Picking Up Roots

It was time. Sometimes it took months. Others it was years. This time it was two years. Not bad all things considered.

It would start to come over him, not quite a wave, more a small itch. Despite all his experience, he would ignore the first signs. When he stopped to think about it, it was fear of change that stopped him. He only stopped to think about it after the fact; a fatal flaw he hadn’t yet managed to fix.

By the time he noticed it was too late. He’d be spending his nights in dark bars drinking bourbon and lamenting to Mick or Pete or Ben how “it would be nice to catch the top of the wave a little more often, rather than being stuck waiting for it to crash on me.”

He loved the idea of adventure and travel and new places, but he also yearned to find a place that could hold his spirit for an extended period of time. The idea of change scared him, even though he’d moved enough to know he would thrive wherever he landed.

On those nights when the bourbon burned his throat, he wondered if his restless spirit would ever settle. It felt cliché to think it, but he always felt like his soul was untamable, which wasn’t how he would have described himself, but there it was.

These thoughts came in the third or fourth week of nights in the bar. Not far behind was the nostalgic sadness of the bridges he’d burned on his ways out of other cities. The emptiness inside him would ache and he’d try to fill it and salve it with more bourbon, to little effect.

He would wake the next morning, head aching, lace his sneakers, load the car and run.

From the small window, the barren whiteness stretched out for miles. He felt chagrined to realize as the plane touched down they weren’t flying through the clouds, but had landed amongst mountains.

He stepped out from the terminal and took in the white covered pines dotting the nearby hills, and in the distance the mountains blanketed in snow.

The sharpness of the cold was a thousand knives on his naked skin. It stole the breath from his lungs, returning it with a burning sensation and white puffs of air that disappeared in the gray sky.

The sun was gone from the immediate place, but in the distance he could see where it reflected an ethereal light of the snow-capped peaks, and white-accented blue sky broke through the clouds.

There was purity in this place. An aura of the unblemished danced across the clouds. He thought it was beautiful, though he could not describe it.

He hadn’t realized how stark it was. He had expected more vibrancy, more life, but thinking about it, he realized it was winter, and that’s why he had come; to get away from the color and the noise.

He was in searching, not for anything in particular, but for some part of himself that remained unknown to him. It wasn’t running away, but more of a running toward that had brought him to Alaska.

He hadn’t realized the slogan on their license plates was “the last frontier,” but now that he was here, it felt like it. It was the furthest west he could go. That’s what he wanted.

He cleared the snow from the rental car and threw his bags in the trunk. The heaters strained against the cold.

He put the car in gear and headed in the direction of the fading white light.

She slid into the kitchen with an easy grace; appearing much smaller than the last time he’d seen her. Whether this was due to age or the diagnosis, he couldn’t tell. She looked fragile, but when he hugged her, her old strength was there.

He felt out of place. It had been three years since he’d seen her last, and it seemed foolish to have come for a visit just now, eight months after the diagnosis; still, better late than never.

It felt strange to see her at home in the summer. He was so used to visiting on the front porch of the cottage as the wind carried the salt air to them and they caught up over glasses of wine. But then, it was strange to be home at all, as his business interests had taken him occupied most of the year on the west coast, leaving little time for any sort of travel.

She led him into the living room, warm and welcoming as ever, and sat next to him on the couch. With a gentle smile she proceeded to ask him everything. To his surprise, he told her.

He hadn’t thought he would ever reveal the unhappiness he felt, but sitting on the couch, he felt safe. He told of the difficulties in his relationships and the hardships he had faced in his business. He explained why he left and what his new plan was.

She sat and listened the entire time, the smile never leaving her face, except when she spoke to offer words of encouragement or understanding. In her quiet way, she demanded honesty, and he found he no longer knew how to lie.

He was devastated to leave and find he had not asked a single question about her. He would come back.