2.1 It came to me in Alaska
It came to me in Alaska, a frosty place to decide you want to have a kid. I didn’t know it yet when I was on the southeastern Alaska ferry that leaves from Bellingham, Washington. It was a massive boat, big enough for hundreds of people and cars and trucks, a poor man’s cruise ship, blue and white, with three outdoor decks. On the ferry, you can buy a cabin and sleep like a respectable adult. Or you can sleep on the solarium level on a deck chair. Deck chairs under the solarium are like gold because the covered open air uppermost deck provides shelter from the rain for those too lazy to carry a tent. To get to it requires a mad rush, like standing room at the opera. Scampering up those stairs, I wondered “Am I too old for this? and I wasn’t even thinking about the baby yet. Not consciously. It’s just that during the run up, as the oxygen slowed to my brain, I saw it as a metaphor for how I traveled through life. The hard way.
Like that woman in her 70’s. She knew which way to face. She knew which chair to take. I realized she too was traveling alone. She had ridden deck chairs before. This time she was headed to Skagway, Yukon Territory, and back, setting out on her economy journey with curlers in her hair. I watched as in the morning, she carried an electric teapot into the bathroom to fill up and plug it in to boil water while most folks were plugging in their hairdryers and electric shavers. She couldn’t be bothered with the on-board cafeteria or the linen table cloths in the dining room. She drank her hot drinks and hot cereals on her deck chair. The hardest part of the journey for her was getting from the Greyhound to the ferry dock. She took a city bus. She might have taken a cab, I thought. Then I wondered, by the time I was 70, would I?