The Alaska Period
1989-1992
I remember the porch.
I remember it because most of my toys were displayed on a card table and strangers were buying them. No toy in particular comes to mind; just the situation and how I felt about it.
My mom loves to tell the story about the night I was born. The trailer belonging to that porch is located in a small, Alaskan town called North Pole. I was born there. In the trailer. At some point in the night of August 6, I decided to join the land of the living. Considering it was six weeks before I was expected, my father spent the entirety of my mother’s labor frantically packing a bag, believing we’d all make it to the hospital. Or at least that’s the way she tells it. She would be the authority on the matter, even if it means the man threw clothes and shoes in and out of bags for two hours.
After a screaming match between them, in which he insists she not push and she insists she must, I came into the world on August 7 around one in the morning. In line with Alaskan sensibility, the fire department was called by my father or my mother's mother and subsequently all stood in the tiny living room while my mom sang lullabies to her newborn on the other side of the thin panel wall. Peace amid chaos.
I’ve since been back to that trailer and it seems just as absurd as one would think. Though I am unclear as to how many men and women bring North Pole’s fire department to quorum, in that living room three would be a crowd.
As kids, my brothers and I would beg my mom to tells us stories about ourselves. She would smile with the warmth and wisdom that only a mother possesses and her eyes would light up while she perused her catalogue of memories of the Alaska days. We’d all cuddle up in the bed as she brought to life anecdotes from our infancy and toddler years. Consequently, my early memories of Alaska are really her stories imagined as life.
Except for my toys on the porch. I remember my toys on the porch. And I remember climbing up a dresser at my grandmother’s house and crawling out of a window onto the high snow. Though it seems reasonable to assume I remember it because it happened, I am doubtful. Memory is a funny thing. Alaska is a funny place.
Known as the last frontier, it is a land of its own, connected to the lower forty eight on paper only. It is at once beautiful and terrifying. With incomprehensible expanses of mountains and rivers and wildlife and plants. With a grayness that lingers year-round. With merciless elements that dwellers are forced to reckon with, one way or another. The visitor sees the elements. The dweller sees the reckoning. I have seen the reckoning.
Few adapt. Most cope. Many crumble. Some run.
My mom ran.
And though many times Alaskans find themselves returning to the place they ran from, when we left it was a true escape. I often wonder if I would have survived a life there. Part of me thinks I would have crumbled.
I don’t know what my little toys were worth to whoever bought them on the porch that day, but those pennies fueled our drive south. They fueled my mother’s dream of a better life away from the drugs, abuse, pain, and hopelessness her life had always known. At 25 years old, she and my dad piled their few belongings and three small children in the covered bed of a blue two-seater Nissan truck. South-bound. Not looking back.
Not a day goes by where I don’t thank God I grew up somewhere else. Sometimes I thank my mother too.