Читать книгу A Normal Life - Kim Rich - Страница 10

CHAPTER 4

Living Back to Nature Can Be Hazardous to Your Health

To this day, I have dreams about being in Juneau. And nightmares. Few towns or cities exist in such a spectacular setting. Juneau lies between mountain peaks of the Alaska Coast Range to the east and a handful of channels, bays, and inlets to the west. From Downtown Juneau, one has to walk only a few streets to find the side of a mountain or a wilderness trail along the beach.

Alaska is a land of extremes, and this is certainly true for Juneau. On a sunny day, there is no place more beautiful on earth; during a winter storm, there are few places more miserable. Southeast Alaska is so different in climate and popular culture from the rest of the state that my moving there was in many ways like moving to Arizona. I found myself in a place radically different from any I had known before.

In Arizona and again in Juneau, I fell in love with the place and people. I found a niche and discovered more about myself—even if I had to do it the hard way.

A historic gold mining town with an ancient and rich Native history, the city is located in Alaska’s Inside Passage, the lengthy archipelago of islands and waterways along the northern Pacific Coast adjacent to Canada. It’s where you or someone you know has been on an Alaska cruise. Alaska is now one of the most popular cruise destinations in the world, but when I moved there, the cruise industry was virtually nonexistent. The town was a mix of isolationism and worldliness, and residents tended to identify more with Seattle and the Pacific Northwest than with Anchorage. In fact, many Juneau residents then and now despise Anchorage. Hate it. It’s a feeling not uncommon all across the state toward Alaska’s largest city, ostensibly the biggest recipient of state financial resources and attention. With Juneau, it gets personal.

The day I arrived, even my cab driver ranted about hating Anchorage. When I asked if he’d ever been there, he replied, “The airport.”

His response was so common that I began telling people I was from Eagle River, a suburb just north of Anchorage.

“Ah, Eagle River,” someone might say. “That sounds nice.”

Juneauites hate Anchorage because for years legislators from the northern parts of Alaska have tried in vain to move the state capital to the Anchorage area, or at least somewhere on the state’s limited highway system. That’s where most of the state’s population lives—more than half in Anchorage alone. This is because no highway or even rail service connects Juneau to the rest of the state. None. Zero. The only way to get to Juneau is by air or sea—when everything isn’t shut down due to a severe storm.

Juneau is also in what is known as a temperate rainforest, with as many as 220 days of rain per year and over 50 inches of rainfall. Most residents wear rubber boots all the time, favoring the brown, steel-toed boots popular with fishermen and those who work outdoors.

It rains so much in Juneau that I was taken aback the first time I saw a fur coat there. The young woman wearing a vintage mink had—of course—just arrived in town that day. Rain gear is de rigueur in Southeast Alaska. I was elated when Gore-Tex was invented.

When I think of my time in Juneau, the weather comes first to mind because I was so often in it. Initially, I had no car, and there was no mass transit where I needed to go, so I ended up walking—a lot.

When I arrived, the city had a lively arts and theater scene, a few good restaurants, and lots of bars to cater to the town’s population of blue-collar workers, fishermen, and government bureaucrats.

From a distance, the downtown, with its handful of multistoried concrete and glass office buildings, seems to have the skyline of a large city. Most residents, though, live about ten miles “out the road,” accessible via the town’s only highway. The Mendenhall Valley is named for the Mendenhall Glacier, a popular attraction and hiking area for locals and tourists alike. Suburban neighborhoods are located along a wide swath of flat terrain created as the glacier retreated to its current location.

The rest of the road services the airport, a shopping mall, and a number of beachfront neighborhoods before coming to an abrupt end about forty miles north of Downtown Juneau.

You’d be surprised how far forty miles can feel when you’ve got nowhere else to drive.

If my late teens were all about playing in nature, then moving to Juneau put those ideals to the test. For much of the four years I lived off and on there, I did so without running water, electricity, or indoor plumbing.

But my move to Juneau happened to place me in the center of a whirlwind of political and social change that would impact the entire state of Alaska for decades to come.

THE FIRST ORDER of business when I arrived was to find a place to live.

When the Alaska Legislature starts in January, hundreds of people swoop into Juneau, including elected officials and their staffs. Along with this influx come dozens of recent college graduates, lobbyists, and former political volunteers hoping to get jobs.

The annual flood of new people strains Juneau’s chronic housing shortage, causing government workers to bunk in apartments and houses like frat brothers. They might seek housing anywhere from cabins to cheap hotels to fishing boats docked in the downtown boat harbor.

In the 1970s, jobseekers longed for the short- or long-term posts with a state employment system known as “the gravy train.” This came from the state’s then-generous benefits and high pay, attributed to the difficulty in attracting employees when most chose the high-paying jobs linked with construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.

When I first arrived, I stayed with friends in an apartment in the town of Douglas, on Douglas Island across Gastineau Channel from Juneau. Then I learned of a small cabin in the woods I could have if I fixed it up.

The cabin was a small A-frame originally built to be a sauna. It was about the size of your average walk-in closet, with a loft just big enough to sleep in. It came with no windows, no heat source, no running water.

So I did what people who live like the Amish (but are not Amish) do: I organized a work party. About a dozen friends and I descended on my new abode and had ourselves the modern-day equivalent of an old-fashioned barn raising.

Luckily, some of those who showed up were carpenters.

We stapled heavy sheets of clear plastic over the window openings, installed a tin wood-burning stove, built a ladder to the loft, and made the place livable. Sort of.

It was cute. The only downside was I had to live there alone and had to travel a narrow, slippery-when-wet boardwalk through dense scrub brush and evergreens from the road to the front door.

At night, it was pitch dark.

Without streetlights or nearby houses, I had to guide myself using a flashlight. Every time I went home, I feared running into a moose or, worse, a bear. Or any number of other creatures and ghosts and everything my nineteen-year-old mind could conjure. I often ended up bunking on other people’s couches.

Once the Legislature went into session in early January, I participated in what was then the tradition of lining up along the second-floor hallway connecting the chambers of the State House at one end and the State Senate at the other. Longtime legislative members and staff recall the spectacle of people lining the halls and passing out their resumes. I’ve always loved a party, so I did what I always do in such settings: I walked and talked and met a lot of people and made a lot of friends.

I had no idea what I was up against, but I quickly figured out I needed to look more professional in order to compete with all those people on the second floor. I went out and bought a new pair of dress shoes. This was a big deal, as I didn’t have much money. I spent some of my last funds on those darn shoes, which I proudly showed off to all my new friends. They were all outraged when I got the news: all the legislative pages had been already hired. I was not one of them.

Then I learned that those hired to be pages had never even appeared in the halls. They were the relatives of political party volunteers, party regulars, and the like, all college age, all great kids, all deserving, no doubt, and all decided upon weeks or months before.

I hadn’t had a chance.

Fortunately, I had friends. Many of those I met in the hall that first week of the legislative session got jobs with various representatives and committees. At some point that week, I also made friends with the representatives from Fairbanks. It was that group that sent a sternly worded letter to the House Rules chairman demanding I get hired. He also got an earful from others I had befriended.

I was standing in the hall when the slightly embattled-looking chairman came out of his office and, with a slight grin, handed me a document declaring I was hired.

Normally, there were six House pages. I became the seventh.

THE POSITION OF page was created in part so that young people can learn about how the legislative process works. We didn’t do a lot back then. We were strategically placed in tall chairs around the House chambers. From our various vantage points, our job was to snatch notes waved by representatives and deliver them to other representatives, staff members, or people sitting in the visitor’s gallery in the back of the room.

When the House was in session, the page’s job was usually fairly boring. At times, though, when important pieces of legislation were being debated or voted on, we had a front-row seat to history.

We also had a front-row seat to how adults behaved when isolated in a hard-to-get-to town, away from their spouses and families, where bars are about the only entertainment around.

All of us pages became close friends. One, Libby Roderick, would bring in her acoustic guitar and sing and play during downtimes. (Her gorgeous voice would later build her a career in music.)

I made friends with the staffers who worked for the various legislators, people from all over the state. Despite having what I like to think is an upbeat personality, I must have possessed a less-than-sunny disposition at times. One staff member bought me a Sesame Street board book about Oscar the Grouch. On the cover, my name was handwritten over “Oscar.” Maybe it was all the coffee. But still, during lengthy debates, it was all I could do not to nod off.

While much of what was voted on did not interest me, several key pieces of legislation did. One was the session where the state created the Alaska Permanent Fund, groundbreaking legislation that basically created a state savings account. Into this account would go a set amount of the money flowing into state coffers from Alaska’s share of the oil flowing through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Alaska was one of the only states to conserve actively some of its wealth for future generations. Otherwise, no doubt, every penny coming in would have been spent.

The other Alaska State House of Representative pages and me at the chief clerk’s desk in the House Chambers. With the seven of us sits the Assistant Sargent at Arms Kathleen “Teeny” Metcalfe. From left to right: Paddy McGuire, Spike Dale, Chris Hart, JD Moore, me, Libby Roderick, Teeny, and Lisa Petro. (Photo taken by Kathleen Metcalfe.)

The Alaska Permanent Fund would eventually pay out a dividend to every person who had lived in Alaska for at least one year. The program was created in part to ensure Alaska would protect the fund from those interested in raiding the account for short-term gain.

MY OFF-HOURS WERE spent hanging out with a group of young people living in North Douglas at the end of Douglas Island. Then and now, North Douglas is largely wooded and remote. In the 1970s, young people lived in the houses that were either tucked into the deep woods or that lined the shore along Gastineau Channel across from Juneau.

The dense forests of North Douglas, much like all of Southeast Alaska, are filled with towering, almost Sequoia-like evergreen trees, including Sitka spruce, mountain hemlock, and red cedar. The forest of North Douglas now seems to me like something from a fairy tale. The dense undergrowth is a myriad of different shades of green, from the mossy carpet covering the ground and tree trunks to the huge ferns and skunk cabbage, a large, odorous plant with leaves the size of elephant ears.

Back-to-nature types lived in every kind of housing available: standard wood-frame homes, old shacks, cabins, wall tents, and such. Someone even hollowed out a giant, overturned spruce and turned it into a place to live—or at least camp.

I know because I had to camp there once. I was picked up at the airport by a friend who offered his place to stay for the night. He failed to mention it was a makeshift home like something out of Winne-the-Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood.

However, bunking in my sleeping bag in a damp tree wasn’t magical or even remotely endearing. It was ridiculous, and if it hadn’t been so late or so far out of town, I would have left. But I did what I could to get through the night and hold up my end of living the “back to nature” movement. That included spurning my friend’s sexual advances—but not without hearing a lecture on the concepts of free love and sharing.

I may have heard similar rhetoric before, but when I was in high school, we were normal teens. Normal, fall-in-love, or crush, or whatever teenagers. Sure, there was the occasional sauna (I wore clothes) or drunken party hook-ups (not for me), and later the go-home-together-after-the-bar kind of thing. But I didn’t really have a boyfriend until I was eighteen. I honestly don’t think I was that attractive to men at that age, or perhaps they were afraid to approach me, given my tough demeanor. I hadn’t had a mom or sisters to coach me on dressing, and I didn’t wear makeup for a long time.

One of my most significant relationships in Juneau was with a sweet, intelligent man my age. He had arrived in Juneau along with a handful of friends from the upper-middle class and wealthy suburbs of Chicago. Some had started working as loggers, wearing their steel-toed logging boots around town. They all had shaggy, long or long-ish hair, and were a back-to-nature girl’s dream guys. Some were from wealthy, established families, the kind of wealth where their last names graced major museums. Others had dads who raced Indy cars for a hobby. One guy described a dining table in his home bigger than the entire house we were standing in.

These young men had something to rebel against. They did so by logging, or learning carpentry or fine woodworking, or becoming commercial fishermen in the small boats that plied Southeast waters.

One of the group was a smart, kind young man who grew up north of Chicago along Lake Michigan. At first, he pursued me. No luck. Then I realized he was a good catch, so I pursued him. For a year, we dated and lived together. That was what young people did back then if things seemed to be going well. You lived together, sometimes almost right away.

His name was Jim, and he was working as a fine carpenter doing kitchen remodels and handcrafting cabinetry. He had long, dark, curly hair, and in a way, we resembled each other. With Jim, I was as secure and stable as I had ever been.

He helped me buy my first car—a forest-green VW Bug. Here’s the thing: I bought it before I had my driver’s license. I didn’t learn to drive until I was nineteen. But when the car was available, and I snatched it up. I did have a learner’s permit, and after taking the driver’s test twice, I got my license.

One should not learn to drive later in life, if nineteen can be called late. I was afraid to drive. To make matters worse, not everything about the car worked, including the driver’s side windshield wiper. In a temperate rainforest. In a place where it rained just about every day, or so it seemed. I did not have a working windshield wiper. On. The. Driver’s. Side.

Maybe I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was.

But the previous owner had hooked up a nifty string the driver could pull to make the wiper work. And for some reason—a lack of funds or just plain stupidity—that was how I operated that car.

There were other issues, one of which was discovered late one night. I was driving with a drunk friend in the backseat. Suddenly, he began yelling, “I can see the road!”

Turns out the floor had a hole that had been covered up by a piece of plywood under the floor mat. My friend had accidentally dislodged the wood, and his foot almost hit the road whizzing by underneath. I felt as if my cute VW Bug had become one of the cars from The Flintstones, where the cars were literally run on foot through holes in the floor.

As if back-to-nature living wasn’t appealing enough, after beginning to date Jim, I bought my first home. It was a popular type of Juneau home at the time called a “float house.”

My then-boyfriend Jim and me on the float house I bought to live in while going to college at the University of Alaska Southeast, in the late 1970s. We had towed the house by skiff on a high tide to a small creek bed to where it’s shown here.

Like a boat house found in marinas around the globe, a float house was also a structure built on a floating dock. A handful began cropping up around North Douglas, all handcrafted by young men and parked along the upper reaches of streams and small creeks, left to rest tied along the tidal flats. I was told at the time that neither state nor federal authorities had any jurisdiction over the tidelands. I doubt anyone gave much thought to the ecosystem of waterfowl and fish that a haphazardly parked float house might disrupt or even destroy. Eventually, a law change made such encroachments on public or even private lands illegal, but in the late 1970s, a float house was the latest housing trend of North Douglas Island.

I believe the one I had been eyeing might have been the first built in the area. And it was beautiful. But first I had to take possession of it.

When I bought it for a grand total of $1,000, it was sitting on the banks of a large creek in North Douglas. The plan was to wait for a high tide to lift it up off the mud banks. Then my boyfriend and I would tow it out with his skiff to his land a short distance away.

The only problem was severe freezing followed by a heavy winter storm and unusually high tides. The float house froze fast to the mud banks, and when the tide came in, it flooded.

We were finally able to get to it and assess the damage late one afternoon after the high tide receded. The inside looked like one giant slush bucket. At least a foot of crushed ice filled the entire float house.

Undaunted, we brought shovels and slowly hauled out all the ice. Miraculously, there seemed to be little or no damage. We were finally able to move it as planned, and I would stay in it for more than a year.

A TALENTED WOODWORKER and carpenter built my float house using in part building materials gathered from an old church that had been torn down. The floors were solid maple; a small stained glass window was set in the roof under a triangular point. On a clear night, I could lie in bed and see stars and the moon.

The entire structure was about thirty feet long by fifteen feet wide, give or take a few feet. The front featured a door in the middle, tall windows, and window seats below. Inside, there was a small kitchen counter to the left with handmade curtains hiding shelving. An open area to the right held a wood stove. The back half was divided by a wall; to one side was a double bed that could be pulled up like a Murphy bed. On the other side was room for a long dresser and closet. A loft above held storage. It was charming.

I cleaned the entire house before moving in. I painted the exterior in Canada cottage colors, with green exterior walls and white window trim with red touches. The house was adorable and would have made a great getaway cabin.

Of course, there was no running water. A sink drained into a large plastic bucket. There was no bathroom. When I eventually parked the float house on a creek on land Jim owned, I used the same outhouse he built for his wall tent. It was down a narrow boardwalk from Jim’s neighbors. All these young people were in their late teens to early twenties, mere babes, as it were, in the woods.

THIS KIND OF LIFESTYLE got me a nickname when I applied during the summer to work for the Municipality of Anchorage Parks and Recreation program.

When the legislative season ended that year, I went back to Anchorage and applied for work at the Summer Playground Program. The city and school district would open about two dozen elementary schools around the city. After a week of training, they’d place two playground leaders onsite to run two recreation programs—one in the morning for little kids, and one in the afternoon for the older ones. The programs were free to Anchorage residents.

That’s how rich the State of Alaska was back then. What would now be considered camp cost families about the same as the occasional movie ticket. Needless to say, the program was wildly popular, often maxing out on enrollment. As playground leaders, we led indoor and outdoor games, art projects, and field trips to the movies or zoo.

During my first interview, I met with the head of the program and a supervisor, both longtime veterans of recreation programs. When they asked me what qualified me to do work outdoors with kids, I explained how I lived in the woods without running water, electricity, or indoor plumbing. They thought I was hilarious. I would have too. Thus, I became known as “Grizzly Adams.”

This was not exactly the persona I was after.

I THINK I SAW MYSELF as a short Emmylou Harris, the willowy, longhaired, beautiful singer who popularized traditional folk and country music in the 1970s. I don’t know if Harris ever had to live off the land. I have read that Dolly Parton grew up without running water—or was that Loretta Lynn? Either way, I was living pretty much as people did in the poorest parts of the Appalachian Mountains. The only difference between me and people living in a “holler” is that I had chosen to do so, and the poorest of the poor would probably choose anything but.

I’m not sure I ever gave it much thought, but over time, I became disillusioned with the whole business of living back to nature. A series of events, including the night in the hollowed-out tree root, led me to conclude that my life wasn’t going so well.

It may have been the day I was napping in a friend’s cabin with some type of kerosene or propane stove for heat. I awoke with a start, darted for the outdoors, and vomited violently for several minutes. I had been poisoned by a leak in the heater. Thank God it wasn’t carbon monoxide, or I’d be dead.

I might have lost faith the day a group of us went to get firewood. We drove out to North Douglas until the guys spotted in the forest what looked like a good tree to take down. In the forest. The US Forest, I believe, as in you-don’t-just-chop-down-trees-here federal forest. I could be wrong. Commercial logging has a long and controversial history in Southeast Alaska. Taking down trees for your personal use? Would the forest rangers care? No one knew. But whether or not what we were doing was entirely legal turned out to be the least of our problems.

The tree was high atop a small ridge above the road. Perfect. We could chop down the tree, cut it into rounds, and toss them over the ridge almost right into the back of the pickup truck. We’d hardly have to lift a finger.

The guys went up on the ridge. Cut down the tree. Cut up the tree, then began tossing the rounds down. As they did, the rounds promptly sank into several feet of snow. Somehow, no one had noticed that the snow was deep off to the side of the road. Somehow, our intrepid loggers had managed to get up the ridge without stepping into what was no doubt a roadside ditch deep enough and filled with enough snow to bury large rounds of tree trunk.

I stood there thinking, This can’t be how this is done. Isn’t wood supposed to be gathered in the summer? Didn’t I read somewhere that it’s supposed to dry out or be cured before it burns properly?

I’ve never been exactly a stickler for details, but I was wet and freezing and getting sick and tired of being wet and freezing.

AFTER MY FIRST legislative session ended, I got a job as a waitress at one of Juneau’s upscale restaurants located on the downtown waterfront.

I had worked in restaurants since I was sixteen. In Anchorage, the places I worked were signs of the times—The Bread Factory and The Cauldron, both emphasizing healthy, natural foods.

The Bread Factory crew made their own bread, and every meal came with thick slices of hearty whole wheat bread. The specials were large tuna melts or frittatas or salads. The Cauldron specialized in homemade soups, bread, and rolls.

In keeping with the egalitarian ideals of the time, all workers at The Cauldron had to do stints at dishwashing. I didn’t mind doing the dishes, except that I had plaque psoriasis and sensitive skin, making me allergic to wool and—of course—detergents. For years, I struggled with large rashes that would erupt painfully then dry over, only to reappear again.

For a while, I was roommates with a nursing student at the community college in town. Rona got into an argument with the male co-owner of The Cauldron, telling him I should not have to wash dishes because of my rash. Rubber gloves never worked to keep out the water and detergent.

“She could get a serious infection,” my roommate yelled.

My boss was into metaphysics, and I received a rambling lecture about good vibes and mind over matter. I was fairly intimidated by him, as he was known to be highly intelligent, never raised his voice, and—as he told Rona—believed the rash was the result of my negative thinking.

I believe my negative thinking led me to quit that job.

The coffee house scene was still very much alive in those days, so places like The Bread Factory had live music, usually a guitarist singing contemporary ballads. For a long time, a local Episcopal church turned its basement into a weekly coffee house called The Chanting Gull. Full folk bands would play there while the audience sipped “Russian tea” (a blend of Tang and powdered iced tea mix) and danced or sang along.

IN JUNEAU, THE restaurant I worked at was nothing like the places I had worked or hung out at in Anchorage. My new job required a uniform of sorts—black pants and a white blouse.

I went out and bought a pair of black pants. I’m also allergic to many synthetic fabrics, so I bought a white cotton peasant blouse to complete my uniform.

My manager did not approve of the top I wore, and somewhere in the middle of our argument, I got fired.

To say I grew up with a chip on my shoulder would be an understatement.

Years ago, a close friend pointed out that I had to learn to fight to survive growing up. The problem was, I fought most of the time over almost everything. Over the years, I’ve left a trail of angry and exasperated telephone customer service agents. I would fight to the death for an aisle seat on an airline flight reservation. And God help the company whose product broke at my house!

But my tough exterior always came with a price, whether that meant it was time to move on from a bad job or not.

Perhaps because I had been doing it all and raising myself as a teenager, I wasn’t enthusiastic about going to college right after high school. But after losing my waitressing job, I vowed to get into college and never to waitress again.

I haven’t.