Apartment Story

apt story

At this writing, I’ve spent the past month moving the last four years of our trio’s belongings out of an unremarkable two bedroom apartment in midtown Anchorage. It’s possible I consumed my weight in ibuprofen during this undertaking. Throughout the endeavor, I also found enough Legos embedded in the carpet fibers to assemble a small, albeit misshapen army.

While I’ve known for some time that I wanted to move from this space, I never could have prepared for the emotional rollercoaster of actually doing so. Packing and cleaning our apartment made my July feel like an unending series of montage scenes. In many ways, my month resembled one of those corny “flashback” episodes of the sitcoms of my youth, like Family Ties or Growing Pains:

IMG_8987

– photo, Brian Adams, 2013

This is the spot in the kitchen where we processed and cooked our first wild-caught salmon.

Here’s the place in the bedroom where our youngest, Matt, was born.

This is where I would put Sam down for a nap when I was in grad school.

And here’s the place – during the period that Sam wanted his mattress in the closet, the year his brother and mom lived in Pennsylvania – that we read The Hobbit together…

matt laff

*

Many writers – well, at least Burt Bacharach and Edie Brickell – have rightfully speculated that “a house is not a home.” We’ve all likely stepped into or dined at a location that at first glance seemed an enviable living space that instead revealed or possessed an unsettling feeling in the air: The spirit of “home” that we expect to inhabit a property can prove noticeably missing from a “house” structure. Still, I’ve visited many more impressive living spaces than ours in recent years, and frequently returned to our apartment – with its 1970’s, bright-orange countertops and carpet the color of a three day old March snow – lamenting that circumstances didn’t afford us a larger, more stylish space to dwell in together.

*

I once heard a bit of “literary lore” that’s over the years helped me work with, among other things, “writer’s block.” As best as I recall, the tale goes that Chekov – the Russian short story wizard and playwright – was seated at a table outside a cafe where a fellow writer lamented the difficulties of the writing task. In response to his friend’s grousing, Chekov lifted or pointed to a glass on the table and – I’m paraphrasing – remarked, “Look! This glass! Start with this glass. I could start writing about this glass and soon a story will emerge!”IMG_6609

If it’s true that each person invents, or at least significantly participates in shaping his or her reality, then Chekov makes a wonderful point. The materials for creating good writing and art, and, more importantly, a life are everywhere around us.

In other words, the tools for crafting the stories (and poems and songs) of our lives are always within view – in every direction we turn or look – provided we learn to cultivate an awareness of them, and then use them to pay tribute to the life we’re given.

“Every day is a god,” charges Annie Dillard, “Each day is a god. And holiness holds forth in time.” If this day is a god, too, then how have I recognized it for what it is, whether I live in a majestically-caffeinated, superbly-microbrewed, literary and artful progressive hub like Portlandia or Brooklyn; or in a gruff, misplaced neighborhood pitched between two thoroughfares amidst a gaudy cluster of stripmalls in Anchorage, Alaska? If Annie’s right, the divine runs amok in every place I find myself, and I’d be remiss to prove too stymied or checked out to engage with it somehow.

Or, as Mary Oliver intones:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you…

unnamed-3

The daily task, it seems, for my small part in life’s continuing unfolding, is to ask if I am even listening in the first place? Am I curiously taking notes or am I continuing to uneasily recite the redundant, recurring melodrama of Me?

Rather, if the world is offering itself to my imagination, calling to me, perhaps it’s only common courtesy to pick up, to answer the call in the first place? No matter where I am?

*

By the end of July, in a space I had for months, even years, known it was time to leave, I was surprised and overwhelmed by the emotions accompanying the move, solely given the import of our collected memories and experiences under our little section of the building’s roof. Though our apartment was never the envy of others, our little brood managed to – with attention and care – create a place together. Not a perfect place – not by a longshot. In fact, at times, it was a deeply troubled and fraught place. (The middle of its story, after all, features a divorce.) But we abided there in the best ways we knew how, and in our abiding, this place became home.

apt br

*

…Here is the spot where I feverishly added to a list of “Reasons to Stay Alive” in 2013…

…This is the room where the songs “Olena,” “Book of Consolation” and “Hope, Alaska” came to life…

unnamed-5

…Here’s where, in 2008, I watched an episode of Planet Earth on DVD, as I gently rocked back and forth in the living room with Matt, then only a few weeks old.

David Attenborough detailed the journey of newly-hatched sea turtles. The mother that the baby turtles never meet laid and buried her eggs in the sand, and then returned to the sea from where she came. In this scene, the newly-hatched babies clamored, scampered towards the roaring ocean, drawn there by some invisible, timeless knowing.

This is the spot where the film showed the baby turtles darting across the beach and flinging themselves at the surging depths.

This is where I was sitting alone with Matt in the dark when David Attenborough noted that only one in ten thousand of the baby turtles survives their journey,

where I was then unexpectedly overcome with tears.

This is where I looked down at Matt sleeping in my arms, and rocked a little harder and swallowed the sea…

One in 10,000.

One in

One in 10,000?

 

We can do this.

 

(Right? Maybe?

Do we have a choice?)

 

We’ll do

– we will –

everything

anything

apt turtle

 

What We Talk About When We Talk About Traveling

JT2

Sunrise through a tent door in Joshua Tree

“Pop,” Matt called out from the back seat, the wind from his open window whipping through his hair, “where’s the most beautiful place you’ve ever been?”

It was late. We were driving home from a house concert at a friend’s property in a secluded wooded area on the fringes of Anchorage. Between the trance of the evening’s music and the long sunlit Alaskan summer evening, I’d lost all track of time, and so I now raced along the highway, distracted by the hour and that tomorrow was Monday and that the kids were still awake.

“Well…” I said, jogging my memory, “I remember really loving Italy…”

“…and Spain…” I added, as an afterthought.

“Wait, Pop,” he gasped, “you went to Italy?​”

In 1999, in my late twenties, my then girlfriend and I left Montana and backpacked around Europe for a few months. While I know the trip made an impression, and that there’s a box of photos in a storage closet somewhere documenting the time, I now struggled to put into words any lasting effect or poignant tales from the journey.

As the boys and I hurtled towards home, my mind only proved a soupy stew of vague, passing images and snapshot scenes: vines wrapping around a trellis of on the back porch of an apartment we rented on the Amalfi coast; standing on the balcony of our room in Barcelona and looking down on the courtyard with its little round tables and wooden folding chairs in the square; our host in the Cinque Terre, Giacomo, lifting a bunch of fresh grapes from a barrel and smiling as he handed them to us; a thumping nightclub in Prague where we winced our way through glasses of Windex­-colored absinthe.

Yet I struggled to grasp these wispy images from a long ago former life, to contain them in the framework of story or to find threads that wove all these together into a single fabric.

Who in the world was that guy in Europe baring my name and face then? What were his dreams? What did he want out of life in those years?

And was this midlife? Do memories just erode like shore lines in a hurricane during your forties? I clamored back to the surface.

“Japan was beautiful, too, though, right Sammy?”

“Yeah…” my eleven year-old dreamily sighed from the passenger’s seat.

We emerged beyond the high trees running along the highway and were coasting past exits and turnoffs leading to Anchorage’s version of the gaudy, predictable chain stores and strip malls featured off of every exit in the United States.

On this night, however, well north of consumer culture’s eyesores in the foreground, the sun blazed and pulsed with a dazzling prism of colors and light. Rounding the curve that revealed as much, it’s a wonder we didn’t drive straight off the highway. Slack jawed, I directed Sam and Matt’s attention to the sun’s show on my left.

“Look at that!”

The kids looked and said nothing.

As a born and bred East coast kid from the working class suburbs of Philadelphia, Alaska’s skies always leave me feeling like I’m getting away with something. From the midnight sunsets of summer, to the aurora of winter, there’s something nearly scandalous about letting a random suburban Philly boy travel so far from home to witness so many jaw-dropping skylines.

I tried keeping my eyes on the road while still absorbing the sky’s show on my left. The last time a sky so brilliantly throttled me and consumed my attention was on my trip to Joshua Tree this past March, where I met up and traveled with one of my oldest and best friends, Mark. Every morning and evening in the park seemed, like and unlike in Alaska, an unpredictable but welcome pass for being daily sucker punched by a sky full of Amazing. The in between times, our days, were framed by stupefying encounters with dramatic stone structures, hikes on paths and ground that recalled Roadrunner cartoons, and wandering amidst ruins and desert flora that seemed props for a Cormac McCarthy novel.

Mark

Mark & boulders, Joshua Tree

I remember passing hazily through the airport, in slow motion on the morning we both flew out of LAX, heading our separate ways back to Alaska and Pennsylvania. I boarded my plane in a trance and sat in my window seat, gaping and eyes wide.

What had we just lived through?

While on one hand I felt like it’d take years to process the silent wonder of the desert and all we’d encountered there ­in its raw, unforgiving simplicity – in its stark landscapes, its sunsets and sunrises and stillness ­- my memories of Europe suggested I might not even remember or be able to note the trip’s impact on my life a decade from now.

As I sat staring out the window of the airplane, looking at nothing, my phone buzzed. Mark was texting from his gate, where he still waited to board his flight. He included a photograph featuring an underlined, marked up page of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire:​

Matt sunset

Matt watching Sunday evening’s sunset, 6/7/15

“If [the desert] has any significance it lies, I will venture, in the power of the odd and unexpected to startle the senses and surprise the mind out of their ruts of habit, to compel us into a reawakened awareness of the wonderful -­ that which is full of wonder…The shock of the real. For a little while, we are again able to see, as the child sees, a world of marvels.”

The desert, certainly. Alaska, too. Perhaps the passage even served as a way to more memorably travel and carry myself as I pass through the world in the coming years.

Because hadn’t I perhaps traveled blind and numb to wonder in my other, younger, previous lives? Didn’t I, like the strip malls we now passed and all they advertised, once treat Experience and the places I traveled like something to ravenously descend upon, consume, and devour? Could that be partially why the threads, the stories, and memories of other places prove so hard to come by?

I blew past our turn and steered the car north.

“Pop!” Matt shouted, “Where are you going?”

“There,” I said, pointing to the sunset in the distance, now straight ahead of us.

“We’re going there.”

To wonder.

Wherever it rests. Wherever we find it.

sunset anchorage

Sunset, Point Woronzof, Anchorage, AK 6/7/15

The Weight (A Balancing Act)

westchester lagoon

I wake up Monday morning, head in a fog and the sky a heavy gray. Maybe I need to pick up the pace on our Lord of the Rings bedtime reading, finish the series and find something lighter to read to the boys: This morning’s gray resembles a specter, a phantom seeping through the windows.

There is light, too. It’s April in Alaska. We wake to light now, but today it’s muted by the undeniable presence of sagging clouds gathered and draped across the Chugach mountains, shrouding them from view. But at 7a.m. in April, the dance between light and dark in Anchorage feels, for my East coast origins and conditioning, properly balanced, stable, “normal.”

“Be grateful,” I growl to no one but me.

Still, I hesitate to rise, to sit up. I rub my hand around my face, press my fingers into my eyes.

I was up till midnight grading papers, a task that segued into restlessly mulling over a number of personal matters while I thrashed around under the covers. At 3 a.m., my seven-year-old, Matt, leapt into bed with me on the heels of a bad dream. Once asleep, he proceeded to kick me through the night – an unintended reminder he was close.

I hear Matt sifting through his Lego drawers in his room across the hall.

Over a swift and admittedly pouty, self-pitying moment, I envy my sister in Virginia, who lives across the street from my parents and can frequently ask them to assist with carpooling or hosting her three daughters.

I also think of my married friends. Envy tag-team parenting for the “bazillionth” time since my boys’ mom and I split in 2011.

“Stop,” I growl. Remember: We’re here. Here and nowhere else. And we’re doing our best.

Aren’t we?

Some days, it’s hard to know.

I swing my legs over the bed.

I’m reminded of a montage scene set to feel-good music in Judd Apatow’s This is Forty, where Paul Rudd adoringly wakes his daughters for school – affectionately tousling one’s hair, canoodling the other, and playfully rubbing his hand around his teenage daughter’s face.

So, I “Power Up” – I motivate, inhale some of whatever so enviably possesses Paul Rudd characters. I breeze into the boys room and cheerily declare a robust, “Good morning! Good morning! Good morning!”

Matt, from his place on the floor, amidst the rubble of his Legos, looks up at me doe-eyed and crestfallen and meekly whimpers, “Pop? Do we have to go to school today?”

He’s still in his pajamas and between his strawberry-blonde bedhead and the spaceship designs stretching across his rail thin limbs, and his childhood-specific pot-belly rounding through his top, I am utterly smitten and vulnerably open to complying with anything he wants.IMG_5937

No! I want to tell him. No, we don’t! No school today! No work! Today we’re building forts in the living room and watching all the Star Wars movies! While eating Pirate’s Booty and ice cream and PB&J! I’ll tell work we took a, a, a Family Care Day, because our “us” is more important than desk work, than paper pushing and Microsoft Outlook; more important than racing you guys to school and then racing to grab you at after care, and then slogging through rush hour traffic and trying to make and eat dinner before 7pm and then bathe and read LOTR at a sane hour so that we can rise rested to start the whole rat race all over again tomorrow!

Instead, I sigh and tell him, “Oh, buddy, I know. I know. I used to want to skip school so many times when I was a boy.” He limply groans and sighs.

Sam’s body shifts under his blankets. Limbs akimbo, he slowly snakes them towards himself and then out again, stretching awake. He blinks a few times and sits up. He rubs his eyes and smiles.

Sam, for all eleven of his years, has possessed the magical ability to welcome each day the way you can imagine the Dalai Lama does. Or Mary Oliver. His waking hours are one long embrace of everything and anything around him, so much so that I’ve often wondered where he really came from, if the stork accidentally brought his mom and me a congenial ambassador or motivational speaker’s child. Never mind getting Sam into commercials or acting, as some have suggested: I often think he’s on the verge of presenting a viral TED talk, or might go solve the world’s problems with Bono.

Today, as with every day, Sam looks around, all smiles and sparkle.

“Good morning,” he sighs, standing.

“It’s dark out there,” he notes peering through his window, “do you think it’s going to rain today?”

“Might,” I reply. “Looks like it.”

Sam stretches once more and bounds to his dresser and pulls out some clothes.

“Wow,” he sighs, “I am so tired.”

Just say the word, I clamor inside. Say it. Say something like, “Can we not do this today, Pop? The weekday runaway train thing we do?”

I stand thoroughly poised to call a sick day, to announce “Fort Building Day.”

He turns and proceeds towards the bathroom.

“Take a load off, Fanny!” he sings.

Ok, wait. No fair. He’s boldly singing the chorus to my favorite pick-me-up song. The one I play on the stereo the way others take a daily vitamin.

“…Take a load off, Fanny!” he continues, running the bathroom faucet, “Annnnnnnnnnddd!…Put the load right on meeee!!!”

I look at Matt.

“Ok, buddy. Time to get dressed.”

mattMatt sighs and groans, pouts. I want to tell him, as Sam’s dutifully reminding me only by the way he embraces a day, something about how we’re in this together, that we can do this, and that every day is somehow always in some way infused with surprising moments of joy, of grace. I want to tell him all that, but he’s seven, and I can’t expect him to agree or understand now.

I pat the top of his head, and he leans his head on my knee. I tell him only, “I know. I know.” Because I do.

There’s a balance to strike somewhere in all of this, adrift as I often feel we are, alone together and striving to keep up with the pace of things in the terrifying, stark, and beautiful spaces we find ourselves. Rather, I imagine, or I hope there is.

I lean one way and then the other, stroking Matt’s hair, wobbly and wavering.

IMG_8784

 

At Home in a House?

back yard

In a couple weeks I’ll turn 43, and I can honestly say that until four months ago, it never occurred to me to want a house. Scouts honor: Until the past autumn, I never remotely considered joining the American “Homeowner” mafia. It’s not that I’ve been stubbornly opposed to the idea, so much as that my lifestyle has never afforded me conditions for seriously considering the possibility.

I spent my young adulthood in a state of perpetual motion, travel, and transit – mostly between states, and occasionally between countries. These experiences were collected in the name of the book I wasn’t and am only sort-of-now writing. These adventures were regularly accompanied by short stints in contemplative communities, during which periods I’d pause, catch my breath, and ponder the possibility of an intentional spiritual or monastic path. While many of my friends and loved ones grew their 401K’s, smartly invested in future “equity,” and touted the good news of duplex-ownership, I fantasized about the conversation that may have occurred between Thomas Merton and the young Dalai Lama. When, at another in the long string of housewarming parties, you would drop “mortgage” and “new countertops” into the conversation, my thoughts drifted to the Alice Munro story I finished before heading to the potluck. Over drinks, you talk about the mold in your basement, dry rot or asbestos in the ceiling, and I’ll nod sympathetically while actually worrying over the lyrics for a song I was working on in my apartment before we met up. sam piano

Maybe it’s that recently the kids’ Legos have become to our two-bedroom apartment what bacteria is in preschool and daycare, accumulating at such an alarming rate that I’d swear these bricks should come packaged with the same rules that applied to Spielberg’s “Gremlins” – particularly that one about not adding water.

Then, too, I suddenly find myself in the company of an 11 year-old, Sam, who recently began requiring “Privacy” in our bathroom. (The humor is not lost on me, as I am afforded exactly 0% privacy in any room comprising our shrinking living space.) Perhaps you, too, would question anew these admittedly creature-comforted, still-privileged circumstances if you watched your six-year-old pound on the bathroom door, followed by his brother shouting he’s “busy,” after which you hear yourself offer the small boy a mason jar. Refusing that option, I recently told Matt, “Well, then you’ll need to wait. Or, there’s the woods? There! Those trees just past the parking lot?”

* * *

yard

It would have been impossible not to see the house. Resting at the bottom of the hill on the curve that leads to our apartment building, it’s actually a wonder the “For Sale” sign is still standing, that no one making the turn this icy winter has clipped it or smashed into it.

And while I initially spotted the sign, I didn’t make anything of it until a week or two later when, while driving the kids home from school, Sam asked if we could look at it.

He just wanted to look at the house, I told myself. It was in walking distance of our apartment building, and looking at a house didn’t mean I had to suddenly unearth the money to buy it. Or did the kids imagine that acquiring a house was a lot like purchasing the newest Avengers Lego set?

The woman who met us that Saturday morning told us it needed work, and she was selling it for her parents and they wanted it off their hands sooner and so some things were negotiable. “Which is still really no matter,” I thought, running the numbers through my head, “because 0 divided or multiplied by 0 is still 0.”

However, I’m puzzling now about what happened the moments after she showed me the faded, dried up remains of the summer’s strawberry and raspberry patches. And then, too, when Sam reached for the sturdiest, lowest hanging branch on the crab apple tree out front. Soon, the kids were running through the large yard out back and I was suddenly watching a story play out in my mind that I’d never until then mildly entertained. Exactly where had this story been hiding, I wanted to know? The one where the kids run laughing through the wide open yard – not a stone’s throw from the garden – and I then drift from my spot by the woodstove, out to the back deck with a beer in hand and cheerily call, “Alright you knuckleheads! C’mon – it’s dinner time!”

At one point, as the kids rolled around the large, empty living room, wrestling and doing somersaults and cartwheels, I looked out the wide, surrounding picture windows – each of them desperately in need of a lot of work – and I saw the room filled for a house concert featuring a friend’s solo act or one of the many local bands regularly staging intimate, unplugged house concerts around Alaska. Around then, deep in the throes of their play, Sam stopped suddenly, shot a glance my direction, and asked, “Can we buy it, Pop?”

I stammered and sighed. The owner’s daughter laughed, told me she had a couple kids of her own and understood, while I grit my teeth and told Sam we’d think about it.

“But I like it! I want that bedroom!” he announced pointing down the hall.

bird houseWe didn’t buy that house. There are a few reasons why. Money is one, of course, but so was the basement, which yanked me out of my fantasizing and only called to mind The Silence of the Lambs.

And I have yet to buy a house, still, though I’m thinking about it with a bit more conscious intention and thought now. I guess, until that Saturday a few months ago, every other house I’ve stepped into seemed only a house shaped collection of rooms. For whatever reason – the berry patches, the woodstove, the three bathrooms, or maybe the kids running with abandon through a yard, I can’t say exactly – one autumn Saturday afternoon, I somehow found myself plumb in the middle of a possibility called home.

bedroom view

Searching for a Home, Via Alaska (part 2)

And I would do it again, but set down
This, set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?
– T.S. Eliot, The Journey of the Magi

Let your beauty manifest itself
Without talking and calculation
You are silent. It says for you: I am.
And comes in meaning thousandfold,
Comes at long last over everyone.
– Rilke, “Initial”
apt xmasAt the risk of proving too dim – more so than usual – how in the world do you even begin a tradition? And how do you decide which traditions to adopt or dismiss? What makes our family traditions lasting, what makes them stick?

These were and are my burning questions this holiday season, beginning – as I described in my last post – this recent Thanksgiving, accompanying me through Christmas yesterday, and traveling with me into the coming New Year. This year I admittedly found myself at a loss. Part of the reason for this conundrum was because, having just flown East for my brother’s wedding in Philadelphia this summer, there was no way to afford another trip from Alaska to the East coast this holiday season. However, I think, too, this mostly-financial matter only forced me to face a deeper, ultimately unavoidable fact of my situation as a single father up here in Alaska, far from Pennsylvania, my home place of origin:

What am I offering these boys, who, at ten and six, are rapidly passing through boyhood and coming of age in a landscape and time period so vividly and markedly different from my own? And how do I attempt or manage to shape anything resembling traditions, for now at least, mostly solo and on too-frequently-limited resources? And how can I deliver legitimate holidays to my boys that don’t blithely or solely coast along the thin surface of the media, Target, or Amazon.com versions of what the day supposedly means?

Over the nearly four years since my sons’ mother and I split up, I found familiar comfort and reliable ease in flying the three of us east to spend the holidays with my family. This effort required little to no thought in my mind, no question of the role I assume or play in the context of extended family, or what I’d be offering Sam and Matt once our plane touched down. Order the gifts early enough online that they’d be at my parent’s house before our arrival and then Sam, Matt, and I would just effortlessly slip into the stream, the flow of everything I’ve inherited throughout the all-American, uber-traditional holidays of my own childhood.

Admittedly, the traditional Bower family Christmas back east has for as long as I can remember also been defined by nothing less than a requisite degree of full blown, manic chaos. Albeit an adorable, welcome brand of chaos, largely because the holidays are perhaps the lone, annual opportunity to find every niece, nephew, sibling, cousin, aunt, uncle, and surviving grandparent reliably collected in one place, even if it is at the price of temporary insanity for all involved.

bower vile family

Jonathan’s Wannabe-Whitman/Thoreau/Teen Wolf phase circa the mid-1990’s

Though an entirely well intended, big-hearted affair replete with randomly occurring acts of familial affection – walloping to near-smothering hugs, earthquaking belly laughs, spontaneous guitar jams and more – the day is no less defined by a never long-sustainable level of noise and borderline confusion. These are riotous events that reliably tax every child’s emotions, ultimately requiring that some assortment of offspring collapse in tears before we can really determine whether the day proved successfully over-stimulating enough or not. Our gatherings have also been annually governed by the persistent din of new devices being fired up or tested, new instruments relentlessly strummed or pounded on, new stereos and/or albums blaring from multiple corners of the room. Of course, someone also always receives the one toy that will send the terrier into a yapping frenzy. It’s a brand of nuttiness that leaves the adults gleefully resigned to caffeinated autopilot from shortly after morning coffee until they can collapse for the rumored winter’s nap at night’s end. By evening, the day’s relentless barrage of good cheer and sugared, fatty foodstuffs and shiny new material possessions and the full brunt of unending social engagement finally reaches critical mass, driving a select batch of us – those too cowardly or soft to live the teetotaler lifestyle of our forebears – to covertly duck into a secret room or to launch out back to grab a nip of an adult beverage. That small band of us pauses and breathes outside, some anxiously grasping for their smokes as we attempt to sit still long enough to raise a glass in the nearest dark space we can find that will afford us a moment’s respite or silence…

Every year in Alaska’s deepest, darkest winter hours, I’ve longed for this single day of unsustainable chaos the way I imagine the polar explorers longed for the affections of their faraway wives and the comforts of home.

The question of traditions and rituals we instill among family – blood relations or adopted or “friend” families – seem to me actually part of the larger question of how you in fact make a home…which is precisely what I’ve circled the wagons trying to do since becoming a single parent a few years ago.

And so, with no ready-made or fixed traditions in place, this holiday season became a kind of riddle, a query lobbed to no one but myself, especially since both my sons, born and raised (so far, mostly) here in Alaska identify no other place they’ve visited or traveled to as home:

What if (huge gulp) we were already home for the holidays?

And, on that notion, what if we started making a day that grew (sanely, maybe even quietly) out of – in the words of Andy Williams, from a Christmas album that has since childhood marked the arrival of the holiday in my mind – “a few of [our] favorite things”? What if we dared test the waters of a new, different stream, perhaps even one that proved a little less chaotic? What then?

sam acolyte xmas eveWe attended the 11pm Christmas Eve service at the Episcopal church we frequent, because Sam was scheduled as an acolyte that evening. Afterwards, close to 12:30am, he raced up to me, bleary eyed and still in his robes, and threw his arms around me announcing, “Merry Christmas!”

I drove him to his mom’s and said I’d see him and his brother in the morning. When I woke the next morning, it was snowing. I took a short walk. As I walked through the neighborhood, muted as it was by the snowfall, I remembered out of the blue, for the first time in over twenty years, that one of my English professors once introduced our class to a recording of T.S. Eliot reading his poems. For the first time in as many years, I wanted only to hear Eliot read The Journey of the Magi.

I returned to my apartment, made tea, and found T.S. Eliot reading The Journey of the Magi at the Poetry Foundation’s website. I played it twice. A day was in motion.anchorage out back

The boys’ mother texted that the boys were awake. Good friends texted and invited me to dinner later, an offer that provided a flush of comfort I wasn’t fully aware I even needed then. I loaded the boys’ gifts into the car. It was still snowing and that hush was only periodically interrupted by the melodic trill of waxwings dashing back and forth between trees out front.

Like the snow’s steady drift and accompanying, welcome silence, and the waxwings passing to and fro briskly overhead, this day required nothing of us. That morning, the boys demanded only that I make it to their mom’s apartment with their gifts, pronto. But the day asked nothing, save perhaps only an invitation that we live into the day we were given. There was no script, no prescribed agenda, no long ago-ascribed roles, no demands to be anywhere specific. Not even any clues for how to proceed with the day. The day only unfolded. As perhaps a good and most memorable day may wont to do – “without calculation,” to borrow from Rilke.

In that way, this Christmas was a lot like writing, like starting a new story. As with composing any new story, the writer plays a critical part in its unfolding. But so much in the details and what happens is left to mystery, too. So much so that, as with any story’s beginning, you have no idea, no clear sense of how any of it will end either. Taking that plunge, then, can often prove frightening, or at least initially a little intimidating.

But in that flow, in the quiet stream of unfolding and unknowing yesterday, the whole birthing of the experience proved at moments quietly thrilling and then also terrifying. In that way, the day also resembled the landscape in which we daily find ourselves piecing together our lives, our family – a striking landscape, and a place that my sons know only as home.

ak wish you were here

Wish You Were Here xo, JJB

 

Wilderness and the Costcolypse

What do we talk about when we talk about food? It’s my feeling that discussions about food always reveal at some level the most intimate, spiritual, and dearly held values with which we compose a life. I think, for instance, of the struggle that some families I encounter go through to make ends meet, and how many times we frame this basic challenge in terms like “putting food on the table,” or “keeping the kids fed.”

It’s hard for me to contemplate my relationship to food in Alaska nowadays without my thoughts swiftly veering to Don Rearden’s wonderfully eerie, post-apocalyptic novel, The Raven’s Gift. The book, which came out in 2011, takes place in an Alaska that could easily and believably prove five minutes or five or fifty years into the future. Set around the far-flung region of Bethel – a city (population approx. 6000) accessible only by air or river in Western Alaska – we encounter John Morgan, a man who with a large heart and pure intentions moved to the remote location with his wife, Anna. Both aspired, in overly relatable, starry-eyed ways, to experience first hand one of the lone, final wilderness frontiers on Earth. John and Anna find their way North and court adventure not by aiding to plunder the state’s wealth of natural resources, but by following opportunities to live and teach in the schools of a community comprised primarily of Native Americans.

The Raven's Gift, Don Rearden

But then things go horribly awry, descend – as the book’s jacket reads – “into total chaos.”

Rearden never goes far out of his way to specifically detail what happens that sends John’s life careening into the most unintended, terrifying and primitive form of survival imaginable. It’s not the “how” we got here that matters. It’s purely, “You’re here. Now what?” We hear rumor of a deadly epidemic. Did it spread through all of Alaska? Did it reach beyond Alaska and infect America? Or was it restricted only to Bethel? Was it an intentional epidemic? But does it even matter? When an unexpected stranger offers Morgan a cup of broth – after wandering how long without food in his belly – you don’t care about the origins of this tragedy. You’re sipping broth with him. When he risks a daydream about a cup of coffee, you’re shivering in your bones, too, and you want to offer him a simple cup of joe. The novel puts a man with minimal skills in the absolute barest of imaginable circumstances, strips him of everything he possesses and loves, and tells him only, “Survive this.”

The story offers a unique perspective – with a touch of Stephen King, and periodic nods towards The Road – regarding the curious dilemma that comes with trying to live out one’s dreams up here. Intentionally or no, it indirectly asks readers how they would survive in one of the rumored remaining “wild places” in the 21st century as it strives to become as domesticated and predictable as every strip-malled and fast-fooded location that many of us came here to escape. On one hand, in Alaska, we can hunt wild game and catch and wrestle with so many salmon in the summer that they will swim through your dreams. We can pick our weight in wild blueberries for free, and not pay the exorbitant prices for farmed blues that our friends and family pay Outside. (“Outside” is ow we refer to everywhere in the Lower 48.) And yet, despite this, it often strikes me that a low-level anxiety persists.

It’s noticeable when you hit Costco or Sam’s Club on the weekends. It’s in the way the crowds, myself included, flock in droves to the warehouse stores to purchase mountains of foods and goods that come shipped to us from Anywhere out of state. You can ask me about terrifying bear encounters all you want, but in Anchorage I’m more often worried about escaping the Costco parking lot in one piece than I am concerned with encountering wild animals on a hike in the woods.

Costco

The idea that “Alaska” largely proves synonymous with “survival(ist)” probably isn’t news to anyone. And, to the credit of more than a handful of true-to-life rugged individualists past and present, the state definitely boasts a fascinating library of stories revealing that many Alaskans live life a little closer to the bone than the majority of their fellow Americans. And while there’s not time or space to explore the topic here, we’ve also seen a rapidly growing demand for locally grown produce and goods, and are watching farmers markets gain traction at the local level in ways they wouldn’t have a decade ago.

But Don Rearden’s novel turns a blind eye to our romance with “Alaska” and challenges every naïve notion we carry about “wilderness.” And he does it in such a way that I consider his post-Apocalyptic Alaska tundra every time I walk into Costco and see crowds manically surviving, depending on mountainous flats of pre-packaged foodstuff and goods that rely on barges, flights, and massive amounts of fuel in order for us to consume it. I see John Morgan staggering across the naked tundra when I hear my coworkers or students giddily rave about the new Olive Garden or Chile’s coming to town as if we were a remote African village miraculously acquiring a fresh water resource. What is this nimble, unsustainable set design we’re blissfully constructing in Anchorage, and what does it say that while we’re welcoming it here, many communities Outside are beginning to reconsider and address the glaring errors and dangers that exist in this format?

The winter I first read The Raven’s Gift happened to be the snowiest winter on record in southern Alaska in nearly 60 years. This, compounded with the fact that I had become a single father only a couple months prior to that cold, record-breaking season caused the book to leave an indelible mark on my trembling, unnerved heart.

Sprawled along my couch those dark, lonesome and silent evenings, I would set the novel down and look past the frosted windows of my apartment, stare out at the four-foot high mounds of snow in the front yard and find in John Morgan’s plight a frightening metaphor for the stark terrain of my new life in Alaska. It was impossible not to feel stranded and terrified in those months, living as far away as I do from my entire extended family and closest friends, all while striving to make ends meet each week, to survive on a very middling-, single-income from my work at a non-profit social service agency. Never mind wanting to be “a good father” (or husband). What did/do those terms even mean? All I knew to want then was whatever would keep the boys healthy and fed.

Snow-moose

What do we talk about when we talk about food? I believe discussions about food are at heart holding and asking the most valuable questions about our collective survival, on one hand, and that discussions about survival explore and reveal our most deeply cherished values and intimate connections to the places we find ourselves and to all the people we encounter there.

John Morgan encounters these truths in the most primitive way imaginable. I’ve been fortunate enough not to learn these lessons as brutally as he does, although his journey strikes me as eerily familiar, and never very far away from my own.

winter2012-01

Where I Am: Twenty Minutes from Alaska

“[‘Nature’] always happens in a place, and generally, whatever you see and learn, you do so in a small place…So why not look around and see where you are?”    – Gary Snyder, The Etiquette of Freedom

 

My sons’ mother and I had barely pulled into town in August 2003 when longtime residents informed us, “Alaska is twenty minutes outside Anchorage.” The fact that our newly adopted city wasn’t in league with the Truly Wild and Last Frontier initially struck me as unfortunate and disheartening. I’d held higher hopes for the place in which we’d soon start raising a family.

Still, it was helpful to learn that sage little chestnut. It alleviated some of my bewilderment towards the city we had – albeit, a little impulsively – elected to call home for the next couple years (which has since become ten, though that’s a different story).

Only days earlier, after nearly two weeks spent road tripping from my city of origin, Philadelphia, and through some of the most scenic and jaw-dropping wilderness areas in North America, I pulled into Anchorage feeling just a little duped, appearing to have landed…in South Jersey?

To the new arrival – especially one from a major metropolitan area relocating to Alaska’s largest city – Anchorage looks less like the Metropolis of the North than a complex and intricately woven web of strip-malls, each of which rests couched in the massive, sprawling lots that contain them.

And for the first few years that we lived here, that’s all I could see. It ate at me constantly: Never mind brown bears and wolverines! How have you people survived such garish aesthetics? You’re an architect? Can’t you do something about all this?

So, while we were married, the kids’ mom and I thrilled in every possible opportunity to peel past the city limits, beyond the gaudy shopping centers and stop-and-go traffic, spilling headlong into the jaw dropping landscapes always twenty minutes or more beyond Anchorage. And in that way, yes, we’re very spoiled here. I won’t pretend otherwise: It’s incredible. It is Alaska out there. With camping gear and rations packed, the grand SUV of fat-tired strollers in the trunk, and a Baby Bjorn strapped to one of our chests, we were often wilderness bound, city-free, and soon romping around in a real-life postcard in no time.

However, when I became a single dad to my two boys a couple years ago, those postcard-romps became a little more difficult to achieve. Not impossible, but a whole lot tougher to pull off single-handedly, much less with anything remotely resembling frequency, or urgency, or – more recently – even energy and drive.

Between parenting, domestic duties, juggling a couple jobs, and moonlighting as a musician, nothing seems more adventurous or wild in my mind many nights than a solid, single night’s sleep.

Nowadays, I’m happy to let the John Krakauers reveal their life-altering Into the Wild and Into Thin Air adventures (and misadventures), if only because I’m trying to conquer the Mount McKinley of laundry piles preventing me from freely collapsing to my bed, or couch, or both. By day’s end, a few meals worth of dishes in the sink, and a minefield of the boys’ most sinister, microscopic Legos embedded in the carpet – brilliant for late night, barefoot walks across the living room – the only adventure you stand to sell me features red wine and my guitar.

The Baroness, the apartment complex in which I reside and spend part of each week with my sons, is nothing to look at. In fact, let’s disregard the building. If you visit, I’ll want to turn your attention the other direction. From our second floor balcony, turn your gaze towards the Chugach Mountains strung along the horizon line, the not too distant range resting there, cradling our funky and flawed effort at a ready-made city, oblivious to our mess. We witness the moon’s cycles, sunrises, and sunsets from this same landing, too. In recent years, even despite the nearby city lights, I’ve somehow seen a handful of aurora displays dance across the winter’s night sky from our building’s front yard.

There’s a creek a short walk away from the apartment, running along a trail network that winds the length of the city. These days it strikes me as only regrettable that during all the years we were firing up the Forester and blowing out of town towards postcard-worthy locations, I never acknowledged or considered this minor-miracle trail network for the nearby wonder it today, time and again proves to be for me. Could I have survived my failed marriage without this stretch of winding path, without the creek’s song singing me through any number of the soul’s dark spells all those long nights a couple years ago?

Sure, the creek is frequently littered with empty cigarette cartons, Wal-Mart bags, and spent liquor and beer bottles. But in recent years I’ve come to adore and rely on how the sun’s light hits the water and trees lining its banks a million different ways in every day. The creek, too, runs in every season, even under the ice that will soon cover it. And its song never changes. I’ve only recently begun to hear that song, and it seems a timeless one, moving to some universal heart’s rhythm, a lulling song that – if it used words – might croon,

“Here You Are,

Here You Are…

And Here You Are…”

Chester Creek, AK