Category: Other Navel-Gazing

An apology to Clarissa Dalloway, among others

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I read Mrs Dalloway in college and thought it was the worst. I knew I should care that Clarissa’s character was a commentary on the sexual and economic repression of women, but unless I was being disagreeable—one bespectacled boy who always sat in the front had lots to say about The Patriarchy and little understanding of his role in it, evidenced by his frequent description of characters as “bitchy”—I didn’t think much of Clarissa. I wasn’t interested in her stupid party, and it went completely over my head that Clarissa totally had the hots for Sally Seton, which might have at least piqued my interest.

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“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” –John Muir

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If you didn’t know any better, the pullout at Seward Highway Mile 48 would look like any other makeshift rest area on Alaska’s most dangerous highway. In fact, if not for the half-dozen bumper-stickered Outbacks and Tacomas with toppers, a couple of dirtbags like us might have driven right past it.

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The secret to success: Just. Show. Up.

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As anyone who’s spent much time with me can attest, I am neither particularly athletic nor someone who could accurately be described as much of a “go-getter.” I’m sort of medium at most things I do. I might refer to my ability level as “serviceable” if I felt extra confident in a given skill, but the label of “expert,” in my case, could really only be applied to activities like napping and selecting pizza toppings.

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Free soloing the First: A story in which I make a few good and a few bad decisions, and ultimately am a little smarter.

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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.

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Alaska, continued! (A story in which, for better or for worse, I find myself back on the Last Frontier)

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The Farm is identified by this often-driven-by sign, cleverly hidden by vegetation on the side of Farm Loop Road.
The Farm is identified by this often-driven-by sign, cleverly hidden by vegetation on the side of Farm Loop Road.

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.

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