Monthly Archives: August 2014

Watching some show or other with Pete, I feel my mind drifting. Without meaning to, my eyes close and the light changes. I am surrounded by the dim blue glow of arctic winter, and one of the trails I know so well runs out ahead of my mind’s eye like a ribbon through the trees. The charlie-brown spruce out across the frozen swamp are heavy with frost. The sun is invisible in the haze of ice-fog. I glide through a long corner and into the relative darkness of a stand of birch and aspen on a small rise. I open my eyes and find myself back in Iowa with no idea what has transpired on the television in the last minutes. I close my eyes again, hoping for more trail, stomach sinking with a deep sense of homesickness that I cannot shake off.

I wrote a few years ago, here, about my sense of place in Alaska despite its relative lack of the deep sense of community I’d become accustomed to in the years before I landed there, as well as my fears about leaving that place for the cornfields and towns of the midwest for a time. I’m finding, two years in, that my fears have been realized. I continue to feel disconnected and adrift here, even in the small pockets of forest and trail I’ve found to wander, the friends I’ve found to walk with for a piece.

I have been back north twice since we left in a U-Haul two years ago, and both times I returned in a deep funk that took months to shake, my restlessness and discontent here put in sharp focus by the trips back. Both times, I have thought better of going back and triggering the feelings again. But now I am considering a longer foray into the north, for a good chunk of the fall. So many things need to slide into place for this to happen, but if they do the question will remain: Should I go? Here, especially since moving to this smaller town, I’m whiling away my days in fits and starts. But leaving Peter for so many weeks gives me pause.

Ultimately, the thing I don’t know is if a long trip will be salt in the wound or a balm for it. Will coming back south (possibly to graduate school, and so a more focused trajectory) be better for having been in a place I love for a time, or will it prove too much of a temptation to wallow? Or (and this, I fear too) will the coke-bottle glasses grown rosier and rosier over the last two years be ripped away and leave me without these unbidden interludes and frank, grasped hope that have helped me power through being here (gracelessly) so far? There is no way to know, but I don’t feel a peace about either way. I am not moored here, with my mind there. Nor there, with my body here. But I’m not sure where that leaves me, or which direction I should head.

In the next few days, I’ll be getting a graduate decision letter in the mail. I’ll be figuring out if the truck can make the trip. I’ll be negotiating and calculating the handful of bits and pieces that need to fall into place to make a trip even feasible. But the question of should remains over that of could, because regardless of what I tell myself about “things falling into place” I can always jam them there if it comes to that, if going really is the best thing for now.

In some ways, I was looking forward to the enforced break that this recent and largely unwelcome move would provide. I imagined all the space I would have without a regular job, out of school for a few months, books and writing projects and knitting stacking up to be tackled in this space between things. I imagined long dog walks, setting up shop at one of the local coffee shops to sift out a few chapters from the cobwebs in my head. I imagined bike rides and paddling forays and adding to my growing stack of goodreads reviews.

There was some momentum at the beginning. I tore through half the books Pete had gifted me for my birthday, paddled around the lake, peddled around town, knitted a few things for the impending babies of friends. I got started on a writing project that’s been knocking around in my head for a year or two. But the momentum was slight, like the third in a row of pool balls, energy dissipating fast with each subsequent crack. We’ve been here two months, and instead of gaining momentum, I am becoming intimately familiar with the crushing weight of ennui.

On the kayaking trip I took a few weekends ago, I tried to pay close attention to the instructor’s paddling style. I realized right away that the breakneck pace (that felt reasonable to me) I’ve been trying to make around our little lake out here is in direct opposition to the slow, intentional stroke pattern she fell into automatically as we started our five hour day on the lake. She’s done a lot more paddling, and more recently, taking her own lessons in pace from long open water crossings and the better part of days in her boat, she is content to glide across the lake in a cadence and measure that I never would have accepted as reasonable. But in the end, with hours and miles to cover, it was the only reasonable pace to take.

Back home, I find myself wavering between utter stasis and a trickle of tasks done, generally only the most pressing. Feeding the dogs, emptying the sink, very occasional laundry. There has been no writing for weeks, and most days I find myself laying couch-bound, watching the clock, waiting for it to get late enough to go to bed again. I am not good at this, this keeping up of momentum. But how much momentum do I need? I wonder if I set my expectations of productivity too high at the start of the summer, and now that I’m not reaching my goals I’m unconsciously throwing in the towel. I feel spoiled with all this free time, and crushed with guilt for squandering it in a deep funk. What is a reasonable pace, after all?