I rang in 2014 in a yurt, with a kidney infection. This is one of those stories that requires a little background information, and since I haven’t written much in awhile, I’ll begin with the last time I watched the clock strike midnight, which, in all honesty, was probably the same day in 2013. (That’s not entirely fair. I got up at midnight plenty of times in 2013.)
Near the end of my twenty-third summer, I got it in my head that I should try free soloing. It wasn’t in a single moment that the idea came to me, but rather over the course of a disaster-style summer, punctuated by a series of nudges in that direction.
Spring Creek Farm sits on the outskirts of Palmer, Alaska, a small, rural community about forty miles north of Anchorage. In the mid-1930s, some two hundred-odd Midwesterners, mostly in their late twenties and early thirties, picked up their families and moved to the Last Frontier as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal. The Matanuska Colony has existed in various incarnations since then, and today, the sleepy township of Palmer is home to just under six thousand people and, still, plenty of dairy cows.
Kids at work ask me all the time where I live. I always point at my little Kelty two-man tent, and they almost never believe me.
“No way, Miss!” they exclaim in a tone of mixed disbelief and curiosity. I must seem almost crazy enough for it to be true. The tents we set up for kids will sleep ten in a pinch; my tiny two-man (which is for one person, really) looks to them far too small to sleep even one adult human. Often, a kid will ask if it’s a tent for dogs. They want to know if I have a TV in there.
My initial flirtation with Funemployment this January turned into a steamy love affair, and things got a little out of hand. I thought I had a job lined up to start in the middle of February, but a series of setbacks finally ended in the realization that I was going to have to work something else out. By then, though, I’d gotten used to skiing every day and having time to eat and sleep in addition to attending class, and “figuring something else out” was something I kept saying I was doing but was really just kind of ignoring and hoping it’d go away.
Continue reading “Employed! (A story in which I finally have a job, but am still living in a tent.)”
my alaskan odyssey 