About a year ago, I decided I had had enough of Alaska. Having spent most of my adult life, and my entire professional career as a veterinarian, twenty years, living in the largest, coldest, most remote state in our country, I wanted something else.
There were many reasons for that decision. The biggest one was that I didn't want to have spent my entire life in one place while there was this whole big old world out there, just waiting to be discovered, explored, enjoyed.
There were logistical concerns, of course, such as what to do with my stuff, my dogs, my car. Money and work were also worth considering, but I figured out I could get licensed elsewhere and ply my trade at least enough to support myself during the initial exploration phase.
So off I went, to Oregon. Me and the dogs. And my reliable workhorse Subaru. We spent the winter in the town of Bend, about a quarter of the size of Anchorage. I worked a bit, skied a bit, met some people, ate some great food. The dogs had fun. I learned some things.
Mostly what I learned was that I didn't enjoy being a vet in Oregon. The ER clinic was alright, but they didn't have enough work to offer me regular shifts. And day practice is evidently not my bag -- fleas and ticks and demanding clientele who don't want to work up their pets' illness? No, thanks.
So I decided to return to Anchorage, mostly for the job. My Anchorage job is both a day practice (vaccinations, spay/neuter, minor ailments) and an ER clinic (splenectomies, brittle diabetics, bite wounds, kicked-by-moose). It's a taxing job but very rewarding, offering me the chance to practice my craft at a more rewarding level than what I found in Oregon. So I came back.
I've been back in Anchorage about a month now. And it wasn't until recently that I realized I have never returned to a place I had previously left, not with the intention of staying. Oh, sure, I have revisited my childhood hometown in Ohio, where my sister still lives within twenty miles of the place she was born. I've walked around the old elementary school and remarked on how much bigger everything seemed when I was a child. I've visited the playground where, in second grade, I bit Ron Solak on the finger, sending him to the hospital for stitches.
But I've never uprooted myself from a place where I'd cultivated a life, and then after some time returned to essentially that exact same life. -- I must say, it's weird.
Of course it's nice to be back among old friends, people I've known for years -- decades, some of them -- whose delightful sense of humor and charms are familiar. Almost as if I'd never left, I'm free to solicit their company to share a meal or take a walk in the endless wilderness which surrounds Anchorage.
But it's also not the same place as it was before. I had only left six months prior, so I'm sure it's not the place itself (though I did see someone has tacked up a nice "lost & found" basket at one of my favorite trailheads since I was last there). It's me. I'm different. In those few short months, I made first a conscious choice to leave this place and then another conscious choice to return. It is through these eyes which I now view my old environs.
Before I left, I might have been justifiably accused of being in a rut. I patronized the same restaurants and ordered my favorite dishes. I shopped at the same grocery stores and bought the same grocery list week after week. -- Moving to somewhere else offered both the opportunity and in some cases the necessity (what do you mean, pet stores don't sell Yummy Chummy salmon treats in Oregon?) of "thinking outside the box." It was a new place, I should at least try some new things, right? Right. At the very least, I had to find new hiking trails for me and the dogs. No more old favorites to fall back on week after week.
But now here I am, back in the same city but with new eyes. How can I make this city both a new place with fresh discoveries, while still affording myself the luxury of enjoying the familiar people, places and things I know have reliably enriched my life in the past? Well, it probably helps that I was somewhat forced to move into a rental property here which is in an area of town I've never spent much time in, much less a place I'd have ever previously considered living. So I've steeled my courage and started patronizing the smaller independently owned local restaurants: the pizza place two blocks away, the bibimbop shop in a nearby strip mall, the french bakery (real Parisian owner/chef!) around the corner. And for the most part, the food has been quite good, the service friendly, the prices reasonable. Who knew?
Since returning, I admittedly now am forced to consciously ignore the hideous plastic signage that advertises businesses both large and small. -- Anchorage, I have discovered by comparison (especially comparison to Bend), is a supremely ugly city, with none of the homespun artistry and aesthetics which cause people to insist that Bend, Oregon, is "charming" in spite of astronomical real estate prices, fairly poor municipal support services and a largely smug population of retired Californian refugees.
It turns out a few roundabouts, some hand-painted signs, and narrow streets go a long way toward slowing people down to force them to smell the proverbial roses.
Nevertheless, this morning I walked a familiar and favorite trail through the foothills of the Chugach mountains. The sun dappled through the hemlock grove upon me and my dogs, and the curving trees created green and shadowy patches in which I wouldn't have been surprised to find Bilbo's pipe or Gandalf's staff.
The air was cool and crisp, maybe fifty degrees in mid-May, just right for a refreshing morning hike. I met only three other people, all of whom had off-leash dogs, as were my own. One was a woman I had worked with here in town some years ago, and we stopped to have a little chat by the side of the trail, discussing people, places, and things we both knew from both of us having spent a lifetime here.
Will I stay? I don't know. I doubt it. One of the things I learned by moving away then moving back is that I am capable of doing precisely that. I can tolerate change, perhaps even thrive. My dogs tolerate it. I can find a place to live and work, make new friends, adapt. And so the old desire to stretch my wings and explore the planet a bit more still burns within me. Whether that might happen two years from now, or ten, I can't speak to that just yet.
In the meantime, Anchorage is both comfortingly familiar and yet also a completely different place than the city I left behind. And, it turns out, both of those are good things.
