Us

Here, and below: there appear to be quite a lot more bears on the Kodiak road system than there were ten years ago.

So. After ten years of wandering, this is what we've chosen; home.

As I've noted before, from a work perspective it would have made more sense for us to settle down in Juneau, where a strong community of academic and agency biologists would have given us access to the personal interactions and collaborations that make for a successful scientific life.

Alisa and I are prime examples of the willingness of Americans to be rootless. We both moved to Alaska as young adults, and made our lives here, separately and then together, thousands of miles from our families.

But we took the opportunity of our return to take a stand, not quite consciously, against being forever on the move. In the US, home for us could only be Alaska. And in Alaska, the place we are at home is Kodiak.

Eric, moving off of Galactic

Living in a town of about 10,000 people without road access to other towns implies a very different social life than the one we might lead in a more cosmopolitan place. 

In most of the US, we would interact with a much more homogenous group of people. Our friends would tend to have similar levels of education as us, would work at similar jobs and have the same narrow interests and outlooks of our particular slot in the US socio-economic world.

In Kodiak, that is not the case. We have friends from many walks of life. Fifty years ago, when America was more rural, I think this would be pretty unremarkable. But now I think it's fairly unique.

By coming back to this town where we have already lived for seven years, the place where we got married and had our first child, we also avail ourselves of a much deeper social life than we would have in a new place like Juneau. In either Kodiak or Juneau we would have a group of close friends. But in Kodiak we also have a large group of acquaintances, people we know well enough to say hello to at the grocery store. That I think is a powerful antidote to the estrangement that marks so much of modern life.

The boys in our new house, after our household goods arrived from storage in the Lower 48. Most of these boxes were packed when Elias was 9 months old, and before Eric was born.

Ptarmigan hunting.

So that is the upside, as far as I can see it.

On the other side, we are coming back to a world that we do not quite understand at all.

The complete saturation of everyday life into the internet, and the products of the net state, happened in these ten years that we were away. Of course there was internet in Australia and Chile and South Africa, and of course I kept this blog going for the ten years that we were away. So it's not like we were unaware of the existence of the internet.

But the degree to which people actually lead their lives through small interactive screens just completely beggars the imagination of someone who has been more or less on the periphery for the last decade. It all looks quite dystopian to me. Consider the state of right-wing politics, if nothing else, and what computers have done with that. I feel myself settling into something of a self-defined museum of a life, apart from what I see as the mass hysteria of our times, and knowing that I also bypass whatever good might come from participating in this new sort of life.

And then there is the historical moment that we chose for our return.

My boys will come of age, politically, in this world. Where we can see how precious these trappings of democracy might turn out to be that we so blithely cast away.

57,000 Miles

We just bought a used car, sight unseen, from Anchorage. That's what people do in Kodiak.

As a part of our due diligence, I had an independent mechanic take a look at the car. 

"No problem," he reported. "That car has tons of life in it - only 57,000 miles."

And how's that for a difference from the sailing world. As I've reported before on this blog, when we bought Galactic we installed a new GPS in the cockpit and left the meter running. As of just now, we have about 51,600 sea miles on the clock.

That feels like a lot. On a traveling sailboat, fifty-odd thousand miles will carry you through several lifetimes worth of memories. And for all the questions we get in port, from general landlubber and dock queen alike, about any "really bad storms" that we might have encountered at sea, our experience is that fifty thousand miles of sailing will bring you moments transcendent and terrible in a ratio of about 100:1.

I'm sure that I'm not embellishing my memories here.

News flash: fifty thousand plus miles is nothing for a car, even though it's well more than twice the circumference of the earth. And you don't look for too many moments of transcendence along the way.

Anyway! Great to get a car, as a step towards setting ourselves up in this new life. I won't quite say "land life". Perhaps what we hope to be doing is setting ourselves up with a home port.

There's just one more difference that I'll note. Sailors tend to count miles as they apply to people, rather than to boats. When someone wants to demonstrate how totally salty they are, they drop numbers like "a hundred thousand sea miles". I've often thought that these self-reported numbers tend to be bollocks and as dependable as sailors' reports of wind speed ("it was blowing sixty!"). But it's another interesting difference between the lives of sea and dirt. Hard to imagine someone bragging that they've driven a half million miles.

Alisa had the great insight that it would actually be cheaper for her and the boys to fly to Anchorage and bring the new car back to Kodiak on the ferry than it would be to ship the car over on the barge. So they got a visit to Anchorage out of the deal. Here they are, with the car safely strapped down and about to leave port.

Leaving Whittier on the ferry. Whittier is the town where I had my first job in Alaska, working on a cannery dock. 

Here and below - driving the new beastie off the ferry in Kodiak.