Just Passing Through

Photo of our community living room, blatantly stolen from Scott Pauker's blog
(http://spokeandwords.com/hitching-prudhoe-bay-part-2/)

When the kids and I found the sheet of fresh cookies and the pan of homemade brownies that Scott Pauker had left on our kitchen counter, I felt a twinge of regret that he would not be there to share them with us. 

Not that our little community of nine adults and four kids would have any trouble gobbling down the treats without outside assistance.  We have a strong track-record in Postprandial Gooey Deliciousness Consumption.  It’s part of the rhythm of the evening, which starts when we hungrily gather to sniff out whatever the chef du jour has concocted, and ends when we drag unwilling children home for necessary slumber. 

Dinner itself is usually gratifyingly replete with dark leafy greens, organic legumes, and whole-graininess.  While dining – and in the comfortable after-supper half-hour of plate-scrubbing and leftover-wrapping – we all decompress from work, gripe about current events, share our very best in off-color humor, or (in the case of the eight-to-ten-year-old crowd) happily absorb the off-color humor while bouncing off the walls.  Finally, we settle down to the pleasures of Dessert Time.

For two evenings during the previous week as well as two evenings this week, Scott had made a nice addition to that tableau.  His sunburned grin radiated his total lack of concern at finding himself in the midst of some kind of weird intellectual hippie mini-commune.  They use an outhouse and make jokes about Oxford commas?  Yeah, I’m cool with that.  He filled us in on enticing tidbits of Seattle news and biking lore.  He shared amusing details of his Adventure Thus Far -- and we were fond of his penchant for washing more than his share of the dishes. 

But, of course, he couldn’t hang around Fairbanks, Alaska forever.  He had places to go…such as Tierra del Fuego.  On his bicycle.

“Will we ever see him again?” asked Molly. She was indirectly responsible for the hoard of baked stickiness that was now brightening our morning with the joys of anticipation; with the honed cunning on an almost-third-grader, she’d been the fastest responder when Scott had kindly asked what sort of foodstuffs he might contribute to the general well-being of Tamarack Knoll. 

“Probably not,” I admitted.  “But we can follow his adventures online, if you want.”

“Okay.”

Molly sounded interested rather than disappointed.  She’d liked Scott.  Still, at age eight, she already seems well-acquainted with the fact that people come and go.  Travelers don’t always return. 

She strapped her own bike helmet over her raincoat hood for the decidedly less epic ride to this week’s summer camp – Shakespearean acting for the eight-to-twelve set – and the subject shifted to the question of why Lizzy’s bike has a rear mud-guard, while her twin’s does not.  But, as we splashed our way up our dirt road, and as I offered pointers on what gear a bike ought to be in on a steep incline (“Try a lower one, kiddo… no, a LOWER one…”) I found myself mulling over how we relate to the transient people in our lives: The Travelers.

I’ve blogged previously about the importance of community; of friendships; of sense of place; of ties that are permanent (okay, fine, not permanent on an intergalactic scale, but you know what I mean); and of people who are SO AWESOME that one can pawn off one’s kids on them at short notice. These myriad bonds are at once as complex as calculus and as comfortable as couch cushions.  In our clock-watching, parking-lot-infested, glowing-screen-riddled lives, the time-and-connectedness algorithms are often tricky to compute, and the fabric of community needs a bit of darning, to say the least.  But where, in weaving that mathematical tapestry, do we place the person who is new, foreign, strange, unknown, and temporary?  What is the role of The Archetypal Traveler?

The Traveler shows up in plenty of stories, from the Odyssey on out.  He or she is the Gypsy, the Tinker, the Explorer, the Warrior, the Vagabond, and the Stranger all rolled into one.  She is the Fairy Godmother, who appears for just long enough to do her trick with the pumpkin.  He is that Brad Pitt character who runs off with all the money in Thelma and Louise – but that’s not why you remember the character, now is it?  He is Gandalf, who never quite seems able to stick around long enough for the entire adventure, due to mysteriously pressing business elsewhere. 

Scott, of course, is not an archetype; he’s a specific, cheerful, 37-year-old man from Seattle with muddy Spandex and a liberal-arts background.  But, for the purposes of my ruminations, he makes a splendid archetypal proxy. We’d never heard of him until a few weeks ago.  He came our way as the friend-of-friends-of-friends, in a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon kind of way. 

Jay mentioned to me, in a vague sort of way, that “some biker guy” might be passing through, like, sometime, and did I think the community would be okay with letting him crash in the guest room?  As the Communications Specialist of the family (a job that falls to me by default, not based on any useful skillset), I posed this question to whomever happened to be around, received some unperturbed “yes” responses, and promptly forgot all about it until my phone rang, showing an unknown out-of-state number. 

“You’re where?  Old Nenana?  Okey-doke, you should be here in about twenty minutes.” 

I went to find a set of sheets, some sandwich-fixings, and a towel with not too many holes in it.

The Traveler is, by definition, is on the move. He’s not merely someone you’ve never met before; he’s someone who has been places you’ve never been, and is going places you probably can’t even imagine: “You’ve never heard of the Millennium Falcon? … It’s the ship that made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.”

Han Solo may not have known the difference between units of distance and units of time, but he was definitely going places: "Look, I ain't in this for your revolution, and I'm not in it for you, princess. I expect to be well paid. I'm in it for the money.” The traveler may or may not be one of the Good Guys in White Hats, but he’s interesting – and undeniably, oddly magnetic.

The Traveler doesn’t just crop up in literature (yes, of course Star Wars is literature!); he or she also seems to crop up with some regularity in our community.  Why?  Well, I’m not sure.  It might be because, given that there are five households in our group, we naturally receive five times the standard-issue number of guests.  It might be because Fairbanks is the kind of place where people frequently couch-surf – sometimes in a not-getting-off-this-couch-without-a-crowbar kind of way.  Or it might be because our community has an excellent reputation for not yet having slaughtered a single visitor in our ten-year history. 

Be that as it may, the vast majority of our guests have brightened and enlivened our lives.  Fairbanks is not a place that people “just pass through” unless they are up to something just a bit peculiar – such as a stint at Toolik Lake field station, measuring arctic shrubbery while enjoying the enthralling company of a few billion mosquitoes. We’ve housed researchers, families, relatives, and strangers.  We played host to the now-community-legend Fred, a retired African-American factory worker who came up to Alaska just to take part in the White Mountains 100 wilderness race.  I’d explain all about Fred, but this sign that the kids made says it all.  

Some of this enlivenment-via-house-guest, granted, involved a sort of after-the-fact “Type 2” fun.  The young woman who left a large, bloody, meaty item in our freezer, for example… well, she might have been lacking a few rudimentary social skills, but she left us with a most excellent story.*

Why are we drawn to The Traveler?  Why, knowing that we have no chance of developing a permanent bond, a reciprocal relationship, or even a real friendship, do we eagerly take in the traveler, make him a sandwich, and tell him to “make himself at home”?  Scott gave us wine, dishwashing, and brownies, but such generosity wasn’t expected or required.  What intangibles make The Traveler worthwhile?

What is The Traveler giving away for free?  Well, in the course of my 42 years, I have not only encountered The Traveler many times; I’ve also been The Traveler.  When I signed up to join the US Peace Corps at the ripe old age of 21, I had only the vaguest notion of what it might mean to go away and live in a less-developed foreign country for two years.  That is, I thought about many of the things I might have to give up: running water, electricity, spaghetti, Cadbury’s.  I didn’t understand quite so clearly what it might mean to give up familiarity, belonging, being at home.  I didn’t understand what it would be like to have to explain – weekly, daily, hourly – everything about myself, my worldview, my race, my nationality, my culture.

But there was no choice.  I was The Traveler.  I needed to describe snow to children who had never experienced temperatures below sixty Fahrenheit.  I needed to describe the American educational system to people who had struggled to get as far as seventh grade.  I, a lone white woman in a sea of resentment, needed to discuss racial tensions, the misunderstood plots of soap operas I’d never seen, the entire history of slavery, what New York City is like, the fact that I was NOT a Mormon missionary, class warfare, hurricanes, the CIA, school gardens, international trade, and English grammar.  My role as story-teller was non-negotiable.

I recall, with peculiar clarity, the day when I was seating at the bottom of a pit – destined to be a new school latrine -- with a shovel and crowbar.  The temperature was well over ninety.  It always was.  I was dripping.  But I was digging with fierce determination, in part because I knew that everyone had one eye on their own work, and one eye on me.  As I worked, a very old man, seated comfortably above-ground, turned to no one in particular and wheezed, with absolute conviction, that white girls sure can dig an outhouse.

If it hadn’t been clear before, it was clear then: the payment for my acceptance was not only my tales from afar, but also my role as a proxy for every American that everyone had never met.  I was The Traveler.   And being The Traveler is fascinating.  It’s exhilarating.  It’s also utterly exhausting – although not usually in the bone-weary sledge-hammer sense.  It’s draining socially, psychically, and emotionally. 

Scott passed through our humble not-a-commune on his way north to the official start of his bike ride at the Arctic Ocean.  He passed through again on his way south.  We saw him for a total of four evenings.  Since then, we’ve followed some of his adventures via Facebook and his blog.  “Oh, look, Scott made it to Whitehorse… Hey, did you read the piece Scott wrote about Skinny Dick’s Half-Way Inn?…” 

We won’t see him again.  The brownies are long gone.  The kids are not pining for the missing guest.  But when another Traveler gets in touch with us (by text or Facebook or pure-white carrier pigeon tossed upward from the slopes of a mythical volcano), we’ll welcome her.  We’ll make her a sandwich, and offer her a shower (replete with caveats about our limited water supply).  And we’ll ply her for stories, for mystery, for vicarious armchair-adventure.  She’ll understand the currency.  It’s one with a long history, and yet – despite the Age of Communication, despite supersonic speeds and instant messaging and a distinct lack of tinkers, magicians, Gypsies, and bundle-carrying train-hopping hobos in  a world grown small -- it still clings to shreds of its former value.

Community spells comfort, familiarity, home.  Without a community of friends and family, it’s easy to feel lost, ungrounded, purposeless.  The Traveler, on the other hand, symbolizes the mysterious, the unknown, the adventure you haven’t yet had, and the places you haven’t yet seen – but might.  Without The Traveler, the world can seem too small, too dull, too unchanging, too lacking in possibility. Thus, Community and Traveler are yin and yang.  We need one because we need the other.  And– at least at some time in our lives – we all need to take at least a brief turn at carrying the tales.  We probably won’t cover as many parsecs as Han Solo.  We probably won’t keep our pedals turning all the way from the Arctic Ocean to the tip of South America.  But we’ll at least gain some appreciation for those who do.

Happy trails, Scott.

* The young woman in question called us up about six months later and told us that she’d be swinging by to pick it up.  When we informed her that’s we’d thrown it away (not without some confusion and disgust), she was incensed.  “You threw away my bear heart?!”

Stranger Than Fiction

 

Photo credit: Jay Cable, Ireland, 2009

It was about ten p.m.  My friend Amy and I were biking along a deserted road.  The only landmarks nearby were a cemetery, a field full of musk oxen, and a whole lot of dense woods.  We were at least half a mile from the nearest house when a very small curly-haired person stepped out of the forest.  She was wearing a nightdress, cowboy boots, a large cross, and a backpack.   A dense cloud of mosquitoes was busily feasting on her dimpled knees and pale little arms.  She gazed about in what appeared to be mild confusion.

I squeezed the brakes.  “Um… hi there.  Do you need help?”

She considered this carefully.  She wasn’t sniveling, shrieking, or showing any other signs of little-kid distress.  “Yeah…” she said, with the hesitation of someone who is unsure whether they prefer chocolate or vanilla. 

Amy and I started questioning her, as gently as possible.  She was six – or, no, maybe she wasn’t six.  Her name was Kira – or, then again, maybe it wasn’t.  After the first few brief moments of simple trust, she was eyeing me with suspicion, her brow furrowed as if recalling a lesson. Oh crap, I thought.  She knows she’s not supposed to talk to strangers.

Don’t talk to strangers.  It’s one of the basics, part of Parenting 101, along with Don’t Give In To Whining and Don’t Fill the Sippy Cup with Mountain Dew.  But it was a safety precaution that –unlike the nifty outlet blockers, diminutive bike helmets, and many-strapped car seats --  I’d never actually done anything about.  Last winter, I felt caught out when notes came home from kindergarten with Molly and Lizzy.  My children – along with everyone else’s -- would be hearing a talk about “stranger danger” in school, unless I demanded that they NOT hear it.  It was unclear what would be done with students whose parents refused to comply, but of course I made no protest.  The school was doing the Right Thing – weren’t they?

Afterwards, I asked the twins what they’d been told, but they were noncommittal.  Trying to ask kindergarteners what they did all day in school is about as productive and informative as trying to ask the cat why she insists on shredding my bags of sewing supplies.  However, a couple of days later, as I was dropping the kids off in the morning, I witnessed an interesting scene.

A couple of first grade boys were chasing each other around in the snow, laughing uproariously as one wrestled the other to the ground.   Nothing unusual there; this is pretty much what all kids do until stopped and forced to wait in line by the boring Grownups In Charge.  But when these two came up for air, the kid on top jumped off and cheerfully told his friend, “Ok, now you can be the stranger!”  They took off again, shrieking and laughing and periodically shouting, “Stranger!  Stranger!” as they jumped on one another.

Yeah, I laughed.  Bad, bad, Mommy. But I also started pondering, then, just how useful the whole concept of “stranger danger” is.  Children DO occasionally get harmed by strangers, and the concept is too horrific for me to even try to say anything flippant about it.  But kids much more often get harmed by people they know.  Friends.  Neighbors. Family members.  Parents.  And no, I’m not going to say anything funny about that either.  But it does kind of convolute the message if the grocery cashier might actually be a safer bet than Uncle Cliff.

On that lonely roadside, Kira – or maybe not Kira – suddenly asked me, “Are you a mommy?”  My affirmative seemed to reassure her, but she still looked cagey.  Mommy or not, I was still, after all, a stranger. 

When we asked where her own Mommy or Daddy might be, she told us, big-eyed and with significant dramatic flair, that her mommy had been STOLEN.  

Oh, crap.  Stolen?  My mind raced down all kinds of avenues lifted straight from Hollywood.  An attack?  An abduction?  I started a sort of off-kilter game of 20 questions with the kid, trying to ferret out the story, but the details quickly became ludicrous and self-contradictory, and I caught Amy’s eye.  This little girl wasn’t suffering from trauma; she was suffering from a few too many movies, an active imagination, and a fear of telling the truth to someone she didn’t know.  We agreed that she would bike on down the road in search of other human life forms.  Someone must be responsible for this confabulating, engaging little waif.  At the very least, somebody had to have a phone, to call the cops. 

Police officers, of course, are almost always strangers, too.  Likewise, on the first day of school, the teacher is a stranger.  On the random Thursday when the teacher has finally succumbed to the fetid germs spread by hundreds of sticky little kindergarten fingers, the substitute is a stranger.  The pale teenager scooping Nanook Nosh is a stranger, as is the nurse who jabs you in the thigh with deactivated mumps, measles, and rubella.  There are six billion people in the world – including, presumably, my kids’ future coworkers, friends, spouses, and mildly annoying acquaintances.  They can’t all be scary.

Moreover, almost half of those six billion people are other people’s kids.  To them – to Kira -- I’m the stranger. 

In the end, no cops were called, and no damage was done beyond some parental heart-stress and a whole lot of mosquito bites.  Amy found a herd of frantic family members combing the streets and cemetery half a mile or more away.  Apparently the little cherub had gotten out of bed, donned her boots and backpack, and disappeared out the door while the rest of the family was watching TV.

“Honey, you can’t DO that,” wailed the not-at-all-abducted mother, alternately thanking Amy and me and hugging her wayward kid. 

I looked at little Kira, whose spirits seemed undampened, and considered that if she was capable of this adventure at age six, her mom might have her hands kind of full in another seven or eight years.  I couldn’t help but feel impressed by a six-year-old who had gotten up alone in the middle of the night, covered well over a mile on trails in the woods, and invented an abductor for her mother.  Of course, it was all wrong – totally wrong.  Pretty much the only thing this little girl had done right was admitting that yeah, she needed help – from a stranger.

It became clearer, then, what I’d always known: that ultimately, we all rely on strangers.  We have to trust them to brake at intersections, to measure the prescription accurately, and to serve the fries without spitting on them.  Sometimes, we have to trust them a bit further, too.  Fourteen years ago, I crashed a truck somewhere between Nowhere and Really-Seriously-Nowhere in northern Saskatchewan. I’m sure I looked like a very unpromising hitchhiker when stumbling down a dirt road in the dark with blood dripping from all over my face.  Nonetheless, a total stranger stopped for me. And turned around.  And drove me half an hour the other way to medical care.  And gave me a card and flowers the next day.

Thus, I’ve decided that the whole idea of teaching kids to avoid all strangers is a truckload of donkey manure – regardless of whether you have the kind of six-year-old who decides to hoof it alone cross-country in her cowboy boots, or the sort of overly-cautious child who is terrified of the Wicked Witch of the West even when she’s a marionette (not to name any names here).  Sure, I’ll talk to my kids about what kind of things no one should ever ask them to do, and I’ll try to make sure they know the difference between friendly and creepy.  But I’m not going to keep them on too short a leash, and I’m definitely not going to tell them to be afraid of everyone new.  I just can’t.  I like strangers too much – after all, they’re the people from whom I’ve drawn every single one of my friends.

And if you happen to be reading this and don’t already know me… go ahead, leave a comment.  I like talking to strangers.