Sitka in the Fall

Three months pass.

We gather around the dining table every Sunday, sharing food and cheer, washing dishes (it is the only time of the week when the drainer is fully empty, and the kitchen is really clean), and we play games and discuss chores. There are 12 of us here, and perhaps one ghost, though only Sally’s seen her. In the shower. At least it’s a hygienic ghost. I wake up and I look out through a windowshade-less window – I keep forgetting to put it back up – and across a lawn often resplendent with golden retrievers and modern day atlatls, and across a public tennis court and playground, across a Crescent Harbor full of thin-masted boats, across a Sitka Sound lavender in sunsets, I see a daisy chain of mountains, capped in snow, wreathed in clouds, and protecting us from a world we’ve left behind.

The frost in the morning here is hairier, hoarier, than any I’ve ever seen. A blade of grass is transformed into a crystal Christmas tree, and if you walk through the woods before the sun rises to its mid-morning apex, you may mistake the frost for a mist. The alder trees are grayed and shimmery in the sidelight, the ever present sidelight of wintery Alaska.

The pictures you see of Sitka paint a misleading idyllic picture. Most days the ceiling is low, especially outdoors, and I imagine that, from the way the street blends into the mountainside blends into the clouds, the world is folding in on itself, and that I live in the shoebox project of a cosmic kindergartener. The puddles on the sidewalk rarely fully disappear, though now they are beginning to ice over. The people’s favorite footwear here are XtraTuf boots, good for fishing, hiking, and generally being outside in Sitka. I didn’t expect to move to a temperate rainforest when I moved to Alaska, but when my brother texts me about single digit temperatures in Wisconsin, and my mother talks about a freezing cold snap in Texas, I am none too upset by the irony. But the snow this morning reminded me I do miss the snow. I think I miss the snow even when I don’t think about it.

But when the sun does shine in Sitka, the edenic setting comes alive, and your friends start disappearing up mountains, if you haven’t beat them to it.

Three months pass, and it’s almost hard to recall the night kayaks that started my first week here. The one where the oars brought bioluminescent phytoplankton to light the night with their swirls of white-blue trailing your silent skimming. We forage wild huckleberries and blueberries, and our neighbors give us salmon and rockfish, the campus garden gifts us sorrel and celery, kale and chard. We meet other young wanderers: Americorp, Jesuit Volunteers, transplants from as far away as Australia. We walk in parades, play trivia at the pub, and dance contras. Our basement, their living room, their dining room, the pub, the street, the stage, we dance and we dance and we dance.

Three months pass, and our jobs normalize, and though we still have two thirds of our fellowships ahead of us, we look to what’s next. We’re always looking at what’s next; when do you become old enough to look at what’s here?

I direct a play, and some of these kids are precisely where I was six years ago, and six years ago feels so meaningless. And at nights, in my house, we discuss the problems of the world, the capitalism, the patriarchy, the system, the environment, the treating people like people, the what do I really know anyway, the how can I what can I why can I not do anything. And I feel young, and I feel hopeful, and I feel like the planet will reject us in a hundred years, and I feel angry, and I feel irresponsible, and I can’t sleep. I have a hard time sleeping in Sitka, and my mind wanders backwards. But I direct a play, and I do my job, and I love it, and I think, “How can I do this all the time?” And then I meet a woman who raised the turkey we eat for Thanksgiving, and I think about the turkeys we raised last year, and I think, “How can I get back to a farm?” And I talk to my friends, and I think, “How can I get back to New York? How can I get to Chicago? How can I get to Germany?” And Charlie writes a song, and she sings, we can’t be everywhere. Oh no, we can’t be everywhere.

Three months pass, and a text wakes me a little after midnight, and it tells me the northern lights arise. I leave the house and I walk onto, out into the ocean, and I search the sky. I wander along the shore, and the dim lights from the street, and the branches from the trees are still overpowering, and I am searching for them, looking to the stars. I hide behind the gym, and the tall walls occlude all the lights and I look up and the sky pulses. It is not magnificent; it does not change my life. But I can feel the sky racing, little sheets of white charging out above me, and the cold drives me back to my bed, but not before the same questions flutter past my eyelids.