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!!!

Since You've Been Gone...

For those of you who are reconnecting after a long absence... I will try to do what I have become quite good at....
Betsy's life.zip

I think you all know me at least as far as high school so I will start from there.
In 1990 I went to University of Pittsburgh, joined the outdoors club and did all kinds of fun things like caving, rock climbing, rappelling, backpacking....most of my university friends came from the outdoors club. It was my haven, my sanctuary, and really led me into the turning point of my whole life. I started out as a dual major in Psychology and English Writing thinking I was heading towards a career as a Social Worker, but then I spent some time working in a Psychiatric Hospital with Schizophrenics, Bipolars, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Eating Disorder Patients. This was an excellent learning experience and I gained much from it but also realized that it wasn't where I wanted to spend my life. I was way too selfish to go in that direction. I truthfully resented all the energy my clients needed from me and found myself to be too empathic -- I simply couldn't separate myself from all of their problems and emotions and it was really bringing me down. During this time I began my adventures going sailing with Ben Hickman who some of you may know from 'Ham (or Pitt). We sailed around the Florida Keys, the Dry Tortugas, and crossed the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas. Somewhere in there I found my true calling when I took a class with Professor Scaglion and realized I was an Anthropologist!!! I still kept my Writing major because (as those of you who know me best should know) I need to write in order to be able to breathe. Then I saw City of Joy and got this idea I was going to be a doctor and run off to India and save the people!!!!! Yes, you all know I am a hopeless romantic.... So I added pre-med to my plan and was well on my way to boxing myself into a very structured way of life that would have stayed that way for many years before I even figured out that I had choices... because I wouldn't have had time to even notice. But then, Ben decided to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail...

(CLIFFHANGER!! you'll have to wait for the next installment)