Tonight I spend the evening along the banks of the Middle Fork of the Koyukuk River, 60 miles north of the Arctic Circle. In my view: Coldfoot Mountain, the river (of course), Cathedral and Twelve Mile to the south and just over my left shoulder a tiny piece of the Dalton Highway. This land does not speak to everyone, but for me, it has become a central theme in shaping my adulthood.



I wonder at times what I might have been if I had journeyed only once into this land, a vacation perhaps, a ten-day float down the Canning or a twelve-day backpack into the Itkilik valley. And yet there might exist another me, one who has never set foot in Alaska; never ventured into the Brooks Range. Because I can’t know that person, I journey instead into this world, a world filled with free-flowing, meandering rivers and unnamed mountains. A place I am spending only one short summer, like the migratory birds or mountain avens. This is my temporary home. One I call upon while…

Laboriously climbing the stair-stepper at the University gym in Fairbanks or monotonously re-writing care plans for nursing school, care plans that have been written and re-written by millions before me. When I need a break, my mind easily slips back to this place full of summer sunlight and shall we say, wilderness, to adopt a long-held American cliché about this land.

I am not convinced this is the best place on the planet. There are too many left for me to see before I make that distinction. For now, however, this is the best place for me; the place I chose, not only this summer but many seasons previous. Here I sit between a sharply drawn line of small moose prints and the lapping waters of the Koyukuk River, atop a bed of river rocks nestled snugly in place by finely ground silt washed out of the valleys and deposited here in this broad U-shaped glacial valley, so vast I can’t imagine its former life beneath a glacier.

But Alaska’s Arctic is not what I wanted to write about tonight. Instead I wonder, who is this person that chose this life?

I was born in Harvey, Illinois in 1977.Many know that year as the release of the first Star Wars film, I have come to know it as the birth-year of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline. I moved (or to be more accurate, my parents moved me) to Wild Rose, Wisconsin shortly after an uneventful cesarean birth. In this small Wisconsin town I lived until the age of 18. In those years I accomplished only two reportable items:

1) I both created and destroyed a pretend friend named Simmy
2) I wrote a spiral-bound notebook full-to-the-brim of a novella called “The Hurt Bird.”

There were, of course, minor accomplishments like winning an essay contest for a local ice cream manufacturer. The prize? A bucket of ice cream of my choosing. And not just any ice cream. It was one of those antiquated thick-plastic buckets with a red swivel handle that puts to shame all of today’s mini cardboard pints that barely feel filling after Thanksgiving dinner. Minor accomplishments aside, this life has been pretty good to me.

By some definitions I became an adult at 18. Instead, I battled the idea until moving to Alaska at 21 where:

a) I drank my first beer
b) I lived alone for the first time ever
c) I saw the mountains of the Brooks Range, which would change the path of my life forever.

Between 18 and 21 nothing much happened. I did somehow manage to get a BA in English and environmental studies. Somewhere in there I checked off the list, get married. Then surprisingly, I checked off a new list, get divorced. I discovered poetry. Hmmm… fell in love with the idea of Alaska. If I could tell my younger-self one bit of wisdom it would be this: you can never know what you will become. But this is silliness because I would not listen. I knew what I wanted and how to get it back then. This might be everyone at this age and that is why we should not expect anyone between 18 and 21 to choose their future profession.

So instead of becoming a famous poet, I have returned to school for nursing. Many years from now, I hope to look back on this writing and come to some greater understanding about my decisions in life, but tonight I hope to go back to a small cabin in the spruce trees and dream of lions.