CHAPTER 2
Peaceful, Easy Feeling
By summer 1974, at just sixteen, I was ready to leave Alaska and go see America. My destination: Phoenix, Arizona.
I picked Arizona because of a new friend named David Ray.
David was in Anchorage for a brief stay before flying to Phoenix, after working a season at a remote Alaska fish processing plant. A mutual friend introduced us because David needed a place to stay and there was room at my house.
A few years older than me, David took to me like a big brother. Of average build, David had long brown hair he wore down or in a ponytail, was soft-spoken and easygoing, and spoke warmly of his hometown and the American Southwest.
David had heard me talk so much about my dream of going to the Lower 48 that one evening he pulled me aside. He talked about his parents and an older sister and her family who all lived in Phoenix. He said I’d have a place to stay, and more than that—a home with him and his family.
He then did something I’ve never forgotten—he pulled out a $100 bill.
I was floored. That was a huge amount of money to a teen at the time.
“This is to help you get down there,” he said.
I promptly put the money in my bank account and used it later to help pay for my trip.
I WAS ALSO DRAWN TO ARIZONA and the desert by the fact that nearly all of my favorite bands or singers had songs about the area. I wanted to stand on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, as singer/songwriter Jackson Browne had written.
My plan was to hitchhike down the West Coast with a friend named Greg, the older brother of my eighth-grade boyfriend, who had moved to the San Francisco Bay Area with his mom a couple of years earlier.
Greg was going to see his family. Our itinerary called for flying to Seattle then going from there.
We had a big send-off the night we were to catch our red-eye flight. In the handful of grainy-looking color photographs that still exist, we’re with the dozen or more friends who showed up to say goodbye. We all looked like hippies, with flowing hair, flannel shirts, blue jeans, and hiking boots.
We all posed for one photo; others show Greg and me preparing to walk down the jetway to board our plane. In still another, I am alone on a padded vinyl bench, writing in my journal. I do not look happy. Perhaps whoever took the photo interrupted my writing, or maybe I had already had the first of many fights with Greg.
Our plan was to fly to Seattle then hitchhike to San Jose, California, where Greg was headed to join his brother and mom. On the way, we stayed at a youth hostel in Eugene, Oregon, where I visited a friend at college.
That first trip emphasized the distance I felt between my Alaska home and the rest of America. Years later, my film director friend John Kent Harrison, a Canadian by birth, quoted a fellow Canadian about growing up above the contiguous forty-eight states: “It was like living in the attic of a house having a party.” And boy, what a party. Everything about America fascinated me, and it still does.
Anchorage International Airport, Summer 1974. While waiting to catch a red-eye to Seattle, I took some time out to scribble in the journal I kept at the time.
Greg and I turn around for one last shot before boarding our flight.
That trip introduced me to the vast natural beauty of California, a state I have seen more of than Alaska, in part because most of Alaska is not accessible by road. Over the years, I’ve driven the coast highway from Oregon to Los Angeles, and I’ve driven straight through the middle on I-5. I’ve spent time in Northern California, in the redwoods around Mount Shasta. I’ve driven to Lake Tahoe, visited a friend’s farm in the mountains around Ukiah, gone to the wine country, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Santa Cruz, Pismo Beach, Santa Barbara, and so on. Sometimes, it all blurs together.
But I have distinct memories of that first trip, including our first night in Northern California. We made it to Redding and got a hotel room. After settling in, I turned on the late-night TV news. The weather announcer reported the temperature was one hundred degrees.
One. Hundred. Degrees. At midnight.
I ran outside and looked up at the stars. Never before had I experienced one hundred degrees. At midnight. I loved it.
I’ve long joked that my bones are made of permafrost, the part of the Arctic ground that never completely thaws. In Alaska, if it’s dark, it’s always cold. If it’s warm, it’s always light. To be warm—even hot—in the middle of the night was an entirely new sensation to me.
Days later, at a party with my old boyfriend and his friends in San Jose, I stepped outside again to take in the night heat. As I stood there, I could hear Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” blasting from inside. In the mid-1970s, that song got played late in the night at every party.
I was an Alaska-raised girl standing in California, where I was born, listening to a rock band from Alabama. The moment was not lost on me. It was one of my first lessons in the power of music as a unifying experience.
Later that trip, Greg and I spent a long, hot day hitchhiking to Santa Cruz to go to the boardwalk and ride the Giant Dipper, the wooden roller coaster. That was all we talked about on the way, but once there, I looked up at the rumbling monster and declared “no way” was I getting on. I repeated this all through the long line, right up until I managed to make myself step aboard.
What happened became a life lesson: I loved it. I loved it so much that when the ride ended, I asked if I could go again.
Ever since, whenever I find myself balking at something—any new adventure, project, or life transition—I tell myself it’s like standing in line at the Giant Dipper. It’s all fear and anxiety and caution, and then you just do it.
AS PLANNED, Greg stayed behind in California and I took a bus the rest of the way to Phoenix.
From the moment I arrived in Arizona by bus from California, I was hooked. I loved the hot desert climate. I would bask, if only momentarily, in the end of summer’s excessive heat. In October, a friend called from Anchorage to describe the winter snow and cold. I was still wearing shorts, and it was seventy-plus degrees.
One of the few downsides of the desert was scorpions. I learned to hate them after staying with friends at an old farmhouse on the outskirts of Phoenix. When I arrived and was shown to my room, I noted something odd about the twin bed.
“Why are the legs sitting in glass jars?” I asked.
“So the scorpions can’t climb up into the bed,” my host said.
I dreamed of giant scorpions every night after that. I slept fitfully, clutching my bedcovers in the fear that they would fall to the ground and the scorpions would find their way up to me.
Soon, I had plenty of other things to distract me. Arizona was the center for much of the New Age/hippie/Eastern mysticism/Eastern religious thinking seeping into American popular culture. In the mid-Seventies,
