Escape: Love and Lies in Alaska (Offering 5.2)
When passion and wilderness collide
This offering enters the wild heart of Alaska, where longing meets liberation and a love story begins to unfurl.
(This is offering 5.2 of Eclosion: An Artist’s Path to Power and Peace. If you’re new here, start at the beginning.)
25 years and my life is still
Trying to get up that great big hill of hope
For a destination
~What’s Up by 4 Non Blondes
My court date for the DUI wasn’t until after the other seasonal naturalists and I were scheduled to leave our jobs and Alaska. CACS was kind enough to find me some work to do while I waited and let me continue to live in the Birdhouse. What I really wanted to do was to go on one more Alaskan adventure before I headed back home, but everyone I knew was gone.
As I returned to the Birdhouse one afternoon, I saw the red light blinking on the corded phone. I picked it up and hit play. The voice on my answering machine was the last I expected to hear. I hadn’t seen him since I dropped a kiln by his place before leaving on this adventure three months earlier. At that time, I didn’t even have a phone number to give him. I listened to his words, “Carrie! Hearing your voice is like bubbles blowing across a meadow filled with wildflowers!” And I remember…
We’re mixing glazes in his ceramics studio. Just him and me. Joking around and having fun while we geek out on glaze recipes. His hand brushes mine and my body comes alive. I step aside, even as my entire being screams to step closer…
We’re both bartering our handmade goods at the Tonasket Barter Fair. He stops by my booth, and we look at my pottery together. It’s so cold the water froze in my water bottle overnight. Our fingers touch as we look at a bowl I made, with a flower design in the middle. I feel the spark of desire and connection right through our gloves...
My partner’s band is putting on a show at the Eagles ballroom. I’m dancing in the back when he comes by and we dance together, bodies moving in rhythm with the music, with each other. Even though we never touch, the resonance rises, every nerve alive and reaching. Earlier that night he told me that he and his girlfriend of many years had separated. Part of me is ecstatic that he’s single. But I’m not, and this pull he has on me suddenly feels so much more dangerous. When the song ends, I walk away…
I met Shon several years before I left for Alaska. He was a ceramic artist working with a few other artists to form a clay cooperative, a group that would share resources and studio space. They were holding a meeting at the library to share their vision and invite others to join their group. Having recently graduated from college, I went to the meeting, looking for a way to keep working with clay. My gaze immediately landed on him as I walked into the room.
Our eyes met and an electric charge rang through me, racing from my eyes to my groin in a single moment. I was no stranger to attraction, but this was different. It was like we resonated at the same frequency. He welcomed me and I sat down in a chair next to his, shoving that feeling, that resonance, deep inside. I was already in a relationship. Turns out, so was he. But that resonance resurfaced every time I saw him.
It wasn’t just a physical attraction—though he was beautiful with his long, dark brown hair and clear hazel eyes. He had what I wanted but was too afraid to admit. He was playful and goofy. He was an artist, able to freely communicate his passion for and right to make art. He seemed comfortable in his skin, walking through life with a light step—almost a dance—like he belonged, unafraid of what others thought of him.
When I dropped the kiln off at his place before heading off on my Alaskan adventure, we made a bit of a game out of hauling the kiln bricks from my friend’s truck down the short but steep, forested path to his kiln shed. I grabbed a couple of bricks from the truck and carried them part ways down. He met me coming up. As I handed him the bricks, somehow, our fingers always touched, just barely, sending that electricity through me. Then, with a flourish and a spin we turned apart, me dancing back to my car for more bricks as he danced the ones I gave him back down.
As I listened to his voice on my answering machine, I knew: Shon was going to visit me in Alaska.
Our first date was 10 days long, in the wilds of Alaska.
I was helping with a dessert auction and fundraiser in our downtown office when Shon arrived. I didn’t recognize him right away when he walked in. He’d shaved his head over the summer, and that long, dark mane I loved so much was now short. I’d changed too. Even though I danced and hiked all summer, my belly was rounder and I felt heavy from the alcohol I drank.
Finally, after years of yearning, we were both single. I didn’t know how to act around him at first, so after the work event, I took him to see a local bluegrass band play at a nearby bar. As the first pint hit my system, I loosened up and we began to talk. When I asked if he wanted another, he said no, so I only had the one beer that night—the first time in months that I had just one drink. We talked and danced all night, always close enough to touch. I’d always wanted a man who danced, and Shon danced with abandon—wild and spacious, movements filled with joy and delight. I loved it. When the bar closed, we drove up to the Birdhouse.
The Birdhouse was so named because of its tiny size and unique shape. It had a steep A-frame roof and where the roofline met the walls, the walls slanted inward instead of running straight up and down. There, Shon rubbed my feet as we lounged on the couch. I didn’t want him to stop touching me, so I invited him to my bed where we got to know one another’s bodies with gentle strokes and touches, eventually falling asleep with our bodies entwined.
The next day, Shon and I both helped with CACS’s annual fundraiser, which was so glorious it felt like a gift to us instead of them. We took the guests on a large boat across Kachemak Bay to the Peterson Bay Field Station. Singing sea shanties as we came up to the dock, we hauled on the rope to the rhythm of the song as we guided the boat in. “What would you do with a drunken sailor, what would you do with a drunken sailor, what would you do with a drunken sailor, earl-y in the morning!”
We served hors d'oeuvres and cocktails on the deck of the field station, but kept finding ourselves behind a wall, or around a corner, where we would fall into each other’s arms with a passion that left me dizzy, nearly falling over as we lost all sense of where we were. That night we rolled in each other’s arms in a patch of wild huckleberries under a black sky rippling with the Aurora Borealis.
The next day found us on the beach, cuddling under a huge driftwood log. While we lay there, he told me how much potential he saw in me, and I immediately felt my walls go up. It seemed every boy or man I’d fallen for had said the same thing: “You have so much potential.” Well, I was done with that. “Nope. Uh-uh. Not doing this. You take me for what I am right now, or you don’t take me at all.” Shon explained that when he said I had potential, he meant that I was potent, that he felt great power within me, and I relented. That I could accept.
What he didn’t know, and I couldn’t admit, even to myself, was that I wasn’t really showing him all of me, and I wouldn’t for years to come.
After our time in Homer, Shon and I spent 5 days backpacking in the wilderness of Alaska. We hiked twelve miles in, singing every song we knew—everything from What’s Up by 4 Non Blondes to Rocky Raccoon—letting the bears know we were in their territory. At six feet tall, Shon had the potential for longer steps than my five foot four and a half inches allowed, but somehow our strides matched perfectly.
The first night the clouds opened and rained down on us for three days straight, trapping us in my tiny tent. We worked together to create a system where we could cook our food outside of the tent but still stay dry inside. I was immediately drawn to his creative problem solving, which matched my own. There was never a hesitation to try and find a solution, a way around a problem.
There in that tent we wrote sensual poems together and made love again and again and again. We talked about all kinds of things, Shon telling me stories from his own travels—he’d been to Europe, Japan, and Mexico. He talked about his activism—about learning nonviolent resistance strategies and marching in the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, about his time in Black Mesa, Arizona, where he herded sheep for the Navajo to support them as they tried to stop a coal mining operation from making their land uninhabitable.
Shon had this idea of Saving the World, a concept I was quite skeptical of. Protecting environments and saving species yes, but saving the world? That was far too big. And I wondered if the human elements, the same humans who were destroying the earth, were even worth saving. Still, I loved his enthusiasm for life and his willingness to do things, like trying to protect the aquifer the Navajo Nation depended on, that most people I knew wouldn’t even dream of. When the sun finally came out, and we still liked each other, it seemed we could get through anything.
It was on the seventh day of our date that Shon told me he loved me. We were sitting outside our tent, surrounded by nothing but the wilds of Alaska. I froze like a deer catching the scent of a predator. How could he love me in just seven days? Was that even possible? We’d only had this one adventure together. I doubted, questioning him, but he was certain. He loved me. Maybe not in the way that I imagined, maybe not in the way that meant we would always be together, or that I was the only one for him, but he loved me.
This was so different from how I thought of love. Love was something kept in reserve. It was something rarely spoken of. It came with obligations. The first time a former partner told me he loved me, he was drunk. I didn’t want to say it back because we hadn’t been dating that long and I didn’t really know, and drunk on my dad’s pull-out couch definitely wasn’t how I wanted to have this special moment. He begged me to tell him I loved him back and I eventually relented, just so he would stop.
This was so different. Shon showed no need for me to say I love you back to him. For him, saying I love you was a simple statement of how he felt, and he wanted to share those feelings with me. It was so different from how I grew up. I was still uncertain, but I was also drawn to the freedom of expression he possessed.
In Anchorage, we stayed at a hostel and went out for drinks in the evening. We shared a cigarette from a pack that I'd had in my glove box and hadn’t touched since he came to visit. Somehow, he could just have a cigarette every now and then. Somehow, he only ever wanted just one drink. That was what I wanted—to want only one drink. But I didn’t. I wanted more and more and more.
I was afraid he wouldn’t want me if he knew the truth, so I became a chameleon, changing my colors when I was with him so that he wouldn’t see the darkness inside.
The next day we sold my car for $300 before flying out of Anchorage. I had originally planned to drive back to Olympia, and Shon offered to drive with me, but that was no longer an option. The Canadian government wouldn’t let me cross their border due to my DUI, even though it had been reduced to a “Wet and Reckless.”
Alright, your turn! What’s the wildest, most unexpected “first date” you’ve ever had?
Or, how have love, place, and adventure changed the course of your life?