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>I first read Jonathan Kozol’s book Amazing Grace in college. I don’t remember the context – if it was a class assignment, something for a student organization or simply a recommendation from an encouraging professor. I do remember the book. I read it over some break or other, and my sister Sarah quickly started trying to take the book away and hide it from me. “It puts you in a bad mood,” she said. “You aren’t any fun, then.”

It’s true. Even though it is the most positive of Kozol’s books (I have read several, since then) the point of his books – nonfiction, a mix of human stories and the sociological phenomenon behind those lives – is to point out how we have failed the poor, especially poor children, as a nation of wealth and plenty. This does not make for light summer beach reading. The anecdotes are pointed, heart-breaking and often accusatory. And as a college student needing desperately for a cause to latch onto, for some specific purpose, Amazing Grace was like a manifesto for me. Go to the Poor!!

That’s not exactly where I’ve landed.

Yet I jumped at the chance to hear Kozol speak at UAF last night, mostly because he had been such a mighty figure for me eight years ago. He was funny and personable. Self-effacing yet obviously incredibly intelligent. He rambled around his topic like a disheveled professor, and looked the part in his too-short suit pants and tennis shoes. He made some well-deserved jabs at Bush’s lamentable education policy. He told his stories well, both sweet funny stories and his requisite heart-rending examples of how unjustly we are treating the children born poor in our country.

I hardly noticed that it was after nine o’clock when the packed auditorium broke for cookies and punch, and an informal question-and-answer session (that I did not stay for.) It was a strange experience, listening to a man whom I hold in such high regard, whom I idolized for so long, whose work I still hope, in the recesses of my mind, to emulate if I ever come into my own as a writer. Yet a man who’s mission no longer holds me in its sway. I was not inspired by his speech. I was amused by it, and it made me angry and frustrated and sad. That was it’s purpose, after all. But I did not come away singing a war hymn, planning to move a ghetto and make a safe place of learning and peace for other people’s children. I came away exactly as I came in. Utterly unsure which path to choose for myself. Vaguely guilty for leaving behind those early 20’s passions and ideals, tempered by a realization of how utterly unrealistic those ideals were, yet still worried by the thought that I’ve given something up. Something precious and real.

I found myself raising my eyebrows at the standing ovation as Kozol ended his well-polished rambling rant without proposing much in the way of a solution to the monster of institutional injustice. Perhaps because there is none? I want to believe otherwise, but the hour and the wine and all the things I’ve read and seen and done since reading Amazing Grace lead me away from that hope. Is that why I’m up here, looking after my own dreams instead?

>I am not a huge believer in the power of Resolutions. I make them every New Year, again around Ash Wednesday, again on my birthday, and usually I throw in a few in the fall for good measure. There are lists of resolutions I make during Statistics class scrawled in my notebook next to the illegible symbols and formulae that I am supposed to know how to use. Most of the lists could be carbon copies of one another. For all my resolve to tie on those running shoes while scribbling in the back row of a math class, they are still collecting dust by the door.

Every New Year for at least the past three, one resolution has continued to make the list, to no avail:

Take A Yoga Class.

I have never been to a yoga class. I have never seen anyone actually *doing* yoga. I don’t know where it comes from, exactly, or what all the different kinds of Yoga are, or why there are so many, or if they all get along or not. But from the bits and pieces I’ve picked up on, it seems like a good thing overall. You move, you stretch, you breathe. Your heart rate gets a little elevated. You do it in a room full of people who you hope are more enlightened than you are – in as much as they are focused on their own movement and not your wobbling pigeon toes.

Tuesday, I saw a flier – one of the many Yoga fliers often lost in the blanket of for-sale, for-rent, for-free paper on the wall of Alaska Coffee Roasters – that Interior Yoga was starting a new class cycle. This week. The only class that fit my schedule was the next night. Tonight.

Some things are best done without thinking. I have overthought Yoga in the past, trying to research styles, figure out what kind of class I need, reading artciles about picking out instructors. Yet Take A Yoga Class kept ending up on my list, year after year. Lots of things in my life are like that – too much thinking and plotting and planning, not enough being and doing and walking through the door.

So after dropping Peter off at work, I drove over to the brand new Interior Yoga facility and tromped through the snow and inside. There was quite a crowd at the door, peeling off layers and depositing dripping snow boots to the corner. The class was very full and the instructor was busy directing people to the bathroom, the boiler room (to change) and the mats. I was pretty intimidated by the shuffle and banter, but the instructor was sweet and encouraging to my deer-in-the-headlights inqiry about what to do, and I quickly settled near the back on my little green mat.

Over the next hour and a half, I streached, twisted, moved and breathed. It’s amazing what a change just paying attention to breath can bring to your body, even though its something we do unconciously through every moment. I peered through the bodies around me to see which way each limb was supposed to be contorted. I listened to those around me breathe, cough, laugh, groan. Watched as some reached far further than I could, and others barely bent. While some balanced without a waver and others toppled into the wall (a beginners class, after all. I did some toppling myself.)

After class, while rolling up my mat and lining up to pay for the session, I got into a conversation with the teacher and another student. One of them is in the middle of getting certified to teach, the other just came back from her first three years teaching – in the bush. We stood around and chatted long after the building had cleared out. I think it was the first conversation I’ve had with women my age since we got here in August. That was nearly as refreshing as the Yoga.

>Two years ago this month, while house-sitting in Homer, Alaska, I woke up at 5am one morning to let an insistent Nyssa out. It had snowed the evening before, and as I walked out on the back porch from my room, I was groggy and more than a little annoyed at her timing. I looked out over the yard as she bounced around in the snow, snuffling about for that elusive perfect deposit-spot. I slowly became aware of strange, dark pockets in the snow crossing the yard. I could not see what they were, blind as I am without glasses, but something inside me snapped, my heart began to pound, my stomach sank, and I fumbled back inside for my glasses. I returned to discover a set of deep booted footprints, thrown into shadowed relief in the bright moonlight. They came out of the woods and towards the house, onto the exposed porch and right up to the window above my bed, where the shade was wide open. They became a tangled mess in the little dust of snow there, then turned and crossed the porch and yard, disappearing again into the woods where they emerged.

The simple intuitive wrongness of the scene now fascinates me. I could not see what the shadows were, or how creepily close they came to where I slept, before I returned with full vision to inspect them. But the fear I felt began in that first moment. I knew something was wrong, before I could see it or identify it. And something was very, very wrong.

A few weeks into our tenure in Fairbanks this year, when the darkness was finally full enough and the bright northern moon had waned a bit, Peter shook me awake at about 3am. I stumbled downstairs and into boots, then out onto the porch. The Northern Lights – which I had never seen in my time in the southern costal climes of Alaska – were out in full glory, dancing green and bright across the sky. Before I had even looked up, I felt an unfamiliar terror building up in my chest. My heart began to pound. I leaned against the cabin wall to stay steady. The lights were incredible and beautiful. The dropped out of the sky, deep green against the black and the stars, a sweeping, undulating sheet of light that spun out, folded in on itself, dropped and pulled back up into the night. They seemed close enough to set the cabin on fire. Although I know what the Aurora are, I have seen pictures and videos of them, read explanations of their cause, know that they are miles and miles above us in the very outer atmospheres of our earth, some deep part of me was profoundly disturbed by this first sighting. So much so that I had trouble sleeping the rest of the night. Yet here is the crux of it: there was nothing to be afraid of, and I knew it.

I do not consider myself a particularly fearful person, on this basic sort of level. My friend Ben and I even had a term for the sort of behavior one engages in, in order to face and conquer those fears: The Glass Elevator Syndrome. It was dubbed so, after the act of repeatedly riding glass elevators while looking straight down, in order to overcome that sinking stomach fear of heights. The sorts of things one might do, in order to display Glass Elevator Syndrome, may include learning to paraglide or BASE Jump to overcome a fear of heights, forcing oneself to get back on a horse after a bad fall, signing up to volunteer at literacy program, a nursing home, a homeless shelter in a bad neighborhood, or to go door-to-door for a volatile political campaign of some sort (imagine the good this would do for a people-pleasing introvert like myself!)

Some fears, like my terror at discovering footprints at my window, or the sudden gasping adrenaline rush I felt the first time I rode over a 7 foot swell in a kayak, the hairs at the back of my neck prickling when Nyssa raises the alarm that someone besides Peter is approaching the cabin after dark, are good and healthy and the sort of instinct that keeps one alert and alive. Others, like my primal reaction (as Peter identified it) to the harmless Aurora, or my near paralyzing fear of going to parties where I don’t know a soul, or of having to eat something with too much onion in it – these are fears that, though perhaps born from some legitimate intuition, should be pushed through when one knows the fear is baseless, that the end will be good. I know there are no monsters in the dark corners of the house at night. I go outside to see the Northern Lights, and enjoy them until the cold creeps through my boots.

> We have been in Alaska for over a month, but the sheer volume of potential material has overwhelmed me to this point. In the midst of narrative paralysis, I have decided to divide and conquer. I will continue to post signature rambles here, and send you to Solar Cabin for tales of our travels and life on the taiga north of Fairbanks.

That means I will post again soon. Really. I mean it. I will.

>As we drove home to pack, we drove into a rainstorm. The deluge started as we hit the DC beltway, and it was the worst rain I have driven through. One of those times where, looking back, you realize you should have pulled off the road and are lucky to be breathing with all four limbs attached and working. We were listening to Bryson describe the hot, murderous climate of the outback deserts of Australia, and perhaps this canceled out the flooded road somehow in my mind. The northeast was flooding. We even made the BBC International front page. The mighty Susquehanna river, which runs just a few blocks from our little abode, has broken her banks and is washing through the lower floors of houses by the river. The arches in the stone-arch bridge are almost covered completely, and we are officially in “flood stage” and rising although the flooding and damage is miniscule compared to the devastation upstream. To add to the trouble, the water treatment plants along the river were knocked out, so there is no longer potable water running from our taps.

(It bothered me that this minor inconvenience annoyed me so, since I have lived in countries without readily available drinking water, and cabins without hope of running water at all. However after a little thinking, I realized that my annoyance was because we weren’t set up for water-unavailability, not at the lack of water itself. Anyway, back to the flooding.)

The deluge and rising water brought to mind, as we began to dismantle our living space of the last ten months, the ancient flood accounts. Flooding in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible are the two most readily at the tip of modern consciousness, but nearly every ancient civilization that lived in river valleys, or near the ocean, have tales of rising waters and ensuing destruction floating through their oral and written histories. These stories talk of the terror of rising waters, the destruction that follows, and the return of survivors to a cleaned landscape, traditionally purged of vice and sin by an angry god. These pilgrims start over in a world devoid of friends and family, devoid of the civilization and culture that was washed away by the water. But in these stories, the survivors bring human character into their new life and land, with the triumphs and failures those strengths and flaws necessitate.

It seems appropriate, as white walls expand behind posters and tapestries rolled up and packed carefully away, as stretches of carpet not seen since we moved in last September are bared and vacuumed and loaded down again with precarious mountains of boxes. (I am startled by how much space we, who own no furniture, no expansive Thomas Kinkaid/Precious Moments/Beanie Baby collections, no major appliances, have managed to fill with heavy boxes and Rubbermaid tubs.) We are moving into a new life, with almost no previous context and no good idea of what we are getting ourselves into (we love Alaska, and know her coastal climes, but have never lived in – and only briefly visited – the interior). We are hopeful and nervous, starting over with just our car, the dog, and a small shipment of boxes from our previous life. We don’t know where we will live or work, and we have a whole city to explore and learn anew to meet our needs for food and water and WiFi. Our life here is flooding out, and a new one awaits us when we land in the White Mountains at the end of July.

For now, we are full of boxes and tape, brooms, vacuums and Simple Green, trash bags and runs to the Goodwill. We ship Monday, and then begin a very circuitous route North (through South Carolina, Texas, New Mexico and Death Valley before settling on a more thoroughly Northward path up the Cassiar & Alcan to Fairbanks.) North To The Future, Ya’ll. Or as the tourism industry encourages – Alaska: Before You Die!