As the Summer Windles Down

Night has returned to Alaska as a real presence and the days, just barely past half-way through the season of summer, have already begun growing colder and colder. Yesterday at 7 pm, with the sun still high enough to barely cast shadows, with no clouds in the sky and a quiet stillness in the air, the temperature was 53 degrees. In supermarkets Ive heard town talk about how the cold has already started to creep in and everywhere I go, plans are being made to migrate for the fall and winter. Perhaps it's mostly the early 20 somethings I've been spending time with, but it seems everywhere everyone is gearing up to leave town for the rest of the year. I guess Alaska does that to a lot of people.

Many are caravaning down the Alkan (driving through Yukon and British Columbia), some are flying, a few are considering the ferry. All options, sadly, are pretty expensive, but that's just part of living here: high expenses and a greater need for planning the old exodus.

For Sven, it's been a major, lynchpin decision whether to stay or to go. Part of his believes in the need to buckle down, get into a strong routine, work closely with his dad on finishing projects, fixing up the house and the mechanical creations in the yard, while attending the community college, educating himself, meditating, getting in shape, and mostly pulling his life together in order to leave Alaska at the beginning of next year a reborn man. The other option, of course, is to leave with all of his friends and cruise the universe for the fall, work farms in California or Oregon and just have a funky time. Naturally, his mind leans toward the former and his heart leads toward the latter.

I'm in a similar place now. As the leaves of the fireweed change from green to a brilliant red, I'm feeling more and more ready to pack up my bags and move on after a strange and probably quite eye-opening Alaskan experience. There is a strong current pulling me to San Francisco right now (Kate Ray finally comes back to America tomorrow and will be in Frisco in a couple weeks), and all my family on my dad's side who I haven't seen in 2 years live in California. Ultimately I know I'll end up in Hawaii by the end of September, but what happens in the meantime, I don't know.
My allergies have been giving me a hell of a time lately and they're more and more pushing me out of this state, but I also feel like this is the last opportunity to work and meditate in relative isolation for quite some time, so I'd like to take full advantage of that. I also need to figure out what would be the cheapest and most worthwhile way to get south.

Anyway, here's a story from the last few days to illustrate the local culture and show a few creative ways to have fun. So we got a crew together to go across the bay for a camping trip, got food, supplies, and enthusiasm collected, and took off in Kristen's dad Kanut's skiff, a little pontoon number with a soft bottom that supposedly couldn't take heavy waves. Off we go skiffing across the bay until we get to nearly exactly 50% of the way across and the motor just stops. We all look to Sven and start laughing, "very funny, Sven!" He laughs and says "No joke!"
We all look around at the irony while he starts pumping as hard as he can on the motor to get it started again when suddenly we all hear a sound coming from very close to my feet: ssssssssssssssssssss. The pontoon is leaking. The air is escaping. In the middle of the bay, surrounded by some of the coldest water I've ever felt, our motor is dead and our boat is very rapidly losing its air. Jesse and I grab paddles and start paddling as hard as we can towards the harbor (3 miles off) but there's an outbound tide dragging us towards the open ocean. Still we paddle as the shore seems to recede from view slightly...

We were rescued by the only other boat out on the water at that moment, a fancy sailboat that just happened to be heading in our direction. We waved it down with our paddles and they came and tied us to their stern, letting us all climb off our boat (though we left the dog to brave the elements).

They dragged us back to the harbor and it was time to decide if we wanted to try again for the far shore or do something else. Eventually we decided to just camp at Diamond Creek on our own side of the bay and we drove to Safeway at 10 pm for more supplies. We found Jazz and scooped him up and drove down to the campsite trailhead. Along the way, conversations were swapped about the heaviness and strange vibes that have been creeping into town lately. There's a greater and greater need for exodus, but it's a directionless kind. Thoughts were on leaving, but also on things falling apart, and a creeping fear that, really, we just don't know what to do with ourselves these days. (This was mostly the locals talking, not myself, I just listened), but it was part emotional, part philosophical - no matter how strongly we could feel that we had a handle and a heart to things, there was this ineluctable sensation of drowning, somehow evinced by the trip out in the skiff. Like going half way, cutting free from the safety and expectation of land until completely at the mercy of the world, the waves, the water, and the Father up in the sky...and a head cutting through, in a defiant shake of "Thou Shalt Not..." and we're lost. We needed to be rescued.

I don't know if I'm talking about a moment or a generation anymore, but there was this painfully palpable feeling of needing to be rescued for a short while.

Then we hiked to the campsite as the last vestiges of sunset disappear and a brutal nightwind cold swept the skin off our bones. We divided into camps for collecting wood, setting up the tent, cooking dinner, and Kristen and I built a sweat lodge. We hiked into the bush and found some dying alder trees, I chopped them down with a hatchet and we bent them into a dome, tied together with string. Then we tied tarps over the top and sealed the bottom with stones. We carpeted the interior with grass and dug a pit for hot stones. Later that night when it was too cold to stand it, we heated rocks on the fire then shoveled them into the lodge and it kept us warm until all the leaks in the lodge became apparent. We poured water over the stones and filled the room with heat while eating scrambled salmon salvaged from a corpse heap, passing the white ale and bowls around, losing ourselves entirely into the steam and freeze and quiet wave crashes of a cloudless Alaskan night.

In the morning I ran naked down the beach then dove into the ocean and swam in the paralyzingly cold water. We made a massive omlette of 12 eggs and a block of cheese, with pinto beans and tortilla wraps. Then we drove back to town where I worked for 3 hours transfering a pile of wood at the local yoga center where I'm trading 6 hours of work this month for free yoga for the rest of the month.

In other news, I've written the first two pages of my novel and the spark is being oxygenated to fan the full fire.

All my love,

Travis
(After a month of going by a nickname, I've discovered something very powerful about identity. The me who wanted a fresh start with a new name and new perspective in a new state was just an outpouring of the me who had experienced so much good and frustration in this world and life. But in the end it's all the summation of an individual's time and that individual was given a name that ultimately, is my name, and new names don't change things in anyway near what I imagined before I tried the experiment...Plus I'm just getting sick of people calling me by a name that is the name of someone else, even if I myself told them to call me that.)