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, Arizona offered new ideas about everything from what to wear to what to eat, believe, and read.
In just a few months, I was wearing all white: long gauze skirts, white peasant tops, and sandals, almost like a yogi. I tried fasting for days on only apples. I’d never been so miserable, and it was years before I could eat apples again.
I began practicing yoga with Lilias, Yoga and You, a TV show on PBS hosted by Lilias Folan. My friends and I hiked in the mountains surrounding Phoenix at night, under a full moon.
It was a time when hippie men began apprenticing in the silver and turquoise jewelry trade as the state’s many large and small turquoise mines experienced a boom. I came to appreciate the different kinds of turquoise and Native American culture and arts and crafts. I learned to enjoy desert ecology and nature. I found those in Arizona had the same affinity for wild places that my little hippie-ish (at least in dress) friends and I did in Alaska.
Throughout the remainder of my teens, I traveled between Arizona and Alaska. I slowly developed a style of dress and an attitude that said “hippie.” Inside, though, I was still very much your all-American teenager.
My friends and I talked about living on a commune, where we would bake our own bread, make our own pottery and dishes, grow our own food, and milk our own cows. In addition to being essentially a calling for all hippies from that era, to a city kid like me who had never lived a rural lifestyle, this seemed a romantic notion.
When I say “all-American teenager,” I mean I didn’t fall for the hippie belief in free love. I now like to joke that such a thing was only an excuse for ugly guys to get girls to sleep with them. I still believed in saving myself for that special someone.
I once watched in horror at a party when suddenly someone announced “orgy time,” and a bunch of young men and women began taking off their clothes and running around the house naked. I left.
I believed in what other young teens believed in: love, rainbows, and maybe unicorns. In Arizona, that didn’t change. It wasn’t as if guys were beating down the door to ask me out. I considered myself attractive, but I was never that interested in male attention. I was pretty smart and terrified of the opposite sex. While I had lots of crushes, none went anywhere.
I think my hesitation stemmed from having a father who sold sex. I grew up around women who were victims of the sex trade and nude-dancing business. Although some of them were intelligent and quite nice, and a rare few were college graduates, I knew that most were trapped in a life they hadn’t chosen. That wasn’t going to happen to me.
I found the hippies and the idea of getting back to nature appealing. It was a trend, but given what I grew up with at home, it made sense. It was my rebellion against my father’s lifestyle and the exploitation at the 736 Club. In Arizona, I experienced a personal renaissance. I also discovered Be Here Now, the 1971 book on spirituality and meditation by Western-born yogi and Harvard professor Ram Dass.
PHOENIX WAS ALSO the largest city I had ever lived in (aside from Los Angeles when I was an infant). Every major rock or popular music act came through. To a teenager who practically worshipped contemporary music, Phoenix was heaven.
I got a copy of the concert schedule for one of Phoenix’s landmark venues, the Celebrity Theatre, a round theater with a revolving stage and intimate setting. Everybody I listened to on the radio seemed to be coming through Phoenix the winter of 1974–75. I decided to stay.
As my original Arizona contact, David, had promised, I found a home in Phoenix. David’s older sister had invited me to stay with her, her husband, and their young son. They lived in a small apartment that had only one bedroom, and yet they put me up on