to be too much for all of us, I met a beautiful high school sophomore who decided I was to be the sister she never had. In keeping with the times, Donna had changed her name to her chosen yoga name, Anandha Moon. I met her at a George Harrison concert in Tucson, where David took her for their first date. I was dumbstruck when I first saw her—lithe, with hip-length straight brown hair and large almond-shaped eyes, wearing a button-down 1940s-style jacket and long skirt. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.
As if the meeting and the concert weren’t enough, that night my two companions and I camped overnight outside Tucson. I had no idea where we were going. We arrived at a campsite way after dark. Somehow, we managed to pitch our tent, unroll our sleeping bags, and fall asleep.
In the morning, when I awoke and stepped outside, I was stunned to see that we were in the middle of Saguaro National Park. All around were towering saguaro cactuses standing like soldiers at attention.
It wasn’t long after that meeting that Anandha convinced her family to let me live with them. That fall, I enrolled in the neighboring Maryvale High School. Because I had arrived late, I had to wait a few weeks for the quarter to end before I could begin classes. I went to the school library every day because I was afraid I would fall behind. There, I read magazines, books, whatever caught my interest. And I wrote, one essay after another. I wrote and wrote.
Once in school, I was invited to join the school newspaper—probably because I was new and enthusiastic and one of my teachers who advised the paper liked my work in class. Before long, I was one of its main reporters and writers. I not only did news copy, I wrote poems and essays, including one love poem for the Valentine’s Day issue. Looking back, it’s pretty embarrassing to read; if nothing else, I had the passionate, overwrought heart of a teen girl.
There, at Maryvale High, with its handsome campus of interconnecting indoor and outdoor halls and walkways, I got to be a carefree teen again. There, I thrived. I developed a couple of crushes—one on a quiet, handsome boy named Buck, and another with curly, shoulder-length hair named Barry. The former I helped get a poem published in the newspaper while the latter talked about finding me “hot.” It was hardly the image of myself that I cultivated. I also became friends with the editing staff of the newspaper, and they invited me to their homes. To all at Maryvale High, I was just another teen—no one knew about my dad or what he had done for a living or what had happened to him. I felt free of that yoke, and an amazing thing happened: I earned straight A’s in every single class. My English teacher liked one of my essays so much that she even entered it in a state competition representing the school.
My Maryvale High School ID in Phoenix.
Many of my fellow students were bored in school. I was gung-ho simply because I had experienced the absence of school, which was far more boring. I learned then that showing up was everything; just doing the work and showing some enthusiasm impressed the teachers. From the student newspaper advisor to my ceramics teacher, I got nothing but encouragement, support, and a strong belief in myself, at least for a time. I excelled and I thrived.
To the delight of one devoted art teacher, I decided to build a tall rope urn in the shape of a fish. I found a photo of an ancient Egyptian clay work with the most gorgeous turquoise-blue glaze. I was determined that my fish vase be the same color. The teacher must have worked with me for weeks to recreate a color from the time of the pharaohs.
I discovered country rock music and Linda Ronstadt, and thus began a love of singing and the desire to sing professionally.
I began to sense that I would live a life in the arts, though I wasn’t sure exactly what I would be doing. Somewhere along the way, I even began to think I might end up living in a utopian society.
Anandha had friends who purchased a large chunk of land in central Arizona. Others, including Anandha, bought into what was simply called “The Land.” They held meetings to plan an eco-friendly lifestyle on the wild piece of property, hoping to build homes someday for themselves, their friends, and their families.
I would go with Anandha to The Land meetings. I’d walk home from school in my long, white gauze skirt and peasant blouse, savoring the sun and heat.
That alone was a stark contrast to the life I knew in Alaska.
I should have stayed in Phoenix. But I didn’t. Like any teen, I was impulsive. By the spring, I was homesick. I’m not sure how I got the money—possibly from my mother’s Social Security benefits that had been coming for me since her death—but one day, on a whim, I flew home to Alaska.
Anandha and her daughter Rhianna at The Land.
CHAPTER 3
The “Hey, Wow, Man” School
I arrived home in the early spring of 1975. I had swapped Arizona’s sun and heat for Alaska’s gray skies and breakup, when winter’s snowfall turns to slush and mud.
I felt disoriented at first; picking up and leaving Phoenix wasn’t easy. Back in Anchorage, I had to find a place to live. I had no car—heck, I didn’t even know how to drive. I bounced between staying with my guardian, with a friend’s parents, and with a group of young people in Mountain View, one of Anchorage’s poorer neighborhoods.
The group house seemed like a good idea at first. My friends were all staying together in a broken-down house that was more or less a shack. A couple of the guys living there were in a garage band. They set up their instruments in the living room, where they practiced and played for nearly nightly parties.
The place was small, crowded, and dirty. I hated living there and soon began to become disenchanted with hippies—although it would take a few more years before I abandoned the concept altogether.
Eventually I settled into living with the Dodges or the Johnsons. That fall, I enrolled in Steller Secondary School, Anchorage’s alternative public school. Years later, I would refer to Steller as the “Hey, Wow, Man” school. Even so, it wasn’t quite as hippie-ish as the so-called Free School some teens had created in Anchorage, where it seemed all they did was drive around together in an old van. Steller was named after eighteenth-century German scientist and explorer Georg Wilhelm Steller, who had extensively mapped Alaska’s flora and fauna.
Steller was founded by civic-minded parents and veteran educators who wanted something different—a place where students learned to love learning. The school philosophy emphasized self-learning. Steller was right in line with an educational movement occurring across the country. Parents disenchanted with a traditional education worked to create schools that mirrored the youth-oriented counterculture that had begun a decade earlier. They viewed informal education—or, as they came to call it, “open education”—as an answer to both the American education system’s critics and the problems of society. The focus on students learning by doing resonated with those who believed that America’s formal, teacher-led classrooms were crushing students’ creativity.
At Steller, that meant calling teachers by their first names, forming a student-led government to deal with discipline issues, and letting teachers create any classroom environment they wanted as long as the state-mandated curriculum was covered. Students could come and go from classrooms without hall passes.
The more relaxed atmosphere seemed perfect for me. It was at Steller that I learned to love learning. I constantly discovered new fields of interest and new paths of knowledge to follow.
As much as we really learned, sometimes independent study courses got approval when they probably shouldn’t have. For one such independent study program, a girlfriend and I tried to teach ourselves “ground school” in order to learn to fly. Ground school. Two teenagers teaching themselves ground school. This was somehow approved.
My friend and I would meet in the hall, sitting on the floor together, trying to read aloud a textbook on aerodynamics. We used our hands to demonstrate the principles