Category Archives: post bucket

The White Cloud continues to hang over me. I turned my pager off last night for the first time all week, and there were two calls – major hemorrhage & an MVA – within two hours. I could have walked to the MVA before the ambulance arrived. Paranoia only grows.

I made a milk run to Freddie’s tonight and caught Steve Wariner on Prairie Home Companion playing a guitar piece that tore my heart in a way I haven’t felt in a long time. I sat in the parking lot until he was done, although I left the engine running since the temps had dropped from a balmy -25 to -35. This morning, when I drove by on my way to proctor an EMT-I test, the temperature reading was nothing short of brutal at -41. I hope things warm up like they are predicting for Turkey Day.

My LPN supervisor shocked me on Friday by sitting down and telling me that if I left the clinic for an EMS job, she wouldn’t hold it against me. After my interview last September, which I characterized afterward as hostile, I didn’t think they were going to hire me at all. Apparently those with an EMS background have a proclivity to get “bored” with clinical work. Clinical work is not boring. I hardly know where the days go. My primary complaint is that it is not what I have been trained (and want to) do. I am still learning a lot, and I’m glad for a full-time gig, but it is a huge relief to know I won’t be burning bridges if something more in line with my training surfaces. Unlikely, but hope springs eternal.

In the mean time, the dark is bothering me but the cold is not. The Subaru’s engine block heater shorted out, and her check engine light has been on since the first cold snap in October, so we’re biting the bullet (after a huge repair job on the Ford two months ago) and taking her into the dealership Monday. I think the cold is bothering her a lot more. I just hope she starts in the morning.

Peter made tacos for me tonight, as well as mixing some amazing new Vodka & Lemon drink he’s created which is perfectly slushy after sitting out on the porch for fifteen minutes at thirty five below.

In light of the vodka, the pager is off. Goldstream, you are on your own tonight.

Discontent is growing. As I’ve settled into my job, I’ve realized that 80% of it consists of making phone calls. And even though they are a minority, the Crazy People make up a very loud and demanding percentage of that task. Week days are so busy that I don’t notice too much, but as soon as I report to the fire station for training – especially EMS training – or watch an ambulance fly by as I’m leaving work, it gets a little harder to go back and take auto-cuff blood pressures and refill Lisinopril scripts for another day.

Fire station hours are not helping. I have been pulling my required 60 hours worth of shifts a month, not to mention having my pager on whenever I am home. However since earning my Paramedic License, I have run on Zero calls. If I’m at the station, the tones are dead all night. If I’m at home, anything that we get paged out for is on the other side of the district. This weekend, I had my radio on from Friday night through Monday morning. The only tone-out we got was for a chimney fire on Sunday night. The tone came out five minutes after I left the house, without my pager, to buy some printer paper in town. By the time I got back to the cabin 45 minutes later, all units were pulling back into the station. My white cloud status followed me all through Paramedic Academy & my internship, but this is getting a little ridiculous. If I ever had an edge, I can feel it slipping away now.

I love prehospital medicine, and I have a knack for the book-learning part of it at least. I got 100% on my recent advanced medic standing orders test at the station, and didn’t do too badly on the scenario testing (besides some major and yet-un-resolved ACLS conflict-of-opinion with my proctor.) But without the dirt under my fingernails, the nagging feeling that a year of my life and thousands of dollars was flushed away keeps growing. I’m frustrated and even a little angry, all the while telling myself that this job, this life in a black hole of EMS, will pass. Most days, though, it doesn’t feel like I will ever get to where I want to be.

As if I ever knew where that was.

In the mean time, I grit my teeth for eight hours and count my blessings for the rest. Three of them are in bed with me now:

Six months later. The light is perfectly balanced between dusk and dawn, picking up speed in its ineluctable swing to the ever-day summers of the north. Another eternal winter is in retreat.

Three years ago, I named the blog Entelechy. I could not know that the time from then to now would bring such an assault of upending change after change after change. From Alaska to Utah, then Texas and Pennsylvania in quick succession. I jumped from four-square and dodge ball with FAS kids in coastal Alaska to backpacking with young adults in intensive wilderness therapy in desert canyons to nannying in a suburban home on the concrete-and-asphalt wilderness that is the eastern states, all in a manner of months. Then engagement, a wedding, starting graduate school and a month long trip back to Alaska. Already sprinting away from the Evangelical milieu as fast as I could, I dove briefly into Eastern Orthodoxy before moving into the vast, trackless expanse of an agnosticism. I have wanted to write more of the turmoil and of the hilarity such relentless change brings, of other things that have passed through these two years. Especially this last year, these last six months.

But silence has won out, and I have needed it. This equinox, I should not be so startled to find myself tumbling down yet another path. There is less ambivalence now, but still no sure steps. Gravity takes over, and you close your eyes and fall, sometimes. You hope the landing isn’t too rough.

I am no longer in graduate school. I spend my days shoveling dog and horse shit part-time at a ranch and kennel outside of town. I drive tours on the ice-road that is the winter Dalton for Japanese seeking the elusive aurora. On a handful of days, I sleep at the rural fire station that serves our area, stumbling through my first calls as an EMT. If I am lucky, I am called on to help a friend run her seventeen sled dogs over the trails around our cabins. These things make me happy in a way that I had almost forgotten about on the stiff-shod, paper-strewn trail towards a certification to teach in public schools. I have not looked back once without a rush of relief.

When I started nannying my nephews, I was a strong believer in the strength of the nurturing side of the development equation. Watching three-month-old fraternal twins elbow their identically nurtured little selves into vastly different little boys blew my presumptions out of the water.

I’m still not sure how to grab a hold of that inborn thing that so shapes how we make it through the world, but I am getting an idea of what a powerful and inevitable force it is. If entelechy plays into how I stumble across these first years of independence, of marriage, of work and play and rest, I still have precious little idea of how it is pushing and shaping these things. But the journey is getting pretty interesting.

Going back to get a teaching certificate has pointed out the many shortcomings of my liberal arts education – particularly in the math and science department. I am happy to return for the science (although I will repeat ad-nauseam that I do not appreciate having to take advanced mathematics in order to teach fifth graders how to divide a pizza into fractions.) Despite my literary leanings, Biology has always whispered her siren song from the horizon.

Last semester I was excited to take an Environmental Science course at our local community college in Pennsylvania. I was horrified that first evening to find the professor, an elderly semi-retired man, not only spewing shockingly derogatory untruths about the third world (my blood begins to boil, here) but that his experience in noted countries where he claimed “expertise” added up to hardly more that a couple of extended working vacations thirty years before. Although he took one class session to “introduce” us obviously culturally deprived Community College students to Thai culture by a visit to a local strip-mall restaurant (yum!) his shamefully bigoted treatment of the staff and owners ruined the experience. Our dear professor could not communicate to save his soul. After a few abortive attempts to clarify the tangle of information on his syllabus, during which he became enraged that we might insinuate any shortcomings therein and proceeded to blame our corporate confusion on our own inadequecy as students and humans, nobody dared ask questions. The second week, one poor girl answered a question correctly, but without including an obscure vocabulary word that he had, ten minutes before, defined so poorly I was actually embarrassed for him. He pointed and screamed, “PITIFUL! PITIFUL!!” until she left the room crying and did not return to class that evening, or the next. The situation only deteriorated from there. I would leave class so worked up I could hardly breathe. I felt awful for my classmates, mostly working mothers going to school at night for their associates degree, to have to struggle through his enigmatic quiz questions and incomprehensible lectures. One woman lost her scholarship. He threatened to fail a woman who’s baby was due on the day of the final exam – after allowing another to take it early because of a sports team commitment.

I was so happy to be rid of that class, and that horrible man. We moved to Alaska, and I enrolled in a few more required courses at UAF. One such class was an evening course on Geography. After some initial confusion, I found that this class did not take place on campus, but on the Air Force base south of town. I spent hours on the phone with the university and Air Force personnel, trying to ascertain the location of the class on base (nobody knew) and my own ability to get on the base at all (Your name needs to be on a list. No, I’m not sure who you need to talk to … ) It was with some relief that I showed up on base, was allowed past the imposing concrete blockades and lines of armed soldiers at the gate, and found my way to the correct building, the correct floor, and finally the correct room.

I walked into a room of four young enlisted men, three young army wives, and an old, should-be-retired looking professor. He was giving a lecture on Adam and Eve. Let me pause here to remind you that UAF is not only a public university, but a Science School. After ushering me to a seat in the front row, he continued his lecture, explaining excitedly how Eve had populated the entire earth by having one baby every year for a thousand years. “You never thought of that, did you? You never thought it was possible! Ha!” We moved on to Abraham, who’s father was a idol worshiping heathen worthy of damnation, Abraham, who was schooled in the faith by Ham the Prophet and Son of Noah, Abraham who’s antics with Sarah’s handmaiden was what caused all these “A-Rabs” to think they had some kind of right over a middle east that had clearly been given to Israel. They do not! They are Illegitimate Sons! They are Not The First Born! They created Islam to control the minds of terrorists, to blow up your friends, our young men! To destroy your families! To tear apart our country! Why else would they pray so many times a day! They are Illegitimate Sons! They are Not The First Born!

Geography Indeed. And I thought my blood had been boiling in Pennsylvania.

I managed to keep my seat, and a blank face, as he sputtered and ranted to the small crowd. After awhile he paused, adjusted his hearing aide, and began a second stream of thought. This one was on the importance of getting an education. How are you going to support your children on a McDonald’s Salary if (God forbid) something happens to your husband? he gesticulated at me. You must think about these things! I tried not to duck. I looked around me. The women were nodding and smiling and taking notes. He told us how he was on our side – he would make sure we passed the class, he would be sure we got through! He begain a convoluted insinuation that Global Warming was a scam, put on a video about the Northern Lights “so you can tell your family back home about it, so they won’t think poorly of you,” fell asleep and snored loudly until the credits rolled.

The next morning I went straight to the registrar’s office and switched to the day-time geography class on campus. Two days later, after sitting through a fascinating (I am not exaggerating for effect here, I was truly sad when it was over) lecture on earth’s seasons, solar radiation, map projections and UTM grids, I got a call. It was the Air Force Base Professor. He wanted to know where I was, why I had skipped his class, didn’t I know how important education was, that he was on my side? I carefully explained that I hadn’t realized how far the base was from us, that we only had one car, that my husband’s new job caused transportation conflicts, how the UAF campus was biking distance. All true. He cut me off. He reminded me that the professors at the university did not have my best interests at heart. He told me transportation could be worked out. He told me to come back to his class. He lectured me on McDonald’s salaries. He offered me several study from home options. He offered to let me attend class once a week, and still pass me. “They don’t have your education at heart. I am on your side!” I pulled my new “gotta’ clear this with the husband” trump card, and hung up.

I was conflicted. Not about which class to attend, but about the professor. Our telephone interaction was strange. He exuded concern. He really did, in his mind, have my best interests at heart. He was going to bat for me! Yet he had not asked a single question about me, or what I needed, or why I hadn’t returned. He hadn’t even let me finish my diplomatic explanation for switching out on him. As far as he knew or cared, I was a maybe-high-school-graduate military wife in desperate need of his care and encouragement to make it through an associates degree. And on behalf of those women, I was glad of him, of his obsessive concern. But I am none of those things, and for myself, I saw the well-meaning and yet insidious and manipulative jargon’s other side. I didn’t – and don’t – know how to feel about him. He continued to call our house for a week. I stopped answering the phone.

The following week, two ROTC men came and sat in Geography right in front of me. As our professor began explaining the physical dynamics of the greenhouse effect, research and projections about global warming, they peppered him with confusing and unrelated political quandaries and science channel inconsistencies until he had completely lost the train of his lecture. They argued and hedged. The professor became more and more flustered. The session ended with almost no lecture notes. The ROTC students have not returned.

I wonder about polarity I see in this country, and in the microcosm of this strangle little town so evenly divided between the Academic and the Military, the Democratic and the Republican.

I wonder, but I don’t know what to think.

Our geriatric landlords Norm and Evelyn live at the slow, sweet pace of the long retired. They wake up early, spend most of their morning chatting with friends at the bar/coffee shop two blocks down the hill, nap and do yard or house work in the afternoon, and go to bed before the sky is dark. They attend church events, go for bike rides, participate in meals-on-wheels and know every person who walks down their alley by name. They let my dog in to share their table food (and out, if they feel we are gone for too long,) admonish us to go hiking or get to work (depending on the day) and toast marshmallows for me over a hot electric burner whenever I visit.

They spend a lot of their summer days sitting on the back porch (watching birds & bunnies feast, watching flowers grow) or mulling over the yard with a trowel. Whenever we come and go (if its not raining) we are stopped for a minute (or hours) of conversation. I try to leave the house a little earlier if I see one of them through the kitchen window filling birdfeeders or picking up twigs downed in the last storm. I know I will be asked where I am headed, and before I answer, they will begin a careful dictation of whatever is on their minds: the weather, the dog, their granddaughter’s schedule, groceries, the War (as in WWII,) Norm’s heart surgery & recovery, “Those People” – the rowdy pot-smoking kids who live in the next building, their van’s transmission, the (lack of) mothering skills demonstrated across the alley, Mormon missionaries, the river in spring.

Today I stood on the sidewalk for almost an hour, listening to Norm talk about the state of the world. Several months ago, I joined them for coffee at the bar down the road. Several bar tables had been set up in a row, covered in a pastel table cloth and decorated with ceramic Easter Bunnies and plastic flowers. There were about fifteen retired folks sitting around the table, sipping coffee and detailing every local scandal, divorce and delinquent as morning traffic piled up on the main road through town. Several unemployed young men played a slow game of billiards, dark, sweaty bottles already in hand, flirting good-naturedly with the elderly women, cursing roundly when they missed a shot, then excusing themselves dramatically to the group. Someone’s granddaughter was visiting, and sat curled around a book on a bar stool, trying to avoid the questions peppered at her by all of these strange adults. I remember being taken to ‘morning coffee’ by my own grandfather when I was ten, squirming under the scrutiny of his boisterous friends, wanting to melt into the floor but also fascinated by their wild stories and weathered faces.

On the walk home later that morning, Norm stopped to look at the overflowing contents of a trash bin taking up the sidewalk across from a new construction site. Much to my amusement and Evelyn’s chagrin, he began pawing through the mess, picking out recycling and muttering about the waste, the idiocy of the non-recycling workers, the state of America’s landfills. Until that moment, I had never heard a person over the age of seventy talk about environmental issues (beyond, perhaps, how the winters just aren’t what they used to be) much less rant on a public sidewalk while pawing through someone else’s garbage.

This afternoon, I was privy to Norm’s entire philosophy of conservation, which is personal, practical and followed with a vehemence unusual for this laid back gardener and lover of birds. He talked about our culture’s demand for pre-packaged, disposable wares. He talked about buying sugar in bulk, cookies from a jar and TV tubes as needed, as a young man. He spoke of seeing almost-new appliances thrown on the side of the road, of the landfills, of his practice of taking yard waste to the woods above town. He told me about rinsing reusable diapers for his children, and his horror at generations of petrified baby poop piling up around the country. He reminded me to recycle, and said that if he were our age, he would reconsider having children. What, he asked, would my grandchildren be left with?

None of these lines of thought were new to me, but listening to them flow from a man on the other end of life made for a new voice, a new timbre to the growing chorus. Peter pointed out later how much this makes sense: The WWII generation is generally a disciplined, practical bunch. They lived through wartime and depression – the real thing, not voice-overed TV battles and high gas prices – and internalized the practice of sacrificing individually for the good of the whole. “They would be such hard-core recyclers!” And it is true. Our culture has changed so rapidly over the last two generations, shifting towards individual freedom, convenience and choice, and we are beginning to see where that shift is taking us. It is not a very pretty horizon. Just before I walked out to my car, Norman sighed and said, “I’m sure glad I’m not going to have to see where all this is taking us.” The anxiety in his voice was genuine. I have never heard a person who loves life as much and lives it as fully, look upon its timely end with such a palatable sense of relief.