“L.I.F.E. G.O.E.S. O.N., what you don’t have now will come back again.
You’ve got heart, and you’re going your own way.”
- Noah The Whale, playing on the boom box when I first arrived at the Yellow House
At the outset, I have to say this is not a love story. It’s just a story where two people who were together in the same time and place did a few brilliant things. Sometimes when two people are together, one of them might perceive what the other person is saying to them, or what the other person is doing in their presence, as something happening to them, the singular audience-member, in a one-way transmission. If it’s a compliment that’s said, it’s something good happening to them. If it’s someone complaining about the dirty dishes they left in the sink, it’s an annoying thing happening to them. This perception is mistaken, and it’s one I held for a long time. I realize now that people are always their own sources of happiness, annoyance, and everything else in the mental and emotional “happening to me” spectrum. What people do for each other when they’re together, though, is amplify or diminish those inner-happenings. You could say this is a story of both amplification - of some very positive thoughts and feelings - and the diminishing of some negative ones, that happened between a friend and I. It’s also told in a much less abstract and preachy stance from here until the end of the story. Most of the shit you just read, she described much more simply, and I think better, as chemistry.
There’s no other “her” or “she” in this story, so don’t worry about names. I met her when we were working in Alaska. Everything about my time in Alaska felt like I had stumbled into some sort of miraculous, often-hysterical dimension that was well separate of the rest of my life in the Eastern United States. In my first few weeks there, I felt I might’ve been somehow let into this dimension by mistake, and that any minute the presiding authority over trans-dimensional travel would grab me by the shoulder and ask for my papers, forcing me to return to the real world of school and shitty restaurant jobs.
Sometime during those first weeks, I was reading alone in the sunroom of the one-story house she and I both lived in, a somewhat dilapidated and smelly structure we called Brown Town. Through a pair of broad South-facing windows, the sunroom had an open view of the street corner our house sat on, as well as its unkempt yard. I looked up from my book, which was starting to bore me. Across the yard I saw our company car, “the whip,” roll up to the curb. She stepped out of the passenger side. In her hands she cradled a black, plastic tray of pansies. At the same time, our boss emerged from the driver’s side. I saw her laugh at something he said. Their words were muffled and distant from my perch on the sunroom’s oversized sofa. Mute as they were, I couldn’t help but grin at the look of amusement exchanged between her and our boss – “I am surrounded by so many good-natured people,” I thought. I turned my attention back to my book.
A few minutes later she walked in from the side door of the tiny sunroom. The squeaky bust of the door opening threw my gaze up from my book to her face, closer than I’d seen it yet since she’d arrived.
“Sorry for interrupting your reading!” She said, smiling but quickly averting her gaze down and away from my dumbfounded face, to trace her steps through the narrow length of the tiny sunroom. The couch I was sitting on really was too big for that room. We were in close quarters for the first time, and words were coming slow to me.
“That’s OK! My book is boring anyway. I’m Jeff.”
She smiled and told me her name. “What are you reading?”
I wished I hadn’t said anything about the book, because now I was about to be exposed for the nerd I am. “It’s uh, The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design. I like games…”
She was now paused by the opposite door of the sunroom, and said something polite about my book that I can’t remember now. It was easy to see she was sincere though. I felt a faint glow coming off of her. She might’ve been the happiest person I’d ever met, a semi-permanent grin etched in the features of her face. Now I was starting to notice how pretty she was. I searched for more to say.
“Are those your pansies?”
She looked confused. “Huh?”
I guess I could have prefaced the question better. I pointed out the window and started to mumble an explanation when she chuckled.
“Ooohh, those. Yeah, sort of, I’m gonna plant them in the flower boxes outside the windows over there. They’re for everyone though!”
Her good mood was contagious. I smiled broadly and said something equally polite and sincere to her comment on my book. I think all I said might’ve just been “That’s cool!” But I did think it was cool. And I was happy to meet her, so I told her that as well as she smiled and replied the same, before walking out the door of the tiny sunroom.
The summer went on in a blurred juxtaposition of solitary moments in wild terrain, and episodes of bonding between my new friends and I, often in the midst of alcohol-fueled absurdity. The benefits to seasonal workers in Southeastern Alaska lie invariably in the love of fun to be had, often through calculated risk-taking, in the wild country surrounding them. Far-flung strangers from all across the Lower 48 become loved friends, tied in the surreal experience of sublime, natural beauty and undomesticated behavior that would typically result in the party’s arrest elsewhere in the US. She and I were both experiencing this for the first time, though we mostly kept our distance from each other a while longer.
One evening towards the end of June, she walked up to me in the kitchen of Brown Town, giggling about something that had happened between two of our co-workers. I could tell she was being mildly flirtatious, and suddenly I felt a new inner-happening. Quite literally, I thought “Wow. She thinks I’m cute! I need to spend more time with her.”
If that thought wasn’t juvenile enough of me, my behavior in the next few weeks definitely filled the quota. I got drunk and kissed her on the dance floor of a bar not long after. Maybe two nights later, I got even drunker and tried to broach the subject with her at another bar. The haze of alcohol wiped the true nature of that conversation from my memory immediately, but when I woke up hung-over the following morning, I was depressed to find that “I want to be your friend,” was the only thing I remembered her saying.
If only I could’ve seen how lucky that statement already made me.
I became the self-imposed stoic in my encounters with her for the next three weeks. It was such a waste of time. My thoughts of her ambled in the same, slightly self-pitying circuit. “She ain’t interested. Get over it. But damn it, she is cool. And pretty. She’s a botanist, for Christ’ sake.”
This was one of those “inner-happenings” I mentioned – I was sulking at the lack of an immediate romantic connection, when the real value of this person was already available as a one-of-a-kind friend to be made. But I considered it as something disappointing that had happened to me. And that ignorance pissed away another three weeks of time in Alaska that I could’ve spent enjoying her friendship.
By then it was the last week of July. She and many of our friends were on the porch of Brown Town’s neighboring house, and we had all been drinking until the early hours of the morning. Led Zeppelin was playing off the boom box that was sitting on the porch, and I was taking turns hula-hooping with another co-worker. I was also shirtless, because my co-worker was shouting in their underwear that everyone else should take their clothes off. It was my turn with the hoop. I am bad at hula-hooping, and she walked up to me to let me know it.
“Turner…”
I stopped my awkward gyrations with the hoop. “What?! You think you can you do better?” I said with mock aggression, stepping closer to her. I was holding the hoop with both hands at my waist, shirtless, and leaning forward until I was almost in her face. I probably looked like a total creep, but she was laughing. She reached down towards my waist for the hula-hoop.
“Gimme!”
I did not give her the hula-hoop, but we did kiss eachother right there in front of our co-workers. It was not a romantic moment so much as it was an exciting one. I heard some of them snickering, and she told me we should go to sleep.
The next ten days were the happiest of my life up to that point. I was in a beautiful place, with good friends, doing well at a fun job, and then having even more fun after work, occasionally roaming the country just outside of town. More often, I was relaxing with her. It’s not exciting to describe what we did – meals were cooked, conversations were had, we went on walks, we kissed and read books in bed before we fell asleep together. But life felt full. She was the most fun and attractive friend I’d ever made.
One night we walked out to the rocky shore of a fjord. After months of daylight intersected by scant hours of twilight, the moon was full and shining behind the clouds. We talked about our lives back in the real world, and what we wanted to make of them when we went back. She told me that she wanted to research natural medicine through botany, amongst other undeniably virtuous callings. This was the flip side to the incredibly light-hearted fun I had with her – she was inspiring, and completely earnest in her ambitions. She would leave the world a better place not out of altruism, but through her fascination with plants. This passion did not lie in a vacuum – all the while, she was going to continue to enjoy the company of the people around her for all it was worth.
She was amplifying my faith in the human race.
The reader has probably assumed by this point that I’ve “drank the kool-aid” in regards to this person I am elating over, and that my objectivity is completely jeopardized by:
A) My physical attraction towards her
B) The alternate reality I met her in
C) Perhaps alcoholism.
To that, I retort:
A) She is a gorgeous human, but I’ve known plenty of beautiful women, even ones who were very likeable otherwise, but none of whom invoked this kind of thought process. This was the chemistry of friendship.
B) This one is tougher. The circumstances of our meeting, and the place we were in by this night especially, felt a lot like a dream. I’ve had time to reflect though, and I’ve seen her since returning to the Lower 48, where we get along just as famously and she continues to inspire me. If it was a dream, it was one of those rare ones that, upon waking, you realize was informing you of truths that are immensely valuable to your time awake.
C) I didn’t have a drop of alcohol this night.
We kissed eachother out on the rocks long enough that the tide started to come in without us realizing it.
She said to me, “You are so sweet and it makes me feel like I’ve known you a lot longer than I actually have.”
I said, “I feel like I’ve known you a lot longer too.”
I was enjoying her company so much that I couldn’t even be bothered with thoughts of my impending departure until the morning of the day I left in early August. She drove me to the tiny one-story airport. It didn’t sink in yet that I was leaving Alaska behind – the surreal had become my reality by this point.
“I wonder if it’d be different for us, meeting back in the Lower 48,” I said.
“I dunno. Maybe it would? I’m really shitty at good-byes.”
“I hate them too.”
I hugged her and kissed her one more time. She was still smiling, and her good mood was still infecting me, so I didn’t find it sad when she turned and walked back to the car. I hefted my bags to the checking counter, then found a seat in the lobby. I picked up an old newspaper laying in the seat beside me. The headlines read “Assembly adopts tidelands lease amendment.” I put it back down.
“Turner!” I heard someone whisper. I looked over to see my friends Mark and Dustin holding PBRs by the side exit. I walked out to chug their offering before hugging them goodbye, moments before my pilot announced he was boarding. By the time I was walking out on the runway to the small plane that would take me to Juneau, Mark and Dustin had been joined by fifteen-odd other friends screaming their good-byes. My heart swelled. I screamed my best rebel yell back at them. I didn’t see her in the crowd, but she was there.
As the plane lifted from the tarmac, my friends stood assembled on a bridge directly beneath the path of our initial take-off. The pilot flew low, maybe twenty feet over their heads, and I could see them screaming at us and mooning the plane below. My laughter was drowned out by the roar of the engine.
Life goes on.