end

I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath until I saw the ocean. Between rushing around Fairbanks trying to get the truck fixed, leaving too late in the afternoon to make much meaningful mileage, worrying about meeting an old friend (unseen for twenty years) in Anchorage, and all the suppressed anxiety about Seward herself, I was a mess of nerves. When I pulled over to camp for the night somewhere south of Denali, I lay in the back of my truck, comfortable and warm enough (except for the mosquitoes) fretting and planning and spinning my wheels, utterly unable to sleep. My heart was racing. Would the truck make it the rest of the way, and back again? When was it due for an oil change? How on earth are we going to move the week after I get back? Should I be in a nursing program at all? What if I don’t finish, what then? How many bridges do I have left to burn? The thoughts darkened with the sky and I lay awake for hours.

When I woke up the next morning, I was no better for the fitful sleep I’d had, although the cold mountain air had dispatched with the mosquitoes some time in the night. There was nothing left to do but continue driving south, but I was grumpy and moody and ready to turn around and go back to Fairbanks, where at least there was Toni’s cabin to hide in.

In 2010, I drove to Seward alone but for one dog, Augie, our giant rescued Ridgeback. When I arrived, I panicked and instead of visiting friends, kayaking and hiking, I pitched a tarp under the trees in the woods and hid out for several days, avoiding town, avoiding all the places I might run into a familiar face. All I could remember was the hand-over-fist rejection I’d experienced as a wanna-be guide her a decade ago. I hadn’t fit in then, and I was sure I would experience the same cold shoulder as I had as a wandering kid in 2004. Also, I was as depressed as I’d ever been to that point, and the feelings of general inadequacy and self-hatred were relentless. They still are. After three nights camping in the rain and feeling sorry for myself, I left, tail between my legs, slinking back to Fairbanks confused about the instinct to hide and worrying over it. I realized, as I got closer to Seward this time, that I was worried that impulse would rear its head again. That I would go make a fort in the woods not be able to enjoy the town for what it is, regardless of the baggage it holds for me.

Coming into town, I held my breath and drove straight to Rick’s kayak outfitting business, determined at least in the moment not to make that mistake of five years ago this time. Heart in my throat, I found him in the yard repairing a boat and approached. It’s been years since I’ve seen him, over a decade since I worked for him as a guide out on the bay. And he was as welcoming as if I was a long lost friend, offering to lend me a boat, take me out to wherever I wanted to go, offered me a bed or a place to park and camp, showed me his fantastic little outfitting business like a proud papa. He made me feel like a prodigal child come home after years away.

Something in me calmed with this welcome. The hurting, confused, lost outsider I was at twenty four, showing up in this town with a car full of camping gear and a dog, hoping to weasel my way into a kayak was mollified somewhat. The piece of me that feared outright rejection and indifference was squashed like a small bug. I am an adult now, I have made something (if not much) of the little thread of life I’m running with, and I don’t need the approval of a bunch of too-cool-for-school, hard-partying guides to be at peace with myself anymore. I may not be at peace with myself for other reasons, but those specters were finally chattering themselves into silence.

I went first to the docks and walked around looking at boats and communing with a huge sea otter crunching clams between vessles. The harbor water was turquoise and the snow-dusted mountains rose up everywhere I looked. Then down to the point at the end of town and I lay in the park grass watching the water and ships and the cliffs across the bay. And for the first time since coming up to Alaska this time, felt myself fully relax. Fairbanks is so loaded these days, with expectations and questions about the future. It should be home, is it really? Or should it be? And what if it isn’t? Where will I be left if I’ve built it into something it cannot be? Every place there, every corner and dirt road and structure holds a memory or a possibility or a disappointment. It feels good to come home there, or try to, but I have not been able to relax the way I need to, not with all the white noise. But here, on the ocean, I may finally be learning to let go of a weird, perfect, horrible summer on the bay and enjoy this place for what it is. A paradise of mountains plunging into ocean at the end of the road.