Alaska's Mountains and Motorcycles

Bonjour!

Several years ago, before I returned to school to finish my Bachelor's degree, Rachel and I lived in Alaska for about a year and a half. This was after leaving California, where Rachel was born, before moving to Arizona (where I finished my BA), and so of course before life now in Montreal. She was a toddler at the time. Our life placed us on a mountain over looking the city of Anchorage, and it's surrounding inlet, which hosts the second largest tidal range in the world. I worked at the University and in the winter to drive into town we'd have to wake up extra early to snow blow a two hundred yard stretch of driveway to get through what was either new snow fall, or snow blown over again by 100 mph winds. To get back up to the house at night I honestly would have to traverse back and forth up the road sometimes. My front wheel drive sedan mostly kicked that mountain road's butt all winter long. But there was one stretch of road that consisted of a very steep up hill climb. On occasion, after a major snow storm, to get up that climb I'd have to put my car perpendicular to the road and drive the car back and forth, slowly moving sideways up the hill. That year we had a record snow fall in the Anchorage area of 28" in less than 24 hours. All businesses and schools in town were of course closed. A friend of mine had to go into work to pick up some paperwork though and to make it to the front door of her building, which was at the bottom of a hill, she walked through powdered snow that reached up to her chest. Somehow she kicked enough snow away from the front door to pull the thing open, and then later managed to push her way out again.

Life in Alaska can be a little over the top. Facing the elements in such radical form takes shape in the people in strange, unpredictable ways too. People tend to be rather to the point when it comes to conversation and saying what they want, what they have to do, or what they damn well expect you to get done. Members of my family, including myself, have on occasion been described as "refreshingly direct" by those from outside of Alaska that enjoy our company, and not described as anything at all (to our faces) by those that find our "refreshing directness" uncomfortable.

This Spring during a brief visit I had several odd little encounters, some of you may have heard of them. Attending a local concert at a log cabin bar in the middle of the woods one evening, a man I'd never met before walked up to me and asked if he could have a hug. He seemed harmless enough so I decided to oblige him briefly. Afterwards he asked (in response to a sleeveless Harley Davidson shirt I was wearing) if I owned a Harley. "I think of it more as a long-term goal." I responded. He looked at me hard in the face and then said, "I've got a garage full of Harleys." I nodded, getting ready to turn away. Before I could he looked me hard in the face again and said, "All I can offer you are all my Harleys and my love. All I need to know is that I can trust you with my life." It turns out becoming a philosopher is one way to obfuscate Alaskan directness. I explained that while hypothetically a person probably could trust me with their life, in actuality he would not. Rachel and I spent the rest of the summer trying to work that conversation into a Country and Western song.

A few days later I was buying coffee from my favorite local café--Kaladi Brothers on Northern Lights, snuggled between Title Wave Used Books on one side, and REI on the other. On my way out I saw that a man was hand carving wooden spoons. It appeared to me that he was sitting there carving the spoons in order to sell them. Thinking I was being helpful, I stopped and asked the man how much for a small purplish spoon he had displayed. By this time I'd finished my coffee and thrown away the paper cup I got it in. "Where's your coffee?" He said. Confused, I asked him what he meant. "Where your coffee? You went and threw it away. Didn't you?" Still missing his point I answered him smiling, "No, I drank it." He scowled at me. "Don't lie! You threw it away. That plastic lid. That paper cup." I changed topic asking him again how much the purple spoon was, telling him that I only had $20 but perhaps one of his spoons cost that much. He looked up from his carving and raised his voice at me, "As long as people like you buy your coffee without a reusable container, my spoons will be too expensive to buy! You can't buy my spoons!" I have to admit I almost laughed but instead told him I respected his cause, and his spoons, and would make a point of changing my cup habits, then walked away. The next day I returned to the same Kaladi café and found a sturdy ceramic travel mug. You coffee connoisseurs know that drinking from metal or plastic changes the taste in a way a ceramic cup just doesn't. The spoon man, though, was no longer there.

Rachel and I just enjoyed nine days in Anchorage, returning this Monday to Montreal. As usual, I spent the first five days sleeping, and the last four sleeping more. Rachel turned 8 the last Friday of our visit and our family celebrated with the moose bone soup she'd requested. The bones came from a moose my brother in law, Kevin, got just last month during a hunting trip he and my dad took out to Naknek on the Western Coast of Alaska, where our family spends the summers commercial fishing.

While there I also visited that same mountain road I'd lived on top of to go for a hike and overlook the inlet. Without snow on the road it was an easy drive. I hiked through a valley that stretches across the Chugach Range looking to either side of me at the peaks stretching up over head. Long before I ever lived in those mountains as an adult, I spent ample time running around in them, or skiing there with my father. The valley was dotted with moose I could make out against the yellowed fall tundra in the distance. Before and after the hike I stood and looked over the city of Anchorage--a bowl built in the marsh land encircled by mountains and the water. By the time I began my drive back down the mountain it had started snowing.

It's a big contrast, now here in Montreal again, to return my self to that spot. There is a great rootedness in knowing I come from such a strongly built place. I appreciate the way in which, even as I live right now in a city with its quick pace and boxed in housing, those mountains are back there reminding me snow happens. Keep both feet on the ground and be prepared for anything. You never know when you may have to push your way through chest deep snow, on the one hand, or be faced with an offer of a garage full of Harley's, on the other.

Cheers!
Hope you all are doing well!
Elaine

Roots, Parks, and Relaxing

Bonjour tout le monde!

Parc la Fontaine, the park near my house, today is filled with people simply relaxing, taking in the Fall sun. It is beautiful today. The full sun pours through yellowing leaves, and a slight wind rustles up the crisped leaves that lay upon the ground. Montreal carries a pleasant air about it. Walking through the park on my way home this afternoon, I strolled down the hill, and along the lake. People had brought their own hammocks and tied them up between two oaks, or between light pole and oak, to lounge along the water. Couples were snuggled up, feeling free to kiss and squeeze together on the grass. There were several sets of elder women giggling together on park benches. Up above, the park is full of game sites--courts for tennis, softball, soccer, areas for volley-hack (volleyball using a hackey sack, hackey sack rules, and a low net), and bocci ball. People were utilizing all of these, and elder men were at tables playing cards and chess. What I love about Montreal is that it seems designed and built for the comfort of people within it.

Five hours east, Toronto hosts a wealth of cultural activities. There is an enormous jazz community, the blues play every night, museums are heavily funded, galleries have ample support. It is a city I enjoy spending time with, admittedly at least in part because every where the landscape is dominated by the English language. One of the differences I see though is that in the center of Toronto, at least, many of the parks seem designed for the overwhelming impression of grandeur they will induce. The feeling of the place is about awe, and impressiveness. Further out in the city there are many parks that consist mostly of rolling grass and playgrounds. The inhabitants of Toronto utilize these parks for community events such as dramatic performances, and community feasts. But even so, the city and those parks don't have quite the feel of well-planned invitation to be comfortable that I find here in Montreal.

It is a surprising and comical city in many ways as well. I'll admit to what for many of the people I know would be shocking occurrences. This morning, walking to re-park my car for the sake of street cleaning, I passed three teenage boys trying to secretly split up a bag of marijuana. It is clear this sort of thing isn't much of a concern here since, though it was obvious they didn't want anyone to see them, they also were only about two feet off the neighborhood street standing against the backstairs of a house. Later this afternoon I walked by an erotic shop, about half a mile from my house, that recently changed it's name from "Erotim" (with an apple as part of the store logo) to "Romance." The store sign also changed from white with red trim to all red. So now when you walk by you see a big store front window displaying a male mannequin in a bell hop uniform with snap up (and off) sides, on the one hand, and a female mannequin with a nursing outfit, on the other. Above them both is a giant red sign announcing ROMANCE! I must confess it's hard for me to imagine a woman in a nursing uniform, with her boyfriend dressed as a bellhop and the both of them doing anything but laughing.

It's been interesting to discover that as much as I love Montreal, as totally as it expresses many of the principles of the good life I hold, it still hasn't allowed me to root down. I'm much more comfortable here now than I have been the last two years. No one I love has committed suicide in over a year, which helps quite a lot. Rachel *isn't* possibly quite ill, and I haven't had a cold, shingles, or any other malady since last winter. All that is a great portion of the comfort in my life now. But also I've just gotten used to be surrounded by a foreign language all the time, I've learned how to get around a city of 3.5 million, and as Rachel put it yesterday, I've gotten better at relaxing. "It feels good to relax," she said. Still, a whole other set of the values I hold rest entirely in family, and in community. I've done well at building and connecting to a community here. But the reality of the sort of work we do as philosophers is that much of our time is spent in solitude. So the community I know here comes from meeting people as they step out of their cave, covered in the bear-ish hair they've grown while trying to sort out what Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblance has to do with the question of race (in my case), or how Husserl's theory of time helps us better understand the self (in my friend Don's case), or why there is anything that exists at all (as in the case of my friend Brian). The work I've been doing in graduate school, it turns out, is very much tied up with my realizing that when it comes down to it I simply am born and made of the mountains in Alaska, and of the utterly peculiar, frequently pain-in-the-butt-strange, fiercely loving, and difficult people I know there. I've spent many years of my life feeling conflicted between the home that I come from, and how it frustrates me, and the ideas and culture I wanted to learn and be a part of. Somehow living in a place so different from Alaska--so different people literally don't even speak the same language--has finally eroded most of that conflict away. I don't feel so split between places anymore but instead simply a person integrated with both. Don't get tricked into thinking I've become idealistic. I'm sure life will continue to confound me in plenty of other ways.

Rachel is doing wonderfully well. She is bi-lingual in French and English, though her English vocabulary and reading ability are further along than her French. I bumped into her English teacher this afternoon and he told me about how excited Rachel always is to get to his class. So excited in fact he usually has to ask her to *not* shout out the answers to every question he asked. But then he made a point of saying she's a good kid, so respectful and polite, as well as energetic and friendly. Somehow that seems like much of the description I'd hoped for in thinking so hard about how to raise her. She's begun taking break-dancing classes on Thursday afternoons, and she goes to Hatha Yoga now on Mondays. Her break-dancing instructor told them that break-dancing comes down to two things--music (and then he bumped his head to a beat, implying that it is your ability to follow that beat that he was really referring to), and acrobatics. This last week they learned how to roll and spin off one heel and a hand, as well as how to do some simple leg bending that looks quite fancy when you do it to the beat. I asked Rachel what she did in Yoga this week and she responded, "Not that much. We were snakes moving around a rock. And then just snakes. And then we just lay there to relax. It feels good to relax. We should do that every time."

Next week we go to Alaska to visit. I'll meet my new Nephew Oliver for the first time--he's three months old today. Rachel will turn eight, at which point I'll also celebrate my 8-year anniversary of becoming a mom, something I'm quite proud of. And I'll root down for a while in those mountains, with all those pain-in-the-butt people I love so much.

I hope life for all of you is full of peace, feeling, and comfort.

Enjoy your comfort!

Your friend,
Elaine