Torn from weeping parents in distant villages
Pubescent children cluster, a bouquet of buds
Collected to entertain the Mother Queen. Singing and Dancing, glowing
As They charm her, the children tumble and shout
Each sommersault higher
They exult then fear Her pledge to carry them to the castles
Only the dead can see. A brighter sun, a bigger moon will
Wash the mosaic floors. They will sip joy from carved cups
To become birds shimmering in fluid colors to sing, fly
Swoop and soar landing at her feet. Only for Her; Only for Her.
Four thousand years later diggers pull her
From the Royal Cemetery of Ur.
Queen Puabi, barely intact, lies among her attendants-
Two hundred dispatched by a sharp blow to the head.
Gleaming, her crown lies close by: eight gold pounds
Sprawled in thousands of jeweled beads.
In eternal waxed adoration dried and preserved, retainers wait:
Department store dummies for placement
In tableaux: splendid rituals of worship, celebration, banquets
For her eyes alone. For her eyes alone.
From their silks, fine woolens, and pleated linens, nothing remains.
All past is past, all glory ephemeral. Dusty thoughts hover, haunting the sweaty diggers.
So fades much for dancing time, for the beyond the beyond,
For the glowing afterworld.
Through the buzz of flies and clink of trowels
A thin, sweet, imperious voice echoes.
“I am everything. The minions are nothing.
I reign forever; bend your knees. I am the Queen;
You are dust.”
At her feet a silver goat pulls jeweled leaves hanging from a golden tree.
--by Gloria Gerritz
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Thursday, January 14, 2010
A Handy Map of Home
You know you’ve met an Alaskan within the first thirty seconds of an introduction because, as a rule, we tend to mention we’re from Alaska three or four times a conversation. More if we’re in a new place. No matter the conversation we always find a way to circle back to our birthplace. It’s like the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, where in six steps you tie a phrase, an actor, even a historical event or figure, back to the actor Kevin Bacon.
“Oh, you raise pigs in Kansas? How cool. You don’t see a lot of pigs in Alaska, where I’m from.”
Or, “You think the sun sets late in Montana during the summer, you should try Alaska! Most outsiders can’t sleep at all the first couple’a years without tinfoil on their windows to block the ol’ Midnight Sun.”
Perhaps because I grew up in Alaska I have always felt the sense of where I was to be stronger than my sense of who I was. My mother and father mixed up the clay, but the land shaped me. My father, an unwitting disciple of Thoreau’s, bought up all the land he could afford just so he could let it be, though he couldn’t afford nearly as much as he’d have liked before he died. We might could stave off the slow encroachment of box stores and strip malls if only there were a man like him for every ten acres in the state.
My sister and I recently inherited a small portion of our father’s land in Talkeetna, Alaska, and I hope one day to nestle there in a stand of birch and spruce trees untouched by any man, save my father and his children. We share the tiniest piece of land you could imagine, smaller than the smallest Wal-Mart parking lot you could find in all of North America. Yet it’s our land, and there isn’t a Wal-Mart anywhere nearby. Low bush cranberries and blueberries grow on our property. Fairly healthy sized moose and bear do their nomadic thing there too. On one side, there's a lake big enough for canoes, perfect for bird watching among the tall grasses. Behind it lies low swampland. On the other side we have a crazy neighbor who once threatened to kill my dog. One day I’ll forgive him for that, recognizing how the same wilderness that made me probably made my crazy neighbor too.
These days I feel lucky to have been raised a wild Alaskan girl. In the introduction to his book LifePlace, Robert Thayer says we are too often expected to learn ourselves before we attach ourselves to an environment. Before we care about the land we are born on or live off, we often must first go somewhere else and learn who we are from other people, in other places. In this way we are “trained in schools and universities to 'become' before we ' locate'”.
In terms of the universal search for self discovery we are essentially homeless, Thayer says, because the compartmentalization of our daily lives alienates us from ourselves and the land. We are therefore unable to fully answer the essential questions: ''Who am I?" "Where am I?" and "What am I supposed to do?'' This homelessness stems from a lack of connection to a place, having “surrendered our former homelands to the new gods of consumerism, transience, shallow information, global communication, and ever-expanding technology”.
This may be true for some, but not for me. I learned my place first, and then I had to leave it, go “outside” to get a sense of myself. But in leaving, I discovered my place has more reach than my mother in a fit of anger with a wooden spoon in her hand.
Alaskans cling to the “outsider” concept as a way of distinguishing between those who know the Alaskan experience and those who don’t. The assumption, and it’s a faulty one I assure you, is that people in the Lower 48 haven’t experienced the cold, the isolation, the harshness we endure. Because of this insular cultural identity I often felt like I was missing out on the experience “real” Americans were having elsewhere. So I did some traveling, hoping to discover who I am in addition to being Alaskan.
It was hard to leave though.
Have you ever smelled glacial winds? Fished upstream from more grizzlies than you thought could cohabitate a single salmon-heavy river? Felt the Chinook Winds blow warm as a summer day in the middle of January, when the ground is hard as the moose meat in your freezer? Stood barefoot in the Kenai River for hours, setting your fly over and over while seagulls cruise the river strip in search of leftovers? Met an old timer from the bush who told you seal hunting tales from his youth, or watched him dance the story of Raven and the Moon?
Alaska encompasses three broad bioregions, in fact: the Cascadia, the Boreal Forest, and the Arctic. These are unique landscapes divided by shared watersheds, soil, and climate, as well as native plants and native peoples. Bioregions are unruly: they disobey state lines, inconvenient territorial demarcations and human habitation practices. Bioregions have “fuzzy” boundaries, as Thayer puts it.
The Cascadia Bioregion ranges from Southeast Alaska, where I grew up, to the northern tip of California and west to the continental divide, including Missoula, Montana, where I currently live. Thus the place I am from is with me in some way, even now.
Let me draw you a map.
Pretend you’re playing cops and robbers and make a gun with your right hand. Flip your gun upside down so your knuckles face you, thumb pointing down. You now have a rough map of Alaska. Trace your left pointer finger north along your extended right thumb past Ketchikan, Sitka and Juneau, up into the meaty web of your palm (the Gulf of Alaska), trailing off once you reach the extended index finger. This is a rough outline of the Alaskan portion of the Cascadian bioregion, where I was born.
I was actually born in a trailer in Spenard, AK, now a derelict old neighborhood in Anchorage, north of the Gulf of Alaska. A mile or so from the trailer park where I was born the Turnagain Arm mudflats stretch for miles along Cook Inlet. A fault line runs under Turnagain Arm, a dangerous one. In 1964 an earthquake ripped through the nascent city of Anchorage, swallowing bridges, buildings and people. Folks are aware the fault line remains unstable, but we take our chances. Some of the wealthiest homes in Anchorage are built upon that fault line. Alaskans live on the edge!
East of Anchorage, the Chugach Mountains rise up like pie crust, while the ocean laps at the city from the west like one big puddle of melted ice cream. The Chugach’s cradled me as an infant; the ocean lulled me to sleep. Later, other mountains in Southeast Alaska took over raising me. Deer Mountain in Ketchikan, Three Sisters Mountains in Sitka, and more mountains than a person could put name to in Juneau, plus the Mendenhall Glacier. There was a stint in Fairbanks, also. Under the shadow of Mt. McKinley.
Mostly, I grew up in raincoats and mud boots, with the sweet, wet, piney zip of a rainforest on the back of my tongue. Ravens woke me instead of roosters. During the year my family lived in a renovated school bus in Juneau, rain was my constant companion. Rain tick-ticked on the tin roof of the bus in tandem with the protracted tick-tung’s of our small oil stove expanding and contracting. I ticked with the rain. I tunged with the oil stove. I grew from girl to woman-child in this way.
I’ve not yet been to the far north reaches of the Arctic. The most I’ve experienced of the Arctic bioregion was a brief visit southwest to Unalaska, the busiest international fishing port in America. Unalaska is an Aleutian Island somewhere near the first knuckle of your extended index finger on the map of your hand. The ocean there chops with determination, and the mountains are actually volcanoes. The people are often landlocked by terrible winds.
Nevertheless, a surprising number of young people are starting non-profits and other small businesses on the Island. They call it a community of choice, because they choose to be there. They’ve seen the world. They’ve gone away for college and to work in big cities. But for those young people, the only world that matters to them is Unalaska.
Perhaps Thayer’s notion of leaving to find one’s self before committing to a homeland isn’t the worst thing, if you return to your homeland wise enough to see it for what it is: a thing you desire to be a part of.
The two years we lived in Fairbanks were bitter cold. The coldest day I remember was -51ºF, but temperature lows rarely dipped below -35ºF. In the black hours of early morning we kids stood like mummies at the bus stop, bundled so tightly our arms stood stiff at our sides. We covered our faces with ski masks and scarves to keep our eyelids from freezing shut. Bat-like, we listened to far off dogs barking at neighborhood moose and the occasional train clanking past, frozen steel squealing and scraping on the tracks. We listened for the familiar tread of the old school bus, tires crunching just so on the snow pack, chains chinking restlessly as a ghost’s.
Cold as it was in the winter, Fairbanks was a steam bath in the summer, with temperatures soaring to 80 ºF regularly. Under all that winter hard pack the land was mostly grassy swampland and bog, humming with the sound of millions of mosquitoes. When my sledding hill melted that first spring I discovered with horror I'd been sledding over a smelly slough all winter. My favorite place to frolic in the snow transformed into a mosquito hatchery, the mud thick and slimy and smelling of sewage, the grasses limp.
That’s the Taiga for you; it’s not always a very inviting place. Yet humans have called this land home for a millennia. Thousands of communities populate the Taiga across the North American continent and Eurasia. From Alaska, the Boreal Forest sweeps south and east through Canada, feathering the northern edge of the United States, dipping into Yellowstone, and again into the Appalachian Mountains on the east coast.
Instead, I found there were more similarities than dissimilarities between Alaska and the contiguous United States. Turns out people are much the same everywhere. No matter your origins, your gender, your race or your socioeconomic status, you have equal potential to be a good person or bad, active or apathetic. No one is more or less American. Some of the folks I met while traveling felt as I did, as though shaped by the soil of their birthplace. For others, landscape was simply there, whether a cityscape, cornfield, pasture or swamp land. Still others mentioned discovering, suddenly, the severe claustrophobia of moving from prairie to mountain scape, or the reverse nakedness of mountain to plains, prairie, or desert.
It seems we develop our life place over time through a conscious investment in a place that suits us. Though it encompasses all the places that shape us, it may not always be the place we live; it overcomes bioregional and communal boundaries in its quest for connectedness. No matter how many places I call “home” the life place in my soul will always smell of pine sap and rain; jagged mountains will soar into the sky, and the low tremor of glacial movement will hum in my bones.
Shortly after I arrived in Montana a Missoulian told me they didn’t consider Alaska part of the “West”. I was gob smacked. What’s further west than Alaska? Granted, every thing's west of somewhere, but I mean, you can’t go further west than the Last Frontier without taking a bath in the Pacific. The Land Bridge goes so far west it turns into the east!
I’d been looking for ways to feel at home in Missoula, but now all I could think of were arguments in favor of my birthplace being cool enough, or “West” enough, to compare with my home-for-now. Alaska doesn’t have prairie, per se, but we have tundra. We have rough living and wildlife. We've had people on our land for ten thousand years at minimum. What’s more “West” than frontier living? And what epitomizes that better than the Last Frontier?
I’m realizing lately it’s easy to fall prey to pride of place, forgetting about the interconnectedness of things. I had to leave home to understand it: my birthright isn’t the State of Alaska, it’s the planet earth. I am a lot of things in addition to being an Alaskan: traveler, writer, musician, student and teacher. I didn't have to leave Alaska to discover that. I think I left because I had to connect my overbearing sense of place to the world at large.
For the longest time it seemed no matter how much I loved new places they could not claim any part of me, because I was taken. I feel differently now. My heart’s still taken, but I’ve found there’s room in there to love a lot of land. This doesn’t make me a deserter. Nor could I ever be homeless, by Thayer’s definition, because my home is in me.
I carry my home around like a gypsy. Dissect my veins and you'll find Juneau rainwater; my lungs, the Chinook Winds; my heart, sunset from the top of Mt. Alyeska. The same eyes that worshiped ravens and glaciers as a child are trained now to find glory in every landscape. The deserts of New Mexico, white-out blizzards in Texas, electrical storms in the Badlands, the mountains of Montana-- big and small, Seattle rain, and the muggy heat of Viginia's Blue Ridge Mountains compared to Italy's Cinque Terra. Every sunrise, every snowfall, every bird and every beast; every adventure in every place has left a mark upon me.
I continue to “become”, am molded anew daily by my homeland: all the lands I call home.
We squatted together on a fallen birch to talk, imagining the future. It was the first time I'd ever imagined a future with my father in it, living next door even, and suddenly the land beneath me took on new meaning. Here was a place I could grow into life with my father. Where my future children could frolic in last year's leaves and this year's fiddle head ferns with their grandfather, a man I hadn't known growing up.
Here was a place I could see myself pondering those big questions at times, ''Who am I?" "Where am I?" and "What am I supposed to do?'' I could also see losing myself to the joy of the red fox hunting his prey, the moose stripping birch from my trees, the neighborhood black bear greedily picking my low bush cranberry and blackberry bushes clean before I can get to them.
My father died just over a month after that family trip to Talkeetna. I will scatter his ashes over our land, the land we meant to build on as a family. Where his ashes mix with the soil I will plant a grove of birch saplings, his favorite. Now it is more than a place I hope to call home one day, it is a bridge between generations. A place my family can return to at will from wherever they are. No matter where I go in the world, no matter how many other homes I build, this one tiny plot of land will be my touchstone. This is the place I circle back to. A shared life place .
-- By Keema Waterfield
“Oh, you raise pigs in Kansas? How cool. You don’t see a lot of pigs in Alaska, where I’m from.”
Or, “You think the sun sets late in Montana during the summer, you should try Alaska! Most outsiders can’t sleep at all the first couple’a years without tinfoil on their windows to block the ol’ Midnight Sun.”
Perhaps because I grew up in Alaska I have always felt the sense of where I was to be stronger than my sense of who I was. My mother and father mixed up the clay, but the land shaped me. My father, an unwitting disciple of Thoreau’s, bought up all the land he could afford just so he could let it be, though he couldn’t afford nearly as much as he’d have liked before he died. We might could stave off the slow encroachment of box stores and strip malls if only there were a man like him for every ten acres in the state.
My sister and I recently inherited a small portion of our father’s land in Talkeetna, Alaska, and I hope one day to nestle there in a stand of birch and spruce trees untouched by any man, save my father and his children. We share the tiniest piece of land you could imagine, smaller than the smallest Wal-Mart parking lot you could find in all of North America. Yet it’s our land, and there isn’t a Wal-Mart anywhere nearby. Low bush cranberries and blueberries grow on our property. Fairly healthy sized moose and bear do their nomadic thing there too. On one side, there's a lake big enough for canoes, perfect for bird watching among the tall grasses. Behind it lies low swampland. On the other side we have a crazy neighbor who once threatened to kill my dog. One day I’ll forgive him for that, recognizing how the same wilderness that made me probably made my crazy neighbor too.
These days I feel lucky to have been raised a wild Alaskan girl. In the introduction to his book LifePlace, Robert Thayer says we are too often expected to learn ourselves before we attach ourselves to an environment. Before we care about the land we are born on or live off, we often must first go somewhere else and learn who we are from other people, in other places. In this way we are “trained in schools and universities to 'become' before we ' locate'”.
In terms of the universal search for self discovery we are essentially homeless, Thayer says, because the compartmentalization of our daily lives alienates us from ourselves and the land. We are therefore unable to fully answer the essential questions: ''Who am I?" "Where am I?" and "What am I supposed to do?'' This homelessness stems from a lack of connection to a place, having “surrendered our former homelands to the new gods of consumerism, transience, shallow information, global communication, and ever-expanding technology”.
This may be true for some, but not for me. I learned my place first, and then I had to leave it, go “outside” to get a sense of myself. But in leaving, I discovered my place has more reach than my mother in a fit of anger with a wooden spoon in her hand.
Alaskans cling to the “outsider” concept as a way of distinguishing between those who know the Alaskan experience and those who don’t. The assumption, and it’s a faulty one I assure you, is that people in the Lower 48 haven’t experienced the cold, the isolation, the harshness we endure. Because of this insular cultural identity I often felt like I was missing out on the experience “real” Americans were having elsewhere. So I did some traveling, hoping to discover who I am in addition to being Alaskan.
It was hard to leave though.
Have you ever smelled glacial winds? Fished upstream from more grizzlies than you thought could cohabitate a single salmon-heavy river? Felt the Chinook Winds blow warm as a summer day in the middle of January, when the ground is hard as the moose meat in your freezer? Stood barefoot in the Kenai River for hours, setting your fly over and over while seagulls cruise the river strip in search of leftovers? Met an old timer from the bush who told you seal hunting tales from his youth, or watched him dance the story of Raven and the Moon?
***
When I left Alaska two years ago I didn’t know the dirt I dug as a landscaper in the Appalachian Mountains belonged to the same Boreal Forest bioregion as the dirt I dug in fourth grade, behind Joy Elementary in Fairbanks. The grassy, near naked slopes of Missoula’s Mt. Sentinel and Mt. Jumbo don’t remind me a lot of Ketchikan, or Juneau, but if I blur my eyes a little on a rainy day I am indeed reminded of Southeast Alaska. They all belong to the Cascadia bioregion, though Missoula is notably not a rainforest.Alaska encompasses three broad bioregions, in fact: the Cascadia, the Boreal Forest, and the Arctic. These are unique landscapes divided by shared watersheds, soil, and climate, as well as native plants and native peoples. Bioregions are unruly: they disobey state lines, inconvenient territorial demarcations and human habitation practices. Bioregions have “fuzzy” boundaries, as Thayer puts it.
The Cascadia Bioregion ranges from Southeast Alaska, where I grew up, to the northern tip of California and west to the continental divide, including Missoula, Montana, where I currently live. Thus the place I am from is with me in some way, even now.
Let me draw you a map.
Pretend you’re playing cops and robbers and make a gun with your right hand. Flip your gun upside down so your knuckles face you, thumb pointing down. You now have a rough map of Alaska. Trace your left pointer finger north along your extended right thumb past Ketchikan, Sitka and Juneau, up into the meaty web of your palm (the Gulf of Alaska), trailing off once you reach the extended index finger. This is a rough outline of the Alaskan portion of the Cascadian bioregion, where I was born.
I was actually born in a trailer in Spenard, AK, now a derelict old neighborhood in Anchorage, north of the Gulf of Alaska. A mile or so from the trailer park where I was born the Turnagain Arm mudflats stretch for miles along Cook Inlet. A fault line runs under Turnagain Arm, a dangerous one. In 1964 an earthquake ripped through the nascent city of Anchorage, swallowing bridges, buildings and people. Folks are aware the fault line remains unstable, but we take our chances. Some of the wealthiest homes in Anchorage are built upon that fault line. Alaskans live on the edge!
East of Anchorage, the Chugach Mountains rise up like pie crust, while the ocean laps at the city from the west like one big puddle of melted ice cream. The Chugach’s cradled me as an infant; the ocean lulled me to sleep. Later, other mountains in Southeast Alaska took over raising me. Deer Mountain in Ketchikan, Three Sisters Mountains in Sitka, and more mountains than a person could put name to in Juneau, plus the Mendenhall Glacier. There was a stint in Fairbanks, also. Under the shadow of Mt. McKinley.
Mostly, I grew up in raincoats and mud boots, with the sweet, wet, piney zip of a rainforest on the back of my tongue. Ravens woke me instead of roosters. During the year my family lived in a renovated school bus in Juneau, rain was my constant companion. Rain tick-ticked on the tin roof of the bus in tandem with the protracted tick-tung’s of our small oil stove expanding and contracting. I ticked with the rain. I tunged with the oil stove. I grew from girl to woman-child in this way.
***
Return to your hand map of Alaska and start at the Berring Sea, the tip of your extended index finger. Trace a course all the way up the Aleutian Chain until you run into your first bent knuckle. That’s Bristol Bay. Follow your knuckles north, past the Pribilof Islands and Bethel. Go all the way north now, round the bend of your pinkie knuckle and trace a swath past Barrow and Deadhorse and Kaktovic until you run into Canada at your wrist. This is the Arctic bioregion, and it stretches all the way across northern Canada to Newfoundland, pretty much halfway across your forearm.I’ve not yet been to the far north reaches of the Arctic. The most I’ve experienced of the Arctic bioregion was a brief visit southwest to Unalaska, the busiest international fishing port in America. Unalaska is an Aleutian Island somewhere near the first knuckle of your extended index finger on the map of your hand. The ocean there chops with determination, and the mountains are actually volcanoes. The people are often landlocked by terrible winds.
Nevertheless, a surprising number of young people are starting non-profits and other small businesses on the Island. They call it a community of choice, because they choose to be there. They’ve seen the world. They’ve gone away for college and to work in big cities. But for those young people, the only world that matters to them is Unalaska.
Perhaps Thayer’s notion of leaving to find one’s self before committing to a homeland isn’t the worst thing, if you return to your homeland wise enough to see it for what it is: a thing you desire to be a part of.
***
The rest of your hand map belongs to the Boreal Forest bioregion, also known as the Taiga. It includes Fairbanks, Mt. Mckinley, and the Brooks Range. Vast herds of caribou roam that swampy grassland. Wolves and bears too. Temperatures vary wildly. I learned to dress in layers: tank top, cotton, wool, down. That way you’re prepared for the bitterest cold, and the shocking melt-the-rubber-off-your-boots heat that can sometimes happen, like when the Chinooks blow, or when you enter a friend’s cabin and the wood stove is cranked so high you feel your skin cook under that wool sweater.The two years we lived in Fairbanks were bitter cold. The coldest day I remember was -51ºF, but temperature lows rarely dipped below -35ºF. In the black hours of early morning we kids stood like mummies at the bus stop, bundled so tightly our arms stood stiff at our sides. We covered our faces with ski masks and scarves to keep our eyelids from freezing shut. Bat-like, we listened to far off dogs barking at neighborhood moose and the occasional train clanking past, frozen steel squealing and scraping on the tracks. We listened for the familiar tread of the old school bus, tires crunching just so on the snow pack, chains chinking restlessly as a ghost’s.
Cold as it was in the winter, Fairbanks was a steam bath in the summer, with temperatures soaring to 80 ºF regularly. Under all that winter hard pack the land was mostly grassy swampland and bog, humming with the sound of millions of mosquitoes. When my sledding hill melted that first spring I discovered with horror I'd been sledding over a smelly slough all winter. My favorite place to frolic in the snow transformed into a mosquito hatchery, the mud thick and slimy and smelling of sewage, the grasses limp.
That’s the Taiga for you; it’s not always a very inviting place. Yet humans have called this land home for a millennia. Thousands of communities populate the Taiga across the North American continent and Eurasia. From Alaska, the Boreal Forest sweeps south and east through Canada, feathering the northern edge of the United States, dipping into Yellowstone, and again into the Appalachian Mountains on the east coast.
***
When I left Alaska for the east coast I assumed I'd finally connect with the real America, and that the real America would somehow transform me. As our country's birthplace, I imagined the east to be the epitome of sophistication, history and culture. I imagined the south bursting with abundance; full of growing things and color. I fell in love with the idea of cow pastures and Civil War graveyards and national monuments. Everything outside of Alaska, especially the people, promised to be more American, more historically relevant, more cultured, more patriotically inspiring than my wild birthplace.Instead, I found there were more similarities than dissimilarities between Alaska and the contiguous United States. Turns out people are much the same everywhere. No matter your origins, your gender, your race or your socioeconomic status, you have equal potential to be a good person or bad, active or apathetic. No one is more or less American. Some of the folks I met while traveling felt as I did, as though shaped by the soil of their birthplace. For others, landscape was simply there, whether a cityscape, cornfield, pasture or swamp land. Still others mentioned discovering, suddenly, the severe claustrophobia of moving from prairie to mountain scape, or the reverse nakedness of mountain to plains, prairie, or desert.
It seems we develop our life place over time through a conscious investment in a place that suits us. Though it encompasses all the places that shape us, it may not always be the place we live; it overcomes bioregional and communal boundaries in its quest for connectedness. No matter how many places I call “home” the life place in my soul will always smell of pine sap and rain; jagged mountains will soar into the sky, and the low tremor of glacial movement will hum in my bones.
***
In addition to the bioregional bridge between my childhood home and where I live now, there’s a people bridge too. Missoula is a place for people who love wilderness, recreation, and a snowy, mountainous oasis, with the added plus of being connected to the rest of the contiguous United States. There are a lot of Alaskans who love these things, it seems. A lot of them spend time in Missoula.Shortly after I arrived in Montana a Missoulian told me they didn’t consider Alaska part of the “West”. I was gob smacked. What’s further west than Alaska? Granted, every thing's west of somewhere, but I mean, you can’t go further west than the Last Frontier without taking a bath in the Pacific. The Land Bridge goes so far west it turns into the east!
I’d been looking for ways to feel at home in Missoula, but now all I could think of were arguments in favor of my birthplace being cool enough, or “West” enough, to compare with my home-for-now. Alaska doesn’t have prairie, per se, but we have tundra. We have rough living and wildlife. We've had people on our land for ten thousand years at minimum. What’s more “West” than frontier living? And what epitomizes that better than the Last Frontier?
I’m realizing lately it’s easy to fall prey to pride of place, forgetting about the interconnectedness of things. I had to leave home to understand it: my birthright isn’t the State of Alaska, it’s the planet earth. I am a lot of things in addition to being an Alaskan: traveler, writer, musician, student and teacher. I didn't have to leave Alaska to discover that. I think I left because I had to connect my overbearing sense of place to the world at large.
For the longest time it seemed no matter how much I loved new places they could not claim any part of me, because I was taken. I feel differently now. My heart’s still taken, but I’ve found there’s room in there to love a lot of land. This doesn’t make me a deserter. Nor could I ever be homeless, by Thayer’s definition, because my home is in me.
I carry my home around like a gypsy. Dissect my veins and you'll find Juneau rainwater; my lungs, the Chinook Winds; my heart, sunset from the top of Mt. Alyeska. The same eyes that worshiped ravens and glaciers as a child are trained now to find glory in every landscape. The deserts of New Mexico, white-out blizzards in Texas, electrical storms in the Badlands, the mountains of Montana-- big and small, Seattle rain, and the muggy heat of Viginia's Blue Ridge Mountains compared to Italy's Cinque Terra. Every sunrise, every snowfall, every bird and every beast; every adventure in every place has left a mark upon me.
I continue to “become”, am molded anew daily by my homeland: all the lands I call home.
***
Last summer I was fortunate enough to visit the property I inherited from my father with my mother, my sister, my father and his older son from his first marriage. An unusually hot July sun beat down on my neck as I tracked my father's footsteps, mosquitoes spinning dizzily around us like mini tornadoes. While we walked, we planned: here would be the communal dining room, there would be my cabana, and there my sister's, mother's, father's, brother's. I had been reluctant to take the trip, afraid of the mood swings my father sometimes had since his stroke last spring. And I was unsure how to navigate this new family landscape with all of us in it, suddenly, as though we'd always been part of one horizon. Though in reality, I hadn't met my father or my brother until I was a teenager.We squatted together on a fallen birch to talk, imagining the future. It was the first time I'd ever imagined a future with my father in it, living next door even, and suddenly the land beneath me took on new meaning. Here was a place I could grow into life with my father. Where my future children could frolic in last year's leaves and this year's fiddle head ferns with their grandfather, a man I hadn't known growing up.
Here was a place I could see myself pondering those big questions at times, ''Who am I?" "Where am I?" and "What am I supposed to do?'' I could also see losing myself to the joy of the red fox hunting his prey, the moose stripping birch from my trees, the neighborhood black bear greedily picking my low bush cranberry and blackberry bushes clean before I can get to them.
My father died just over a month after that family trip to Talkeetna. I will scatter his ashes over our land, the land we meant to build on as a family. Where his ashes mix with the soil I will plant a grove of birch saplings, his favorite. Now it is more than a place I hope to call home one day, it is a bridge between generations. A place my family can return to at will from wherever they are. No matter where I go in the world, no matter how many other homes I build, this one tiny plot of land will be my touchstone. This is the place I circle back to. A shared life place .
-- By Keema Waterfield
Monday, January 11, 2010
He'll Be 10 Soon
He’s too old, now
for constant monitoring,
he who uses men’s rooms alone
and cusses with his friends.
So I compromise,
sitting with my back to the window
to keep myself from spying,
but still peeking through the sheer curtains
now and then.
Outside,
he wraps himself in the chrysalis
of the blue nylon hammock,
oversized feet dangling from the sides
like a
He kicks them sharply
deliberately,
lanky toes pressed together,
perfectly pointed.
Earlier,
I had suggested that he hold his eyes closed
and allow his tears to wash the dust from them.
“I can cry whenever I want,”
he said.
“I only have to think of the sad things in my life.”
I realized
in that moment
that there is nothing so terrible
as my powerlessness to protect him.
He drops his book to the ground
and folds himself inside.
I have never tried it
but I can imagine that the sunlight shines blue
through the thin fabric.
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