Monthly Archives: October 2014

The nights are dark now, around the new moon and with snow clouds blotting out the stars but not releasing the powder we need for the trails. At least the ground has finally frozen, so chopping wood is easier. The marshes and black spruce forests are slowly opening up for exploration as the muskeg solidifies for the winter. The ice on the creek below the cabin is solid enough finally that I no longer hold my breath when Ersta runs across the snow-dusted glaze, slipping a little but now without the danger of falling through.

In the mean time, there are other things to worry about. Specifically the barely-a-puppy anymore and my ability to be patient with her teenage phases of defiance and selective deafness. There are secrets I have kept close about the puppy. Particularly that I have never been sure she was a good idea at all. I didn’t get her on a whim, exactly. But I also knew that the timing wasn’t ideal, and stubbornly brought her home anyway. Her little personality, thoughtful in the midst of her energy, people-oriented despite a million distractions for her little puppy brain at the breeder, was too good to pass up.

First night home at 11 weeks.

A rare pause from puppy antics.

Existentially in need of a project, I may have overstepped myself when I picked the project of a working German Shepherd with search prospects. I am starting graduate school, Pete has sunk deep into the abyss of medical school, we don’t have a fenced yard anymore, we will be moving at least two more times in the next two years. Her hyper-alert interest in the cat has left me worried and wary, back in Iowa. Many times over the last nine months, having her and her energy bounding through my days has felt like too much. And I was right about it being too much in many ways, but on the other side of it, I have had more time to spend with this little black ball of fur in the last nine months what with our move and my subsequent lack of regular employment. She has had more attention and training and one-on-one time, more road trips and socialization, new situations to learn to deal with nearly every week, than she ever would have had if I’d been working full time and we’d been in a stable location. In many ways, given her early stages of development, this has been ideal.

Snow Bear

My expectations for her and for myself with her are high, though, and I have certainly not lived up to them. She is a ball of working-dog energy, and is, at times, much smarter than I give her credit for. At others, she acts dumb as a brick, though lately I wonder (know!) if it is willful stupidity she uses to try and get her way.

Visiting Texas at five months.

She is a sweet little beast, with an attentive, mellow temperament clear even through the gamboling antics of her puppyhood, especially for coming from working dog stock. We play fetch constantly, honing on her ball drive and work on basic obedience almost every day, but the almost haunts me. Am I doing enough with her? We have worked on find it games and occasionally a run-away when I can find help … but is it enough? Am I engaging her fast growing puppy brain to the extent it needs, or is all the kennel time required of her (and my lazy days just playing fetch instead of real games) damaging what she could be figuring out, learning, doing … will I ever know?

With Janelle’s kids at nine months.

Or is all my anxiety about her simply another manifestation of protestant guilt? She is, after all, just a dog. And a good dog, no, a fantastic dog. But she can still be overwhelming. Last week, she decided that she doesn’t like getting into the truck in the morning, and refused to do so as we were leaving for work. And refused to be caught, of course. She never ran away, but stayed out of reach for nearly an hour as I cajoled, tempted and tried to trick her into getting close enough to lay a hand on her collar. The command “come” which she knows perfectly, which I have spent cumulative days drilling into her little puppy brain, she now clearly also knows isn’t mandatory. My things were in the truck, and she wanted to keep playing, not be confined for another day. And she suddenly realized she very well didn’t have to be.

Leashed for the rest of the week, she never protested our morning hike out to the truck and, clearly without another option, jumped right into the cab like it was her favorite place in the world every day. Saturday, I decided to play fetch with her before truck time, thinking a week of leashed walks out and no protest meant we were past a short phase of truck defiance. I was ever so wrong. As soon as she got wind from my body language that I was done playing fetch and ready to load her up, even though she was nearly worn out, she dropped the ball and sat just out of reach. For another half hour, we played the game (to her) again of keep-just-away. I was so flustered and frustrated and disappointed that I could hardly think straight to figure out how not to reinforce this behavior. And I doubt I did a good job of it, although when I finally did catch her it was all praise and love and sweetness and not a direct walk to the truck, even though I was shaking and angry and wanted badly to just throw her in her kennel and then have a good frustrated cry.

So what of this? I have a dog, now over ten months old, that I feel unworthy of. Whose energy, some days, many days, feels like more than I can handle given everything else on my plate. With whom I’m still not sure how I’m going to manage once graduate school starts and my weeks are more full of commuting and school work. Yet so far, she has also been a savior of sorts, forcing me out of myself and out of the house when all I wanted to do was sit on the couch and sulk. Making me think when we hit walls in training, forcing me to learn hard lessons in patience with the same brick walls didn’t seem breachable, giving me joy when we have a breakthrough and move suddenly forward in leaps and bounds. Her cold nose on my face in the mornings cuts into the requisite loneliness of being here, away from Peter, away from Pico and Duncan.

Arriving in Fairbanks at 10 months.

My self-doubt about Ersta, though, is really only a jagged piece of the bigger puzzle of self I am constantly trying to put together. The demons of my own inadequacy to live up to the expectations I have of myself seem always perched on my shoulder, whispering in my ear, darkening the sky. The writing projects that sit stagnant. The hours of footage that have yet to be edited into usable clips. The gym only occasionally visited. The kayak sitting latent in the garage for the second half of the summer. Cards left unsent and email unwritten. Projects on standby. Laundry piled up. There are whispers about everything from the epic (when was the last backpacking trip?) to the mundane (how long have the dishes been neglected in the sink?) Yet these are the things that weigh heavy, a paralyzing force that is a challenge some days just to push through.

I was sitting in the public library struggling with the intricacies of the Central Limit Theorem, when there was a slight shudder of shelves and then a rolling buck underneath my desk. No books fell, but the movement was followed by a moment of eerie silence as the patrons around me registered the earthquake and waited to see if it would continue or subside. No aftershocks forthcoming, the entire event passed on into the day without comment. I went back to my statistics work, and Fairbanks went back to what was left of her Monday afternoon.

I have been here for nearly three weeks, and my routines are as established as they are probably going to get. I wake and bundle up to go outside to pee, accompanied by the dog who must do her perimeter check before we can go back inside, then listen to NPR as the coffee brews. I drive into town, Ersta asleep in the passenger seat, already so bored with the commute that she is sacked out before we reach the highway. Some days, I hit the gym before parking at the university, other days we go straight there so I can check e-mail and take care of my own tasks before I’m needed in class. Then I run wet-behind-the-ears EMT students through their paces, checking the accuracy of the blood pressures and pulse readings they take, walking them carefully through a scene size up and initial assessment over and over again until it begins to coalesce in their minds, a solid, logical progression replacing pages of disparate steps to be memorized. In the afternoon, there is fetch with the now ten-month-old puppy, and then obedience exercises that go better some days than others. In the afternoon, I park myself at the public library, where there is my own online and largely unguided statistics class to struggle through. I find myself attempting to supplement the esoteric textbook with youtube videos and google searches. Again, some days more successfully than others. Some evenings, there is another class, airway mannequins to be ventilated and AEDs to be applied and oxygen bottles to be safely assembled and disassembled and assembled again. Other nights, we are back at the cabin before dark, chopping wood, building a fire, reading or writing as the cabin warms too slowly, then heats nearly to discomfort, then cools again as I fall asleep.

I am content. I miss Peter, and with his relentless schedule and the time difference we do not talk nearly enough, but I do not want to be anywhere else but here. I have seen and connected with friends, visited old haunts, taken a long walk in the woods with my old sled dogs running free and blissful, sniffing out moose tracks in the early season snow. I’ve spent a day at Jodi’s kennel with many more of those long, exhausting and blissful interludes to look forward to each week. There is still drama around work, though not as much. There is still a restlessness at night in the cabin, alone with the silence, sometimes without the energy or drive to do anything much once NPR retires to musical programming for the evening and I am left with myself. But somehow what I’ve said remains true. It is better here, somehow. I am better here. The discontent and restlessness has a different edge to it, it is not as desperate, not as sharp. I am more capable of sitting with it, with a woodstove to stoke, water to be hauled, woods and trails outside. I still don’t understand how this is so true, but I know now that it is. It was not my imagination, during all this time away. In Iowa, there was the same ennui, the same evenings sitting pointlessly on the couch, staring at the ceiling, waiting for enough time to pass to justify bed time. Yet somehow here it is different. Somehow here, I am OK to sit with myself and ride out the moments of panic or discontent. They hit just as hard, but the landing is softer. They can pass without comment, fade into the background, an aberrancy instead of the constant upheaval I’ve been riding out for a while now.

This morning, a full moon shone down on the front porch between the tops of the towering spruce trees across the creek. With all the snow, the glow was enough that I didn’t need a headlamp to make my way to the outhouse around the back of the cabin in the woods. Nor did I need one last night, navigating the bridge across the creek in the dark at the end of a long day in town.

The snow has stayed with us so far, although the ground is still soft and this weekend is threatening warmer temperatures and the possibility of rain. I have been here a week, and although the heady giddiness of the first few days has worn off to a degree I am still feeling wrapped in a contentment and peacefulness that has not faded.

There is only spotty cell service at the cabin. Texts can get through, but voice calls and data are out of the question. After ten years with Peter as a near constant presence, I find myself struggling to become used to being alone again. Struggling to be content with my own company, my own projects, my own silence. Home in the late afternoon, I split some wood, play fetch with the puppy, make dinner and read into the dark. I fight the urge to text whoever I can think of in the evenings for some kind of company. I find myself succumbing to sleep by nine, wanting to write or read (or study!) more but unable to gather the focus or energy in the dark, warm cocoon of woodstove and blankets and snow. Which makes for early mornings, Ersta nosing my face before dawn, my own body waking reluctantly into the cool darkness left after the woodstove burnt out hours before, the blue glow of moonlight outlining the few furnishings of the cabin through the windows as I peek out from under a pile of blankets.

Not every day has been picture perfect. There has been miscommunication and conflict about my work schedule with my old boss, notorious for his absent minded, yes-man management style. There has been a disorganized scramble to complete paperwork, background checks and training get into the hospital to precept students. There have been questions and no straightforward answers (which is causing no small degree of stress for me) about what I can and cannot do as an instructor while nationally registered but unlicensed to practice medicine in the state. There has been a week of near-misses trying to communicate with Jodi about running dogs, as she is out on the trails and in the dog yard as long as it is daylight – the only time I am in town with a decent cell signal. There was the bittersweet sting of driving to our home to meet the new tenants, flooded with memories all the way down the road, up the driveway and into the house. I stood with the tenants at the picture window as they told me about the resident moose family and watching the northern lights in the yard. Watched the sun set together through the trees as a red fox paced her slow way across the yard, hunting voles under the snow. I drove away and cried.

All this made for a day of mild, sustained panic on Wednesday, as each of these little things came piling on and smothered the general mood of come-what-may-I’m-so-happy-to-be-here that I had been riding high on for a week. It made for an exhausting day. The low-frequency tone of missing Peter that I was growing used to suddenly reverberated through everything and I nearly broke down on the phone with him, without being able to articulate why. I began to question this whole endeavor, wondering if it was a huge mistake to come here after all, to uproot everything and try to be home again for awhile in a place that cares nothing for me despite my obsession with it. I felt I couldn’t complain to anyone, because I am so fortunate that everything has worked out so well and so far. And it has. And ultimately, I knew days like this would come, days of questioning myself deeply. But I rode it out as best I could, coming back to the cabin that night with my tail tucked between my legs. I found some solace, or at least distraction, in a Wendall Berry book tucked up on a shelf and woke up the next morning a little more ready to face whatever challenges this path will bring.

A little. I know there will still be bad days, confrontations, frustrations and miscommunication. But I also know I can ride it out, and that being here is a gift to be relished every day, even the hard ones, even the ones that leave me questioning everything. I have to keep before me the reality that these next weeks and months are mine to shape, and ultimately it is on me to make of them what I need and want. It is easy to blame these swings of mood and purpose on the phase of the moon, a little harder to go outside in the moonlight and walk in the snow and relish it for what it is, deliberately turning away from all the doubt and fear and second-guessing that rears its head in the dark. A little harder, but so much more worthwhile.

The first day and a half across the Canadian border was more of the same western landscapes I’d been driving through since leaving the Midwest. Rural dirt roads & fences stretching for miles along our route and spidering out to every horizon. Sagging barns, abandoned and rusting farm equipment, tiny one-horse towns with only a slightly reduced speed limit to mark their hold on the side of the blacktop. Road signs for historical points of interest and billboards for politicians and car repair and injunctions not to camp in pull-outs. We passed through the stunning Fraser canyon region of British Columbia with her sheer walls, myriad road tunnels and crystal blue rapids, then endless parched pastureland devoid of wildlife or cattle, finally northern forests rimming fields green and full of horses enjoying the cool early fall air. As we made our way north, birch and aspen turned slowly from green and silver to a deep earthy gold. And still the fences stretched on, boxing us onto the highway and our winding route north. We slept in a hotel in Prince George, next to a sprawling casino, parking lot packed with brand new F250s and chain store icons glowing in a march above the road back to town, dimming the stars. I had been on the road for four days, working my way west and north. And still the landscape seemed the same.

Half a day out of this last gasp of civilization we finally turned truly north onto the Cassiar and just as suddenly as the turn was upon us with her iconic “North To Alaska” sign, we were in the true northwoods. Fences disappeared, towering spruce trees hung over the road blocking out the intermittent sun. Dark clouds, heavy with rain and menace and cold, hung just below bare mountain peaks, occasionally spitting cold showers on the truck and wet road. Hunters sped past us hauling four-wheelers and tarps, heading south and away from the rain and mountains of their weekend. Further north, only spruce held the green, lakes small and immense winked their black depths through the trees. There were no more intermittent towns, no more fences, no more of anything but trees and mountains and creeks and sky.

Fall Colors, Northern BC.

And as we turned truly north and the landscape changed so suddenly and irrevocably, I felt something opening up in my chest. There has been a bottling up over the last two years, a building of pressure that I had noticed but tried hard to ignore. There was some release on our last two trips up to Fairbanks, but the subtle underflow of grief and stagnation that has been building for so long and especially in these last months of relocating yet again, leaving a good job, friends, the familiarity of a cityscape mapped out over the last two years in Des Moines, that the true extent of it was beyond me. I wanted, almost needed, to stop the truck and stand on the edge of the wilderness and cry for being back in a place where my soul can uncurl and breathe again.

But there was no stopping. My father, who was tackling the last five days of the drive north with me, asked what I was most looking forward to in being back in Fairbanks, gave me an utterly blank look when I responded, “Just being there. Being in the landscape …” He was expecting a favorite restaurant, or connecting with a particular friend. Being is not in his lexicon, as evidenced by his road-warrior approach to our trip with fast, efficient stops only when absolutely necessary for fuel or food, the latter mostly eaten on the road, and six am departures every morning to pack the most miles into every day. No waysides, no photo-ops, none of the rambling, puttering stops I have become so familiar with in traveling with Peter. He took pictures with his arm sticking out of the truck in the cold wind, snapping away without the benefit of a viewfinder, trying his best to cater to my need for images without slowing our breakneck pace.

So instead of stopping to breathe in the north, to reconcile with being in a place I have missed so fundamentally (and the promise of being there for two months instead of a few days) we hurtled on up the increasingly narrow and pitted road towards the border. As we drove, gold leaves dropped and littered the road, bare branches left reaching for the mountains and the glowering sky. The last day of the trip, we drove into a snowstorm. Most of the day on the road was spent crawling through Kluane Reserve at thirty miles and hour in four wheel drive, snow blowing across the hood of the truck and reducing visibility to a dozen feet at times.

Blizzard, Aftermath. Yukon Territory.

Dirt & Snow after the blizzard.

I sent my dad back south on Thursday and moved into the cabin that will be my home for the next two months that afternoon. It is a cozy little log cabin with a woodstove and a loft, down a winding, narrow track driveway and then a fifty yard hike across a creek and up a small rise, half an hour from town. I woke up this morning to a few inches of wet, early season snow. The ground isn’t frozen yet, and I doubt the snow will stick, but the bliss of waking to the blue-white glow of dawn over ice was delicious. I feel the slow release of the pressure I didn’t realize had built up so much, and maybe this slow release is better. I can feel myself opening up now that I’m here, breathing again, able to be in a way that I haven’t for the last two years. My hands smell like sap and wood from splitting birch and my clothes hold the subtle scent of smoke from blowing coals to life in the woodstove. There are wet boots by the door and contentment in the warm, dry cabin air.

Snowy Cabin Morning