Answered a Formspring question today:

Since you are a lovely shade of brown, do you ever get mistaken for and Eskimo?

It’s funny you should ask that ’cause I get mistaken for different things depending on where I live. In Michigan lots of people would ask me if I was Indian, in Texas everyone assumed I was Hispanic, and I think here in Alaska most people think I’m Native or Eskimo. I guess I just have an ambiguous look about me or something :).

I don’t look 100% Indonesian either (well, because I’m not) so I wonder if when I’m in Indonesia if people assume I’m from a particular non-Indonesian heritage.

What do you consider to be your greatest strength(s)?

Love of learning and compassion towards others. These two things have saved me more times than I can ever remember, as well as opening my life to all kinds of rich experiences and day-to-day poetry.

Answered a Formspring question today:

What makes you the happiest?

What makes me happiest is going for a day hike with Jennifer on an unknown (to us at the time) mountain trail and ending up lost in the dark with no flashlights, stumbling back down the trippy tree root trail with only a blurry bit of moonlight in and out of clouds to help us on our way. This is back when one of us still smoked so we broke out the lighter in a stroke of extreme genius and helped ourself to a tree branch thinking that soon there would be a nice little torch that we could wave out in front of us Indiana Jones style so that we didn’t end up bouncing painfully down each glacial ridge back to the car. But the thing that we didn’t know at the time and found out the hard way was that nothing in Juneau lights on fire because it fucking rains there 24/7 (did you know there are rain forests in Alaska?) and everything is saturated to the point where you could take a blowtorch to it and it would only puff a bit of weak smoke back at you, just for fun.

So we just keep on going and were really happy when the trees would clear and you could easily see the trail and tiny amber city lights in the distance but on the other hand that just made it suck more when we had to go back into the thick dark of the trees. I’m talking like Mordor dark shit here and freaking who knows what stalking in the woods and we’re trying to feel our way down trails that sometimes turned into shorter trails, but you didn’t know you were on the shorter trail until the trees and brush started to smack the crap out of you right before it ended and you had to backtrack to the fork.

Eventually and very late in the order of events one of us gets the idea to take all the miscellaneous paper crap out of our wallets and roll it all up and stick it on the end of a tree branch and light it, well at least something would burn if only for a few minutes and we’d be able to see if anything was looking back at us. This worked great but by that point we had already hit the end stretch of the trail. How did we know this, well because even though it was like 1 am and pitch black there were people going up and down that last but very steep stretch of the trail, for excercise.

They each had a headlamp strapped to their head and you could see them jogging up the hill towards us looking like bright cyclops on pogo sticks and the really nice ones would look to the ground and cover the light with their hand a little when passing us. Think of like if coal miners were super skinny and clean and wore $200 jogging pants with fleece vests and smelled like imported shampoo. What? Yeah anyway so the thing is by this time the paper had burned away and all that was left was the tip of the stick that was still glowing a bit red, which Jennifer was waving around near the ground because hey it was something and it was really freaking dark out and you could easily step off the trail and fall pretty far to a broken ankle or worse. So I guess we probably looked a lot weirder to the headlampers than they did to us, being as we were so tree beaten and shabby looking by that point and…well…waving around a red tipped pointy stick.

When we got to the car and got in it and closed the doors and sat there for that moment like you do at the end of any crazy trip just to breathe for a second, I said ‘Let’s not ever mention this to anyone.’

But of course we did (eventually) because it was pretty awesome and fun after all. Even though there’s about a million years between that day and now I feel like Jennifer and I haven’t lost that sense of crazy foolish adventure and when we’re bored one of us will still say ‘Let’s get lost in the woods with no flashlight.’ and that’s what makes me the happiest.

Answered a Formspring question today:

What is your greatest fear?
 

The simple answer to this question is ‘Jennifer dying before I do.’ But before I could get to Formspring to answer this question my mind started ramping up the greatest fear notch by notch:

Jennifer dying before I do but -after- we get in a big fight.

Jennifer dying before I do but -after- we get in a big fight where we say that we hate each other.

Jennifer dying before I do but -after- we get in a big fight where we say that we hate each other and she storms out of the house and gets in a horrible car accident.

Jennifer dying before I do but -after- we get in a big fight where we say that we hate each other and she storms out of the house and gets in a horrible car accident because she’s trying to call me and make up.

Jennifer dying before I do but -after- we get in a big fight where we say that we hate each other and she storms out of the house and gets in a horrible car accident because she’s trying to call me and make up but I don’t answer the phone because I’m mad.

Jennifer dying before I do but -after- we get in a big fight where we say that we hate each other and she storms out of the house and gets in a horrible car accident because she’s trying to call me and make up but I don’t answer the phone because I’m mad and then she tries to call me again at the last moment but dies as I pick up the phone.
 

OMG what the heck is wrong with me lmao!!

Answered a Formspring question today:

How do you and Jennifer support yourselves out there in the wilds? I am always fascinated by ppl who are somewhat off the grid because I always wanted an “alternative lifestyle” but keep ending up locked into the system more and more.
 

Hi, Thanks for the question:)

I’d like to say that Jennifer and I are all cool and off the grid but we actually are fairly plugged in all in all. Jennifer has a normal job and I do normal house wife stuff. If you made a movie of a random day in our lives you probably wouldn’t be able to tell that we were in AK vs. the lower 48. Well, except for the panoramic mountain views in the background :D.

The distance between Alaska and the rest of the US is quite large though, and in that way we -are- off the grid. It takes a fair amount of money and effort to even get to the next closest state let alone someplace in the south or on the east coast. This is a bittersweet thing for me because one of the qualities I love most about Alaska is it’s pristine wilderness, something that’s only possible due to it’s isolation. If I want to I can head out of town and in less than a couple of hours take a step where no human has gone yet. That’s just freaking amazing to me and my time in the wilderness has been key in recovering from what was by all accounts a seriously horrible childhood.

But being off the grid is also sad for me because there’s a lot of people that I’d like to see right now but can’t. There’s no just taking the weekend off and jumping in the car for a few hours to go visit them. Things have to be meticulously planned out and airfare saved up for. How do we deal with this? We do go to the lower 48 a couple times each year but we never get to see all the people we want to, that’s just how it is. I think this might change sometime in the future though, the internet is changing things at an ever increasing rate and I predict that Jennifer and I will have no choice but to travel more and bring more people up to AK.

———

So -you- want to live differently and be more off the grid? I think that being off the grid at any level starts with a change in mindset and a sorting out of priorities. Like for some people it might be relevant to ask themselves which is more important, having use of a car all the time or being more off the grid by taking a bike everywhere? Life changes a lot when you use a bike as your main source of transport, whether it’s good or bad depends on your mindset and priorities :D. I think if your mind truly changes then your life will follow and won’t be so locked into the system. Feel free to challenge me on this though and I’ll post my responses!

For examples of what extreme off the grid living is like you might want to check out any of the movies made about Dick Proenneke (‘Alone In The Wilderness‘, ‘Alaska Silence And Solitude‘ are a couple that have footage that he shot himself) if you haven’t seen them already. He’s a guy who said to heck with conventional living and lived alone out in the Alaska wilderness for 31 years until age 82! Hell yea pretty hardcore stuff lol. But even he wasn’t entirely off the grid and had a few supplies flown in every once in a while, so don’t feel bad about being tied into the system a little.

:)
Anita

More:
Dick Proenneke Wikipedia Article

Excerpt From ‘Alaska, Silence And Solitude’