Clock page was several finger scrolls long.

In my twenties, I’ve relocated every year or less.
21: Poughkeepsie > NYC
22: NYC > South Korea
23: South Korea > Nepal
24: Nepal > India
25: India > New Jersey > Alaska

This was a move to feel abroad without being abroad. But Alaska was never going to be forever, and already I’m chasing away the familiar listlessness that settles in my gut around the one year mark.

But for now, it’s summer, the sweetest reward of eternal light after an isolating winter where, despite a writing group and a pick up women’s basketball league, weekly potlucks with the Michiganders and a new, over-dinner friendship with a woman my grandmother’s age, I feel kinda sad. Lonely in a newfangled way for me. I’ve made friends. I am day-by-day a part of the community I report on. But the friendships feel, in my darker moments, like relationships of circumstance. What binds us together is Alaska, and I’m self conscious I’m not Alaskan enough. My friends forage for mushrooms that become bountiful meals, lay concrete in buildings, own beacons and know how to use them to save their lives in the event of an avalanche. “Camping”, to me, had previously meant my brother and me eating popcorn in the old Colemman tent in our backyard until 11pm, then sprinting against the dark to reach our safe beds. In the last year, I’ve swapped my Fryes for hiking boots, stopped wearing makeup entirely, and learned how to ratchet strap a kayak onto the roof of my truck.

It might also be, and I hate to admit this, that I’m lonely because many of my friends here have partners, and I feel the tension of not being anyone’s someone. I’m beginning to accept that maybe I'm ready to prioritize long term relationships—particularly romantic— over my own wayward non-commitment lifestyle. But each time I try to imagine a future, my mind short circuits on a relationship in my past.

I have spent the last however many Saturday mornings staring up at my A-frame ceiling, on the phone with home. With Melina or with my mom or with Melanie (notably: all partnered), someone I had to calculate the timezone to.  I’m missing easy weekend morning companionship, someone with whom I can point to the spider building an impressive web in the high arch of the ceiling and say: Look.

So I’m excited, what I’m saying is I’m excited, to welcome well-worn friendship to Haines.

For the last week, Kelsey texts me in spurts, seven lines at a time, asking about plans and packing tips and reminding me, daily, how she can’t wait to see me. We communicate back and forth with selfies, and her astute attention towards my clothing takes a hyper focus leading up to her trip. 

OMG what’s that shirt
it’s perfect
From who?

she says to every shirt in every photo, and I know that her packing list is a pretense for both of us.

Kelsey is my original long-term, long distance friend before that became the catch all descriptor of all of my friendships. We’ve never lived in the same place—aside from a brief overlap in New York City after I got a job, and before I quit—but our relationship has always felt urgent and present in my life. She sends me regular postcards, no matter the postage, without ever signing her name. She mails me books, emails me good writing, and speaks about everyone in her life by omitting last names or relational descriptors, assuming you already know. I gave her one of my two comped subscriptions to receive the Chilkat Valley News delivered at her front doorstep in Pittsburgh, and she reads it every week. Crazy about the pollen apocalypse, she’ll text. Or, reading the police blotter section: OMG the injured raven. She sees her assets as shared, and even when she was broke and saving all her laundry for weekly dinners at her aunt’s apartment, she purchased two of the bougiest yogurts from Whole Foods on her lunch break that day, cheaper than ice cream, in preparation for my sleepover that night. We trade clothes like baseball cards, and she will often tell me I can keep something if I think I need it, and mean it sincerely. She sees me as an idealized version of myself, and uses it to paint a picture of me to me when I feel like I’ve lost the thread. Stop Wondering the subject of an email she sent me on Sep 21, 2017, reads. You are a travel writer.

Our relationship is marked by a certain intensity that means we fight a lot. Sometimes I feel threatened by our similarities, like we’re competing to be the same person. Like our shared desire for closeness eclipses our own sense of individuality. I get my nose pierced, she gets her nose pierced. She buys the most incredible pair of stretch Citizen of Humanity bootcut jeans, I buy (or was it borrow? steal?) the same pair.

Last summer, I met Kelsey’s boyfriend Andrew for the first and only time, and felt the heady rush that comes when you genuinely connect with the partner of your friend. Andrew was familiar right away, dropping the ‘enna’ off my name for a warmer ‘J’, engaging Kelsey and me about a recent New Yorker article, suggesting the three of us go to Central Park to play—and he had to have known this ahead of time—my favorite childhood game: The Book of Questions. I liked that I felt included in their relationship, oftentimes even prioritized ahead of it. In the last hour of my visit, I got violently ill in the McDonald's bathroom across the street from Penn Station and Kelsey came all the way back downtown to literally clean diarrhea off my new jeans and taxi my limp body back to her apartment. From my horizontal position in Kelsey’s bed an hour later, I heard Andrew instructing her on which medicines to give me. 

K&A’s week in Haines, I write at the top of a legal pad I find at work:

-Hike 7 mile saddle, camp with the Michiganders
-One year in Haines anniversary dinner at Travis and Rachel’s
-Drive out the road to Canada. Hike Samuel Glacier trail. Stop at 33 mile roadhouse for burgers and beer
-Open mic at P-bar (Friday)
-sushi night at Shelby’s yurt
-Fireweed for pizza, drinks at distillery first

I make a separate section of activities for them while I’m at work:

-Haines Hammer museum 
-Hike Riley (bring bear spray)
-lunch at Sarah J’s (Get the spicy salami melt)

I love showing Haines off because I still feel the caffeinated excitement the community’s STOPTHECAR beauty and charming quirk create. Out of the Chilkat Valley News’ second story window, I have never stopped attempting to photograph the specific hour of day when the alpenglow casts a blush gold hue over Santa Clause mountains, an effect that somehow makes them look close enough to touch. I have never stopped shaping my character list, a cast of town folks who each personify a different quality of this community, to highlight to outsiders: 30-something year old Erik, who quit his job at NASA to become the town librarian here; PizzaJoe, who earned his name after a failed business venture to deliver pizzas by bicycle, who makes felt art and once made national headlines for dressing in a bear suit, getting down on all fours, and scaring the shit out of wildlife photographers at Chilkoot Lake; Roger Schnabel, a developer in town and the father of Parker from the Discovery Channel show Gold Rush, who often gets into it with the greenies over zoning ordinances at 3-hour long borough assembly meetings, who once hung up on me during a conversation about such a permit, then called back to apologize.

We hit all the activities on my list and then some, which Kelsey makes me add in writing so we have the record (beach campfire w/aurora sighting!!). At her yurt, Shelby rolls the coho she’s brought home from work at Fish and Game into sticky rice, and we gather around a campfire outside, Joel and Gordie with their guitars, and sing. Betsy and Shelby do a rendition of EmmyLou in perfect sopranos, and Kelsey joins in. Travis does his classic: Miley Cyrus’ Wrecking Ball that brings down the house at open mic, and we all laugh, our faces lit by a warm glow. Kelsey and Andrew immediately drop the “is” off Travis” and “y” off Betsy. This is the closeness I miss. There’s no bathroom in the yurt, so I go with Kelsey as bear protection to release our bladders amongst the trees. I love your friends Kelsey says, the strap of my Carhartt overalls she’s wearing dangling threateningly close to her streamline. They’re perfect.

Andrew drives us home in my 1986 Toyota 4Runner with the shag carpeting on the interior doors. Each night, the three of us in a row of repose in my tiny bedroom, we say our rose and thorns of the day, while Kelsey holds my hand from six inches above me. Thorn: the wall of fog that turned us back the way we came on the rock scramble at the 7-mile saddle. Rose: the trail runner who alerted us of our lost friends ahead.

Although I don’t have a specific exit plan for Haines yet, I do have another sort of plan. Last month, when my aunt died unexpectedly, I bought a ticket back east to spend a week with my mom. While I’m there, I’m planning a trip to Washington, D.C., to (hopefully) meet with a person I used to love, who I still love, who I feel sure also loves me. Brennan and I met in college, and I was attracted to him from the beginning. I remember how his face looks when he’s laughing, eyes almost closed, mouth totally open, chiclet teeth like front row seats at the movie theater. I like how he shortens words—nothin’, doin’, movin’— in a way that makes him feel Of The People. While our freshman cohort—me included— flew home from our European campus for Christmas break, Brennan traveled alone to Ireland, researching his family lineage and sleeping on the floors of churches. The summer after college, we drove west to Colorado, sleeping in a borrowed yellow tent and hiking the Rockies. 

I feel innate similarities between us, but admire the ways in which he is better, more tenacious, more rugged. We both studied journalism and had an interest in foreign corespondency. But where I was waiting for an editor to respond to my lame email inviting me to their country with a full-time employment offer, Brennan was becoming a foreign corespondent by sheer force of will.

He was already on the ground in Ghana, and later the Philippines, researching story ideas and cold emailing editors and networking with other journalists. He was printing off his own business cards, for God’s sake. I was teaching compound sentences to Korean seven year olds. He was interviewing the founder of the anti-communist vigilante group in the Philippines, for a publication included in the required reading in our college journalism class. For every rejected pitch, he later told me, he’d hone his approach and pitch again until he was 4 for 4.

The final line in his 1,000 word email on freelancing advice I solicited from him in 2017, when I was in Nepal:

Finally, I didn't do this enough abroad and it can simply be difficult to get access to them, but read books. I know you already do. Having a strong historical understanding of Nepal will help you enormously. You can get story ideas even from reading books published decades ago. Use the past to inform the present. Connect history with what's going on. History repeats itself. There is nothing truer than that. 

I messed it up a few years back, hurt him, hurt myself. Though we’ve met up several times since— in the Philippines, then later in Taiwan— Brennan has maintained a cool distance between us. I can’t let it go, though. He’s not my first, or my last boyfriend, but I can’t shake the singularity of him, nor the combination of us. We both ask questions more than we answer them, are motivated by a similar sense of—and I wish there was a different word for this—adventure, and are the type of people to ask for the manager on the phone with, say, a budget airline. We are both from suburban towns in the Northeast, reaching outward, and share the same favorite number: 9. Where he’s tenacious about work, I’m tenacious about him. I email him every few months, most recently asking if he’d meet with me in October if I came to D.C. When he didn’t answer, I told him I’m coming.

What I’ll tell him in person: that I’m ready to be in a relationship, and I want it to be with him. That I would allow this decision to be the organizing force in my life, if he’d let me.

Something I’m learning on the job is how to write like a reporter, versus like a writer. Kyle bought me a hardbound red copy of The Elements of Style in my first few weeks at the job. He’s taught me, slowly, how to strip down my “flowery” language, and to make sentences clear enough that children can understand them. Congratulations! He told me recently, red pen in hand, editing a piece I’d filed. You came here as a writer. Now, you’re officially a journalist. But you can tell I’m still learning by reading disorganized fragments of a speech I’m preparing for Brennan. I can’t not talk in metaphor.

Andrew eats up my plans. I say Andrew, because Kelsey had already been debriefed. It’s Andrew who holds my nervous gaze across the picnic table at the Haines Brewery. I’m filling him in, my fellow romantic. That’s another thing about Kelsey and Andrew: they are hype friends, people who support this kind of ludicrous plan, to book flights from Alaska to D.C. to profess love and commitment to someone who, by the way, has blocked my number. They are rooting for me, telling me in shouting voices that I NEED to do it, even as Andrew clutches his head in the visualization of my anxiety.

It’s the last day of their trip and already I feel homesick for their constant company. They’re on the 3 pm Seaplanes flight out. We’ve got Maggie Rogers on repeat and are zig-zagging around town in my truck, attempting to finish off my roll of 36 photos so they can bring them home for development. There’s so many good shots on this roll: Kelsey looking at Andrew beside the ‘Welcome to Haines’ sign, the Old Fort at a distance across the fjord in the sun-drenched background. Andrew popping a bottle of champagne on Shelby’s porch, his face in a grimace of anticipation. The two of them staring at a TRAIL CLOSED DUE TO BEAR ACTIVITY sign in Canada, a half eaten apple in Kelsey’s fallen hand. We keep shooting until the counter on my camera reaches 35 and I say last one, guys! Make it good. They strike a pose that’s only slightly different from the last and click. I pull the lever to advance the film, expecting to feel tautness that indicates the end of a roll. Instead I feel dread when the counter on camera keeps advancing to 36, click, then 37. It’s gotta just be wrong, Kelsey says, so we shoot til 38, then 40.  Like a surgeon, I open the back of the camera slowly, squinting my eyes in the parking lot outside of the American Legion to delay the truth. Empty. It’s empty. I never loaded it to begin with. Kelsey reads it on my face before I can flip the camera around to show her and she’s already dissolving into a hyena laugh. It’s the perfect metaphor. We’re just going to have to remember it the olllll’ fashioned way: my first year in Alaska; us in 2019; life, a constantly moving target.