Category Archives: post bucket

After ten years of wishing, dreaming and fantasizing, I finally broke down and bought a kayak. I went back and forth for months – years really – between buying a plastic boat or a composite, and between buying a boat at all. In the end, the reality was that composite is out of my price range despite all the advantages it offers. Since one of those advantages is being able to manage and carry the boat easily by myself, buying a huge, heavy plastic boat that I’d probably need help schlepping on and off the car kept me out of the market altogether. Until I found a used, badly damaged and rebuilt composite boat at a local dealer here in the cornfields. I took a day-long lesson with the outfit, still unsure about this investment in my dreams, so I could test paddle the thing. In addition to being ugly as sin, patched, faded and scratched to shreds, it is seaworthy, tracks like a hound and fits me like an old pair of tennis shoes. Being on the water, even in the mud-green, weed ridden, bathtub warm and nearly bathtub sized “lake” out in the country where the lesson took place, was like falling into the embrace of an old friend. Dip, slide, twist, glide. Wake and water and sunshine, a sandwich on the beach at lunch gripped with wrinkled fingers, bruises blooming on my shins from kicking out of the unforgiving fiberglass over and over, the lurch of hips as the boat tips just a little too far into the point of no return, the sting of water up the nose as you go under again.

I gave myself two days to think it over, and despite thinking better of it several times, thought it was better in the end. I picked it up when I was down for work this weekend, and got it home this afternoon. It is storming now outside, sirens and thunder in every direction. The boat is nestled in the garage. It needs a little bit of love, some epoxy and foam and new shock cord and handles before it will be perfectly comfortable, but it is perfectly functional as it sits now. If these storms blow through like they are supposed to I will be out on the lake as soon as the dogs are fed in the morning.

Last night, I spent my dream-time dreadlocking my own hair into tight, tangled ropes. Impossible in real life, it was easy and natural in the dream world. I didn’t give it any thought, back-combing each section as I wandered through the odd landscapes and strange faces of my subconscious. With each knot, each completed dread, I felt myself settling into myself. The parts of me that have been lost and buried over the last few years began to surface, and I began to feel whole again, just a taste of it, but whole and settled and secure.

At the end, just before waking, I realized I needed to find someone to finish locking down the dreads but couldn’t find a soul in the dreamscape who would do the careful last bit of work. Then I realized that I would never be allowed to attend a graduate program in healthcare with my hair locked up, and the thought of not going, of turning down my currently hoped-for acceptance, was a relief.

I woke up with my conventional, straight (if often tangled) locks. Still waiting for an acceptance letter. Still wondering if I want it. Still thinking that even though I don’t know what I’ve really wanted all along, the path I’m on only seems like the right one some of the time. When it seems right, it seems like the perfect, if not inevitable, course. When it seems wrong, it seems like the worst kind of mistake.

Tomorrow will be my last day working as a Paramedic at the Tri-Valley Fire Department. With fall colors in full display and temperatures dipping precipitously towards freezing, the last of the hearty tourists are filtering to points south. In a few weeks, Denali National Park will all but close down for the season. The last four months have seen my first real, paying, full-time work as a Paramedic. Despite a rocky start, I found my stride and can hardly believe I will pack up my uniforms & trauma shears and head off to the next bizarre adventure tomorrow afternoon. (And yes, this sleepy small town fire department proved itself perfectly capable of producing the bizarre.)

I took this job because a mentor-of-sorts told me that working a summer at Tri-Valley is what inspired her to become a Paramedic, and was where she returned to cut her teeth as a new medic as soon as she earned her badge. It was also the only opportunity I had been offered, after hounding after every opportunity I could find for a year, where I could work in Alaska, cut my own teeth on an ambulance as lead, and not have to run into burning buildings as a side-line. I gave up working as a Wildland Fire Medic to spend my summer indoors at a fire station, and although I missed the smoke, safety-naps, bears, cubbie baths, fresh-food box steak-nights, campfire coffee (ok, maybe not) & endless blister mitigation, I don’t regret spending my summer on the road system in a real bed (well, maybe a little bit … but you get my point.)

The lessons learned here in the mountains have been various and have as much to do with life (and especially Very Small Town Life) as with medicine. Any delusions I had about living in the idyllic world of a tiny rural community have been thoroughly and permanently debunked. Working alongside the PAs at the Canyon Clinic has been the best part of the summer, and has solidified my resolve to pursue that end … eventually. The confidence I have gained in my abilities as a medic and as a fledgling lead are already invaluable, and will hopefully soften my landing on Monday.

Next up is temporary remote-site medic work in Western Alaska. I have already compiled a two-foot-tall stack of reading material to keep me from imploding, and in light of redoubled warnings regarding unprecedented boredom I am considering an attempt to redeem the debacle I made of knitting back in ’05. In the mean time, I’m watching termination dust work its way down the mountains around Healy and trying not to think about the future encroaching from just beyond this season’s snow.

Outside, the glow of the late northern sunset is inching towards unaccustomed night. Up here in the cradle of the mountains, the fierce winds of the last week have faded into a fluttering, almost-warm breeze that has just a kiss of the stinging autumn nearly upon us. I want to strip this stiff uniform into a heap, pull on my own familiar clothes and walk up the valleys away from this little outpost of roads and houses and people. Away from anxiety about what the next months will bring or won’t. I want to walk into the woods and valleys and sleep under the newly lit stars in a bed of alpine tundra, I want to wake to the almost-frost of late summer on my cheeks.

That is why we go to the woods, go out on the water, across the desert, isn’t it? So we can just walk for awhile? Just focus on picking a line across a valley, or a dry footstep in the rocky creek? So we can get the weary rest our bodies can never quite capture in our real, our necessary lives? So our minds can reset themselves with the monotony and physical demands of travel under our own slow power. Is this why the dream of the journey cannot be shaken?
I have debunked so many of the fantasies that brought me here, but this one remains. On a warm, darkening night like this I just want to walk away into the mountains.

So what now? I took a seasonal Paramedic job with the Tri-Valley Fire Department, resigning from my clinic job after eight months of blood pressures, flu shots & nebulizers for a chance to get more solid Paramedic experience, if only temporarily. I’ve been here nearly a month, working every other week. As the spring semester was wrapping up, The Plan was for Peter to finish up school in the fall, after which we would move to Texas to establish residency as he applied to Texas med schools. I was going to get a real, full-time Paramedic job. Finally.

I turned thirty a few weeks ago. I was hoping it would pass like every other birthday … just a blip on the radar and on to another year. I refused to believe it would bother me. But apparently a self-reflective freak-out was inevitably right on the heels of the margarita & hot-wing celebration. Since I finished my B.A., I’ve never held a job for more than nine months. I’ve applied to and been rejected from MFA programs, started applications for and abandoned the pursuit of an MSW, and dropped out of a Master’s in Education one semester from finishing. I’ve tried eight year’s worth of different jobs on different tracks. I’ve made lots of roads into what I don’t want to do and backed out a little wiser each time, but until I started into the medical field last year I hadn’t found anything that stuck.

Turning thirty and Peter’s trajectory into the next eight (plus) years of medical school & residency have made me give my life a longer look. I love pre-hospital medicine, at least in the limited capacity I’ve experienced it so far. But a life of being underpaid and working twenty-four hour shifts isn’t exactly where I want to be when I’m turning 40.

With encouragement from the PA & ANP I was working with at the clinic, I’ve been looking into what it would take to apply to PA school. It’s a little intimidating, going back to school … again … on so many levels. But the life & possibilities presented by being a PA are so much more along the lines of what I want for my life. I think. Even though I won’t be on the front lines anymore, my Paramedic license and out-of-hospital work isn’t going away. I do love what I’m doing right now, now that I’m working as a Paramedic. I just need to start looking ahead as well.

I worry a little that by jumping with both feet onto a career path that heads directly into science and medicine and several more solid and very full years of school with a R.E.A.L. J.O.B. at the end, that somehow I’m giving up on writing, on running dogs, on playing guitar on stage and raising goats & chickens & a greenhouse full of tomatoes & peppers & spinach. I’m trying to remember, more, to believe that all these things are mutually possible. But looking at the specter of hard sciences on the horizon it’s a little hard to see how its all going to fit.

We’ll see how I feel about all this in six weeks.