Teenagers and Other Shitstorms

An Alaskan Story

Just like me.

Part 1: Wind. It blows ’til it sucks.

And now, here is a haiku poem that I wrote many years ago, inspired by a particularly ferocious wind event in Palmer, Alaska:

The trash can is gone
Water sloshes in the john
Why’s the cat still here?

In all seriousness though, the wind in Palmer is no joke. If you’ve ever experienced it, you know what I mean. Once you’ve done your time there, wind will never again mean the same thing to you.

It can literally knock you off your feet, topple semi trucks, and send school busses into ditches. It can last for many, many days, until your children are doing backflips on the couch.

As an added bonus, glacial silt from the valley bottom is carried through the air at approximately 100 miles an hour. Whenever the Palmer wind it is at large, you can see a dark brown cloud hovering over the length of the braided Matanuska River, which snakes along at sea level at the hems of five and six thousand foot peaks that rise straight up out of it. The scenery is truly epic, which was why we tolerated the conditions. The silt is a quicksand when it’s wet, but when it lets loose, the superfine grit serves to exfoliate everything in its path: your face, your eyeballs, even the paint on your car.

And when it comes to cars, during windy days, one must exercise caution while opening doors. They can be ripped right from the hinges or flung into a nearby vehicle when a gust grabs ahold. Parking lots can be quite exciting; shopping carts go rogue, and careen around with anything else not nailed down. I once saw a queen sized mattress blowing down the street. Not tumbling so much, as just blowing.

Anything improperly secured, like say, your roof, can wind up miles away from you. During one event that clocked the wind at 135 miles per hour, a friend of mine was awoken at three o’clock in the morning to a loud crunching sound, and found someone’s metal roof lodged deep in the side of her house. (By the way, shingled roofs are a waste of time. If you have one, you might as well climb up there right now with all your money, and toss it into the wind.)

Part 2: The North Wind

During my second year in Alaska, my children and I lived about twenty five minutes from town, near the end of a long, washboard gravel road on Lazy Mountain. I won’t go into too much detail about the cabin itself except to say, it was quite literally jerry-rigged. When I was searching for a new place to live, a friend who knew about it put me in touch with the owner.

Our rental agreement was made over the phone and went something like this:

“Hi, Jerry! My name is Stella. I’m calling because I’m wondering if I could rent out your cabin? The one up on Lazy?”

“Okay, sure.”

Several decades earlier, someone — Jerry, I suppose — had begun building an addition to the cabin, but had never quite gotten around to finishing the project. This ramshackle, half constructed pile of lumber was visible from one of the downstairs windows, and boasted ghostlike fragments of ancient, shredded plastic sheeting that hung like halloween decorations from log walls that had never made it all the way to the ceiling.

Thankfully, the incomplete addition was not accessible from our living space. When storms blew in from upriver, ripping through the wide open spaces meant for eventual window glass, forgotten pieces of plywood rattled around, creating a hell of a racket. This noise, along with millions of worries about money and children and money and everyone’s contradictory needs and money and how to make it all work churned through my mind and often kept me from getting much sleep.

It was during a massive wind event and simultaneous cold snap, after we’d been settled in for some time, that my then-second grader came bursting through the door one morning. He was frozen, red faced and frazzled.

“What are you doing back? You’re going to miss the school bus!”

“I can’t wait for the bus out there! I need a ride.”

I thought maybe it was a moose problem. They were always hanging around, changing our plans. When we’d moved in, a neighbor had granted my kids permission to duck into his yard to wait for the bus behind the fence, if it ever became necessary to put something between a pissed off moose and their tender bodies.

“What’s up?” I asked him. “Is it the wind?” A big crash from the addition answered the question for him.

He was still quite breathless. “Yes! It’s really bad. I was holding onto the fence post as hard as I could and both my feet were off the ground!”

I laughed, picturing it. And then realized it wasn’t just the wind banging around in the addition, but my dairy goats, who had broken free from their yard. With hooves-up up the windowsill and faces pressed near the glass, they caught my eye and began yelling at me for being a bad mother.

Part 3: Chinook Winds

There are two kinds of wind in the Matanuska Valley. There’s the bitterly cold kind that funnels down the river at 100+ miles per hour, bringing an arctic chill from the even colder, interior part of the state, and there are Chinooks.

This second variety blow in over the Knik Glacier from Prince William Sound, and generally bring with them unseasonably warm temperatures and rain. Rain in winter is the last thing you want. With the ground frozen solid for about seven months, there’s no where for water to go, and the world becomes an ice rink. When accompanied by wind, ice gets polished to a shine.

In the depths of an Alaskan winter, it’s not the many feet of snow, or the blizzards, or even the abusive wind that stops the show. Drizzle is what closes schools and grinds everything to a halt.

Part 4: Mid-winter Thawing and Other Calamities

It was during a Chinook wind storm that I wrote the haiku. My boys and I were living in a shitty little rental in downtown Palmer. It was an architecturally challenged place with a flat roof that hadn’t been updated since the ‘70s. In short: a real dump. The appeal was the location. The importance of the kids being able to walk around town independently won out over appearances.

These were hard years for us. My teenagers were stressing me out of my mind on the daily. Adolescence was wreaking havoc; my youngest son was in and out of serious trouble. I lived at the circus, in the center of an ongoing testicle festival. Simultaneously, I was dealing with a massive heartbreak, and there was never enough money to get our hands all the way to our mouths. I worked my butt off in my home birth practice, and had a couple of side hustles: I made herbal medicine, and encapsulated placentas. While it’s true I was wearing many hats and keeping a lot of balls in the air in an effort to make ends meet, it’s also an unfortunate fact that nothing I love to do has ever brought in much dough. Historically, midwives and herbalists traded their skills for a loaf of bread here or there, or maybe a chicken, and have lived mainly in shacks. While this place was a step up from that, it was not by much.

As I recall, I was laying in bed when I first felt rain coming through the ceiling.

I was hiding from my kids under the covers with my ear plugs in and eye mask on in the middle of the day, learning the hard way that the only thing more difficult to push out than a 14 inch head was an emerging adult. I lay there, alternating between taking deep breaths and shouting to please TURN DOWN THE FUCKING MUSIC (but they couldn’t hear me over the din). I might have been trying to sleep after being up all night at a birth, or simply escaping the hell they were making the house and my life. Probably both.

The wind had been ripping through town for a couple of days, which put everyone on edge. You could see people’s lips moving behind their windshields, uttering curse words while trying to keep cars on the road, white knuckles on steering wheels, dodging feral trash cans and the like.

During more extreme storms, toilet bowl water would begin sloshing, splashing at the sides of the porcelain bowl with something like a surf. I’m not sure I understand the physics of it, but it was always a portend, a sign that some industrial-strength weather fuckery was afoot.

As it turned out, we would discover no less than seven different active leaks in the roof during the first Chinook at the new rental. “The Pineapple Express,” some called it, when warm winds came howling. The foot or more of snow that had built up on the flat roof warmed and melted into a small swimming pool of water, which found its way into the house. Seven ways, actually, as I have mentioned.

Conveniently, and inconveniently, one of those leaks was directly over the toilet. It was convenient in that, with the lid open, the steady drip ran right into the bowl. However, when using the toilet, we had to hold a different kind of bowl over our heads while conducting our business.

I didn’t know how we had all become so individually and collectively neurotic, but the cat was no exception. Ever since she’d gotten into something bad — anti-freeze, I think it must have been — she had some serious ticks. I suppose she was lucky to be alive, having barely survived the ordeal. After spending several days with her eyes closed in the corner, digging deep, she cashed in one of her nine lives, and emerged anew, albeit with some strange new characteristics.

One of these was to obsessively scratch in, on, and all around her litter box for a very long time after each use, or just because she felt like it. The walls, the sides of the tub, the bathmat, the door — everything needed a thorough and constant wiping down, and she was on the job. As I peed, I watched her scratch, and contemplated what must be going on in her walnut-sized brain while I held the mixing bowl over mine. Each drop of water that plunked against the metal container resonated through the bones of my skull.

The slumlord couldn’t do much of anything about the leaks in the middle of winter, other than offer hope that soon the temperature would dip back down below freezing and stay that way until break-up (that’s Alaskan for springtime). Moving in here had been on another handshake agreement, so nothing was what you’d call binding. He did lower our rent a little, which was a welcome relief, and well worth the emptying of buckets. Before long, the winds would change, literally and figuratively, and we’d find ourselves back in the grip of more typical sub-zero temperatures. Meanwhile, I carried on, barely holding up under the weight of the world (and the bowl).

Part 5. Ice Storms

When I first moved to Alaska, I took notice of how familiar household items were often put to uncommon uses. One must innovate when living in an extreme climate. The bowl could be counted as an example of this, I suppose. Or take box fans: these fill the seasonal aisle at the store just as it’s getting cold and rainy, which I thought strange when I was newly transplanted, until I learned to see them as an essential element of salmon smoking equipment — a tool for keeping flies off of fish.

A hairdryer can get a window open when it freezes shut. Rolled bath towels help out where weather stripping comes up short. Fishing net nailed to decking can work as an anti-slip device. Snow machine tread might be repurposed as a door mat. A propane torch can thaw out an oil pan if you’re too broke to have an engine block warmer installed. And in a pinch, a hammer can be used to clear icy steps.

This last tip was something I picked up one morning during an ice storm from the kid next door. I was trying to keep my feet from freezing to the ground while I worked to remove a quarter of an inch of ice from my windshield.

Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap.

My eyes followed the sound to the neighbor’s house, where I saw Moses bent over the front steps. (Names are changed here to protect the identity of the would-be innocent).

Moses was one of eight adopted children that lived next door to us for a time. His was a very religious family, and I am sure our household provided them with a lot to talk about.

I had often seen curtains being pulled shut against us when we would sit naked in the wood-fired hot tub in the yard howling at the moon, or in the full light of day. The sharp contrast of the hot tub in icy cold weather often inspired my boys to dare each other to do crazy things: run naked to the road and back, get out and roll in the snow, or jump on the trampoline soaking wet. Their wet hair would be frozen into wild shapes by the time they plunged, shivering and shrieking, back into the warm water again.

Poor Moses was quite corrupted by my kids, I’m afraid, especially when it came to marijuana. I would’ve preferred not to have known about this, but unfortunately, there’s hardly a less intelligent creature on Earth than a teenaged boy. Being a master avoider, I wished they would have hidden it from me, but as it was, they did stupid shit like making an apple into a pipe, then placing it back into the fruit bowl after use. Smoking with Moses in the crawlspace, which very obviously vented into the kitchen, for instance, was how I knew they were teaching him more than his parents ever wanted him to know about weed. And it was this type of negligence on their parts that was constantly forcing me to confront such asinine behavior.

Moses was always trying to make arrangements to sleep over on Fridays. Very specifically: Fridays. He was persistent about this, and would start asking about it early in the week. We came to find out this was all by design, in an effort to avoid being home on Spanking Night.

What, pray tell, is Spanking Night? We all wanted to know.

Spanking night is when you get spanked, whether you need it or not. Apparently, it happened every Friday, when all eight children lined up for it (except for Moses, when he could secure a sleepover at our place). He went on to explain that if you had committed an actual offense in the week prior, the next-oldest sibling to you in the hierarchy was allowed to select the belt used for the whipping. Otherwise, this was chosen at the parents’ discretion.

I gave Moses full permission to sleep over on Fridays or any other night, henceforth.

I always felt judged by his mother, and I understood maybe there were some valid reasons for this, but I was beginning to dislike a lot of the things I was learning about her, as well. Perhaps that is why, when I found myself cornered next to her in line at the pharmacy one day, I let my composure slip a little.

She was genuinely curious about my birth work, and this was a safe topic for small talk whenever we were forced together.

“I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be a midwife,” she said, starry eyed, while we stood waiting for our turn with the clerk. I was used to encountering this kind of romanticism about my profession. Most people don’t realize it’s not all pink fluffy babies and unicorns.

I smiled and said something like, “Oh?”

“The only thing is,” and now she leaned in to almost-whisper, conspiratorially, “what do you do about, you know? Certain things?”

Because of the theatrics, other people in the line were starting to eavesdrop, though they pretended not to be.

“What things?”

“You know, like, after…” She shook her head while tightly sealing her lips against the abomination that had nearly escaped. I was supposed to be the one to say it, I guess.

“What? You mean the afterbirth?”

Her eyes widened a little and she cringed, probably because unlike her, I wasn’t overly concerned about pretend-whispering when it came to such human subject matter (just ask my kids). She acted scandalized, and I could see she was beginning to wish she hadn’t brought this up. She nodded a little, almost imperceptibly, and now several other people in line were also waiting to hear my answer.

“Well, some women eat it,” I said, and left her to turn bright red while I stepped up to the counter.

Part 6: Something Steamy

My kids tolerated my profession and a lot of things that went with it — an exhausted mother, missed birthdays and such, but there were certain places they drew the line. Discussing mucus plugs at dinner was one. And they hated placentas.

They didn’t have a lot of choice about the latter. My placenta encapsulation service (I’m pretty sure this is organ trafficking, Mom!) was a means to an end — the end being: keeping a roof (however leaky) over their heads.

I’ve been called a lot of things in my life, but The Placenta Lady is not the worst one. If you’re unfamiliar, consuming the placenta after birth, or placentophagy, is a practice that comes from Traditional Chinese Medicine. While I do realize it’s not for everyone, it was a valuable and sought after addition to my doula and midwifery services. I probably processed nearly a thousand placentas over a dozen years or more.

Here are the steps:

1.Steam the placenta (Oh my God, Mom! That smells so awful.)

2.Slice it into strips (Ugh! So bloody! Why do you have to do this in our house?)

3.Dehydrate it (You do realize this is human flesh don’t you? Can’t you smell that?)

4.Powder it up (Why???)

5.Put it into capsules for women to ingest like vitamin pills (Gross. I would never.)

6.Sanitize all equipment and your workspace carefully and thoroughly (I don’t care how much bleach you used, I am not making a sandwich there.)

It’s a time-honored medicine, which helps to replace hormones and nutrients, promote healing, and bring on plenty of breast milk.

If this seems strange, I would point you to the example of every other mammal on Earth, who consumes the placenta upon birthing her young. And if you’re cringing or gagging right now, I’m so sorry, but perhaps it will help you relate to my children. They learned to live with this, and much more, which they will happily tell you all about if you will listen.

This was only one of the terribly embarrassing things about me, but I was okay with that. It confirmed I was fulfilling my contractual obligations as their mother, and I figured it gave them a good head start to understanding reproductive science. Surely, their future partners would thank me someday for all my frank openness about the goings on of a woman’s body.

Plus, the placentas gave them something to talk about with their friends. Because the thing is, when you have two boys, you usually have six hanging around, and they’re almost always in your kitchen.

“Oh dude, YES! Your mom’s making moose jerky?” One of them says, peering into the dehydrator that’s cranking out a certain meaty aroma.

“It’s not moose jerky,” my son replies, scowling at me.

I was told years later that once, they dared one of their friends to eat a piece, and he did. This horrified me, not because I thought any harm might come to the boy, but because when the sacred placenta was entrusted to me, that was not part of the arrangement. While I found this upsetting, it was nothing compared to some of the other shenanigans that went on in and around our house in that painfully small town.

Part 7: Cabin Fever

For one reason and another, we moved around Palmer from rental to rental frequently when my kids were growing up. Constant change and instability was not the only reason they carried a lot of pent up rage — they had some other very valid reasons, too. In any event, anger management was a constant topic at our house. It was an issue that only got worse when everyone was trapped indoors for long periods, due to untenable winds or the roads becoming hockey rinks. I struggled to figure out how to help my burgeoning teenagers healthfully process difficult emotions.

Then we found a solution.

The first TV we smashed was one we already had on hand. We put a tarp down on the driveway, dragged it outside, and using goggles, gloves and a crowbar, I let them take turns.

When that TV had nothing left to offer, I cleaned it up and went to the thrift store for another. Then another. Soon the kids from across the street were stopping by to ask, “Are you guys going to smash any TVs today?” and, “Can I have a turn?”

At the thrift store, I looked for the biggest, junkiest, most outdated, and therefore cheapest TVs that would give us the most bang for our buck. I figured I was doing the world a service by taking these boob tubes out of circulation one at a time, while also helping my kids work trauma and anger from their muscles.

While waiting in line one day with a particularly old model, a woman ahead of me started chatting me up.

“That sure is an old TV! Are you sure it works?”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m buying it so my kids can smash it up.”

She gave me an alarmed look, but then someone behind me holding a stack of dishes piped in. “That’s what I’m buying these plates for! I like to throw them as hard as I can into the dumpster behind our building.”

Now the person behind her leaned in, contributing her part in helping to normalize rage. “I throw eggs at the side of my house.”

We learned that the common denominator among all of us was having teenagers at home, and I was so glad to learn I wasn’t alone. I often felt like the only mother in the world with my set of problems. The disastrous reality of raising teens is that you have zero control and total responsibility. No matter how “together” I tried to appear, our freak flag was always flapping in the wind.

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