Losing Time Means Losing My Mind

Another excerpt in working on my Alaska story. I am not sure what form this story is going to take- only that I know I want to write about my experience in Alaska and I'm just posting these as I go. I will tighten it up hopefully sometime later. I think it will help to just get my words out there. Releasing the pieces, as unpolished as they are, helps take the pressure off the delusionary quest for (personal) perfection....better just to write and move on and keep writing and keep moving on.

On my arrival in Nak Nek Alaska:

I got off the plane and looked around. I like small airports, one baggage claim, one airstrip. I feel like my arrival matters, I will not be lost in the mayhem. I collect my bag easily, but there is no indication for where I should go. There is a huge yellow school bus with a man holding a sign, “Trident Cannery” and almost everyone from my plane starts filing onto that bus. I want to go with them. Safety in numbers. Before climbing up the steps of the bus, the man I sat next to on the plane turns back and gives me a sad smile and a thumbs up. Suddenly I feel my only friend is leaving me. The school bus pulls away.

The parking lot, if you could call it that, is clearing out. A woman jumps out of an SUV with a big shaggy golden retreiver and asks if I’m LuLing. Yes…just like that? I'm the only one to pick up? I don’t know what to think, so I think nothing.

We drive. The dog calms me as I reach over the back seat to pet it. I let it lick me generously. I let it lick away my salt and my fear. There are endless fields of wildflowers. We make easy small talk about the weather up here, the population (300), what kind of wildlife roams (bears, moose, caribou, foxes, wolves), and after about twenty minutes, we’ve pulled up to a compond with some rusty boat hulls in a gravelly parking lot and shanty-looking clapboard buildings dotting a sprawling uneven acreage.

(Note to self: It hurts to go over this in my head. Do I need to recall the details? Can I just talk about the stuff I want to talk about? Do I have to tell the story with any kind of narrative cohesion? I only want to recall some, not all, of the memories. But will it make the story patchy?)

My dorm is called Waldorf Hysteria. I think it’s funny for the first day and by the third, I resent anyone making light of the shit we suffer through.

The only thing that can preserve my sanity, that can run its fingers over the fissures beginning to crack across the surface of my body and mind, is time. Time is the panacea, the caulking. Time means sleep, getting to eat, dialing the phone to the one voice out there who can soothe me. But time is always one step ahead, taunting me, as I chase its slithering tail. I cover my ears, and blot out its laughter.

We work sixteen hours a day, every day of the week. That leaves eight remaining hours that should, arguably, belong to me. But there is a line for the shower. There is a line to do laundry. There is a line to get food. There is a line at the payphone. I swat mosquitoes, exhausted and aimless, waiting. I wait to turn on the hot faucet and wash the sick stench of fish off my skin. I wait to dump my clothes in the washer. I wait til the Polish girl is done yelling at me because I have removed her clothes from the washer and some have fallen on the floor. I wait with my plastic tray to lift a lifeless heap of cafeteria grub.

For those of us desperate for time, waiting is the tax we pay. With pain, I watch my minutes pass. The first second of a new minute is a seed. The subsequent seconds build around the seed, packing around it, morphing and coalescing into a ball. After sixty seconds, a new seed forms, and the seconds pack around it, and each minute becomes a round hard unit, like a marble. As I stand waiting, hungry, tired, sweaty, itchy, longing, dirty, I watch as a big hand reaches into the last stash of my equanimity and pockets my marbles. I am losing them, and I feel my undoing.