On Alaska Time: Making Time for Outdoor Memories

      It was a life of screen doors slamming, dogs barking, and ringing phones. There were endless errands to run, car pools to drive and the appetites of four growing children to consider. When I got the chance, I jogged and gardened and fed the homeless on Thursday nights. There were few moments in a day to hold close to myself, empty of demands. Like everyone I knew, I was busy.  Now, I made considerable noise about changing this--to drop the obligations, say no to the uncountable claims on my time--but it took a sizable stumble and thump to change things. It took the mythic dimensions of Alaska to stop me in my headlong tracks.

      Every summer my husband headed north to Alaska to work during the salmon season. For years he had urged me to join him with the kids. When our youngest turned three I said yes, imagining six weeks in a cozy cabin with a lush landscape outside our door. To prepare for our sojourn the kids and I watched the movie ‘The Wilderness Family’, and saw a happy clan sawing logs and saving a baby cougar. Adventure beckoned!  With anticipation we flew north to Alaska.

      My husband met us at the airport in a battered truck. Wedged together in the cab, we bounced down a road of formidable potholes that turned the drive into an endless polka of body sways and head thumps against the truck roof. The tundra stretched before us flat and peculiar, the sky a vault of scattered clouds. There were no discernible features to orient by. No rise of peaks, or spine of hills to navigate with. My eyes slid uninterrupted to the wide horizon. I drew a breath and looked away. 

      We pulled into a rutted drive and lurched to a stop before a structure that resembled a trailer if you glanced at it sideways real fast.  “Here it is!” my husband said, “Here’s home!  I have to get back to the boat, I’ll see you in the morning.”  He gave big hugs of encouragement, and extricated himself from our clinging arms.  We stood in the dust with our bags and watched him drive away.

     Home was a truck container. Someone had cut windows from the sides, called it a trailer, and set it upon a scraped off patch of tundra. We stepped gingerly up the plastic fish box that comprised the threshold to the door.  

“This can’t be it!” our daughter cried. “I could never, EVER, live here!”  

I felt a slow slide into an unnamable place reserved for car accidents and broken bones.

      Home smelled like a swamp on a warm day. Greasy towels hung on a rack, the faded sofa was missing a leg . The water ran tea colored from the faucet, and to our horror we discovered a strange trumpet-shaped lichen growing from the damp carpet.  Home. I rolled up my sleeves and went to work while the kids threw themselves outdoors to dig a world of rivers and channels in the dirt. 

      The days stretched long, unpunctuated by dark at this latitude.  The endless light did strange things to our appetites, to our sleeping habits. Bedtime became a battle when the sun called the kids out to play at midnight. I lurched from one problem to another:  a water pipe burst from its joint under the trailer, squalls often blew in and to the kids’ delight, filled their river world with currents of water--joining mud, skin, clothing and children in a happy marriage of mess. When it wasn’t raining the mosquitoes drove us like cattle from tundra to trailer to car. In the evenings bears nosed around the trailer searching for garbage. Twenty hours of available light to see what my Wilderness Family had come to:  a place of mud, mosquitoes, and bears;  to a dirty tribe of dislocated travelers. 

      One sun filled night I hung clothes on a line strung between scrub alders, then sat down to watch the kids play baseball with neighboring children. They moved the bases around in the dirt until they were satisfied. The three year old was allowed 10 strikes, a girl declared, older boys could hit only within the base lines or they were O-U-T out because bears were in the bushes. She glanced over at me. 

“You wanna play?”  she asked . 

I shrugged thinking there was something else I should do, like pick the lichen that stubbornly sprang daily. 

“She’s a good player!”  my  son cried. 

I smiled. He’d never seen me play baseball.  I hefted the bat and considered. 

“Batter... UP!” the girls shouted.  

I hit a home run deep into the tundra. 

 “NEW RULE!” a boy screamed, “Mothers can hit to base lines ONLY!”  

I was in league with the big boys now. 

     We played for hours under that midnight sun, laughing and shrieking, changing rules, shaking the dust from our bodies in charged halos of light. Suddenly I was a girl again, unfettered and breathless with the crazy fun of it all. As I lay in bed that night something shifted inside. Why not change the rules that governed our lives here?

     The next morning I decided the days would follow the urges and appetites of our bodies, not the clock. We began to rise at whatever time we woke, eat when we were hungry, and sleep when we were tired, even if that meant dinner at ten and bedtime at two. Problems that seemed overwhelming before, fell away, and the weeks stretched deliciously long, empty of duties. We called it Alaska Time. On Alaska Time I became an available lap, a willing ear for listening to worries and dreams. I had idle hands for scratching backs, for pouring plaster in bear tracks, for throwing a baseball. I had newly opened eyes for the treasures available to us:  boundless light, midnight drives to watch caribou graze and eagles wheel in the sky, and hours to discover who we were without the static and velocity of home  

       There was no turning back after that summer. The journey north offered a touchstone to this day that we measure our lives against. We are on Alaska Time anywhere in the world when we walk together after dinner, when we drop everything to play ping-pong, when we watch a radiant sunset, and name the stars that bloom in the sky. It is Alaska Time when the rules change; the dishes wait; the phone goes unanswered.  We are on Alaska Time in the words Yes, I want to play.