Whales and Puffins and Otters, Oh My!
It’s been such an action-packed few weeks, I hardly know where to begin. Do I write about seeing puffins for the first time on a crystal clear day in Seward? Or about banging knees with two of my not-very-grown-up friends on the Mad Hatter’s Teacup ride at Disneyland? Maybe the more interesting giggle was the throaty laugh of sandhill cranes flying overhead on the Coastal Trail. In just a few short weeks, I’ve been on the run from Las Vegas to Seward to Fairbanks to Anaheim and while sleep has been in short supply, I have not wanted for friendship, connection and experiences that make me want to nudge the person next to me, saying “Look! Over there – you won’t believe what I just saw!”
A quick caveat before you read on – I do sometimes get carried away. In Disneyland on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, I jumped out from behind the wheel of the truly fine motor car asking my friend and colleague Amanda, “did you spin the steering wheel coming around the turns?” Looking puzzled, she said “I thought it was fake, right?” “Yes, exactly!” I exclaimed. I guess that’s the theme of this particular stretch of the journey – some of what has made me laugh and gasp with delight in the last few adventures has been very real while other moments have been pure flights of fancy. The alternation between the two has left my head spinning and seems to have gotten me unstuck. Imagination and absurdity, deep connection to places wild and wonderful, uplifting joy and heart-wrenching fear and loss – it’s not that I don’t have the words because I’ve been in too many places, it’s that I don’t have the words because I’ve been in too many places.
If my drawing skills were up to snuff, I’d make a map for you, but they’re not, so I’ll just ask you to close your eyes and imagine the trajectory lines created by recent travel – Las Vegas to Anchorage to Fairbanks to Anchorage. Short hop down to Seward and back, then Anaheim and I’m now somewhere over British Columbia on my way home. Even the round trip Anchorage to Anaheim went through Seattle one direction and Portland on the return trip. For those who might think of Seattle and Portland as one place (my sister and I used to call it the Specific Northwest), I’m here to tell you it just ain’t so. Even at the level of spending an hour in the airport terminal, you get to experience two very distinct cultures in Portland and Seattle, something akin to siblings who share some common experiences and patterns of speech and thought but who are so different as to make you wonder whether one of the pair is actually a changeling or the offspring of the postman.
Now that you’ve got that set of lines etched in, zoom in a little and pencil in the ground-level scurrying. The more action packed my life is, the more I cling to the ritual of the daily run. Add some more squirreling around for running errands, schlepping things back and forth at races and zipping around road closures to find lost duckies on a marathon course. Finally, add in a layer of unnecessary back and forth created by the fog of fatigue and the fact that there have been several stretches lately when I’ve counted myself lucky to remember my own name, let alone the reason I made a trip to the grocery store. Right now, I’m thinking Spirograph – big wheel, little wheels, different color pens. There are, of course, a few of those little shaky spikes jutting out from the drawing where I got going too fast and lost control of the pen and wheel. Was it just my Spirographs that had those?
So with that as background, on to the people – Whales and Puffins and Otters, Oh My! The wild things in this story really don’t need description. As soon as I say “moose”, you conjure up images and feelings and, if you’re fortunate…or unfortunate…enough to have had direct experience with moose, you also conjure those up. Everyone has a frame of reference, even if that frame is summed up in a Bullwinkle cartoon. Just for the record, I do consider the wild things in this story to be important people, teachers of the lessons I’ve learned. Forgive me for dipping a little toe into the waters of spirit and inner life that I normally leave as better experienced than discussed.
The human people in the tale of the last few weeks are about as varied and unique as the puffins and whales and otters that set me on this track. I wonder whether I need to change the names – or do I need to leave them be so that you can experience a flash of recognition when you meet?
I’ll start with Ivan, name most emphatically not changed to protect either innocence or guilt. A trip all the way to Seward just to see Ivan and have a chat over a crepe would be travel time and miles well invested. And I mean that regardless of whether you happen to live in Anchorage, Albuquerque or Albany. A trip halfway around the world just to see Ivan would be a journey well worth taking.
Ivan is from Belgium and was a deep sea diver. He doesn’t dive now and because of a back injury, he tells you that it will be four minutes in the back prep room of his farmhouse kitchen to slice the strawberries for your crepe. “One minute to slice, one minute and a half each way to pretend I can still walk”, he says, and the mild observation is absolutely without bitterness or regret. Ivan is an everyday guru. He knows about parenting and community and building log houses. He knows about love and fear and hardship and about the people who through love make the fear and hardship so much easier to bear. He has an opinion or two. He’s raised a large family, several not related by blood, and has rescued more duckies than I’ve yet met. He’s an expert on the virtues of Nutella. And the thing that’s most extraordinary about Ivan is that you have to be awake and wide open to see him at all. He met us for an hour and treated us with deep respect, love and kindness yet the people at the table next to us missed him entirely. Their loss.
Come to think of it, why don’t we have tour books that talk about the people you need to go visit? Why is it food and buildings and spots on the map when the best stories are all about the people who really make up the fabric of a place? Imagine if your annual copy of Milepost had notes in it about all the characters along the way…wow!
I can’t think of anything to follow Ivan, though I think what’s most coming to mind right now is that I”m doing well to capture event a fraction of what I experience there’s literally no way to capture this stuff. As I move this along trying to get it out of the drafts folder, I’m sitting in another airport watching more human drama unfold. Imagine the scene in a movie where they shoot the moving walkway in an airport as a visual rendering of transition and usually of a journey taken too fast – the scenery blurring by at a speed that’s too fast for feet. It’s like that – stories breezing by me all the time, big things in people’s lives happening every moment of every day and even with my closest friends, I often see only a glimpse and a blurred one at that. Maybe that’s why I need anchors and focal points. Maybe that’s why we all do.
Here’s to your daily adventures in the hopes that today at least, they involve more Ivan and less anonymous blur.
