Coming Back is My Redemption Arc

Alaska, Then & Now

Alaska, Then & Now is a series published in four parts: then (Kelsey), then (Jenna), now (Kelsey), now (Jenna). This is part four. 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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I don’t often think about my growth on the How Alaskan Are You Scale. Except, I guess, when it’s forced into comparative light with you, a mirror of my time in Alaska from five years ago, just before I left the state, to now—I see myself between a 3 and a 4.

Alaskans quantify their Alaskaness with how many winters they’ve endured here. I’ve clocked two, and am considered an Alaskan toddler. When the smiling old man biker asks us if we’re local, you tell him that I am and I feel awkward, like tugging on too-small clothes. I’m only able to see how “Alaska” I’ve become in the company of a Squarely East Coaster like you. I’m telling you we need to pack PB&Js for our presumed ten hour, off-trail day hike, and you’re like: can’t we just buy lunch there?

***

Brennan and I started by saying I’m “here for the summer.” The plan was to see how it goes, hence the noncommittal language, while betting on our relationship and my job prospects here in Anchorage. We both felt like we were crushing other peoples’ doubts if we addressed them first. At least I did. Like, when I told people about Our Experiment, I felt in control by naming the insanity at the jump. I’m doing something kinda crazy! I said, I’m moving to Alaska—at least for the summer!—to pursue a relationship that never really got off the ground with someone I’ve thought about since. I sublet my perfect room in Brooklyn as an insurance policy. That doesn’t sound crazy at all, the woman with a slicked back ponytail eating chips beside me at a beach picnic said. It sounds, like, really calculated. 

It’s not dramatic to say that Alaska has wholly shaped my career. I’ve had the same job since I left the state in 2020, covering Native American news across the country from my desk in New York, a gig I got based on my reporting experience in the Arctic, and in Alaska in general. But I’ve been ready for the next thing long enough that it feels dire.

I didn’t realize—not exactly, not in these terms—until I was verbalizing it to this girl I just met at a Coney Island picnic, that I’m pursuing two unresolved relationships: with Brennan, and with Alaska. Coming back is my redemption arc. 

***

Brennan is pushing a cart through the Costco parking lot when your plane lands. My plan was to have dinner ready for your arrival, the way you would, but instead what we manage is just the ingredients. They take up the whole hatchback trunk, plus Takis purchased from Fred Meyer on the way. Shopping trips take longer than expected as a new Costco member. Brennan, who has lived with the pleasure of a membership for more than a year now, and chose his apartment location specifically due to its proximity to the Costco on Debarr, sticks to the list. But when we separate after the produce and before the shelf stable aisles, I become manic, impractical, returning to him near the checkout holding Mexican helados (the perfect dessert!), a 12-pack of SteamDot cold brew (local to Anchorage!), and a jumbo jar of sun-dried tomatoes (for salads! yum!). Brennan looks at my haul, looks at me, and laughs once from his stomach.

You’re already at the pick-up sidewalk when we pull in, and we both get out of the car to embrace you, separately, with the enthusiasm of parents welcoming their kid home from summer camp. I give you the already-opened Takis (I couldn’t wait), and an insanely flavored Beach Bum Plum LaCroix I tear from the plastic casing. You tell us that you watched Ella Enchanted and 27 Dresses on the plane, something about how Anne Hathaway is a bitch, according to your friend who met her, and that another friend, [redacted], recently had — “I’m so sorry, Brennan”—“accidental consummation sex.”

***

We’re driving down the three lane highway, which turns into a one lane highway, which turns into a four lane highway. Anchorage reminds me of Jersey in that way, multi-lane roads and strip malls. You point at the Right There mountains wordlessly as we commute to a second-choice breakfast spot, after the red text on Google Maps told me that the James Beard award-winning bakery is closed on Tuesdays. Fuck. 

You want to know what direction we’re driving. At Kaffee Klatsch, you ask if I’ve been here before. At the Coastal Trail, you ask if I’ve been here before. You ask if Hearth is the best pizza in town. You ask where downtown is. I don’t know; I haven’t: I haven’t; I don’t know; it's like….fifteen? minutes away?

I’m embarrassed when I tell you I liiiiiiterally don’t know shit about Anchorage. I also just got here, nineteen days before you did. 

When I direct my Google map to ‘home’, the whole thing zooms out to the size of the United States and shows me the driving time—seventy hours—between Anchorage and Brooklyn. 

***

My relationship to Anchorage, like my relationship to Brennan, is hard to explain. Not exactly linear, and requires a lot of context. I often described the two, in the months leading up to this move, with the same language. “Never really got off the ground” and “false start” and “unresolved.” 

I moved to Anchorage in January 2020 to live with Elsie, with my ‘89 4Runner full of my shit. Travis came with me on the Northbound drive from Haines, and the heaters were either broken or ineffective, I don’t remember, but we wore our coats, gloves, and hats throughout the below zero, fourteen hour journey.

My plan was to leave my belongings with Elsie at her duplex in Northwest Anchorage while I pursued a two month reporting grant in the Arctic. I’d return to Anchorage afterwards, at the end of February, and try for a job at the state’s daily newspaper. The plan would have worked, I bet, if a virus—that was highly contagious, didn’t present symptoms in half the population but killed the other half, and shut down global commerce for close to two years—didn’t arrive on the scene at the same time I did. After my reporting trip, I left Anchorage in a hurry, on a one way ticket back east. Most of my stuff was neatly folded in the second bedroom closet. I wouldn’t return again for five years.

***

Let’s play a game, you say, turned towards Brennan, and he laughs by way of response when you tell him what you’ve just cooked up. I don’t play, just sit across from the both of you, flicking my attention from face to face as each of you paints a picture of the other. My best friend and my boyfriend, and me as the judge, the ref, the witness. The original artist?

What Brennan knows about you: that your voice sounds “exactly like mine,” when I play your voice note aloud in the morning, though he still easily confuses you with the storylines of other friends; that you’re my best friend; that we met at a writing camp in Washington D.C. one summer in high school, and then again serendipitously in Florence two years later; that you’re married to a person named Andrew, and you live together in Pittsburgh; where I lived in your guest room for four months during the pandemic.

What you know about Brennan: that he’s one of five siblings; grew up in Blue Bell, PA; that he worked as a journalist before switching to law; he bears the initials BMW; that we met in D.C. five years before, when he told me he needed to move on; that he moved to Anchorage a year ago for work, and texted me in December when he was home for the holidays, asking if I’d meet for a coffee. I sent you a voice note on my walk to the diner in Cobble Hill, sweating in my winter coat: I’m feeling like I do on a plane when there’s serious turbulence and I consider that this could be an inflection point in my entire life; you know that it was me who proposed, after that made-for-TV meeting of still-live feelings, that I come to Alaska to change jobs and pursue an on-the-ground relationship, once and for all, that it was him who said “woah, what?” and then, “okay, come.”

It’s 8 p.m. and chilly enough that I’m wearing your jacket, but we’re sitting in the sun’s still-shining rays outside of Tent City Taphouse, our hands affixed to pints. Brennan shows his teeth while you rattle off your list to him with straight-faced specificity. He outright cackles when you list his siblings' names in descending order. I’m bummed he doesn’t repeat your dog's name, a detail he asked for the night before you arrived, but forgot.

I like her, Brennan tells me in bed at night, after I’ve stared at him for long enough. I can see why you guys are so close.

***

Let’s be honest, you’ve planned this entire trip, booking flights while I was still in Colombia, then texting, we should obviously go to Denali… right? We laughed about it then, and laugh about it now. Something about the idea of the two of us Jersey girls whose default time spent together is eating pizza and drinking Lambrusco at Motorino in the East Village, assembling the barrels of a tent pole and threading it through our nightly shelter makes my lips curl. Who are they?

The drive to Denali from Anchorage is one road north, with the lone turn into the National Park entrance, 400 miles later.

We each leave post-it notes for Brennan on the counter upon our departure: your suggestion. It’s my first time away from him since I got here. I’m excited to miss him.

Brennan demoed to you how to use bear spray while I was in my Spanish class, you tell me after the fact, when we’re on a mountain. I’m picturing me on one side of the apartment, conjugating in the subjunctive, and you on the other, staring at Brennan's hand, holding what looks like a can of spray paint, already giving up the fight to the future bear attacking us.

We listen to an amazing Reply All episode you’ve heard before, and stop once to fill up, buy postcards with wolves on them, and Takis. The cashier doesn’t charge us for the Takis, I tell you once the wooden door is swinging behind us. A cheap thrill. We see snow capped mountains from a distance. Or are they? We’re embarrassed to ask, even to each other, is that Denali? I honestly can’t tell if the fluffed white 100 miles off in the distance is a cloud or the tallest mountain in North America. 

It can’t be
It has to be
It can’t be
It is

I fly by every scenic pulloff going 75 mph, eager to get there. When the podcast ends, you cue up a Spotify 2010 throwback playlist that keeps cutting out with service, laying bare our shrieking voices. It’s seventy degrees and BLUE, the kind of weather we can’t stop remarking on, already a rose. You turn up the volume and I roll the windows down when Yeah! comes on. 

You turn down the volume when your phone dings. We try out message responses to an invitation to interview at a company that you will in your head decide, in the next twenty four hours, that you need to work for. You’ll die if you don’t get the job. You tell Evan, who we’re already calling your boss, that you’re in Alaska, but are happy to interview the day you return home.

***

Is it fair to say this trip is a redemption arc for us, too? Over the last five years the pendulum of our relationship has undoubtedly shifted from close friends to something closer.

Was it in the early pandemic, when I lived in your spare bedroom, the two of us unemployed and building our days around walking Fala? Was it our Smells Like Quarantine Spirit group chat with Andrew, when he’d text us an invite to meet him at “Café Americain” for 6 p.m. happy hour, where he was the suited bartender across your kitchen island? Was it the time we were at such a stalemate—both of us hurt and stubborn over reasons now fuzzy—and Andrew convened a conference call to shepherd us to a resolution?  Or when I got on your father-in-law’s phone bill? Was it the time I misheard your offer to accompany me to the bathroom until it was too late, and you were already sitting on the side of the tub while I was extracting a tampon? Was it that we each committed to therapy, and became similarly obsessed with self-reflection? How taking accountability for ourselves, inevitably, made us softer towards one another? Was it the reading you and Andrew asked me to write for your wedding, where my chest constricted, then released, as I talked about the Invisible String(™ Taylor Swift) that binds the three of us together? Was it when I came to your Thanksgiving and became so overwhelmed by the Whole Ass Life you’ve built for yourself, I cried at the dinner table and you laughed? Was it when, for your thirtieth birthday, I gifted you the other half of a silver heart I bought fully intact in Mexico City, and had to break along the perforated crack line myself? For months afterward, you texted me, YOU BROKE THE HEART?

Last week, Brennan told me he declined a colleague’s invitation to join a bike relay race this upcoming weekend, saying that his girlfriend has a best friend coming to town. These new titles, although they’ve been in the works for months (years?), feel precious.

***

Brennan makes us his specialty: salmon with pesto and veggies, in the oven when we walk in with a bang—my key still sticks if I don’t jiggle it at a weird angle— dropping six bags on the floor by the door. I emerge from the shower just as Brennan’s plating dinner.

What I didn’t foresee when you booked your flights was how grateful I’d be to have you here as a witness to my new life so early on in it. I didn’t foresee the simple comfort I’d feel at the dinner table in pajamas, hair in a towel, no bra, with the two of you. I didn’t foresee how much I’d enjoy watching you develop a relationship with Brennan, rather than just watch ours develop and re-develop.

We rally for Kincaid Park, Brennan leading the charge, at 11 p.m.. First we stop at Smoking Queens LLC on the way to get a cigar cutter—an apparently important part of smoking a cigar—and a pack of cheeky Capri cigs we’ll smoke exactly two of. Brennan gets road rage at a mom who honks at him at a traffic light on the way there, and you goad him in his tailgate of her like you’re supporting your favorite sports team.

The wind is a vortex that straightlines our hair, making it nearly impossible to light the skinny cigarettes we smoke to feel French. We walk out to the dunes, shoot some photos on your film camera, stop on a bench and talk about our views on friendship: what’s expected, what’s required, when does friendship change and how?

She has an interesting way of thinking about things, Brennan says about you in bed that night, and I feel proud of you for being smart and thoughtful. 

***

Once our train gets moving, the scenes of Southcentral Alaska are framed in film reel imagery by the huge glass windows. You suggest another game. The idea is to answer immediately, with whatever your sense is, without having any time to reason it out. Are you thunder or lightning? you ask, and Brennan lights up. He’s thunder. His new friend, the passenger beside him, is also thunder.  Later, we’ll realize we forgot the Book of Questions, and I’ll look it up on my phone instead. Sitting in the dining cart on the top level, pelting rain blurring the gray landscape outside, you go off-book and start asking about our first jobs, about the difference between feeling annoyed and being annoyed. Brennan shows and tells the Worst Photo of Me That’s Ever Existed. You zoom in on the freeze frame of my profile caught in a yawn where my neck has disappeared entirely. He sends it to you before you have the opportunity to ask.

***

It’s raining when we head to Judy’s, greet Ariana, and order without menus. It’s raining when we walk the Potter Marsh boardwalk, and stare at the people who are staring at birds. It’s raining when we enter Writer’s Block and sit separately from Brennan, who selects a table so close to the ad hoc “stage” it looks like he’s on it when the musician starts. Intermittently, I flip my laptop screen around for you to read my draft cover letter. You squint at my screen, bite your cheek, and reorder my sentences so they read cleaner.

We get Wild Scoops on the way to the airport, strawberry rhubarb and Sitka Swirl. At the same curb where we found you, I feel like I’m leaving summer camp; it’s back to school. Are you sad? Brennan asks me as we pull away from the curb, his right hand cupping my face. I nod. Me too.

You call us two hours later. The pilot said the plane is missing some parts? That are on their way here from Seattle? You tell us on speaker. It sounds bad, but somehow the airline workers aren't calling it yet. You change your flight anyway. I’m moments away from submitting my job application. Brennan stands, wordlessly going to assemble the blowup mattress I’ve already folded back in the closet.

***

Already, Anchorage is changing for me. Has changed. There’s yellow leaves lacquered on my windshield each morning. I got a new job, and began a night course at the University. You began a new job, and Evan really is your boss. Brennan and I are on episode twenty six of Love Island USA. I change my default Google Maps setting to my current address. 

When we talk on the phone that’s jammed between my ear and my shoulder, groceries in hand, closing the distance between the third floor far hallway and my front door, I set off a symphony of barks. You’re home, you say, a statement rather than a question, the hallway dogs as your cue, finding and focusing me in context, then and now.