The Multi-Million Dollar Art Project

I came back to Alaska in February of 2006 feeling refreshed from my travels and ready to put all my energy into working long hours and replenishing my nearly nonexistent bank account so that I could continue with my new world of traveling during the off season. At first I was just an off-loader and general worker at the plant but through a series of bizarre and unexpected events mostly attributing merely to my being in the right place at the right time - somehow I ended up being the production manager as we attempted to pull the plant back into full production. This was a situation it had not been in since its hey day nearly a decade before when I had worked there just out of college. But I had learned well many of the jobs involved and understood the general process of things as well as having a good rapport with the fleet. So, rather suddenly, this opportunity involving a good deal of power, control, and autonomy landed in my lap. We started recruiting workers mostly from Eastern Europe : Russia, Serbia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Turkey... We were shorthanded at the beginning, so most of us who had any experience were generally doing the job of about 12 people each. So we immediately started training new people for individual positions to try to take some of the load off of ourselves. It was quite an adventure trying to integrate all of these foreign cultures into the small town frame of mind that was this remote fishing village. There were some issues of ethnic friction among the employees - as some of these countries have a history of war and bloodshed from time immemorial - and often left to their own designs the natural instinct of people was to segregate into their various ethnic divisions and maintain an US vs Them mentality. We managed to pull together a small team of management people, ALL of whom had about as much experience in "management" as me - namely NONE. But we were young and fresh, with all kinds of ideas, and we spent time brainstorming and doing problem solving exercises as a group, and then were actually able to implement our solutions and watch the results unfold whether it be success or failure. It was an amazing experience to be able to be in a position to effect that kind of change on such a large scale. I found myself filled with a level of confidence I had never felt before when 2 months into our season one of my co-managers and I stood out on the plant floor listening to the hum of a smoothly flowing operation of 100+ employees speaking 5 different languages who all knew how to do their job and work together as a team. We looked at each other with such a sense of pride because when those kids had arrived not one of them had ever worked in the fishing business before and our first month or so had been complete chaos, but here we were watching everyone moving as cogs in a well oiled machine. It was particularly incredible because none of our little management group were your typical "business" types. We were all a bunch of artists and hippies who had a very different way of looking at how things should be run. I won't say our first attempt was perfect : we certainly came away from that season with a long list of changes that we wanted to make and improvements to our management plan, but it was a positive first attempt and the upper management group were happy with our team and wanted us to return in the spring. Before we all departed for the winter, we sat down to a little brain storming session to list all the problems we had that year and try to come up with ways to solve them. All of our little group went away with our minds bustling with ideas of changes to be made in the next season to make things work even more smoothly and ways to reduce the ethnic friction that had occurred at the beginning by simply forcing people to work in small groups with people of other ethnicities. Through the removal of the possibility of clannishness and the bonding that occurs from working together closely for long hours and under duress - we found that friendships began to form across ethnic divisions. This gave us even more ideas and a hope for the future more profound than anything to do with working in a seafood processing plant in Alaska. This season had an enormous effect on me and when I left that winter to begin my first real SOLO travel in a trek around the world, I did so with a level of confidence and satisfaction I had not previously had, and a solid belief in my own ability to effect real change in the world.

Alaska Immersion

I got back from China with $25 to my name and feeling like my tail was between my legs. I bolted straight for Pelican which somehow seemed like a safe haven. I was awash with emotions and mostly hid at my friend Paula's house for the first few weeks when I was not at work. But the cocoon did it's job and it wasn't long before I started spending time with a local guy of Russian and Inuit background who had grown up there. He was very outdoorsy and loved to go hunting and hiking through the wilderness that surrounded us. In the following months all of our spare time was spent traipsing through the muskeg and wandering deep into the wilds experiencing the natural vicinity of this place in which I had spent so much time but which I had never really known. I grew to be very attached to Alaska and found the wildness and enormity of Nature's boundless beauty to be breathtaking and so healing. We would take a skiff out to the ocean and go wave jumping through the surf then tie up at some remote location on one of the small unnamed coastal islands and wander off into the unknown, perhaps traveling in places no one had ever set foot on before. No trails or paths, just forging through the wild, sharing space with the very real threat of Grizzly Bears, hypothermia, storms that could leave you stranded and unable to return - just a few miles from town but completely out of contact... The danger attracted me. This idea of living on the edge of things. This was one of the things I always loved about living in China as well. The safety of life in America was always one of the things that left me feeling bored and unfulfilled. Ever since I hiked the Appalachian Trail and had a taste of a life where every day was a question of survival - it is like a drug I cannot get enough of. And the untamed quality of life is also intoxicating. There was some part of my soul that was finally rearing it's head with no trails or path burned in it yet - just a miasma of wilderness and uncontrolled emotions pulsing endlessly in a wild dark night. Alaska spoke to me in secret quiet ways. I could stand at the mouth of the inlet and look up at the mountains that stretched all around me up into forever. And the boundless stars made the sky into infinity. This period of time helped me regain my calm, refreshed me with a silence which I didn't realize had been missing during my time in a country with a billion people... It struck a chord in my heart and filled me with a deep love for this quiet corner of the world where everyone knows each other by their first names and would help even their greatest enemy in a time of trouble because that is what you do when death lies just around every corner. Alaska was cemented in my heart in a thousand ways it never had been before and I knew that it would always be a part of me.

I was there from September to December, and then I headed back into the world and spent the winter visiting family and friends who I hadn't seen since I left for China.

The Nomad's First Steps

I know I said that Alaska was the next stop on this crazy ride.... but in my attempt to make my last post at least minimally cohesive I left out a very important set of happenings... and a shift that happened within me. As I said previously, up until my move to China I had only traveled in foreign places with a guided tour group (with the exception of a week in Mexico with Chris where we stumbled along with minimal Spanish - but Mexico somehow seems less scary, perhaps because of its' proximity???) Even on my arrival in Tibet, there was someone there to meet me and always someone to fall back on for help to figure things out and to travel with around China. I do admit though, in the beginning, there were many times when I felt very alone - one person surrounded by hundreds of thousands who spoke only Chinese.... But as my language skills improved I started traveling more in the countryside on my own. I fumbled my way along for awhile but I found that without any English speakers or guides around to help your language skills improve dramatically by necessity. I found that I LOVED traveling solo because there was never any question of compromise. Whatever I wanted to do is exactly what i did and I never had to worry about another person not being interested in the things I wanted to do or worrying that they were bored and therefore sacrificing my own interests in order to make my traveling partners comfortable. I enjoy traveling WITH people as well, because it is really nice to share experiences with someone and to have another mind there to bounce ideas off of and to help you process the events which are constantly and inevitably changing you. Both ways of travel are excellent and valuable. But the idea of traveling completely alone had previously been out of my frame of reference. I did quite a bit of travel within China while I lived there, but the most important trip was one that was born of a random conversation..... My friend and colleague, Suzanne, a Singaporean girl who was teaching at the same school as me, was at my apartment one day and in boredom we were flipping through a mini travel atlas and got stuck on SE ASIA. She mentioned she had to go to Singapore for a wedding. I mentioned I always wanted to see Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Angkor Wat is between here and there. Why don't we go overland? Thus was born our two month meander through Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Hong Kong. For me it was another first. I had a travel partner but there was no guide and we didn't speak the languages in any of these countries except Hong Kong. We had a vague plan but no set dates except our flight out of Hong Kong in the end. We took trains and buses to the southern border of China and walked across into Vietnam. From there we spent several weeks traveling south to the Mekong Delta then took a boat up the Mekong into Cambodia. After our pilgrimages to Angkor Wat and Tuol Sleng we headed north and took another boat into Laos. We spent several more weeks there and then hopped a train south to Bangkok. I am summarizing greatly as the purpose of this blog is not to tell every detail of my past but to explain how it has changed me. At some point I may post a blog for that trip. Those who have known me since then got to see my emails and photos during that trip....and you can look on my flickr site where eventually all my good photos will be posted. I experienced many amazing things - night spotting for nocturnal critters while walking through the jungle in the middle of the night in pitch black - listening to the jungle wake up at night into a symphony of sound....especially the hollow staccato sound of the centipedes - a sky of endless fireflies in a mesmerizing dance - swimming into caves in Halong Bay - eating cuttlefish - learning to play a mouth harp - seeing a play performed with water puppetry - playing with phosphorescence in the South China Sea - eating pineapple pancakes - getting the worst sunburn of my life - riding in every kind of boat imaginable and then some you haven't got the imagination to think up - visiting a Cao Dai temple - riding motorbike taxis whenever possible - dancing with a serpent - the endless faces on the wall at Tuol Sleng Torture Museum and the monument filled with skulls at the Killing Fields in Phnom Penh - relearning American history from the viewpoint of the people of SE Asia - chasing river dolphins - geckos echoing in the night - the epic grandeur of Angkor Wat and the incredible stone gardens that the jungle tries ever to take back - monkeys playing with my things - riding an elephant through the jungle - an adventure hiking up a waterfall with a multitude of dragonflies, getting caught in a downpour and having to bushwhack our way through the jungle to find our way back - tubing down a river full of zip lines and swings - swimming in a bottomless lagoon - relaxing at our sunning spot in the middle of the river on Don Det - the tree of life - LAO food - kitties everywhere - hiking to the hill tribes - mango sticky rice - riding 3 to a moped with our favorite ladyboy after a burlesque show - the endless treasures to be found on Khao San Road - getting my hair dreaded and beaded - and friends, friends, and more friends who we meet and leave and meet again. I wasn't going to describe it but the memories pour in despite me. My point was this: there was no schedule, no framework, no plan. We woke up in the morning and decided if we wanted to stay or go to a new place. Then we decided where. We did ALL the things we wanted to do. We skimped on housing and food but splurged on jungle adventures and entrance fees. Even so - we ate PLENTY of amazing food. We tried anything new that someone put in front of us. Local food is cheap. We balanced tourist sites that interested us with time in nature and physical expeditions and time spent with local people in their homes. After such a trip, a week long guided tour to some exotic place could never again suffice for me. I was addicted. I was changed. Most of the people I met were traveling for 6 months, a year, or more - all over the world. The person that came back to America and fled immediately to Alaska had all of this very recently pent up inside her as well as all the heartbreak mentioned in the previous post. No wonder I needed to go hide for a while. So I will stop here again, because now it is really time for the episode in Alaska.

Upheaval, Chaos, and Bliss at the Top of the World

Trying to summarize events like these is difficult to say the least. For anyone who has never lived outside the country of their birth for any significant period of time, much of what you will read here will only partly sink in. I can't begin to explain what happens to you, but it is permanent. And everyone who has shared my experience knows exactly what I am talking about. There are several kinds of people who are living in "foreign" countries. One kind is doing their little stint of exploration time before which they fully intend to return to their own country and settle down for their "real" life having fulfilled the expected episode of adventure which makes them a fuller more well rounded person and which allows them to have a good stock of interesting stories to tell their grandchildren by the hearth fire in the end days of their long and peaceful lives. I am not knocking this. For many people this is all the taste they will ever need of the rest of the world. I have met people here in Martha's Vineyard who have never lived anywhere but here and have no desire to ever leave this place. It is not a sentiment I could ever share but I have seen it shining in their eyes as they spoke it so I know it must be possible for such feelings to be true. These period travelers have their time of traveling and then return home to begin building their careers and families. They are comforted and nestled in the culture of their birth and it is heartwarming and welcoming and good and they
are happy to return.
And then there are those of us who go native.
And then there are those of us who go wild all together.... humpty dumpty had a great fall.... and the pieces wont go back together at all.
I'm sorry this is a random and sporadic explanation. When I came back from Tibet to visit after being away from America for 2 years my brother said that I spoke English like a person who had studied it well and knew all the rules but didn't really grok it well. Didn't really understand the nuances and the cultural references and the humor.... My phraseology was off and my sentence structure seemed backwards at times - or just a little bit alien. I got my cadence back quickly -- it is the mark of a true chameleon that it only takes a short time to shapeshift once you have learned that shape well -- but it was something much deeper than language that had been altered.
When you grow up in one place there is a generally accepted and assumed world view that we all agree to share by living in this particular corner of the world. I am not just talking about rules or commandments or religions. Notions of reality are a part of it as well - customs, proprieties, ideas of what is right and what is wrong, of what is real and what is true and what is utterly ridiculous. Living in America my whole life I grew up with all the same beliefs not just that we hold in the United States, but also those held to be generally true in the greater western world -- the so-called "civilized" world.

And then she woke up.

Visiting other worlds than our own.....taking a trip to Prague, vacationing in Bali, going on retreat in Goa, visiting Machu Picchu....these are tastes of flavors in the world that are new and delicious and interesting. But you don't really get it, not even a tiny bit, until you have been there for years. And even then only a little bit. Until you speak their language and can think in it and understand that there are concepts that exist in other cultures which cannot even be expressed in your language because the ideas are so different and alien that there are no words for it. You begin to realize that behaviors which are so normal to you that you notice them as little as your own breathing - are alien and incomprehensible for an entire country who just stares at you in disbelief or confusion. That ideas about freedom which we may hold self-evident and take for granted are very young little fledgling ideas even in the so-called "land of the free" and that they exist because people fought and struggled and died for them. That words like childhood and adulthood, friendship and love, marriage, truth, honesty, medicine, work ethics, family and saving face - may translate literally from one language to the next but that the ideas behind them are not being translated if the assumption behind them is that the meaning is remotely similar. You begin to realize that the foundations of your world which you assumed to be real and truth and incontrovertible because everyone around you agreed with you are being shaken at the core because you have found an entire other world out there who believes that the sky isn't blue as you once believed. And then you find that you can see the sky not blue as well. You can still remember when it was blue, and can drag yourself back to seeing it blue if you must. But in that place it just makes more sense to see it as not blue - because then everything starts to make more sense.

And a part of you steps outside yourself and realizes that all of these rules and mores, social norms and expectations - everything in your entire world that you have ever held true is just one way of looking at the world. And now you have seen another. No better or worse. No judgment. Just another and different way. And then you pan out across the globe and realize how many other worlds there are - how many other world views - how many truths - how many realities and your head starts to spin.

And you learn that while moving through these worlds you wear their reality like a garment, because it aids in communication and acceptance and understanding - but in truth - none of it is real and you are bound by nothing except what is real and true in your own heart.
The divisiveness in this world seems to me to be based largely on the ideas that you are different than me. That my countries ideas are the correct way of thinking and all the outsiders are strange and odd. That my religion, my beliefs are the only valid and correct way and all the others are heretics. But what if you see another way that is completely different and also right. Are they ALL right? Are NONE of them "RIGHT"? Everyone knows in their own heart when they have done something wrong - when they have caused harm. No one needs a set of rules or commandments to teach them what is right or wrong. In fact the rules don't even correctly answer all situations because they don't take relativity into account. They don't allow for extenuating circumstance, but our hearts do - our gut instincts. Now your entire framework for reality and how the pattern of your life should play out has been blasted all to pieces and you find you are floating free and the only thing left that is keeping you tethered is FEAR.

And then somehow you discover that everyone is afraid. The question is : will you let your fear rule you, placate you, coddle you, constrain you, chain you ... so that in the end your life is full of regret. Or will you feel the fear and do it anyway.

And then you look behind you because you wish you could take it back but the door you came through is no bigger than your knee now and there is no way you could possibly fit back through.
It is not a comfortable way to live.
In the literal sense of things : while in China I taught English to students of many ages, ran a small travel agency of Tibetan tour guides with my Tibetan friend and partner, learned to speak Mandarin Chinese passably well, and Amdo Tibetan enough for little conversations. I loved and loved deeply a man who fit my ideal of everything I ever wanted in a partner. Both tough and sweet, rugged and outdoorsy, a singer and a musician and a dancer, a lover of languages who spoke about 9 himself, and a spiritual thinker, a playful generous spirit whose mind was like a child's, always seeing everything as new and exciting and wonderful. And I watched our 2 cultures clash and I watched it tear him apart. I got hassled by the Chinese police for being a foreigner spending time with a Tibetan infidel - since we must obviously be fomenting revolution in our most intimate moments. I got hassled by his Tibetan father who wanted properly traditional Tibetan grandchildren and a demure Tibetan wife for his son who could pour the tea properly when dignitaries came to visit. One who wouldn't taint the women in his family with ideas that were far from subservient. I learned that no matter how much love you both may have - it is not always going to work out. Sometimes there are things more valuable than what you think is your own happiness at stake. And sometimes it is worth making sacrifices to preserve them. And sometimes people cannot be forced to grow but need to do it in their own time. And no one should be blamed for failing to do something which their entire culture has not even allowed the possibility for yet. And sometimes the plan which we see for ourselves as perfect is not really the perfect plan after all - that if only we could see a bit further down the road we might realize that sometimes events which seem tragic and dismal and the negation of all that is good in the world are in fact surmountable and might turn out really excellent in the end. Even more amazing than we could have imagined on our own - because that was another door - one we had not yet stepped through. And that love never dies really. No matter how many million miles and stories and years and experiences get in between.

I remember a time when I used to have the same ideas in my head about how life would be. School....college.... career.... marriage.... kids..... house..... pets... cars... picket fence... I remember my ideas of how relationships were supposed to be. Of how work was supposed to be. Of what a home was supposed to be. Of what SUCCESS was....
I tore all of those apart into pieces and threw away everything that didn't work for me anymore.
This is what China did to me.
This is what I did to China.

When I left America I remember the idea of arriving alone in the Beijing airport was frightening - because it was foreign and I spoke no Chinese. Moving to China was the most frightening thing I had ever done and had taken so much courage to even try. The idea of leaving everything familiar to go out into the complete unknown was terrifying. When I returned to America in the end - after living abroad for nearly 3 years - it would not have occurred to me to be frightened to fly into any airport in the world - whether I spoke the language or not. The idea that there is no real plan and that everything is possible - every little dream I ever had - was firmly in place.

I am sorry if this explanation/summary has turned out a bit preachy in any way. I have to say that China changed me in ways that I am still discovering. As I said before - it is not a comfortable way to live. I love America - there are so many people I love here. So many beautiful places I cherish. I love the open and frank conversations I can have with people here. I love the honesty I can find in people here. The authenticity. The passion. There are places where these things cannot be found. But I don't know if I will ever be comfortable living here again. Not in any permanent way. It's like we all learn the rules to the game as kids. We grow up knowing how to play and some of us get really good at it and become happy and successful within the parameters of the game and love it utterly. Never would want to not be a part of the companionship of the game, the sharing involved in being a part of something that an entire huge group of people can share and understand and know where they stand within the framework and that their lives make a little more sense because of this feeling of security. I know many of these people and sometimes envy them - visit and cherish and live vicariously through them. But somewhere along the way I forgot the rules to the game. I fell off the game board completely. I know the rules I guess but it's like the way I spoke English to my brother with a Tibetan accent. I'm stumbling along trying to play the game because I've learned all the rules but they don't really make sense to me any more. It took me all of one day in Seattle to realize something was irreconcilably different inside.

And I hopped a plane and fled back to Alaska. That place of wildness and beauty, of danger and possibility, that place where keenings must happen, where molting occurs and where rebirthings are the inevitable result of any real experience.
And it is there - in Pelican, Alaska that the next episode of this story takes place.

The Quiet Season

PORTLAND

Living in Portland was the pretty much the only stable, peaceful period in my life so far. I was in a steady relationship. We cared deeply for each other. We had a home, furniture, art, lots of movies and books and THINGS. I lived there for 6 years and became quite dug in to the whole idea of home and hearth. I started gardening - no real surprise there considering the parents I come from - and by the end had a huge landscaped garden which had become my living art project. I spent hours and hours every day out in my garden, my hands in the dirt, talking to birds and squirrels and plants... It was my meditation as well, and I felt most at peace when simply puttering about, moving this plant over there and pruning that vine back a bit, building trellises out of bamboo. My dream in my head was to recreate the wilderness that took over Max's room in Where the Wild Things Are. I wanted my yard to be like a tropical jungle around me. My cats were of utmost importance as well. I had 4 of them over time, though not all at once. They were my babies and my sanity and we raised them all from kittens. During that time I also went back to school to become a massage therapist because I was tired of working for other people and hated the fact that no matter how hard I worked I still only had a week or two free every year for travel and vacation. Traveling and seeing the world, which was the joy I found in Anthropology classes in college, was the only thing I really wanted to do but somehow I got stuck in the daily grind - bills to pay just to keep living - never the right time to go and never enough time to really absorb anything... It was a dormant disgruntlement, but slowly, quietly building. After working my full time landscaping job during the day for 2 years while taking massage classes at night, I graduated and started my business. Then for another year I worked full time at my day job and did massages on nights and weekends. I was exhausted for a year, but it paid off and I was finally able to quit my day job and have my massage practice as my sole income. In that first year I took 5 weeks paid vacation and it made a big impact on me. Since I worked for myself, I could work my ass off for a while to make some extra cash and then take off as much time as I wanted knowing that I had already covered my bills for that period of time. For the first time in my life I was able to not only take several weeks to spend some quality time with my family, who were still back in New York, but I also took several weeks for travel to new places. During the next few years I was able to visit Hawaii with a friend, and I also was able to visit Peru and go to Machu Picchu which I had always wanted to see ever since I was a child. One day I was at my office and I saw a flyer for a trip to Tibet. I immediately wrote it off as too expensive and kept walking. By the third day I had paid the the entire amount so I couldn't change my mind and chicken out. I don't know why but I was sure I was supposed to take that trip. In the end it turned out to be yet another of those life changing events. I met people who became some of my most intimate friends, saw a world which opened my eyes to things I had never seen before, and saw REAL travelers for the first time. People who weren't on an organized trip with a guide and a schedule and a return ticket. People who had no plan, no destination, no real home. Something inside of me cracked open like an egg that had been trying so hard to keep itself together for so long. I came back from that trip and my home was not my home anymore. The idea of staying there and living out my life in the plan that I had intended suddenly seemed like a cage that I needed to get out of. It was difficult because this feeling overrode everything else, and in the end, tragically, I left my home, my business, my boyfriend, my cats, my garden, my friends, my family, and my country. In some ways it was one of the saddest times in my life. I felt awful abandoning everyone and everything in my life, but I had this horrible feeling that I was at some kind of turning point - that if I didn't escape the comfort of normal life immediately that it would become SO comfortable that I would never have the strength to break away and be the person I always knew I was on the inside but had never had the confidence to be on the outside. I was suddenly terrified that I would live my entire life being comfortable inside that invisible cage that I hadn't even realized was there. And yet, it was also the most exciting time in my life when I finally realized that all those secret dreams I had dreamed of being a world traveler were possible - not just some pipe dream that couldn't ever really come true. All those plans and schedules and expectations of career and family and the normal progress of time were just a guideline. But not necessary. I learned that I could move mountains. I spent the next 8 months living in my office and sleeping on my massage table, while I sorted through my life. I sold, or gave away an entire house worth of STUFF until my entire earthly belongings fit into 3 bags. Then I said some sad goodbyes, got on a plane and flew back to northern Tibet in western China. Since then, nothing in my life has ever been the same.

Wild Alaska...

Betsy's life.zip episode 3

So, the year was 1994 and I had already started getting my annual bout of Spring fever which continues to haunt me yearly ever since I hiked the Appalachian Trail. If I am in a stable position in life when Spring rolls around.... I start to get itchy feet. It's time to move. That time I went to Alaska with my college roommate Paula. To try to summarize the experience of Alaska in a few words is about as hard as it was to summarize the impact the Trail had on my life. It can't be done. It opened up worlds I had never seen. Before that summer the farthest west I had ever been was Wyoming. California was an imaginary land of sunshine and beaches solely peopled by surfer dudes and movie stars. China was a place I had heard of but never thought about and didn't care about at all. It wasn't even in my frame of reference - about as real as television. So suddenly I'm in Alaska - the wild wild west of America - where I flew in a seaplane for the first time in my life and landed in a tiny little village on a remote island in the middle of abject wilderness that stretched into forever. In this town everyone knew everyone else. There were no cars or roads. There were no police. It didn't matter because you could not commit crimes because everyone would know that you did it and they all had guns. There were wild animals everywhere. Grizzly bears would wander through town and scratch their backs on the boardwalk. Killer whales would swim by the dock. Bald eagles were as common as crows. That TV show Northern Exposure? That's where I lived but way WAY smaller. I was working in the fisheries in a world where the men outnumbered the women about 10 to 1. The work was not difficult per se - just hard on the body. It left one prone to tendinitis and carpal tunnel syndrome from the repetitive motion of your handiwork. The reason people do this job is because you get massive amounts of overtime and your living expenses are covered. So you work like a maniac, but you have no time to spend your money and so rack up a pile of cash in a short amount of time. Most people just did their one basic task - the slime line - which was just cleaning the guts out of fish. It was pretty boring work. I never understood how most people could be satisfied just doing their time and collecting their paycheck. It sounded too much like a prison sentence. So after a week or so I started asking them to teach me different things, and then more. By the end of the summer I had learned to do about half the jobs in the plant and had become quite expert at species recognition, which everyone seemed to think was very difficult but which to me was just attention to detail. So I managed to work my way into positions that actually kept my mind occupied as well. I would sort and grade fish at the door as they were offloaded from the fishing boats. I spent my days looking at the beautiful gem colors of watermarks on wild salmon that were freshly caught, sort boatloads of fish by size, species, and quality, and schmoozing the fishermen who would stand by my side and watch over my shoulder to make sure I wasn't cheating. Some were grizzled old men who were cranky or crass, others were young local boys who had grown up there and knew the woods like the back of their hands and were following in their fathers' footsteps, and still others were guys from the lower 48 (as they referred to the rest of America like it were some alien place beyond comprehension) who had walked away from the rat race down below and thrown in their lot to try to make a go of it up there in the wilderness. Whatever it was, it was all beyond my experiences so far. But my smile has gotten me far before and between that and my eventual skill at being able to tell the weight of a fish within a quarter of a pound just by putting my hands on its head and tail and therefore speeding their offload time considerably because I didn't have to weigh each fish - all of this led to me befriending the fleet so that they would ask for me when they came to offload. I found this job interesting and relaxing with a great view of the inlet, mountains and islands in front of me and wildlife going by. I enjoyed the conversations and the general stimulus of exposure to all kinds of new things. It was lucrative enough that I decided not to go back to school in the Fall because the season went into November - and so I took another semester off from school. Going back in the Spring was even harder than it had been the last time. Luckily it was my last semester. I only had 2 classes left to finish my double major in ANTH and English Writing and I finished all the work early and took my exams in a coffee shop on the way to the airport a week before finals so I could go back to Alaska early. I had hoped it would be the same but things had changed. We were required to belong to the ILWU (International Longshoremen and Warehouse Workers Union) as part of the job and the company deducted monthly dues from our paycheck. The union tried to renegotiate the wages of their seniority members and when the company refused to comply they decided that we should go on strike. This was a fight we were not prepared to participate in. We understood that the local people had demands and they were valid and worthy of a strike. But most of us were college students who had spent a lot of money to get up there and had no interest at all in sitting around not working, nor would we benefit in any way since we would be leaving at the end of the season. Needless to say a rather large schism formed in our small little community. It got a bit nasty. A dangerous situation in a place with no police and loaded guns on every living room wall. And then it got worse. The company retaliated by making life miserable for everyone who worked there. Their intent was to break the union and make everyone want to quit so they could hire all new workers from the Philippines and pay them minimum wage and then fire them at the end of the season and keep doing that every year to keep their costs down. My world became small and miserable and meaningless. The conflict was not worth losing friends over. When we tried to voice our rights they found someone who would play their game and tried to get us to train them for our own jobs. So it was time to move again. I had been seeing Chris at that time for several years and so together we decided to hop the next ferry south and get the hell out. He was the foreman at the time. When the crew found out we were leaving (what few that were left by then) a bunch more left with us. It was a mass exodus and cut the population of town by quite a bit. In the end their great plan backfired. Since everyone quit, they were left only with brand new people who hadn't ever been trained properly, and none of the management people actually knew how to do any of the skilled positions. They ended up going out of business before the season was over. I have to admit I felt a twinge of satisfaction when I heard about it. So, suddenly we had a rather abrupt change of plans and didn't know what to do next. We got off the ferry in Bellingham, WA and had planned on taking the bus to Seattle, where I had relatives, and try to decide what we wanted to do with our lives. But all the same hot sweaty people who had been on the ferry with us in the 90 degree heat for the last 3 days were getting on that bus. So, on a whim we went to a car dealership and found a used car that we bought with cash, piled all of our belongings in it, and started driving south. We stopped in Seattle for a few days to see my aunt and cousins, and we enjoyed our visit but the town didn't really feel like what we were looking for. So we got back in the car and drove south some more. We got as far as Portland, Oregon before the car broke down. While we were waiting for it to get repaired we found an apartment and just like that a new chapter began.

The Turning Point

Betsy's Life.zip - episode 2

Ben decided to hike the Appalachian Trail while I was in my junior year of college and I never thought for a moment of trying something so huge. My life was all tied up in schedules and plans. But then, I went with him for a week for a trial run in North Carolina and I was swept away by Winding Stair Gap and Standing Indian Mountain and the immensity of the entire idea. Suddenly, I had to do it. So I rearranged everything in my life so I could take a semester off. It was the best thing I ever did. We had rough times surviving floods, droughts, forest fires, carnivorous insects, endless hunger, sickness, exhaustion, and even a broken foot. But we also had amazing times, outstanding views, incredible people. I can't speak for Ben, but I have to say it was a turning point in my life. Everything that has happened in my life since then has occurred because of the changes in me that came from that journey. Just the idea of it - to WALK 2,147 miles over what seemed like every peak in 14 states. To WALK from Georgia to Maine. To live outside carrying everything with you for nearly six months. For your entire life to be simplified to 2 questions: what am I going to eat today and where am I going to sleep?
Nothing was the same after that. When we reached Mt Katahdin in Maine(the northernmost terminus) we thought we would be finished with a great accomplishment and then go back to our lives. But for me, at least, there was no going back. I could pretend for a while, but the changes inside of me were always there ever after. And for this I owe a great debt to my friend Ben, because if it weren't for him deciding to do this hike - I would never have thought myself capable of such a thing. It would have never occurred to me to try anything like that. But now, there is very little that I would consider daunting or out of my league. And I am so incredibly grateful for that.
When we got back from the trail I went back to school for the spring semester- the first semester of my senior year - I would only be graduating one semester behind....

But then - my college roommate, Paula, said: Why don't you come to Alaska with me this summer?????

Woo hoo.... another cliffhanger!!!