Uprooted

In Loving Memory of the Woods between Trumpeter and Kobuk Streets, Soldotna, Alaska, rest in peace forever.
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Alaska: Coming Back to Earth

Man, it was strange.

from the Land of the Rising Sun to the Land of the Midnight Sun...

I hadn't been back state-side in over 6 years. My family had been trying forever to get me back home, organizing family reunions for me without me, that kind of thing, bless them all. They'd been so patient. But to be honest with them and myself, I was afraid all of this time of reverse culture-shock, where you become so assimilated into your host-culture that you can't re-adapt to your home culture. The last time that happened to me (the first time I came back from a year in Japan), I gained 60 pounds in 3 months from depression, unintentionally severed most of my friendships, isolated myself from my family and did whatever I could to get back to the Land of the Rising Sun. I thought nobody cared and no one could relate. Lame, huh?

Momma warned me. Some things change whether we want them to or not.
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My dear husband was getting really tired of hearing me compare everything around me to 6-year-old memories and encouraged me to just go for a week and get Alaska back into my system, all the while Mom warning me in her wisdom not to "expect anything to be the same as I'd left it."

Making the violent, mind-blowing switch from the crazy concrete and steel ant colony that is Tokyo to the vast wilderness of America where a "town" can have miles of trees between each building, I felt so lost, despite all the English around me. But descending through the rain-soaked clouds towards the familiar shapes of the Chugach Mountains overlooking Turnagain Arm, I burst out in silent tears, touching the oval-shaped window of my plane, begging Alaska for forgiveness for having been away from her for so long. I know this sounds crazy, but when I told my Mom this, she said she sensed that very moment in her own heart as well.. She knows I'm tied to the Land as much as I'm tied to her. Mom always amazes me like that, anyways. I shouldn't be so surprised at her intuition.

Like I said, nobody uses the sidewalks in Soldotna
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I think my biggest fear was feeling the way I did before -that I'd wake up in my old bed in my old teenage room, hear the chickadees and nuthatches chirping, and then slowly opening my eyes to see that nothing had changed, that Japan was just a far-off dream. My second biggest fear was that nobody would give a darn about the past 6 years of my life. My third biggest fear was that I would inflate like a balloon from the insane fat and sugar content of super-sized American food like I did before.

Playing it Safe: delicious vegetarian soup and sandwich at the Funky Monkey in Kenai, minus cheese and mayo.
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But my fears were all for naught. By steering clear of sugary drinks, cheese and fast foods and sticking to my normal "Asian" diet of grilled seafood and salads, I actually lost a few pounds on my trip (Alaskan seafood is amazing, anyways. I'm sorry but Japan's seafood, mostly imported, can't hold a candle to it!). And this time, though my political/religious opinions differ drastically from that of the rest of my conservative family, I learned that they were greatly interested in my opinion from the standpoint of a "citizen of the world." That was amazingly refreshing! And no, I didn't hear any familiar birds before opening my eyes in the morning. You see, I learned that this year, they just started cutting down the woods at the end of my street, that seemingly endless stretch of raw Alaskan beauty I would run to whenever I was happy or sad...The birds had all left for lack of habitat. Feeling uprooted like them, I ran to the woods (or what remained of them -beautiful old collections of white birch and poplar silently awaiting extinction between piles and piles of overturned, loamy brown soil), this time in a hurry to preserve it forever in digital format before she became a memory to nobody but me. The woods needed me to come home that very week and capture them before they were lost forever. They had called me home and their timing was amazing. I could take those woods back with me, safe in my little camera case on tiny pieces of plastic.

Vehicles for Young and Old
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I walked around the destruction to the new, unrecognizable "suburbia" (I laugh at that word used in the Alaskan sense), all the pristine lawns, cookie-cutter houses and pickup trucks too big to be practical. Why the rush to tear my woods down to build more when they can't even sell half of these new houses, I thought to myself. Uprooted, my woods and me. That feeling of betrayal and of change beyond my control made me feel that much better about saying goodbye to Soldotna. I could take what was left of my roots with me.

I walked around my old schools. It was a beautiful sunny day and I was the ONLY one using Soldotna's endless miles of beautiful pedestrian-friendly sidewalks. Someone clued me in at a coffee shop that in Soldotna, only poor people walk in town. Coming back from a country where everyone's trying to sell their cars and use public transportation to protect the environment and improve their health, I couldn't wrap my mind around the fact that Soldotna, with all its space, still didn't even have a bus system.

Walking around town alone, I didn't recognize a single soul driving by. Likewise, nobody recognized me, either. I guess losing 90 pounds will do some serious change to a person's face, but really. I'm certain that Einstein's theory was meant for expats as well as astronauts. Being this far away, for this long, is like being in outer-space. Mom was so right. I realized that I'd changed too much to live here comfortably. That was the hardest feeling. I should have felt more attached. I should have felt like I was really home. But I was glad to have that return-trip ticket to Tokyo in my hand, that I could return to a more familiar place, and to the waiting arms of my new husband with the chirping cicadas and grasshoppers greeting me at the break of dawn. I found myself longing for the sound of thunder and the sight of bamboo.

Whenever I left Alaska in the past, as a student or a JET employee, or whenever Mom left Japan after seeing me, I never cried. But this time when I kissed my Mom "see-you-on-Skype," the tears really came down and I think it startled her a little bit. But this time it's different. She's planning on moving, too, the last one of my immediate family to leave the wilderness. I think it was very fitting for her to stay there that long. I like to think that she stayed there for my brother and I to have a place to call "home," but she knows that "home" can mean many things.

Before leaving the house for the final leg of my journey, I made my request pile of things to have shipped, mostly my old Asian cookbooks, some smoked salmon for my hubbie (great on fresh hot rice!) and a big pile of inexpensive girlie clothes I bought in my new size at Burlington Coat Factory in Anchorage. But my greatest treasures, and to my surprise the very things my Mom mailed me first, a small collection of books written/co-authored by Alaska Native Peter Kalifornsky about the history and botany of my homeland from a Dena'ina perspective. I'm not Dena'ina, but I like to think that the Land of Alaska speaks to me the way she spoke to them, maybe because I care enough to listen. Our roots are one and the same. Those books explain why things were named the way they were, the same mystic amazement they felt at the glimmer of a piece of agate found on a Kenai shore, or the rustle of the wind through the poplar trees. Without having read any of that in his books, I felt the same power and I need reminding of that from time to time, here where I have no roots.

Japan is still too new to me to really hear her voice. I look to Mount Tsukuba and hear nothing from her gentle slopes of green. The rice bends over full and golden, rustling in the wind, but it speaks a language I can't decipher. With the help of the elderly and the farmers where I live, maybe I can learn a little. Hopefully my children will understand. I want them to feel the same sense of belonging I still feel to Alaska.

Funny thing: the following 3 days after returning to Japan, I awoke in the morning, heard the deafening chirpings of cicadas in the trees and could have sworn I was still in Alaska, until I opened my eyes and felt the sweat on my forehead. Strange.