Poetry & Prose by Jo VonBargen

Here’s what I did. Ten years ago, after sulking over my soap opera life and everyone in it, I sold everything I owned and moved to Alaska, where real danger lurks around every corner…and the elements are a fierce challenge. Blowing into Anchorage on October 17th with the first snow storm, I found a little efficiency apartment at McDuffy’s Hotel in Eagle River and lived there for a year.

Hibernating and feeling sorry for myself for three months, I finally went out and got a regular job at an engineering firm, walking to work and back home every day in the dark (the sun rose at 10:00 AM and set at 3:00 PM). Eagle River is a small town in the foothills of the Chugach mountains and if I wanted to go 20 miles down to Anchorage I hopped on a bus. Snow that winter was up to my hips.

Here’s what I learned:

You can’t know and appreciate yourself and your strengths until you’ve cut yourself off from all your familiar crutches and you have to depend on your own resources to keep warm, keep safe and feed yourself. When you live in a place, like I did, where you can turn a corner (even downtown) and come face to face with a bear or moose, you learn that much of what you previously feared was horse-hooey and mostly made up in your own head. The first week I was there, a woman in a pink nightgown went out her back door to see why her dog was barking and was killed by a moose, a man was kicked to death by another moose in front of a door at the University of Alaska and a female hiker on the bike trail looping Eagle River was attacked by a coyote who ran out of the woods, bit her on the butt, and ran away. Over the next few weeks, a grandmother was mauled to death by a bear in front of her grandson out on a hiking trail and a man sitting watching TV inside a worker’s lounge up on the North Slope was mauled by a polar bear who looked in through the window, saw him, and broke through the glass.

You come to appreciate what friends and family mean because they are 6000 miles away and you can’t exactly hop a puddle jumper and go home for the weekend…and, much to your chagrin, all those petty grudges and resentments you held against your parents or siblings for forty years seem pretty lame when you realize the damage you’ve done to your own life just to spite them all.

You learn that, while it’s nice to have a soulmate, it’s likely to be much nicer when you finally meet one after you’ve learned how to live and survive alone. You have to go deep inside your own being to find who’s really in there. That true you, the real you, is the one you want to offer to someone else if the occasion arises.

You learn how to say no. No to the leeches who only want to bleed you dry. No to yourself when it’s not in your own best interest. No to the fears you’ve been dragging around all your life. Fear is a funny thing. 99 percent are products of the imagination, yet they cause untold human misery as we numb ourselves down to try and escape them. One thing you learn for sure: no matter how deep it is or how long the self-induced coma lasts, you have to come to sometime. And the baggage is still there unless you ditch it yourself, while you’re awake and have come to see how much you don’t need it. What’s left is the true you, the glorious possibilities for your life, and a deep, soulful thankfulness for all that you have and, indeed, had all along.