sǝuoſ ǝuıɥsunS

I was surprised beyond belief for my birthday with a trip to Alaska last week. It was a small piece of what I would call the best day of my life so far. I woke up early, but decided to meditate, reflect, and read instead of stumbling into the kitchen and slouching over the laptop. I took it easy because typically my birthday and I are in an unpleasant relationship. I hide under the covers, fake happiness on the telephone, and it takes about a week to recover. In the spirit of saying yes to life and not falling into these well-charted pot holes in my heart, I went down town to have lunch with a dear and treasured friend. I surprised her with flowers… well, she busted me trying to surprise her with flowers… and we ate crazy salad on a bench in what turned out to be the sunshine. After I went for a roaring scooter ride across San Francisco and arrived home with a grin on my face. Jaime called and we both moaned and groaned a little about how neither one of us wanted to go to the meeting we typically go to together. Naturally since neither of us wanted to go, we made plans to meet up and went. It was a superb meeting, and a radiant man told my story. That never happens, but I guess I can’t say that any more. I walked out of the meeting blown away, and inspired. The middle of the day where I was of service to friends, didn’t let it show that I was about to burst, and my difficulty with remaining in the moment all seemed behind me now.

When I arrived at my apartment I was surprised by Megan. She had flowers everywhere and desert on plates with candles burning. I love surprises which take me by surprise. I asked if she had eaten dinner, she hadn’t. I cooked dinner and we ate it on the floor surrounded by a beautiful orchid, and roses, and these spikey, blood-red flowers which seem like the new symbol for my heart these days. When we were done I opened my card, a growing card you can plant and it grows into flowers… and then she handed me a tiny little piece of paper with a pretty little star on it. I opened it expecting another trip to the nail salon, or a massage.. but it was a plane ticket to Alaska. It blew me away, and I was delighted. I needed to be pinched because I was so full of heady happiness that it didn’t seem possible. Then we danced to Louis Armstrong into the wee hours of the morning.

See the whole set here

The trip up was easy. Despite the early hour, everything went smoothly, and we flew from SFO to Seattle, enjoyed a little snack at the airport, then flew without incident — mostly because we were asleep — into Juneau. Megan’s father met us at the airport. His easy smile disarmed any fears I had about my hair, or my face, my age, my clothes, or questions about what I might actually be doing in Juneau immediately. We laughed a little, and I was outside photographing the sky and smoking a disgusting cigarette in no time. We rode to Megan’s father’s house and heard the story of a bear attacking the family’s Toyota hybrid. We witnessed the family’s sail boat come out of dry dock and be re launched into the Gastinau Channel. I wept for the sinking Strider. I discovered that there are vicious anti-republicans in Alaska… it wasn’t anything I’d expected to find there, but once I did, I relaxed and knew everything was going to be ok.

After years as a vegetarian I ate some salmon. the phrase at the time was something like “your descent into meat-eating” but I thought of it as a return to being an omnivore. Something which felt right, and still feels right. I sat at the family table and listened as Megan’s mother, step mother, father, brother and Megan all talked and talked. I couldn’t tell if it was the soul of the salmon swimming upstream in my veins, or perhaps our plane had crashed and I was flickering the last sparkles of Valhalla before expiring, but I felt immediately as if I’d known these beautiful, natural, and brilliant people all my life. What I had questions about later was how in the world this modern, fractured family were able to sit at the same table with so much love and communion. It all seemed like something that happens now and then and is actually very nice. Never seen anything like it.

But that’s no surprise because I’ve never seen anything like Juneau, Alaska. While it bears some slight resemblance to the pacific north west… Blaine, Linden, Deming, Bellingham… it is more the wet ground, the pale faces, the stillness in the trees and little else. The sky is amazing, overwhelming, something I could have sat and stared into for years without growing tired of it. The air is so crisp and pure and fresh that it makes smoking cigarettes seem like a crime. I walked the oldest road in Alaska, looked into an old mine shaft, watched the beautifully stacked houses flit past like the flowers at the side of the road. I crunched on freezing cold beaches, listened to soft waves lap at the crisp curl of land’s end, and stared in disbelief at the mountains resting in the distance.

I also went to several functions, met so many people, asked a lot of questions, watched drunk people play with fireworks, attended a wedding in the rain, and found myself in a panic at the thought of being the only person actually dancing at the reception. I reassured a man I’d only known a minute or two that his son’s hassle over his smoking a cigarette was only love, and nothing more. I kept quiet, and observed. I meditated, I prayed, I was kicked out of bed and slept on the floor. I fell in love with the past, met it… peered into it without fear… washed myself in pungent feelings which were something like arsenic or a potent mixture of wild herbs meant to end my consciousness and let it softly recede and dry in what little sun there was in the sky. I learned a lot about Alaska, and a lot more about my companion. And it seems that despite the ocean of her, and all the seaweed of my thoughts and feelings now pivoting within those waters, I am closer to Megan. The truth is all we ask, and as the result I can only love you more for having made this journey.

At the end of the trip I did not want to go. Something within me whispered “stay” so sweetly that I had to reflect on it for a while. Like Maui, this place you can only arrive at by plane or by boat, where everyone knows your history, your business, your status, your politics, your preference, and may or may not have an opinion about it is the heart of a land mass, a glacier’s destination, the oasis at the end of ice sheets. Her magnetism is powerful, and is both difficult to leave, impossible to forget, and somewhere to return to.

Home, after a reckless journey back, I remember walking out to the end of the observation point with Deborah at my arm, listening to Spencer’s fun facts about Juneau, watching Megan slip and fall to the hard, cold ground in slow motion, scaling wet slopes, and hiking narrow trails in my birkenstocks, laughing and talking, and sticking my camera into the faces of the most beautiful flowers I find that while the ghosts appear to whisper night and day, and the sun barely seems to set, I found another view of love and family in Juneau.