Gossiping is fun until it's not anymore

minding my business is so peaceful

First: do you want to sleep on warm sand under the stars? And build your confidence with cross-country navigation? In a low-stress environment? I will help you prep, build your gear list, even come up with a training plan. Some backpacking experience is helpful but if you have other outdoors experience I can help you fill in the gaps! More deets on my fall Utah trips here.

POV: yr just a little guy

I went to Anchorage for the weekend to look at used cars; I hadn’t visited since last summer. Fairbanks is fairly connected to things, as far as Alaska goes, because it’s on a road, but it’s still a six hour drive to Anchorage in summer, and heading down there made me realize that I live in the middle of nowhere now- which is wild because I would actually be more in the middle of nowhere if I lived in most other parts of the state. Living in Alaska is very humbling. One learns one’s smallness very well, one’s impotence against the natural world, which is, and always will be, large, in spite of how terrible and important we think we are.

Before driving to Anchorage I spent some time playing what I call Facebook Cars, wherein one tries to find a used car on FB marketplace that’s not grossly overpriced or (as the kids say) ran through, or both. In Fairbanks this is almost impossible and I quickly became discouraged but luckily my boyfriend loves to play Facebook Cars and he was sending me all sorts of links. Anchorage was the place, it seemed- in Anchorage the cars are only listed about $2,000 above the Kelly blue book price, not $4,000 above like in Fairbanks. Still, the idea of driving around for hours looking at overpriced vehicles was overwhelming, and at the last minute I decided I’d just go to Anchorage to visit, and not worry about the car thing. Even though mechanics keep telling my I need to get rid of the Subaru I have now because of how much rust it has, that it’s not worth putting any more money into, and I don’t feel comfortable driving it out of town and feel like it’s gonna shit the bed at any moment while I’m running errands, I figured I could nurse it along for another season or so. At least until I was next in the lower 48, when I could buy a used car in the desert where nothing ever rusts and barge it to Alaska and still save money.

It was fun to see friends in Anchorage. I just know so many people there, am interconnected in a web of humans in a way that sometimes, when I was living there, made me feel ecstatic with belonging, and other times made me feel as though I was suffocating in a fishbowl. I know people in Fairbanks too, but practice a lot of minding my own business, and hope to go many years before I can be at a party and know the intimate details of how every single person is connected to each other going way back, for better or worse. When I first moved to Anchorage I was an enthusiastic gossip. I felt as though knowing absolutely everything that was going on would give me a sense of belonging; sometimes gossiping can also give us a sense of safety, or even control- if we know what’s going on we can avoid danger, right? And sometimes this is certainly true. But in the day-to-day all it did was give me social anxiety; the devil is certainly in the details, and one’s life and close social circles already contain plenty of devils to fret about. When it comes to people in my life, I’m like a border collie; I worry about everyone all the time, and have to manage a deep instinct to herd them, lest their lives, and the larger universe by extension, spiral into chaos. If you know me, I am worried about you, even if I know better than to show it (because that would be weird). I gossiped in Anchorage until I knew too much, and then I would be in a crowded room at a party and instead of having a good time I’d just be worrying about everyone, and fretting about the chaotic nature of existence, and spinning my wheels trying to figure out how to fix it all before the very core of reality fell out and everything collapsed. (I also think that this is why people drink at parties, and being sober certainly doesn’t help.)

When I moved to Fairbanks I decided that I had learned my lesson and now I would do things differently; I wanted to know what was going on with my friends but beyond that, I would keep to myself. I would have to give up the idea that gossiping would make me feel connected (it didn’t, my close personal relationships are what make me feel connected) or that it would keep me safe (if there was information I needed to know, I figured, it would reach me) or that I could control anything at all (fine! the whole universe can collapse! see if I care!!) Surprising no-one, this new way of being has been so peaceful. Ignorance is bliss, as they say.

me when I know too much

But anyway, there are a lot of people in Anchorage I care about and it was good to see some of them. It was also very exciting to go to restaurants and stores. The land of items! And concrete. And overstimulation. I had forgotten about the car thing and then the last morning Jon sent me a link and was like “I found this one” and lo and behold, the car was only a hair overpriced and not ran thru at all. Why not look at just one car? I thought, so we did. The car was totally fine so I bought it, and that’s how I actually got a car without running around or stressing too much, somehow. Now I’ll put my rusted out beater-with-a-heater on marketplace for cheap and it can become someone else’s problem, maybe someone who likes fixing things that aren’t worth fixing? You never know.

The drive back to Fairbanks was long and I listened to Torrey Peters’ new book Stag Dance, which is a collection of novellas and which is, so far, one of the best things I’ve ever read; each novella is so different from the others and I’m absolutely blown away by people that can write in such different voices so well. And each story is such a good, honest, almost uncomfortably real exploration of gender and sexuality and through that, the human condition itself. I drove through Broad Pass in the Alaska Range, the mountains there still blanketed in unblemished white, and dropped into the flat reaching forest of the interior. I felt the anxiety slough off of me as I pulled into the driveway of my little woodland home. The land of items is fun, but I’m so grateful to live in this place that feels far from everything, even if there aren’t many good used cars for sale. Capitalism is an urban system, and things do be set up like that; you can have nature, or you can have easy access to items. You can have concrete or you can have peace. This is, I suppose, one of the arguments of being alive.

Now that I have a more reliable car, I can do exciting things like leave town and visit friends on their land projects. At least until winter returns and driving fast on the icy highway is the last thing I want to do. In summer in Alaska the world expands; people leave for field work, or commercial fishing, or long trips in the backcountry; they drive on roads that are no longer terrifying or fly in bushplanes or paddle on rivers. The world expands but time shrinks- suddenly everyone is busy and everything is happening all at once. I’ve written about this before but summer in Alaska feels like a music festival where all the bands are performing in the same time slot, so no matter what you choose you’ll miss almost everything. Then winter returns and things flip; the world shrinks, becomes almost pathologically cozy, and time becomes expansive again- the evenings are bottomless, the months stretch on for years. Maybe someday I’ll get tired of living so far north, of being endlessly wrenched from one extreme to the other. Right now it’s still worth it for this peaceful-ass existence, and for the strong connection to the land you can have here. Connecting to the land is the best way I’ve found, so far in this life, to make meaning- so wherever you’re able to do that I say hold on to it, because what even else is there?

That’s all for now,

Carrot