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 and harsh, were now engaging and quaint. The hill by her house that had been such a long climb was nothing to an eighteen-year-old.
I looked up what childhood friends remained, or their parents. I was struck with how much I liked the place and the people.
I remembered that when I was a little girl in Ironwood, there was one family that had a son, Bobby, who was older than me. My memories of him were not good. He would bully me again and again. He liked to trick me into getting on the bench swings of the old metal swing sets. He’d swing the entire thing so hard and high that it seemed the entire swing set would topple over. I would scream and cry in fear.
Bobby was the boy who wouldn’t let me take refuge in his house as a thunderstorm approached one day. In Ironwood, you could see storms approaching on the horizon, all dark, low clouds and menace. I hated thunderstorms and was always fearful my grandmother’s house would be struck by lightning.
That day at Bobby’s, he had given me no choice but to run all out for my grandmother’s house across a large field. I may never forget that day, out in the open in a full-on thunderstorm, getting soaked in the downpour. Terrified.
Now that I was all grown up, I looked forward to confronting that little SOB Bobby.
Bobby’s mom was named Stella. She, like the rest of the families that lived in Jessieville just outside Ironwood, had been a friend to my mom and to me.
When I arrived, Stella and Bobby’s younger brother greeted me warmly. Then we waited for Bobby to arrive.
“Bobby loved you so much,” Stella said. “He still talks about you and always wondered what happened to you.”
Huh? Are we talking about the same Bobby here? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Should I tell her what he had done to me? What my memories were?
I decided against it. Then Bobby walked in the door. He practically had tears in his eyes when we hugged. He was handsome, polite, and soft-spoken.
I don’t know if I ever told him of my memories of growing up with him. I might have been too shocked to think of what to say. What would be the use of dragging up bad memories? I just let it go.
During that trip, I visited my mother’s gravesite for the first time. She was buried in a downtown plot with her parents, my grandparents Marietta and Paulo Chiaravalle. I suppose that was the right place for her, and I took some comfort in that. But her headstone gave Chiaravalle as her last name, with no mention of Rich.
I thought that someday I would go back and buy a new headstone and include her married name. I have yet to do that.
AFTER MICHIGAN, I headed east to Rhode Island to meet up with the friends I had met in Alaska. My bass-playing boyfriend and I had parted ways, so I continued on alone.
In Rhode Island, I experienced another first. My friend and I took a day trip to Block Island, a popular vacation area. At one point, I stood in the surf for a photo. My friend yelled at me to turn around, and just as I did, I was overcome by a wave of water. For the first time ever, I tasted saltwater.
I had made my way across the entire continent. It was time to go home.
THAT FALL, MANY of my classmates from Steller headed for Ivy League or other storied private colleges in New England. Others chose schools that specialized in arts and crafts, or unique trade school programs, such as a wooden-boat-building school in England.
Initially, I wanted something akin to my experience at Steller, so I found an alternative music program at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. However, my life took another turn.
Someone wrangled me into volunteering at the State Democratic Party headquarters.
It was 1976, the bicentennial of the nation’s birth. Jimmy Carter was running for the presidency. Young people were energized by his campaign. I’d been accepted to college, but I deferred my admission as I got swept up in my first and last foray into politics. What I got for my volunteer time was the promise of a job in Juneau as a page in the Alaska House of Representatives.
After Carter’s win in November of that year, I packed my bags and moved to Juneau with little money and little idea just how hard such a move would be.
It was the middle of winter. I arrived in a small town that was cut off from the rest of the world except by plane or boat.
I have needed knee-high rubber boots two times in my adult life: in Juneau and in New York City. Both have bitter rain and snow storms. Of all the places I have been, both have the most expensive housing, and people are willing to live in the most God-awful places. And despite the massive size difference between the two—Juneau had about twenty-five thousand residents in the late 1970s, and New York City over seventy million—both seemed to be the center of the universe.
CHAPTER 4
Living Back to Nature Can Be Hazardous to Your Health
To this day, I have dreams about being in Juneau. And nightmares. Few towns or cities exist in such a spectacular setting. Juneau lies between mountain peaks of the Alaska Coast Range to the east and a handful of channels, bays, and inlets to the west. From Downtown Juneau, one has to walk only a few streets to find the side of a mountain or a wilderness trail along the beach.
Alaska is a land of extremes, and this is certainly true for Juneau. On a sunny day, there is no place more beautiful on earth; during a winter storm, there are few places more miserable. Southeast Alaska is so different in climate and popular culture from the rest of the state that my moving there was in many ways like moving to Arizona. I found myself in a place radically different from any I had known before.
In Arizona and again in Juneau, I fell in love with the place and people. I found a niche and discovered more about myself—even if I had to do it the hard way.
A