We are finishing up a whirlwind stay in Anchorage, getting ready to head further north.
The place we’ve been housesitting — well, I should say, I’ve been housesitting, since Jason slept here all of three nights — has been a lovely place to base operations out of for the month, but it hasn’t exactly been restful.
In the last month, I’ve logged 13,000 miles. The itinerary:
Lafayette to Anchorage, Anchorage to Fairbanks, Fairbanks to Anchorage, Anchorage to Lafayette, Lafayette to Houston, Houston to Anchorage, Anchorage to Fairbanks, Fairbanks to Anchorage, Anchorage to Homer, Homer to Anchorage, Anchorage to Juneau, Juneau to Anchorage, and by the time you’re reading this, Anchorage to Fairbanks.
This is small compared to what my husband has been up to. He flies for a living, and since we pulled up stakes, he’s begun commuting to work from Alaska to Texas. Most nights, I barely know what state he’s sleeping in, and sometimes, he’s in Mexico. How he could want to travel for fun on his days off is beyond me. But he does.
In addition to all the traveling, packing, sorting and hauling, I’ve also sold two vehicles and a house, and bought two vehicles and a house.
In fairness, the houses are still works in progress. The one in Louisiana will close in a couple of weeks, which will refill our depleted coffers and go toward the place we’re buying in Alaska.
Moving in and out of the Far North, one must think carefully about the worth of each item she is paying to ship. But while needing to bear limited shipping space in mind, it also wouldn’t do to arrive in Fairbanks empty handed, just in time for winter.
Thinking it best not to have to start over again completely, as we have several times now in our lives together, I tried to strike a balance in the moving process, between taking our possessions all the way back down to the bone, and having what’s needed to basically function once we got wherever we were going.
Regarding that: we didn’t know exactly where we were going, but just before we left Lafayette, I stumbled on a little gem by word of mouth. That’s the way these things happen in Alaska, and while we weren’t positive it would work out or turn out to be the right house for us, I began to vividly imagine us there.
Having this vision helped to guide decisions about what to bring and what to leave behind. Given that it’s a small place of about nine hundred square feet, the decision to off-load some bulkier items became an easier one. Thus, my last week in Lafayette was one of brutal culling, with lots deep asking about whether a given item “sparked joy.”
In the end, there were a few pieces of furniture left, and many totes and boxes. I guess for us, joy looks like a whole lot of books, artwork, implements for kitchen nerdery, an insane amount of musical instruments, and tons of winter gear.
The latter is less about pleasure than not freezing one’s ass, and I’m not going to tell you how many different kinds of footwear are required when you live in Alaska, but we have all of them.
Okay, fine. I’ll tell you.
Mukluks for very cold, dry snow, Sorels for wet snow, insulated rain boots, non-insulated rain boots, muck boots, cross-country ski boots, skate skiing boots, downhill ski boots, ice skates, hiking boots, bunny boots (the black kind and the white kind), snow shoes, biking shoes, chest waders, cowboy boots (not necessary for honky tonkin, but easier to dance in than X-tra Tuffs). Slippers are essential — something you bring with you when, say, you go to a friend’s house for dinner. Sandals get the least mileage but are a relief to slip into once the snow finally melts. And then there’s dress shoes: nearly irrelevant, reserved only for weddings and such, and maybe not even then.
Bear in mind, there are two of us.
Yes, when we moved out of Alaska a couple years ago, we hauled this northern footwear and other winter gear all the way to Louisiana. And yes, in hindsight, that was dumb.
But back then, kind of like now, we had no idea where we were going to end up. It was just as likely to be Colorado as North Carolina. In fact, we didn’t even have Louisiana on our radar. It would all depend on where my husband got based after training for the new airline job he’d landed. And besides, even as we left Alaska, we knew we’d never truly give up our citizenship.
The quest that led us away from our sweet little cabin home on the hill in the first place was driven by my husband’s career ambitions. The move back is propelled by my fervent desire to get the hell out of America.
Luckily, dematerializing comes naturally to me, which assists in making such enormous transitions a little bit easier. Perhaps this is owing to the fact that, when I was young, I lost everything I owned multiple times. And if I hadn’t already learned how to let go of possessions by the time I became an “adult,” three moves in and out of Alaska has taught me well. Not to mention the many smaller moves that have forced plenty of purging along the way.
When I say we are Olympic movers, most people don’t understand the scale. Sometimes to get the point across, I have to put it this way: a couple of years ago, my husband filled out some paperwork for the FAA — part of the process of becoming an airline pilot. He had to list all the addresses we’d ever registered for the previous ten years.
There were thirteen of them, and we’ve added five more since then.
Going insane is just part of the process of moving. For days I sorted and cleaned and packed, all while living in the seventh level of Facebook Marketplace Hell (if you’ve been there, you know).
Periodically, while looking for where I’d put the packing tape, then my phone, then the packing tape again, I had to stop walking in circles in order to sell something - like a pair of red leather cowgirl boots that never fit right, but were so cute, it had always been hard to part with them.
The sale of the boots provided a quintessential Southwest Louisianan encounter, one of many that I had during the whole of my experience living there.
The woman who came for the boots began chatting before she’d even closed her car door. Based on the boozy smell that wafted from her, I think she was pretty tipsy, at the ripe hour of eleven in the morning. She traipsed in, found an uncrowded spot on the couch, plopped right down, and seemed prepared to stay all afternoon.
She kept a running, if tangential, commentary going the whole time.
“Oh bebé, these little bootsah niiiice! Gonna get me out to dancin’ again. Ya’ll muss be so sad to leave, Sha, your house so cute. Help me honey, get this boot offa my foot. Just pull there. You got nice curtains, and ohhhhh, you like antiques, huh? Me too, Bebé. Ok well. These little boots. They so pretty! I’m gonna say a little prayer for you. When you get upt’Alaska you say one for me too, Sha, that I getagoin’ a cruise up there someday. My cousin went on one a dem, and she says it’s niiiiice up there. But the cold, you know!”
After about forty-five minutes she was on her way, and I went back to wandering from room to room, looking for the tape again.
The picture of the little log house continued to burn a hole through my brain as I closed my eyes on planes, lay my aching back down on various airport floors, crammed too much stuff into Subarus, and finally sank into the hot tub overlooking Turnagain Arm. (The place we’ve been housesitting in Anchorage can only be described as “epic.”)
The house in Fairbanks, where I had already mentally placed what’s left of our furniture, sits on twenty acres. But that holding is nothing compared to what it abuts. The property borders state land that goes on forever in rolling hills, which, when we saw them, were alight with all the golden magic of interior Alaska’s brief autumn. It’s up a long, winding mountain road, perched on a ridge, proximal to an established, little-used trailhead. But trail or no, the skies the limit. One could walk or snowshoe, fat bike or ski for days, in any direction, depending on the season.
We found this spot through a teacher we know in a little village on Prince of Wales Island, where my husband and I used to travel regularly to teach music to the kids at her school. She saw my plea for help on Facebook, which began: Dear Fairbanks, I love you. Can you please reveal the perfect house for us to buy?
She got us in touch with her daughter, who lives outside of Fairbanks and had been considering letting this little place go. She and her growing family had already moved up the road to a bigger place, and had been renting this one out to travel nurses.
We started the conversation from Louisiana and made a plan to come and see it as soon as we landed back in the state.
When we blasted up to Fairbanks to see the house in person, we both got The Tingle.
“I think we’ve found something truly special,” Jason said when the owners were just out of earshot, as we walked the corners of the land. He gave me the raised-eyebrow-nodding look with the tight jaw that said, “I’m serious about this.”
The sale is going well. It’s lovely to have such a human transaction based on mutual trust and respect, and having no competition, we got to take our time thinking about it, given that this place wasn’t even on the market. We’re doing a direct purchase without realtors, and will be renting it for the month of October while we wait for everything to finalize.
Having a small house in Fairbanks is a good choice. It’s easier to heat, has less to fix and keep maintained, and while this place looks like a cabin, it functions as a house. There are three covered outdoor spaces, which are invaluable here. Upstairs are an open loft and one bedroom with a balcony. Having a real staircase, rather than a ladder, sets it apart from most two story cabins in the area, as does the tank for delivered water, and indoor plumbing. Laundry, fergodsakes! And dare I say, a dishwasher?
We’ve lived in plenty of dry cabins in Fairbanks. Outhouses and slop buckets are a way of life, but I’m not sorry they won’t have to be our way of life.
In addition to all of these modern amenities, there’s a functional chicken coop which begs for me to keep my end of the bargain: for every new musical instrument my husband buys, I am allowed one new animal. I’m at least two pets behind. (Question: do “chickens” count as one?). There’s also a little log shed that stands waiting to be turned easily into a sauna.
But I care about none of that as much as I do the views that beam from every window, and all the wild critters that share the land.
The compromise is, it’s a little further out the road than where we were looking, and while we do have friends living in “the neighborhood,” it’s not an area we’ve usually gravitated toward (no particular reason, we just haven’t).
However, when you get to it, the reasons to embrace it are clear: peace and quiet. Views. Dark, starry nights and Northern Lights. With a wood stove crackling, and space for the dogs to be free-roaming, it’ll be like living at a writing retreat. Furthermore, the political signs in people’s yards all the way up the hill were on the correct side of the line. The airport is thirty minutes away, and shopping, about fifteen.
It’s not really at the end of the Earth but, in the best way, it kind of feels like it is.
PS: Chena Hot Springs Road, for those of you in the know. Mile 7, then a mile and a half up a side road to the left.
Thank you Stella Lyn for the progress report. Lots of positive movement; literally and figuratively. It all sounds great. I'm sure it's been lots of work and headaches, but you did it. I wish you and your husband all the best in your new, old world. Yeah, you're still my heroine! I'm doing very well physically; even walking many 2 and 3 hour walks lately!
Good luck with the move. We have just moved from London back to my homeland of Scotland. Not the far north, so we don't have the same issues you have with clothes etc. We are still renting while we look for a house. There are a lot of highs & lows when moving!