Before we get into the post, if you are a subscriber of any level, I want you to know how grateful I am that you are here. Sharing my writing was (and still is, let’s be honest) very scary to me. Putting my deepest darkest thoughts and feelings out on the internet for any stranger to read is actually insane. But I do this because I love you all. My writing is my devotional offering to the world, and I hope you can find connection, solace, and peace here. From the depths of my shy and introverted little heart, thank you, thank you, thank you.
In a few days, I’ll be starting the long journey back home to Alaska to be with family for Christmas. Making it to remote rural Alaska is a challenge at any time, but adding winter weather and holiday stress makes it more daunting. My entire immediate family is there, though, so I will brave it.
I haven’t been home in three years and sometimes the homesickness is more than I can handle. It’s a challenging thing, leaving somewhere so beautiful. It’s in my blood, my bones are made of it. A piece of me is missing all the time, left behind in the wilderness there. A part of my soul is tangled in the roots of a Sitka spruce somewhere or drifting at the bottom of the sea.
The mindset and culture in remote rural Alaska are special. The community is tight, yet very strange. Shipping in food and supplies is costly and time consuming, so many people depend on the land and sea around them. A subsistence lifestyle continues that was born from heritage and necessity. Practicality rules through trial and consequence. If it isn’t waterproof, it won’t last.
There is little separation between civilization and nature, as I believe it should be. We need the ocean and rivers for fish, the earth for wild berries and mushrooms, the delta for moose, and the island mountains for deer. Hurricane force storms born in the Gulf of Alaska make landfall with such force that they cannot be ignored or underestimated. They must be weathered with preparation and patience.
I was shaped by the wild. I was raised by the sea, catching salmon, halibut, and rockfish for as long as I can remember. One of my earliest memories is standing on the bow of my father’s small boat as we followed a powerful male orca through the inlet, his tall dorsal fin towering out of dark water. To this day, I still dream of orcas and the ocean consistently, at least once a month.
It’s easy to romanticize a place like that. Easy to paint pictures of a gruff, yet symbiotic fishing town where people live in harmony with the land, but that isn’t the whole truth. My hometown is marked with its own challenges.
Remote villages in harsh climates breed a specific type of person that isn’t found elsewhere. The community is small and tight knit by consequence of our remoteness. We depend one each other much more than other communities. A beautiful sentiment, but not always so desirable in practice. It creates a “locals only” mentality that can range from inconvenient to hostile. Meeting new people and making new friends was just not a skill my peers and I developed. We had the same friends from age five, sometimes younger, and the only option other than those friends was social isolation. Not many choices in a town of under 2,000.
Living elsewhere has been a challenge. I have always felt I don’t fit in with most people. I don’t think the same way folks down south do. I don’t see the world through the same lens. There will always be a degree of separation between us, because the land I came from raised me so differently. I have accepted that, and secretly used to love how special it made me feel. But now it just feels lonely.
I’ve been away so long that going back is a challenge too. People don’t remember me and sometimes ask “what brought me to town,” a phrase that feels like a tiny knife in the heart every time. Once, I was sitting at the bar with my old friend Nate while the rain of a late fall storm lashed the windows, drinking an overpriced beer. A man approached, clearly drawn by his curiosity over the “new girl” in town, put his arm around my friend, and asked me how I knew Nate.
Nate looked at me with gloating laughter in his eyes, waiting for my answer with amusement. “Nate knows me,” I replied. After the drunk stranger left, confused, Nate clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Never thought I’d see the day when I was more of a local than Angie.”
My old therapist once told me that I would always feel out of place. She said I had too many unique experiences and specific traits, from my upbringing to my travel to my education. I would always be separate from others, and even if I moved home again, I would be so changed by my other experiences that reintegration would be long and lonely.
I’ve always felt somewhat removed from the rest of the world. I’ve had many good friends and deep experiences of acceptance, but I can’t say I belong in any one group, place, or situation. I spent my twenties wandering, bouncing between countries and ideals, obsessions and infatuations.
The best homes I have found are through connections with nature, and through meaningful connection with people. Building a deep and intimate connection with someone who really knows and sees me is a powerful antidote to loneliness. Home really is not a place.
Leaving the home I have made here with my partner and animals will be bitter, painful, and complex, even for the short time it is. Returning to my origin home will be deep, beautiful, complicated, and cold. But, as any writer would, I will dive in and feel it all.
This resonates with me, too:
“I have always felt I don’t fit in with most people. I don’t think the same way folks down south do.”
I recall thinking, anywhere can be and will be home. Home is the place I sleep. It’s wherever I hang my hat. The trailer I rented as a student. The cottage I rented on a farm. My first owned property, my second.
Anywhere.
It’s home because it’s where I live.