well, we figured. Not much we could do about it anyway, and besides, it was unlikely there was anybody on that bus who knew who we were. Once on the other side of the stream, we dressed and continued on our way.
We spotted a small hill where we decided to camp. As we approached, we saw something even more alarming than our earlier misadventure. A sign read: PRIME GRIZZLY BEAR RESTRICTED AREA. Or habitat. Or whatnot. The message was clear: our backcountry permit area was right next door to GRIZZLY BEAR HABITAT RESTRICTED AREA.
We knew this meant employing all the bear-deterrent camping rules we had learned from one of the park rangers. We had to prepare, eat, and store our food far from our tent and sleeping area. Somehow, we got the idea that we should also bury our food containers and eating utensils deep in the ground. (We thought this was safe. It didn’t seem to occur to us that bears have great noses and big claws for digging.) For extra measure, we decided to leave the clothes we wore that day with the buried food, which meant changing outside. For those who aren’t familiar with this kind of terrain, there are few to no trees.
We would have felt clever and prepared had we not forgotten two critical things: matches and, most important, mosquito repellant. The former meant we didn’t eat any cooked food that evening. The latter meant that we had to swat mosquitos madly while eating and burying and running to get inside the tent, followed by zipping up the door quickly and then frantically slapping and killing as many mosquitos as we could.
Aside from such moments, our camping spot was perfect. As with all of Denali National Park, the vistas are huge and the landscape epic, like one of those nineteenth-century wall-size paintings of the American West.
That night, as we settled into our sleeping bags, we devised our own bear-deterrent plan. If any of us awoke in the night, we were to peer outside and either yell “Bear!” if we saw one or yell anyway to scare anything in the near vicinity.
We all slept fitfully that night, being near the grizzly bear habitat restricted area. At one point in the middle of the night, I dreamed not of a bear but of a large spider, slowly descending from the top of our tent. I leaped up and slammed my hand down to kill it, yelling loudly.
Immediately, Kim popped up and cried, “Bear!” Then she lay back down and kept sleeping. Sigrid and I, now both awake, just looked at each other. Then we closed our eyes and also went back to sleep, or something like sleep, under the Alaska summer night sky that never gets dark. We hoped the bears next door would stay put.
IN THE SPRING of 1976, I graduated high school. At Steller, we made our own graduation gowns in the style of wizards’ robes, with hoods and long trumpet sleeves. They were made of beige or white cotton or gauze. We decorated our robes in everything from batik to applique. I tie-dyed mine.
About twenty students were in my class that year. Our graduation was held in the gym/cafeteria at Steller. I think we all spoke a few words; I remember saying only, “No more homework!”
My graduating class at Stellar Alternative School. (Photo courtesy of Alaska Dispatch News)
A photo of our graduating class, of young men and women in long, flowing hair and long, flowing robes, has always reminded me of a painting of Jesus’s apostles.
That, of course, may have been the point. We eschewed all things that were part of conventional and traditional high school life—sports, homecoming, and prom. The girls didn’t wear makeup, and the guys didn’t get haircuts and, in some cases, didn’t shave. I look at photos of me from this period of my life, my hair down to my waist, and think, Would someone please give that girl some hair care products?!
In a way, we were like the apostles that spring, minus a leader. Our figurehead was the entire state of Alaska and the outdoors.
The only time I ever engaged in vandalism was after a night of high school partying. A group of us drove out to South Anchorage, to the site of the first-ever overpass/on-/off-ramp constructed along the only highway south of town.
We sneered at this latest development. On the green sign next to the northbound on-ramp, one of our group jumped out and spray painted the word “Los” above the official “Anchorage.”
Los Anchorage, as in Los Angeles. One meager on-/off-ramp. Is there a statute of limitations on misdemeanors?
THIS WAS ALSO the era of garage rock bands and the worship of rock band musicians, and I was not immune. If a guy played guitar, had long hair, and even vaguely resembled, say, George Harrison, I was smitten.
For a while, about the time I graduated high school, I had a boyfriend who played bass. The more hippie-ish of my friends and I would go to hear bands in our standard rock concert outfit—long cotton skirts, hiking boots, and peasant blouses.
During those days I met two brothers who had come to Alaska from Rhode Island. One of them dubbed me and my friends “little pioneer women.” He once tried to describe what it was like coming to Alaska from the East Coast. At home, his idea of wilderness was the view from a hill above a freeway with nothing but forests or fields as far as the eye could see. But Alaska’s wilderness was almost beyond comprehension.
I wasn’t sure I understood, but the summer after I graduated high school, I decided to hit the road again to explore the rest of the world.
My bass-playing boyfriend wanted to go to Jamaica because of the growing popularity of Bob Marley and reggae music. I had no such desire. I was willing to go as far as Rhode Island, where I had friends.
We rode the state ferries through Southeast Alaska, flew, hitchhiked, and took buses. From the Pacific Northwest, we went across Wyoming, then into Nebraska, where I still remember the most generous people who opened their homes to us for overnight visits. Iowa was where I began asking, “Is this the Great Plains? Is this?”
At one point, we stopped for lunch at a Howard Johnson’s. I picked up something off the table—a condiment, perhaps—and was amazed that it had been manufactured right there, in the town we were passing through. In Alaska, nearly everything comes from somewhere else.
Along the way we reached a small farming town and stopped in a café. The place was filled with regulars—farmers and retirees, old men dressed in coveralls. I felt all eyes on us hippies. I was a little intimidated but more enthralled by what seemed like the all-American scene of middle America.
Later, we hitchhiked amid tall cornfields. A family in a station wagon picked us up—a mom, dad, son, and daughter. I can’t recall their names or where they were going, but I was floored by their courage and openness. They were friendly and talkative and kind. I can’t imagine anything like this happening today, but in the summer of 1976, it was still possible.
We met a lone female college student who drove us most of the way through the rest of Iowa before we turned north through Minnesota and headed toward my mother’s hometown of Ironwood on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
I ENTERED IRONWOOD with great trepidation. The three years I had spent there between the ages of six and nine were painful at best. My parents had split up, and my mother would spend her few remaining years in and out of mental institutions. But like any place you go back to as an adult, all things that once seemed enormous feel somehow small with time. So, too, were my difficult memories.
I was happy to see my mother’s family and felt a sense of belonging, of my roots. I found that my memories of life with my Italian grandmother, once alienating
