Travel Stories

So it's been a while since I've updated. That's mainly because this site is blocked at work and there's no internet at my house, so I have to wait until I go to the library. I have been writing some in the meantime though. I read a really good book in the style of travel writing, so I thought I'd try my hand at that. Here are some stories since my last update...

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Sit up, sit down, speak, listen, hold hands, march to the front, stay still. Catholic mass is a cultural experience for me. Even more so when a third of it is in a throat-heavy language, pronounceable slowly by only some syllables printed between dashes.

It’s my second time at this church here in Bethel. The first was our first Sunday in Bethel, the morning after we arrived. Having been to Mass before, I already knew my prescribed limitations, barred from the Eucharist as a non-Catholic. I checked with Jill and made sure of the sacred signal of crossing my arms over myself to get a blessing instead of a wafer. I stood up, joined the humble, trudging forward line. I approached the deacon, crossed my arms, awaited my blessing. He recounted the words he’d said many times already, picked up a wafer. I wanted to open and protest, protect their rules and decisions. I ended up with a wafer in my mouth. I walked down the side aisle back to our pew, eyes wide with surprise and a bit of worry. Jill offered a knowing, somehow forgiving shrug and half smile as we kneeled to pray. Thanking God, I reflected on what the ironic and historically burden meanings could be of force-fed communion.

Monday, August 24, 2009

I tromp through the chilly jungle that is Alaska in August. Past the lazy wires and discarded rosy insulation. Past the silver cylinders that beg to be climbed through like their McDonald’s play-land cousins. Past the blue-speckled grass blades, too planted to escape the scattering spray paint. Make my way between the building with recovering-or-maybe-not men, housed away in the middle of the community and somebody’s falling apart garage.

To something snarling. Again.

Sometimes I notice that I hold my breath here. But sometimes I just try to get by fast as I can, edging away from that rattling chain. The neighbor said she thought that one’s neurotic.

Who knew salvation would come in the face of a different dog with one blind eye, clipped into a red leash on a red house with a damp hay yard.

“Hello Ruffian” I manage to speak, relief fluttering from my padded down anxiety.

I am dog-sitting for a woman we barely met. We inherit her trust by way of the people who have lived in our house before. And now I, the one of the seven who feels a self-misunderstood discomfort for dogs, am scurrying with feigned confidence to reach them, the ones who do not snarl, who just bounce and shed.

Severe knocking in the broad daylight of seven or so p.m. alerts the front room movie watchers. Normally we expect our neighbor who comes by every day, knocking as he walks straight in. But today it’s just another housemate, fist meeting the door as the rest of his hand curls around slipping white garbage bags. One fish, two fish, white fish, salmon. Impromptu invited on a boat with a boss’s brother (who may be a cousin instead), he comes back bearing a later winter meal. The boys assemble themselves at the base of the back porch. Embark on cutting and gutting. Ask for pictures to be taken. I stand at the neck of the red rust wooden stairs, pajama paints fairly pushed into rubber boots, hooded sweatshirt hood up, and capture the blood and bugs and vacant fish eyes jammed on our kitchen’s cutting boards.

I’m still itchy from the bugs that snuck inside. But my camera job was not enough of a contribution. I earned my bug bites joining the inside line of clean, wrap, tape, name. “Joe’s catch, 8/24/09, white fish (or silver)”. The curls of the letter J may sneak part way into the freezer paper. The smell of the marker masks the smell of the fish and I hope I’m not poisoning our dinner in three months.

The sunlight pretends to fade close to 10 p.m. now. I think it’s still only laughing at us, hidden behind the darkened clouds. Supposing to be daylight for so many hours, instead we are provided dull gray varying across miles and miles of open sky.

Sometimes the sky opens a peak to bestow light spit on the dampening earth. And then mud. Mud and mud and gravel. I slop through it both ways, to work, from work. I don’t really mind the mud and mist. It twinkles of an English-Irish, or Irish-English, forest. Full of mystery and novelesque promise. I think tea with milk. And with gruffness, remember milk is kissing ten dollars a gallon. That will be my reason for visiting “home” in the winter. When all my real reasons become so visible that I must ignore them, I will go home for milk.

Yupik sounds with many y’s and k’s to my foreign ear. Odd to be foreign in a place I can re-register to vote. But I am the foreign one. I am the guest in my own country in another’s nation. People mention “the Yupik way” and leave bread crumbs to its direction. I am still nervous of stepping wrong, speaking funny, and becoming horribly offensive. Like if the underside of a fish turned out to be hairy and coarse. A rude awakening, kassaq—white people. Oscillate between acutely aware of my white-ness (sometimes made my most defining but not self-owning feature) and my downstates origins (this I do not shy away from, a proud Midwesterner). The parts of one’s identity raised to high import are those that convey origins and group belonging. I am a white not from Alaska. Here, one asks the natives who their family is. One asks the whites when they moved to Bethel. Hard pressed to find a white native to Bethel. Hard pressed to find a native generations back native to Bethel. Maybe no one is from here. But (almost?) everyone stays.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

“Today’s AA meeting right?” …Silence. She looks up at me. “…Alcoholics Anonymous?” Silence and she looks at me again. “Oh right, that means yes.” I hope she laughs as I struggle with the nonverbal customs; I would. My boss told us last week, raising the eyebrows means yes, and that would often get school children in trouble when as they answered silently, affirmatively. I try catching on and find that it’s used frequently, unquestioningly. Like a nod or shrug only subtler.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

I spoke with a Yupik coworker today. I’ve begun to recognize how the culture I come from is abrasive and assertive. Having the power of persuasion celebrated. But this has wreaked havoc here, leaving much historical trauma and current imbalances in its wake (and continued use). Instead, seek humility and empowerment. How do you seek empowerment? Listen. And let others make their own choices.

After work we were enticed to attend the Parish Council meeting (it had pizza). May have not been the most exciting or efficient meeting, but it seemed fairly typical for a church board meeting. It’s as if that meeting strategy is an unspoken but unwavering cross-religious tradition. Perhaps the most exciting moment was the church secretary whispering swear words when building maintenance seems out of hand.

Friday, August 28, 2009

I walk to work in the awkwardly place sunlight of Bethel nine a.m. The sun glares happily at me, right in my eyes. So I keep them cast down. The stones on the road –the road is mainly made of stones and rocks and caked mud—have long long shadows. Pointy at their ends. Like icicles that have laid down their lives for the worship of the sun’s rays.

Sunday, August 30, 2009

I walk to return to the Unitarian Universalist group of Bethel after a missing week hiatus. I walk down Napakiak to the intersection with Akiak. Turn left. I start muttering a Unitarian meditation song to myself as I make my way across the gravel brown road. There’s an odd, invisible nestling of birds in the taller grasses to my left, someone’s front yard maybe. A dog whines behind them somewhere. I think, as I repeatedly do, how much my dad would enjoy this walk, this place. Even though it’s a bit grungy, it seems genuine. It loosely holds the beauty of nature running into lived community life on purpose. It’s not pristine, and by many means it’s not specifically beautiful. If it were a motion, it’d be a shrug. Simple, full of different meanings, and conveyant of its true being, even if that’s somewhat noncommittal in some busier lifestyle’s point of view.

Just as I finish noticing the birds, their sound is over-laden with the barking of two maybe-stray dogs just down the road. I don’t like dogs. Especially ones I don’t want to meet on the street. I stop. Wonder, what am I suppose to do now? They are turned towards me, barking. I am too unfamiliar with dogs to know if their noise is to be threatening or some secret greeting. Are they protecting their space or inviting me to play? I turn around. Walk a little a ways. Turn and observe. Wonder, should I go right by them or turn and walk the very long other way to Pinky’s Park? The Log Cabin where the Unitarian group meets is literally just beyond the dogs. I just want to go to church, I think in my head, frustrated with my own discomfort and fear. Please God, just provide me a safe way to get to church. (Whether or not it is ironic that I pray for safe passage to the Unitarian gathering remains to be judged, but no one’s allowed in the privileged position of judgement, so…). I look back over. They’ve preoccupied themselves with another direction, so I pretend to have courage and walk swiftly the rest of the way to the Log Cabin. Making it inside, I forget until later to be grateful and thank whatever allowed me to escape the charge of the strays.

And perhaps it is odd that a few of the emotionally charged moments that I share here of about my encounters and escapes from dogs. Perhaps it is even odder that my younger brother wants to be a vet and purposefully encounter and not escape them. I chuckle at myself and my family whenever I think about that, which of course, is every time I encounter a dog on the street here, which of course, is very often here in Bethel.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

“I’m on a boat”. (That song often playing in our heads as often we report to one another that one of our housemates is in fact, on a boat.) So, on a boat. In Alaska. Heading up-river? Maybe down-river. On the Kuskokwim River, one direction or another. Looking at the beauty that reminds me of Costa Rica. And singing Taylor Swift at the top of my lungs with my companions.

I came along with the teen group from work that my housemate leads. It’s the first time I feel alive and joyful in awhile. No pretending, not really working, and singing.

Every now and then the boat’s driver quiets us. As we silence we peer around. It’s the first time in a long time moose hunting has been allowed this close to Bethel. We see plenty of people out and zero moose. Maybe a moose track or two.

Each time we’re quieted, I hear a high-pitched whining in the back of the boat. Imagine this to be some sort of moose call the driver has. Not until more than half way through the trip do I realize this is just the raising up of the motor to go slower.

By the end of the trip, I’m sitting in the back of the boat half covered by a big yellow raincoat, next to our one eleven-year-old boy. We occupy our time singing the Jesus songs I know that have hand motions. He asks to sing them again and again, faster and faster. “Waves of mercy” becomes a first line, blurred notes, and speedy “na na na”’s. Until he gets too cold and decides it’s better to camp out under the raincoat or fall asleep sitting up in the wind since it’s almost 10 pm anyway. The sun finally sets.

We pull our boat up to the side where it’ll be dragged in. Well, we just sit there really, as the boat is directed by our driver and our director. Gasps. Eyes move rapidly to our right. Someone got one. A gigantic dead moose is sprawled across the neighboring boat. They pull their boat out and up. We clamor quickly, stiffly out and up, race to their boat being hitched to their truck and gape. Apparently moose have white tongues.

Monday, September 7, 2009

We each had Labor Day off. So we each piled into the boat of our neighbor and headed off on the Kuskokwim. An hour later, we each piled out onto the squishy bank, up the hill, through the tall tall grass. We arrived at an abandoned Moravian Mission and Orphanage. Peered through broken glass. Stepped over broken boardwalks, pulsing with mud through holes as each step passed a certain point. Climbed into a slanted chapel with a left over vacuum and three fourths of a record. Up the stairs of someone’s old house with many many mattresses, strewn flour, and an old box of toothpicks. Underneath fallen boards and blunted rusted nails. Onto the roof that was removed for it’s wood where we could see forever in the different colors of the tundra.

Next stop didn’t seem a stop. We pulled up under a life-covered cliff. Looked at a hawk. Then climbed straight up 30 feet, holding onto bits of branches and slipping on the moist dirt. Reaching the buoyant tundra above, we could see a different forever, this one framed by far-away mountains and a cluster of maybe 20 trees that two of the teens climbed up while telling their younger sister not to.

Lastly, we stopped at their not used fish camp. We sat for awhile in their tented structure, enjoying a sanctuary away from gnats. Then helped clear the path for the next users, moving little trees cut for us, all the while hiding in our hoods and sleeves to escape the insects swarming. At the entrance, the green grass glowed, looking radioactive, but soft enough to burrow your body into for daydreaming.

Pile onto the boat again for the last of the fried chicken and the drive back to Bethel.

After arriving, I went back to their house. Cup of hot chocolate with Irish Cream and tutor the distributive property to one of their seven children. Then the mom and I went out back to finish painting the numbers onto the doghouses for their jumpy huskies, ready to start their mushing season again.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

I imagine living in a shelter could be off-putting for kids. But if they’re young enough and buoyant enough, maybe it can be just a new environment in which to play. And so maybe it’s enough if I just pay attention as a four-year-old clumsily slips on the Darth Vader mask for the fourteenth time, looks at me, laughs hysterically as I show a frightened face, then quickly pulls it off to assure me it’s ok. Maybe it’s enough for me to ask him to take turns with the three-year-old who uses gestures in the place of words, grabbing at the mask again and again. Maybe it’s enough that I’m willing to retrieve the semi-deflated red ball that he throws over the work area more than once. Maybe it’s enough. Because in the middle of the morning, he comes back up to the counter door, looks at me, and says, “I like you”, after meeting me an hour before.

Saturday, September 12, 2009

I cried after I made burnt pancakes today and was scolded for it. So I cleaned up, packed up, and swiftly walked to the library across the boardwalk. Already ashamed of my own independence inabilities, already tired of community some days, already missing a settled normal. Wishing I didn’t live with strangers all the time.

Hope comes in the changing colors of the tundra. The promise of winter makes locals excited. The UU group mentioned the glorious colors of the tundra as fall creeps quickly through. My coworker mentioned its brilliant sunsets, which will happen in the late afternoon come winter. I think colors are always my saving grace. No grays of clouds or burnt browns of pancakes. Seek the brilliance of the tundra and await the first-frost-reddened cranberries.