I have had requests from folks to tell more about my summer, and subsequent Alaskan move, and this is the post that will answer all those questions and probably some you didn't have. So sit down and buckle up, we've got a long journey ahead.
The story begins way back in January of this year, a few days after the New Year to be precise. I was sitting in a friend's living room and we were talking about how well work was going - everyone seemed happy, everything was running smoothly, etc. Ahh, those words are a gamble. Less than a week later the first of a series of devastating and difficult blows came. I cannot go into all the details, it is not only my story to tell, but by the beginning of February I was once again sending out my resume to find a new job.
I started with more "typical" jobs, but summer camp is my first love and so I included my resume onto a typical job hunting summer camp website. I was soon flooded with cold calls and emails, job offers from around the country - I even interviewed for a few. And then one day I opened my email to find one with the catchy subject "Spend Your Summer in Alaska!" Intrigued, and slightly dubious, I filled out the online questions and it wasn't long before I received a follow-up email asking to set up a job interview with Girl Scouts of Alaska. We wrestled with timing (I had no clue how familiar I was soon to become with the time difference between Alaska and Pennsylvania) and set up the phone interview. It was a long and difficult interview and it ended with a job offer I accepted on the spot. I walked out of the room with a sense of unreality. On New Year's I was fully settled into Bethany, with plans for the long-term and by Easter I told my closest friends that I was going to Alaska for the summer.
Leaving Bethany was an agonizing decision and not one I entered into lightly. Bethany taught me so much, introduced me to the amazing world of before and after school care, and gave me some of the fondest memories of kids and working with kids that I have. I had some truly magical moments at Bethany, met some amazing people, and it, in no small way, changed my life. However, things at Bethany were changing and I could not (again for reasons that are not wholly mine to tell) stay on in my current position. I cried several times in the weeks leading up to my two week announcement, and I cried the day I told the kids. So did they. My last two weeks at Bethany were an extremely emotional time, with everyone's emotions running the roller coaster. When I closed the door behind me on April 15th for the final time, I couldn't quite identify which emotion I felt most strongly (and I still can't).
Wait, you say, what about Alaska? Oh, I remembered Alaska all through the difficult months of March and April and into May, but there was so much else going on, so many other people dealing with equally difficult decisions that, except for a shopping trip or two and an ever-growing pile of stuff destined for the summer, most of the time my mind was not focused on the summer ahead. After leaving Bethany, I spent the last two weeks of April visiting friends in Philly and my sister in Virginia and the first two weeks of May moving out of my apartment.
And then suddenly it was here. Most of what I owned was in a storage unit, my car was in a friend's driveway, my apartment was gone, and I was at the airport waiting to board a flight to Anchorage, Alaska and a summer of 100% unknown. If I didn't know how I was feeling when I left Bethany, I was overwhelmed by emotions at the Philly airport. I actually cried standing at security while they went through my carry-on luggage (I forgot and left batteries in my carry-on). By the end of that day, four time zones and many hours and waiting at airports later, sitting in a camp van riding from Anchorage to Wasilla and Camp Togowoods, I was more exhausted than emotional. We were halfway there when one of my favorite songs came on the CD and I knew...I knew that everything was going to be okay.
Friends, everything was more than okay. Alaska Summer 2016 as part of GSAK's SouthEast Travel Team was an amazing, challenging, rewarding, difficult, and ultimately growing experience. (For reference, what I refer to as SE Alaska is the bit that hangs down beside Canada if you look at it on a map.) My co-travel partner (Tantiana) and I were pretty sure we were mismatched at the beginning, however as we continued through the summer, we quickly became very close friends. We marched in Kake's 4th of July parade, met Daffodil the haunted van, picked salmonberries and thimbleberries, went roller skating, met a group of awful missionaries from Minnesota, sang Girl Scout songs repeat-after-me style through the streets of small SE Alaska communities (and once on a plane with less than ten others on board), went canoeing, shared late night exploratory walks through Alaska's nearly 24 hour sunshine, experienced the SE Alaska state fair, bought so many souvenirs, enjoyed coffee and tea from local shops, saw bears and eagles and all manners of sea creatures (but no whales!), rode tiny planes that seated six people (and had one memorable flight where it was just us and the pilot), discovered gratitude and optimism, explored the Tongass National Forest, experienced Tsimshian and Tlingit culture, met some awesome hosts, slept in churches, people's spare rooms, and a dorm room (I once slept almost an entire week sleeping on top of a pool table), enjoyed elk and moose burgers and caribou sausage, went on hiking trips, played on playgrounds, swam in lakes and oceans (first time touching the Pacific for me!), climbed trees, saw Mendenhall Glacier, had bitter arguments and long, heartfelt conversations, enjoyed sunsets and photography, and, of course, talked with and taught and learned from and had fun with the absolutely amazing girls we met and worked with in South East Alaska. There is an entire album dedicated to the subject on my Facebook. I recommend you go check it out.
We spent the last weekend of the summer going to an all-night music festival and hanging out at Tantiana's grandparents' house, and
finally watching
The Proposal. Right before I boarded an airplane bound for Philadelphia, we took our Director out for a meal. In the course of the conversation she mentioned a different organization, Camp Fire Alaska, knowing that I still hadn't decided what I was going to do in the fall. I boarded the plane (and went through security for the first time all summer without having my bags opened and checked! - did you know peanut butter is a liquid? I didn't) with those words still ringing in my ears.
They were still ringing in my ears when I arrived back in PA and it wasn't too long (though it was after enjoying some Turkey Hill coffee and breathing good old Lancaster County air and visiting my favorite haunts) before I was on the Internet and looking up this Camp Fire. "Hey, they are hiring for Site Directors - I am qualified for that!" Less than two weeks, two phone interviews, one wedding (congrats again to my niece and new nephew-in-law), one storage unit move, one car inspection, and many hours spent soaking up Lancaster County-ness), and I was suddenly in my car about to drive from Ephrata, Pennsylvania to Anchorage, Alaska.
Before I continue telling this tale, I need to take a moment to say thank you to the Miller family, who have gone above and beyond the bounds of friendship. Even before I left PA the first time they were good friends, inviting me to family holidays, helping me out when I totaled my car, and generally being amazing people. But over the course of summer and into the fall, they have once again transcended themselves and helped me move not once but twice, helped repair my car, given me advice, driven me back and forth from the airport, called and texted, gave me a place to stay between Alaska trips, scrounged through my storage unit to send me things I have forgotten, held and forwarded my mail, and are generally some of my favorite humans.
I left PA on Sunday morning and I drove into Eagle River, a suburb of Anchorage, the following Sunday evening. It was a very long, hot, arduous, and difficult trip. I did get to drive a good majority of the Alaska Highway which was an amazing experience. I documented most of the trip in a FB photo album you can go check out.
I am staying with Tantiana's grandparents (see how the world works?) and driving the twenty-two minutes to and from Anchorage where I am the Site Director at Camp Fire's program at Denali Montessori School (they have 31 sites throughout the greater Anchorage area). It has been a challenging two months (I can't believe I have been back in Alaska that long). Camp Fire is doing excellent work with the children here and I am glad to be a part of their organization. I am extremely grateful for my direct Supervisor, a wonderful woman who has been a strong ally and support as I find my feet as a Site Director. I have also been doing some part-time office work with GSAK.
I have no idea what the future holds, as I rather think this post has proven, however, my goal as it stands right now in November of 2016, is to move back to Pennsylvania at the end of the school year. I have no doubt that Camp Fire (and Alaska) is and shall continue to be a challenging, though ultimately rewarding, experience and it is also not a permanent thing. My heart still lies in PA and with my close friends and family located there.
Okay, enough about me! I'm going to take the last bit of this post to try to talk more about Alaska since I've gotten a lot of questions about it since living here.
Alaska is two times bigger than Texas and fully 1/5 the size of the entire "Lower 48" with less people living in the entire state than the city of Philadelphia. As you may imagine, that means that life up here is a little...different. I compare visiting Alaska more to visiting a foreign country than a different American state. With cities and communities spanning the entire state there is no road system that connects them all (not to mention that Juneau, the capital city, is located on an island). People move to Alaska for a couple of reasons: oil, hunting/fishing/outdoors, the military, or to not be near people and the state caters to them all. There are four major types of people up here: Native Alaskans (those born here), Alaskan Natives (those whose family trees are with the indigenous people), Transplanted Alaskans (those who chose to move here for whatever reason and set up shop), and those like me (the transient ones, here for a season). Tourism is the biggest source of income, but that is pretty much a solely summer thing (though in the summer when the cruise ships are in town they can double - or even triple - the population of such cities as Ketchikan and Sitka, not to mention the smaller communities connected to the inter-island passage and completely overwhelm the cell phone towers). The scenery differs depending on where in the state you are, but life follows one consistent theme, Alaskans love Alaska (people here wear "Alaska" shirts with the same dedication as other states wear shirts with the logo of their favorite sports team) and love to be left to their own devices to do life the Alaskan way.
Drive ten minutes out of Anchorage, the largest city in the state, and you could swear you were deep in the country, with no one for miles. Moose and bears regularly wander into intensely populated areas and cause traffic fatalities on a consistent basis. People are flown to Anchorage from the rest of the state for most major surgery and all autopsies, but some surgeries are dire enough people need to be flown to Seattle, Washington because medical here just isn't enough. (The state trooper force is so strung out in the less populated and more remote parts of Alaska - the North, Southeast, and Southwest - that in 2013 a girl was murdered and left without police on the scene for over 11 hours and was guarded only by local townspeople. I stayed in this town this summer, in fact in the very building the murder took place, and it is a beautiful community with amazing local culture and members.) Despite the high volume of traffic on the Glen Highway (one of only two highways in or out of Anchorage and the only one connecting Anchorage to the "Valley"), if you drive it often enough you start to see the same vehicles over and over and over because honestly, it's the same exact people driving it at the same exact time as you every day.
Blockbusters are a thing up here still. Honestly, what is or isn't here still surprises me on an almost daily basis. It takes weeks to ship anything here - Amazon overnight is laughable - and it is normal to see grocery stores "run out" of an item because it hasn't been shipped in. It isn't as bad in Anchorage as it is in some of the smaller towns and communities, but it isn't unusual for Walmart or Fred Meyers (the gigantic version of Meijers or Walmart that is a part of the overall "Kroger/Turkey Hill coorporation) to run out of a certain kind of perishable food. Yes, food (esp perishable) is more expensive up here, but wages are higher as well. Also they have a fun version of over time - you get overtime if you go over 40 hours in one week OR if you go over 8 in one day.
The sunrise is already around 9:30 am with sunset around 5:30, with those times growing rapidly closer together on a daily basis. We lose about five minutes of sun a day and the forecast suggests sunrise will be closer to 11 and sunset to 4 by the end of December. Judging by the dusk that passed as "night" during the summer in Anchorage, I think the daylight hours will be more "dusky" than sunny in a few short months. It also snowed for the first time in the middle of October. For a state that gets a lot of snow, they are really bad at cleaning the roads - sprinkling the roads with gravel (not much nicer to drive on than ice) and relying on the volume of traffic to clean the ice and snow off of the roads. Temperatures right now range from 9-35 degrees most days.
There is a sweatshirt (that I plan on owning before I leave the state) that reads "Alaska: Just North of Normal" and I honestly don't think I've seen anything that more accurately sums it all up.
I hope I was able to provide you with not only a look at my life for the past months, but also a peek into life in Alaska as well. I also hope you enjoyed this journey and please share it with others that are not on FB that you think might enjoy hearing about it. If you have more questions feel free to ask, I love to answer questions, especially about Alaska. Thank you to those of you who have shared this journey with me, especially in texting or calling or messaging me - Alaska is pretty remote and contact with the outside world is beloved. The time difference thing (Alaska is four hours behind EST) is a definitely a THING, but I will respond to you as I can.
As my good friend JRR Tolkein once said, "It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to."
I bought a new winter coat today. That might not sound noteworthy, but it's been ten years since I bought the last one. It was a great coat, a bit torn and stained now, but it survived. And I'm buying the same brand because it survived so well.
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