TRAVELS - Part 1

I was quickly brought back to reality as I came into the office Monday morning, my last Monday, and finished writing over 16 pages filled with short write-ups, protocols, and site descriptions.  I checked back over entered data and analyses, enjoyed beers and pizza as a final huzzah, and before I knew it I found myself saying my goodbyes to supervisors, co-workers, and new friends – People I’d likely never see again. 

As I packed up my final things in my small cabin, I sunk myself on the couch and nestled in close to my friend.  With his arm wrapped tight around me, I soaked in a feeling that would end all too soon.  I closed my eyes and briefly imagined my plane that would take me back to Virginia to ultimately spend the next 2 and a half years in western South Carolina, conducting the research I had always dreamed of.  I missed him already.  I imagined the time spent there that would be devoid of travels to unknown locations, new people, and him.  Instead, my soul would devour text books about statistics and ecology, write papers through midnight and at the end of it all, supposedly be qualified and prepared to make wildlife management decisions.

I thought back to the things my next years would be devoid of.  I knew I was being dramatic.  But after a year a half of rustic travels and adventures taking place in dry cabins and my backpacking tent, settling back into the bustle of a college town in an urban southeast environment somehow felt displacing.

Once on the plane, I watched an Alaskan landscape get smaller and smaller.  I longed for the spruce, the glaciated braided rivers, the barren landscape that challenged man and animal all the same.  I was glad when we finally got above the clouds and I couldn’t see the green beneath me.  I didn’t want to yearn for a landscape that would never be mine.  The clouds below me were pink with the glow of sunset.  They undulated like giant icebergs in a frozen ocean.  I wondered what they felt like.

I ordered a whiskey coke and began to read “Faith of Cranes”, a novel about a man finding his way through a changing Alaskan landscape.  Not a story about finding yourself in wilderness, per say, the way Christopher McCandless did, but instead finding yourself in, well, yourself.  The man in the book traveled searching for something he didn’t know.  He fell in love with a rural foreign environment that would never be his and left it to return to his home town in southeast Alaska, but the contrast between busy urban cities and the loneliness he experienced in remote villages still didn’t fill the void inside him.  In between it all, he fell in love with a girl, but was too absorbed with finding himself and being independent to ask her to stay, even though he knew she would have.

The story felt too familiar.

 “Although it was slow to take root, Uramuro planted the idea that moving would keep me from ever finding the contentment under my feet.”

As I re-read the line from the book, it resonated in my head.  I sipped my whiskey -- my second one of the night, this one stronger than the first.  The bitter taste of whiskey on my tongue surprised me.  I put the book down and returned to my airplane window where I watched pinks fade to orange and orange fade to an empty gray.  Behind us, towards the setting sun, a fire red glow skimmed the horizon, but towards the front of the plane, towards the fate that lied ahead of me, was a cold and dismal dark blue expanse.

I sipped my whiskey again, then breathed deeply.

I knew the book was right, the idea that continuously moving would keep me from being content.  It was part of the reason I wanted to escape seasonal work and begin the progression towards something permanent and stable. I was tired of never feeling complete.  I had been traveling my entire life.  First, following my dad as a military child, oblivious to any other kind of life style, and then for seasonal work during college summers and again after being handed my undergraduate degree.  My more distant travels began the very day I got my degree.  Seasonal work was great.  It was filled with endless adventures, no rules, and a great community.  But it was always filled with inevitable goodbyes.  The constant search for the next position and accompanying location. The persistent stress of packing, moving, unpacking, and starting over somewhere new just to know in a couple months, you’d be leaving.  But the memories and experiences are well worth it.  I don’t regret a thing and wouldn’t change my challenges for anything in the world. 

Through my Dad’s travels we moved from South Carolina to Vermont to Alaska to Washington to Virginia to Alaska to ultimately retire in Eastern Virginia.  This is where I called home.  Through my own travels, I moved from Eastern Virginia to western Virginia to North Carolina to Indiana to Idaho to southern Alaska to interior Alaska just to find myself headed to South Carolina – right where I started.  But I had needed all of that to get to exactly where I was now.

A plane, headed home – Temporarily.

Temporarily.  I played with the word in my head as though it were something malleable in my fingers.  It made me smile for the first time during that long plane ride.  Maybe it was the whiskey.  I sipped it again, this time a long, refreshing drink.  It no longer tasted bitter.   I continued to play with the idea of “temporary” and everything it stood for.  Opportunity.  The cold and dismal dark blue expanse in front of us was hidden opportunity.  I repeated the idea in my head and challenged the words as if it gave the sentence difference meaning.  I smiled again.

My thoughts were interrupted as the stewardess asked if I wanted another whiskey.  Red no longer lined the horizon and I found myself holding a glass filled only with melting ice.  In the dark and quiet airplane cabin, I nodded and silently mouthed yes please.  I was one of the last ones with eyes still open.

I wanted to be upset about leaving Alaska.  I wanted to be angry at myself for supposedly settling for a south east urban journey and leaving everything I loved and pursued in the west.  I wanted to feel like I was giving up.  But I couldn’t.  It didn’t matter I was leaving the tallest mountain in North America and the 6 million acres that surrounded it.  It didn’t matter I was leaving the tundra, the grizzly bears, the caribou.  It didn’t matter I was leaving him.  I looked out the window.  It was dark outside.  A faint glow separated the sky from the clouds, barely.  None of it mattered because it would all go on the same without me. The same way I would go on the same without them.

I sipped my Whiskey.  It was strong again, but didn’t taste bitter this time.  My thoughts wandered.  I no longer knew what to think about.  I was sad to be leaving the last frontier, but I was happy to be embracing the new opportunity and lifestyle.  I was scared to move to the southeast and begin rigorous graduate level course work, but I was excited for my trip back west in 6 weeks for a wildlife workshop and the start of west coast networking.

I thought about him, briefly, but stopped.  I knew the momentary embrace we felt on that couch in Alaska would be our last.  Despite our summer romance, we had departed as friends.  Just friends.  We had joked about the lack of attraction and connection we felt that summer, but I think we both knew better.  I knew better.  My return to Montana in 6 weeks for the workshop, and possibly seeing him again, wouldn’t matter though.  It’s time and distance, he had told me.  Time and distance.

It was 1:27am.  I stared at my mostly empty glass of whiskey next to me and thought of my Dad, the one man in my life who never cared how far I traveled or for how long I was gone.  He loved me unconditionally and always welcomed me home with open arms and after 9 months in Alaska, I was excited to see him waiting for me upon my arrival at the airport at home. 

My Dad taught me everything I know, which always surprised me considering how often he was deployed overseas during my impressionable childhood years.  In the stories my mother told me, it seemed like he was never there, but in my memories, he was never gone.  I wondered if, as an adult, it was the same for my dad, if my persistent coming and going and the months I would be away without stepping foot even in the same time zone as him went unnoticed.  During my travels, I called him often, bouncing ideas about life, work and sometimes just for company.  My favorite phone calls were the ones where he seemed to need to company as well, and I was glad to oblige. 

My dad is the one constant in my life.  He taught me how to be strong when everything is going wrong.  How to fish, how to camp.  How to gut and filet a flounder.  How to chop wood for the fireplace.  He taught me how to grill and encouraged creative cooking in the kitchen.  He pushed me while learning to snowboard and became my strongest influence when I began slalom racing in college.  He taught me to dream big and to believe that the unachievable was always achievable; you just had to want it.  He taught me to believe in myself, to be independent, strong willed. 

When I got into graduate school in the south east, a vast distance between where I wanted to be and where I was ending up, he was the first to remind me that I wasn’t settling, but instead that I was making the right choice.  He reminded me it was exactly where I needed to be to get to where I wanted.

I hoped he was right.

The stewardess took my glass devoid of whiskey.  With my headphones clinging to my ears, I saw her lips mouth if I wanted another one, but I silently shook my head no.  Three strong whiskeys and I barely felt a thing.  I silently cursed the Irish in me and wondered if I would sleep at all on my redeye headed for Minneapolis.  I suspected not.  Not without another drink, at least.

I once again stared out at the dark landscape through my airplane window.  Sparse city lights and white expanses of snow covered earth just barely glowed under the full moon.  I longed for stars.  This dark landscape felt foreign to me.  It was the first time I had seen absolute darkness since April.  It was now August.  At the same time, I longed for the aurora borealis.  Mostly, I just longed for something familiar.  Something constant.  Something that, like the moonlight, I knew would always be there, no matter where I went.

I thought about my Dad.  Then I silently laughed as I thought about the lack of whiskey in my hand.  But I couldn’t stop staring at the landscape below me.  The all too soon replacement of spruce for yellow popular.  Snow for waterfalls.  Culture based on survival replaced by civil war reenactments. I felt abandoned in my own mind.  I knew the book was right.  I knew my dad was right.  I knew temporary meant opportunity.  I knew that one day, I would be back.  But as we continued to fly east, past everything I had lived and breathed for the last year and a half, I still felt sunken.

I thought back to that last embrace on the couch.  The way I sunk into his arms and let myself feel vulnerable to the changing world around me.  The way he kissed my forehead like we weren’t departing in a couple hours.  The way we casually said goodbye as if we’d see each other in the morning.

I didn’t long for that moment the way I thought I would.  I longed for something, but I didn’t know what.  Staring into the dark expanse that was my new future, I propped my pillow near the airplane window and closed my eyes.  I wandered in and out of light sleep until my mind finally rested with me.  I slept, gently, and dreamed of nothing.