Category Archives: post bucket

It turns out the edges of things aren’t fitting together as they’d seemed to at first. My housing up north has fallen through, unexpectedly & irrevocably. A good chunk of the work I was hoping to do has fizzled to nothing. And I am starting to very seriously wonder if forcing this little pipe-dream of a trip is really the best thing after all. I’ve spent the last few days canvassing friends, acquaintances & craigslist for viable housing options, but so far nothing workable is on the table. One thing that this has helped make clear is that I am looking at this time up north not only as a time to reconnect and work and learn, but also to have some space to myself to reflect and write and dig into what about Alaska and Fairbanks is so compelling for me and why. To get a good deep drink of the cold water before heading back into the desert for a while.

So I am continuing to spin my wheels, hoping for some purchase. And in the mean time, I’m coming up with alternate plans of what this fall might look like if I stay in Iowa for the duration. Either way, there is graduate school in February, a solid marker in an otherwise murky future.

Last week, I got this fortune after a fantastic Thai meal in Des Moines.

Not one to take fortunes too seriously, I nevertheless found myself latching onto its message. Even if it just means a trip out west to see friends and the ocean and a loop back to the corn and soybeans, I think a change of location of some stripe or another is definitely in order.

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?

“In Iowa we have our wilderness in the city, because the country is for farming.” – Unknown Guest, River to River – IPR, 2014

I slept outside for the first time this summer, over this last weekend. I had signed up for a two day kayaking course with a camp-out in the middle to brush up on some skills, see a new part of Iowa and force myself to get and stay outdoors for more than a few hours at a go. As I was digging through our camping gear to get ready, I realized that it has been since last summer’s Boundary Waters canoe trip that the tent, stove, sleeping bags and sundry gear have been out. This trip was on Red Rock Lake, the biggest in Iowa (as very many signs on nearby roads proudly proclaim) a largish body of water surrounded by a thin strip of woods and encased by the requisite corn and soybean fields that are more than ubiquitous here. The lake is the result of the damming of the Des Moines river, one of many flood control projects in Iowa.

I saw lots of birds over the weekend; kingfisher, blue heron, some kind of small falcon, various ducks, a bald eagle, and a plethora of smaller birds that I am struggling to learn to identify. I am remembering now how I got so into birds when I was kayaking in Alaska – even with all the other more prominent and popular wildlife there, shorebirds are easy to find and follow and less spooked by human approach, and there is a singular pleasure in identifying them, like recognizing a familiar face in an unfamiliar crowd. I also saw more than my fair share of ticks and spiders, and was bitten by a small army of mosquitoes. All food for the birds I was enjoying, to be sure, but that makes the bites no less unpleasant.

The kayaking was fun but exhausting. Bumping up from an hour here and there to four or five hours of paddling for two days, at times in pretty stiff headwind, practicing unfamiliar strokes and rescues, takes its toll and I am certainly a little sore and bruised on the other end. But the sunburn, camp food, morning coffee by the lake and sweet shoulder burn of hard effort were all worth it many times over.

Yet I still find that being outdoors in the midwest is a puzzle. I have been so spoiled by my time in less populated states, in places with more wilderness than people, more trails than roads. The ‘primitive’ campground sported marked, mowed campsites with reservation slips and fire rings, a porta-jon (with toilet paper!) and a huge picnic shelter just up the hill and a rural highway visible across the small arm of the lake. To my mind, primitive camping is when you find a flat spot near a trail, camp there and leave nothing but the impression of your tent on the grass in the morning when you move on. Yet for some of the folks I worked with in Utah back in 2005, primitive camping involves starting a fire with sticks and bows, sleeping on the ground with only your clothes for shelter, and trapping your own food with cord you twisted yourself from the plants around your rocky bed. My jetboil stove and (mostly) bugproof tent are luxuries that preclude me from that primitive camping crowd quite definitively.

For all its amenities, we were the only people at this particular boat-access campground. However when I pulled out of the larger boat ramp and campground the next afternoon, I couldn’t help but notice that all of the RV friendly, drive-up campsites (and there were hundreds of these spots) were full. And for all my aversion to kayaking around a lake full of motor boats, there were scores of families out enjoying the water and sunshine, kids shrieking and swimming, adults lounging in the shade. There was hardly room on the beach for us to pull our kayaks up for lunch.

Paddling next to cornfields (and for a while through rafts of water-logged corn stalks washed into the lake by the summer’s floods) and lawns carefully manicured down to the lake shore, dodging the wakes of enthusiastic tubers with country music blaring across the water, brought me back to my earlier discussion of wild places and what draws Pete and I to them. But it becomes a broader question, here on this populated lake, of what draws so many of us out of our homes to whatever versions of wilderness we can access and enjoy given our geography and context. I may be a wilderness snob with my expectations of isolation and wild, yet I know that my own small adventures pale in comparison to those of others I know and have read about.

For all my complaining about the nomenclature of campgrounds in Iowa, the time spent sitting around in starlight, cooking scrumptious food on tiny camp stoves, watching the wind in the trees and listening for bird calls, waking up to the sun shining through my tent and the cool morning breeze off the lake was as refreshing as it needed to be and whet my appetite for more – even of the same (though perhaps without so many ticks!) And for all my bemoaning the motorboats and their fumes and noise and wakes, I was just as happy to enjoy motoring around in my Uncle’s boat on a similarly dammed lake in Texas earlier this month.

I don’t have any further insight, at this point, into what it is about these places and experiences that draw us, as humans, out of our homes and to whatever wild spots we can find. Yet something does draw many of us, as clearly as the campsites and open water fills up with families on the weekends, away from their jobs but also their homes and neighborhoods and all that is familiar in the workaday week they, and all of us, are trying for a few hours or days, to leave behind.