#30: Rest and Restoration

I WAS FEELING A BIT OF BURNOUT from juggling two jobs and still fretting about lack of hours, a rather chronic problem I was heartily bored with. Too, I was far from home and a prevailing sense of isolation and loneliness was taking its toll. But then Chilkat Float Tours of Skagway treated everyone at Alaska Excursions, where I worked part time, to a ride down Taiya River.

Can a day be lovelier? A lazy river, salmon spawning, eagles soaring, sun looping through a cerulean sky, hang gliders adding color to a glacier glinting off the horizon. Everywhere I looked the raw wilderness spread forever, untouched and pristine as the day God made it, gently lifting me into a place of peace.

Hang Glider Above Nelson Glacier

Steve and Hunter

Shady

End of the Float

“Hey! Anyone lose $10?” Our guide pointed to a ten-dollar bill floating on the river’s surface.

Rest. Renewal. Reassurance. Someday I'll go home, but I'll take with me this moment of time and abundance.

#26: Flying "Over the Top" Into Skagway, AK.

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"Are you getting excited yet, about going to Skagway?" my daughter-in-law asked the night before I was to fly out of Seattle for Juneau--and on to Skagway, AK."

"No, not yet."

I've been splitting my time between the Seattle area and Skagway, AK, for eight years now, and I'd not been up for two and a half of those years and was missing all my friends and the little Alaskan gold rush town. "You can write up there as well as down here," I decided one day just before Thanksgiving. And so began my plans.

Three days after Christmas, the morning's flight to Juneau was uneventful. Just another airplane ride in the rain. But when I checked into Seaplanes at the small Juneau airport and they ticketed my bag, I got excited.

And then more excited. The sun came out. A young man all of thirteen, I swear, called my name. "You ready?"

"I am!"

"Lucky you. This is our first sun in a month. We'll go over the top."

Yes! 

Instead of going up Lynn Canal, pretty enough, we'd go over the mountains, stunning, unimaginable, a world of ice and snow. I'd done it once, and knew I was in for a treat. I grabbed my computer bag and trotted outdoors, into the icy air. "Am I the only one?"

"Yup."

I settled into my seat, breathless. The pilot, I'll call him Dan, gave the propeller a few good whacks, it whirled and whirred into motion, and soon we were taxing out for take off.

We veered away from Lynn Canal and headed straight for the Mendenhall Glacier...

...rising swiftly, steeply, straight for the ice, up, up, up toward the tree line, a layer of fog, sunshine beyond, and the snowy mountains. 

Dan dipped and leveled out, wings just yards from the tectonic uplift of mountains unbelievably beautiful, their tops jagged, uncompromising, the tips sharp enough to have bitten through the earth's crust eons ago and tall enough to escape the glaciers of yore that grind smooth the lesser heights.

And then my phone died. No more pictures to capture the ragged snow-covered mountain tops that framed vast valleys stuffed with snow--heaped atop the Mendenhall Glacier; a snake of crushing weight, a river of ice bent on carving out stone and rock and gouging deep troughs, pressing the earth as it winds north to meet the ice sheath that goes 100 miles up and to the Yukon.

As far as eye can see, ice cream as silky as a cat's ear. Whipped cream. Way, way down, ribbons of navy blue cut through the ice and snow and run out to sea. Sometimes the whipped cream tumbles, with lines like hen scratches, then gives way to cobbled snow. Where the glaciers drop steeply, turquoise sparkles brilliant against the blinding white.

Serrated mountains tops circle like Roman amphitheaters, plunging down to fields of white fluff. A high range sends spikes up like a dragon's back, rounding out to make a sculpture of a fat, plodding Tyrannosaurus Rex frozen in time.

To the west, Lynn Canal sometimes shows up, a deep cobalt blue, then the mountains rise straight up and spread to the horizon. All razor sharp mountain tips, endless white. To the east, they stagger and coil and tower with nothing to tell me they don't circle the world and meet east to west.

Curling away from the white castles in the air, I worked up enough nerve to ask the pilot to take a picture of Skagway for me when we made our final descent. He pulled out a charger. Well, darn! For once I should have spoken up earlier. He plugged in my phone and by the time we eased down to the tree line and wound west and north, Haines hoving into view, he handed me my phone. 47% charged. Yes!

SKAGWAY, ALASKA

Seventeen miles on, I spot my home-away-from-home. Caught between two mountain ranges, this gold rush town of 1898 is five blocks wide at the docks and narrows to just three. The only road out crosses the river and winds up White Pass to Canada. And while it's gorgeously sunny from the plane, the mountains drop shadows. It's 11:00 a.m., and I know it's cold down there and veiled.

In the twilight, though, my friend Judy Mallory is waiting at the airport to welcome me home.

#19: Destination: Skagway, Alaska

(reposted from May 2010)

Jewell Gardens,  Skagway, AK

My son, Blake, insisted I apply for a summer job in Skagway, AK, as a tour guide at Jewell Gardens. He was up there last summer and is up there again this summer driving tour buses. He got it into his head that I’d love it, do well, and probably make some pretty good money in tips. "For someone your age," he tells me, "you look hot." Do I feel insulted? or not? More importantly, he felt it would do my unemployment streak a world of good. It could even be fun. So I applied. Long story short, I’m headed for Alaska this Thursday morning.

Here’s the truth. I’m scared to death. I have to pay my own transportation and it ain’t cheap. Too, there is no housing. Apparently people just land and “stuff” works out.

“You  remember I’m pushing sixty, right?" I tell Blake. "I can’t do the camping thing. I can’t do cats and dogs if someone does take me in.” 

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," he says.

Here’s the kicker. There is no doctor, no pharmacy in town. I have to take up five months worth of medication.

He arranged for free housing with the preacher, at least for May. Okay, a compromise. A place to lay my head for a couple of weeks. So I’ll go and see if “stuff” happens. If not? I’ll just come back and consider the adventure one thing I can scratch off my Bucket List. I’ve always wanted to get up there.

Charlotte Jewell

My job at Jewell Gardens will be to take tourists through the gardens, a glass-blowing factory housed in the gardens, and help serve my specific group at the tea house, also housed in the gardens. All of which I can handily do, and which I will enjoy.

A forty-hour week, I'll have time to explore, hike, maybe take a train out to some gold-rush sight, and probably write. Write lot. I always do.

To get there, I’ll be driving the AlCan highway. The 2,000-mile route will put me in beautiful landscapes and my son Phil has lent me his camera to I can capture the wildlife. I am to begin in Bellingham WA.

My first day will be up through the Fraser Canyon to my sister's house in Quesnel. A night or two to catch up, it'll then be into the mountains to Hudson's Hope and my cousin Carolyn’s house. Then a long haul through wilderness where I’ve been told the wildlife is unbelievable to Liard Hot Springs on the B.C./Yukon border. For $19 I can soak in the hot springs and pitch my tent with the bears. Last leg to Skagway takes me to Whitehorse where Blake tells me I need to stock up on food. I’ll arrive Sunday night at the preacher’s home/hostel. 

I am now officially jazzed.

So, see ya in Skagway!

#7: The Golden Shadow and A Skagway Friendship

My friend Nick is an odd bedfellow to be sure. I use the term metaphorically, yet I have loved Nick from almost the first moment I met him a year ago here in Skagway, Alaska. Rather, I should say I love the inner shadow and light of this man, a dichotomy, a puzzle, a cynical dude who is very much in touch with his dark side. His good side? Not so much, he says, but that's just plain silly. What am I talking about?

Carl Jung was one of the first to name our shadow. For every up there is a down, for every left, a right. Life is a tension of opposites: good and evil; kindness, rudeness; politic and unwarranted. Grace, justice. Daily, unrelentingly, we are required to choose between this or that and our shadow is everything we choose not to do, be, say, think.

For instance, if we choose to be an artist we choose not to be a scientist. If we choose to be tough, we choose not to be tender. Thomas Moore in his The Care of the Human Soul writes that "the person we choose to be... automatically creates a dark double--the person we choose not to be." Robert Johnson calls the Shadow "our psychic twin that follows us like a mirror image." And this is what Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jeckle and Mr. Hyde is all about.

The shadow is not all "bad" however. Much of it is good--surprisingly and wonderfully good. Euphorically good. The homophobic who decries homosexuality in reality can find tolerance in his shadow. Mr. Tough Guy who is self-sufficient, uncaring, and disconnected with those around him can't help but discover the opposite if he looks for it. A racist can find love. It therefore behooves us, as we age and from time to time, to re-examine our inner selves and check out what bag of surprises our shadows hold.

Most of us resist because we have come to believe we are our persona. We're a bad ass. Or we're Nice Guy. In reality we're both. But if we ignore our oppositions, we miss our Golden Shadow--our chance for wholeness and creative expression.

Not that chance doesn't come knocking. Murray Stein posits that at midlife the shadow begins to agitate. Like it or not, he says, our un-chosen self bubbles to the surface--and it needs to be, he says, "dealt with in a new way, because the seeds of psychological renewal and of possible future directions for life lie hidden within it." Ah...renewal, new direction, creativity. He calls it the Golden Shadow, and William Zinzer in his The Golden Shadow tells us that the integration of our oppositions is experienced as an explosion of creative energy, new focus, a wellness of being, and closer connection to God. 

I yearn for that wholeness--and the loss of fear and self-doubt that now fractures me. That hinders my creative edge. My un-chosen self is once again bubbling to the surface.

Robert Johnson says that to own your shadow, to really know it, "is whole making. No one can be anything but a partial being," he writes, "ravaged by doubt and loneliness, unless he has close contact with his shadow." Raised in the evangelical world, it's a handicap in finding this necessary contact with my shadow, yet I believe God brings people into our lives when we're open (or when they are--it's not always about us). But never the person we'd pick.

Amy and Nick

Most certainly, I would not have picked Nick. Totally agnostic, cynical, no filter, mocking, at times unmerciful in his assessments, he is everything I am not. Unafraid of his flaws, well acquainted with his dark side, he's brutally honest and delightful in his humorous and sometimes contemptuous jabs at the pretensions of life. "Why do you need that shit?" he asks me. Why indeed? I revel in the question, for it's portal to the dark unknown that is in me, and key to my Golden Shadow.

Yup, love the guy. He's good for me. Might make him a little nervous to hear it.; in fact, I'm sure it does but I don't give a shit.

What Brings You To Skagway?

Charlotte Jewell's Tea Room

I'm talking to Bonnie from Boston. She's seated in the conservatory at Jewell Gardens, Skagway, Alaska, with other tourists. I am pouring her English Rose tea while she waits for her treat of a lunch: smoked salmon quiche, salad, Nolan Jahn's soup of the day, and rhubarb-begonia bar. Always rhubarb at Jewell Gardens.

"What brings you to Jewell Gardens of Alaska?" she asks.

"I was replaced at work two years ago by a twenty-year-old," I tell her, "and it's been hard to find work. Yes, it's still sticking in my craw, and, yes, I know I should get over it." But I have to say I don't really see age discrimination as anything to get over. It's an injustice someone needs to object to. Even if it is only me. Anyway, I tell Bonnie that my youngest son had come up to Skagway the summer before to drive tour buses, had taken one look at Jewell Gardens and e-mailed me, an avid gardener, to say: "If you still haven't found work by next year, Mum, apply to Jewell Gardens."

"I couldn't, I did, and here I am," I tell Bonnie.

It was actually a hard land and I still wasn't on my feet. I'd been given ten days to report for duty--Washington to Alaska. Arrangements to be made for my house down in the Lower 48, goodbyes  said to my grandchildren, and packing up my Toyota Scion--Arizona Lunch Box--with five months' worth of basic food supplies. Blake warned that living  in a Gold Rush town isn't cheap. And housing is an issue--always an issue. Lucky for me, the Presbyterian minister has graciously agreed to temporarily take me in. But come the end of May, what then?

"God only knows," I tell Bonnie.

"How did you get here?" she asked.

"I drove."

My Four-Day Road Trip

It was a four-day trip. Exactly 1,649 miles from my front door to the front door of Skagway's Presbyterian manse.

Apprehension set in the morning of my third day on the road as I drove north out of Hudson's Hope, leaving behind my cousin Carolyn and civilization. A moose ambled across the highway ahead, a giant silhouette against dawn and as graceful as a giraffe. Two bear cubs frolicked in a ditch. Soon telephone poles disappeared, the radio shut off, and it was just me and the road, me and Arizona Lunchbox riding the left shoulder of the Rocky Mountains north for 600 miles. The farther I went, the deeper my apprehension, the higher my anxiety. By the time I reached Liard Hot Springs on the Yukon border I was nauseous from the distressing sensation I couldn't name.

Yukon/BC Border

I drove into the fourth day with a churning stomach and feeling adrift. Zigzagging west, back and forth across the Yukon/B.C. border, cutting across four entire mountain ranges and rarely seeing another car, here was land as God made it: never ending, eternal, unmarked by any sign of human the single exception of the road unzipping before me as I traveled into more of the same and struggling to contain the exhaustion that had set in and my mounting anxiety that was beginning to feel a little threatening.

At Whitehorse in the Yukon I turned south onto the Klondike Highway, the only road in and out of Skagway, and wound my way up the Gold Rush Trail in reverse through the White Pass.

White Pass

The snowy mountain peaks sprawling and stretching took me to the top of the world. I only had to get out of my car, snowshoe to the crest...I'd be able to see clear around the globe. I pulled to a stop at the summit and got out. Here was the international boundary line. Behind me the Yukon and Canada. Forward, southward, downhill, Skagway, Alaska, my destination. What am I doing here? I asked myself. What in the world am I doing?

It was while standing at the "Welcome to Alaska" sign, looking south into the seam of yet another tumble of mountains, that I recognized my agitation. I'd experienced it before. I was nine. My family had just immigrated from Canada to the States, to Meteor Ranch near Upper Lake, CA. As a child growing up under the filtered sunlight of cedar and hemlock and Douglas fir, I'd threatened by the endless land unfolding before me. I couldn't sleep, eat, think. One night I slipped out of the house and stood looking south over the sheep pasture to Clear Lake.

Sheep field, Meteor Ranch 1961

My father came out, stood quietly beside me. "What's happening to you?"

I struggled to find the words. What came out was this: "It feels like the land will go forever and we will all evaporate and die and be nothing." It was the best I could do, and I've spent a lifetime wondering what I'd been trying to define, to name, to understand. A kind of dark and lonely despair. Now here I was, nearly fifty years later, experiencing the same sort of thing and no closer to comprehension.

I got back into my car. Yes, land that spread forever, and it felt as though I might evaporate and die, disappear and be nothing. That night, settled in at the preacher's house where I was invited to live until the end of May and fighting for words, I wrote:

I am experiencing a kind of isolation that disconnects me even me from myself. I have yet to find a word that names this. A disconnect of some sort. A severing of normal thinking patterns. Who am I, sitting on the edge of eternity? Why does it feel so annihilating?

At both Meteor Ranch and now here in Skagway, the stretching land triggered and triggers something, broke and breaks something, internal, and left and leaves me adrift from myself. It takes me some time, but I'm beginning to think I am not teetering on the brink of losing myself but finding instead the insignificance of Self when compared to endless worlds that have no boundaries that ensnare and bind me to the person I've become.

My cousin asked when I stopped in on my way north, "If you could wish for one thing this summer, what would it be?"

I'd stared rather stupidly at her. Wish for something?

Carolyn, I now know. I wish to embrace this sense of separation, this lostness and disconnect from what I've understood myself to be me, to let go of everything that once told me who and what I was. An aging women? easily replaced by a twenty-year-old? and to instead embrace this expansion of possibility, unscripted and mine to explore.

Carolyn, I wish to live as someone I have not yet met.

"And this," I want to tell Bonnie from Boston, "is what brings me to Jewell Gardens of Skagway."

Jewell Gardens Kitchen and Tea Room