adaptation

 And so we all settled into life in our new cabin. Bill was working at the university again, but now he had to drive 25 minutes to get there, instead of just heading 3 miles down the hill. I was at home, trying to adjust to non-academic life—a life I’d been a part of one way or another for almost all of my adult life up to that point (I’d started at a community college when I was 25 and our daughter was starting first grade). I was somewhat lost for a while, but I did have a lot of time to think!

The critters had their own adjustments to make. Our sled dog, Mikiruaq, (who let it be known early on that she was actually a bed dog, not a sled dog), was nervous. She was not one for change and she wasn’t keen on this one. The cabin was great—I loved the way things were set up and organized to make use of the small space. There was a living room, small kitchen, and bedroom downstairs and an almost ladder-like set of stairs. Upstairs was an open space, with a bed on one side and open space on the other, where we set up our computers, back when big desktops were the thing. The dogs could not navigate the stairs, which was an issue for Miki. She did not like for us to be out of her sight. She had to adjust, though, and she did. She and her brother liked to sleep on opposite ends of the futon couch. 

It was not long before I noticed that she knew when Bill was cominghome from work. She would suddenly sit up, turn around, set her chin on the windowsill and look out the window until she saw his truck turning into the yard. By paying attention to how much time elapsed between her sitting up and Bill’s arrival (about 10 minutes), I knew that she somehow knew when he was getting off the Richardson Highway. It didn’t matter whether he stopped for groceries, gas, or water on the way home and was a little later than usual or left a little earlier—she knew.

The cats also had a change in personality. Bentley became a madman, racing around the cabin with his bent leg, getting into stuff, and generally being crazy—a big change from how he behaved in the previous house! One day, I came home to find poppy seeds all over the floor. He’d gotten into shelved cart where I had them and ripped open the package. Another time, I found that he’d gotten into my basket of crochet thread and chewed/clawed some of it to shreds. We got lucky on the night he decided to eat some yarn. I saw a piece dangling from his mouth, so I grabbed it and started pulling. I pulled, pulled, and pulled some more. It just kept coming. He was gagging. But we eventually reached the end. I started calling him Pest Elvis, but I still loved the little guy.

J Frost E had his routine. He loved the duster that was supposed to be Bentley’s beloved toy. The latter had no use for it when he started living with us, but J really took to it. He had a system for the cabin. He played with it off and on throughout the day. But at night, things got more intense. He would start playing with it upstairs, then at 10 o’clock every single night, we would hear the thunk, thunk, thunk of J carrying his duster down the stairs to get wild with it there. You could set your watch by it. Who knows why 10 was the magic hour. He knew.

During winter nights, we could watch the northern lights from bed, which was cool, if we didn’t feel like getting dressed and going outside in the middle of the night. The cabin had a septic tank, but no running water, so when we had a holiday weekend where the temperature got down to -50F, we didn’t really have to worry about freezing pipes. Bill did have to go out and start the truck each day so it could run for a while, but by the Monday, even with that and keeping it plugged in, it wouldn’t start. He called the auto club people around noon and they said it would be 3 before they could get there because they were backed up.  We weren’t planning to go anywhere, so that was fine. Time passed. Three o’clock came and went. Hours went by. The evening passed. It warmed up to almost 0(F) so we went outside in T-shirts and started shovelling some snow. The guy showed up at midnight. It took a few tries and the guy almost gave up, but they got the battery going and we left the truck running for a while to warm up. 

Winter turned into spring and we continued our discussions about how we wanted to proceed. We were soon to come to some conclusions.

selling and buying

 Approximately a year after we got our septic tank replaced and Neighbour had inquired about our plans, we had decided we wanted to move on. Bill had grown tired of the oral history job—not the work itself, but the uses to which it was put. Both of us saw potential in bringing the kind of work he was doing to a wider audience. He was combining interviews with photos and scanned documents into a computer program that could be viewed like a website, but offline. The way these were structured at work was for the benefit mostly of researchers, which was valuable, but not how we would do it for people who wanted to document the life of their grandma, for example. We did a test project with the local quilt guild, which was fun for us and them and quite fascinating. They loved the end result, which was promising. We wanted to pursue this idea, but for various reasons, the university was an obstacle, particularly when it came to funding community projects. Also, I’d joined an online writing community and had gotten inquiries about being brought to local writing groups as a speaker, but the cost of my travel would have been prohibitive for them. We decided that staying would place us in a kind of a holding pattern. Since Daughter had graduated from high school and was moving away herself, everything seemed to point us in a new direction. 

We dithered about timing, but finally made a decision to call Neighbour on a particular weekend, since we’d promised to let them know when we were ready to sell. That Saturday, the phone rang. Imagine my shock when it was Neighbour asking us again about selling. I told him, ‘You won’t believe this, but we were planning to call you tomorrow!’ He went on to say that he was in Tennessee at his parents’ home. He wanted the house for them. They had no other family, were elderly, and had just gotten scammed. He’d been trying to get them to move to Fairbanks for years and they’d always refused—until that weekend. They were ready to head north. Neighbour said he and his wife would be over when they got back home later in the week. We sort of walked around in a daze, marvelling at how things were unfolding.

The neighbours came over to look around the house. I kept pointing out all the things that were wrong or would need work. He kept repeating, ‘This place has great chi.’ I laughed and commented that we were each taking on the wrong role. I was supposed to be gushing about how great the place was while he pointed out the many problems. He made an offer for a cash sale. We accepted it. That was that.

We started preparing for a major move, for ourselves and Daughter. Bill quit his job and they had a farewell party for us. I’m not sure why or how we decided we’d check out Down East Maine, but we booked a flight to Bangor and headed for Ellsworth. We talked to a realtor about what was available. It quickly became apparent that nothing there would suit, so we just enjoyed the rest of our trip and went back to Fairbanks. With about a week left until we had to vacate so remodelling could begin to make the house more comfortable for Neighbour’s elderly parents. We arrived home in the middle of the night and Daughter was flying out later that day. We got some of her boxes mailed off to her new address and then drove down to North Pole, a town 20 miles south of Fairbanks, to look at a cabin that was for sale. We’d picked up one of those real estate booklets that they had at the time and found it in there. It looked promising, so Bill called the realtor and set up an appointment for a viewing the next day. Later that evening, we drove our daughter to the airport and said a tearful good-bye. Then we went home and crawled into bed.

The next day, we viewed the cabin and said we wanted to buy it (it was another owner contract, so we didn’t have to deal with a bank). We went back to the realtor’s office and explained our situation, saying we’d need to move in the following week. He was surprised, but he said he thought he could make it happen. He did. So a week after we got back from Maine, a little disappointed but open to whatever was coming next, we moved into our new home. It was a holiday weekend and we’d rented a U-Haul. It broke down in front of the cabin. The office where Bill had rented it was closed early for the holiday, so he had to call the national number. A flatbed truck was sent to haul it away. Our truck was at the office, so Bill called someone to pick him up and bring him to the truck. I hauled some boxes until he got back, then we went back to Fairbanks for one more night, bringing the dogs and cats to their new home the following day. We were exhausted, but got settled into life in North Pole. When Neighbour’s parents moved in, they invited us to visit them. They were lovely people and we became friends, visiting them regularly. 

Bill got his old job back and we tried to decide what the next plan would be. One day at work, someone came in for something and mentioned that he’d gotten Irish citizenship because his grandparents were born in Ireland. Bill’s ears perked up and he started asking questions. When he got home, he looked into it further, saw that he qualified, and started gathering the required documents. I am writing this today in my home in rural Ireland partly as a result of us not going to Down East Maine, but going to North Pole instead, and Bill returning to his old job. And we weren’t done with Maine, yet, either, although that was almost a decade in the future. 

issues and the septic tank

 After leaving academia, I took some time to pursue other interests. I was particularly happy to have so much more time to be creative and pursue my passion for fibre arts and doing my own reading about the history of knitting, embroidery, crocheting, etc in women’s lives. I joined the local needlework guild, where I learned new techniques. I taught myself needle tatting—a skill that would be useful in a practical way a few years later when I was hired to teach this and other skills at a local yarn shop. I was having to adjust to a new sort of life, which was sometimes difficult, but I was glad to be out of academia. However, after a year or two, when it was suggested to me that I start an interdisciplinary PhD course of study with a focus on language preservation, I allowed myself to be talked into it, against my better judgement and in spite of my misgivings. I was also offered a job in the Alaska Native Language Center (ANLC), which I accepted.

This all turned out to be a mistake, of course, for a few reasons. Some of the same old stuff would turn out to be an issue again as far as the Native-White tension goes. One day, I had a frank discussion with a younger faculty member in ANLC, who had brought in close to a million dollars in grant money. Under normal circumstances, this would have provided him with a secure track to tenure, but in this case, because he was a White guy, he was not even on that track. He finally had to apply for a position in the education department as a threat to ANLC before they relented and put him on the tenure track. ANLC had a bunch of White guys as senior faculty, but they were trying to get more Native people in there. This was a commendable goal, but was often counterproductive. In the case of my teacher, for instance, she was not given proper teacher training and did not know how to proceed. Students dropped away after the first year.  That wasn’t the only problem, however.

In this new program, which I was building from scratch, I would be working with her again, but long fieldwork trips to Village would not be required—we could work together in Fairbanks. But then she got arrested again. She and her husband had started drinking again during their first year in Fairbanks. He stopped, but she had difficulty controlling her drinking. As someone who used to have the same problem, I understood this and had some empathy. She’d gotten arrested for driving under the influence a few years before and had continued to get caught violating her probation. So it was again. At a committee meeting, where we were discussing how I should proceed under the circumstances, one of the members suggested I could work with her in the jail. I wondered what the hell I was doing. 

In the end, it didn’t matter. I was gaining a deeper understanding of my mistake when one day at work, when she was out of jail and back in the office, she called me over. I went in and wondered what that smell was. She reached around into a bookcase, pulled out a plastic cup, and took a long drink, before telling me that she’d just learned her contract would not be renewed when it was up, so she wouldn’t be back. I knew I was done with academic life.

I stayed at the job, though, as the pay check came in handy. Bill was continuing his work in Oral History and the Film Archives and we were starting to develop ideas for future projects of our own. In the meantime, we needed to have our septic tank replaced. We didn’t know it at the time, but this would be the start of a new chapter of our lives. As the work was being done, our nearest neighbour came walking over to chat with Bill, asking him what was going on. Bill told him and Neighbour asked whether we were moving. Bill said we weren’t then, but it was possible that in another year or so we might be. Neighbour said that if we ever wanted to sell, to call him first before placing the house on the market. Bill said we would do that. 

I left the job at ANLC when one day, my pay check was not in the pile. When the admin person inquired about this, she found out that someone had not submitted the proper paperwork or something. I was told not to worry—it would show up eventually. Indeed. I told them they could combine it with my last check, because I was done.

trapped in the bentley mall

One night at a meeting of the Fairbanks Needlework Guild, a woman sat down next to me, nodded towards another woman across the room, and said, ‘She told me to talk to you.’ As I asked her what she wanted to talk to me about, I was curious about what her answer would be. She proceeded to talk about a black cat, less than a year old, named Bentley. He was given that name because he was found as quite a young kitten stuck in the door of the Michaels craft store in the Bentley Mall (the northernmost mall in North America). When rescued, he had leg injuries so needed to have some surgery. His leg was saved and he could use it, but it was bent in a funny direction (another tie-in with his name!) and he limped a little. Nonetheless, he had recovered well and his injury didn’t impede his movement in any way as he grew. The problem was, this woman’s daughter turned out to be allergic and they needed a new home for the little guy. I was apparently seen as an easy mark, so she was pointed in my direction.

I told her I’d talk to Bill about it and when I got home, that’s the first thing I did. He was not hostile to the idea, but he wasn’t overly enthusiastic, either. We’d just adopted white rescue cat named Frosty from the Humane Society (we quickly renamed him J. Frost E.). We weren’t sure about introducing another cat into the house so soon, but Bill emailed the woman and asked a few questions. After she’d answered, we talked about it and agreed that we’d bring Bentley home. We needn’t have worried, because J and Bentley became friends very quickly. Bentley came with a feather duster, because he loved it, we were told. He was uninterested in it when he came to our house, but J loved it! He would flop onto his back, holding the feather duster with his front paws, then bite it and start to attack it with his back paws. It was funny. Bentley, although younger than J, was kind of mellow. It all worked out beautifully and we were glad that we’d agreed to become Bentley’s people. 

combat fishing

can be a very frustrating way to fish.  People get tangled up with their lines every now and then.  Others move around to find a better spot.  Needless to say, it is a very popular sport in the summer months.  

welcome sign

A beautiful carving of the bear somewhere in Soldotna.

 

fishing community

Ken's Alaskan Tackle has been open for over 35 years providing the community with a go to tackle store that carries everything you need for fishing.  We stopped to get some fishing supplies because our friend wanted to fish for salmon.