The Wastepaper Basket

I don’t remember what the great american novel was about. I was supposed to write it after dropping out of school– I remember the stories I worked on, tore apart, hid away and forgot about, but I don’t remember the one that I quit school for. Maybe the fact that it isn’t so clear proves that my parents really did have a right to be worried– even then, I knew they should be anxious.

“Listen,” I remember sitting them down, about three days after moving back in. It could have been that night, thinking about it– it would have been a normal summer night, otherwise. “I’m going to try and get a job– I need a break, but I’m really going to try– I want to make this writing work. And I don’t want to give up and be that… pot smoking drop-out kid that lives in their parents basement.” My parents didn’t have a basement, but I was comfortable playing into cliches. If there was anything I feared, it was becoming a cliché. Small town girl goes to college for two semesters, drops out to become americas top author– but gets more than she bargained for. I had watched movies like this– mostly about middle aged party girls who realized that they weren’t chasing their dreams, and ultimately fail to get anything except a hot new boyfriend. I didn’t want a hot new boyfriend– I wanted to go places.

I am not sure why my parents were surprised about Alaska.

“I can write my novel there,” I told them. “I want to get some life experience, meet some people while I do it. I won’t have much to write about if I don’t go out there and work.”

This was hard to argue with. But my mother is a very talented woman.

“Some of the best books are about places that are important to you– and you know, anyone can write books about simple things, housewives can write deep, interesting books.”

It looks even more blatant on paper– she would hate to hear it read back now, but even two years ago, my mother was still getting used to new pictures of me. At seventeen, only three years before, I had told her boys weren’t the only thing in the picture. We talked about it only once. After that, it was clear that my interests in a partner would be… singular. My future husband and a house in the neighborhood was hard for her to forget, but even she had to let it go, inch by inch and day by day. When I went to school, it wasn’t to become an educator, but to rush through an english lit degree. My mother had told me years before that if I was serious about writing, I was serious about books. To be a real writer, I should study literature, not writing. It’s the type of doubletalk that was so hard to sift through then. But even though I had started down that path, my mother had to rearrange the picture once again when I dropped out. I moved into the room that was still warm from when I had left it nine months before. She had begun to turn it into a greenhouse. But I was back home– and all too soon, I was ready to be off. To Alaska.

I had been home for almost a straight year– two different jobs, summer through spring, countless days of crying on both sides. My mother and I had that in common– most of the crying was done alone. 

I had found the job online, an everyday thing to me know, but to me and my parents lives, a bizarre golden ticket. My mother told me daily how excited she was– how scared she was. I was going to Glacierview Alaska, miles from civilization, without a car, without knowing anybody. It’s something I’d do again, but I would scold myself for laughing it off then. Laughing didn’t make my mother feel any better- “If they turn out to be crazy, how will you get out?”

It’s surprising how much good common sense would have done me– three months later, I would be asking myself the very same thing.

I arrived in Anchorage airport in mid-april. I knew my bosses, a resort-owning couple from California, by sight. They called to say they were four hours away, and would be picking up a coworker in the same airport. At this time, I still started a trip asking myself, what if you find the one? I had been away from home before, but was, as said by Thai of Clueless fame, “a dumb virgin who can’t drive.” I still carried around my Bible on trips, and was uneasy watching any film about a PG-13 rating. I never swore, I didn’t drink, and was often told by girls my age that I “talked like a teacher.” To this image I add an overgrown good-girl pixie cut the color of a sunburnt peach. I had just pierced my nose, and was experimenting with the idea of a tattoo. The second I pierced my nose, I knew there was more to come– I’ve kept the piercings at bay, but it was definitely the start of something. When I flew into Alaska, I knew I was starting to become something. It would have helped if I knew that something was myself.

The coworker that my bosses introduced to me was Enrique, a friendly, tired man in his mid-50’s. We drove mostly in silence on the way to the RV park that I was to work at, stopping in shorter and shorter intervals as my boss, Mike, had spasms in his hands. His wife, Dolly, said this happened if he got too tired. Every ten minutes he would stop the car by the side of the dark highway, and stand while the Alaskan spring froze him awake. Dolly had talked and talked when they first met me, in high-pitched and pitchy broken English, most of which was impossible to make out. But as our four hour trip stretched longer and longer, we all drooped. I tried to soak in as much as I could, as it was spring in Alaska, and night was more of a blue-grey bruise, not the real, dark, winter nightfall from back home. We careened across highways, past mountains, over the rivers– and I found myself falling deeper and deeper asleep…

When I woke again, my phone was overflowing with messages. My mother-

Did your plane land? Call me when you land, haven’t heard from you in a few hours. Are you there? We need to know that you got there safe. Did you meet them yet?

It was a few hours of messages– how many hours behind was I? It was 1:00 AM in Alaska. I had been up for 30 hours. My mother was waiting at home, waiting by the phone at 4:00 AM in Missouri.

Honey, you need to answer because we need to know if we need to call the police and go searching for you with helicopters.

Something about the specificity of the helicopters stuck in my head. I’ve learned to call my mother by now, to the point of distraction. Nowadays I’ll ring her from Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, and she won’t even pick up. My first time travelling was her first time letting one of us go– go across the states to the middle of nowhere, where there are more moose droppings than people.

The RV park blurred in front of me. A modest few huts of buildings where we would be living, and the quant red-wood green roofed restaurant that I’d be working in. Surrounding us all were the mountains, and the great, face-like view of Lion’s Head. I didn’t pay attention as I collapsed into the thin mattress of my shack– there wasn’t much to pay attention to. I had flown across the universe.