Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1995
I always thought it would be ideal to live six months of the year in one place and the other six months of the year in another place. I’d have a trailer down in Tucson for the winter and I’d have a summer cabin in a lovely northern, wooded place. You know, something like in the movie “On Golden Pond.”
I would arrive my summer home like Katherine Hepburn and pull the sheets off the furniture, chattering on about hearing the loons, nagging Henry Fonda about going out in the motorboat on the lake, and wandering out into the woods to pick strawberries. I’d be so happy to be back in that familiar house, looking out on that familiar water, and getting back into the familiar routines I’d been missing the last six months somewhere else.
So, here we are again in Nome but I have no sheets to pull off the furniture. Other renters were sitting on this furniture just before we arrived. Instead of a few boxes lugged in from the car, we had 26 large, hernia-popping duffle bags, trunks, and boxes in various states arrival by air freight. The ravens and gulls around here are not exactly melodious, the blueberries won’t be ripe for another two months, our boats are locked up in some warehouse in Texas, and we don’t know where we’ll spend the winter. “On Golden Pond,” it ain’t.
I didn’t want to pack up and live six months somewhere else. I wanted to stay here and finish more of the books on Arctic exploration and sing in the Handel chorus. We still had tundra to explore and snow to ski. And it was a crime to leave when we still had salmon in the freezer.
Most people don’t take us seasonal movers too seriously, anyway. Why shouldn’t we suffer the bad weather just like everybody else? At the public library back in Pennsylvania, I had to pay a $30 “transient deposit” just for the privilege of checking out two books every three weeks. And even those cost me a quarter each.
But we’re part of a long drifting tradition. My parents are from Ohio. My husband’s parents are from Idaho. Their parents were the children of transplants from the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, and England. But I’m happy we recrossed the land bridge between Pittsburgh and Alaska to be back on Bering’s golden pond this year. So I’ll pin up my hair like Katherine Hepburn and start listening for red-throated loons and sandhill cranes, picking baskets of berries, walking the local trails, and nagging my husband now and again. Just like the movies.
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