Finding Balance in the Land of Extremes

   There is nothing balanced about life in Alaska.  It is a land of extremes: long, dark, cold winters, insomniac summers, monstrous mountains, and vast empty spaces.  A landscape and environment so out of balance that it forces its inhabitants to either reach deep within themselves to create balance or risk going mad.  Deep equanimity is the only antidote to the myriad mental assailants inherent in the North.
   "Pack your Sorel's®" was the message that came from my mother while I was stumbling onto my path in the Phillipines.  I was accepted into the graduate program in geology/geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a new chapter of my life was about to unfold.  A quick visit in the spring left me feeling heady and invigorated; I knew it was the place for me, but I really wasn't prepared for what it would do to me.
   To say that life in Alaska is intense is an understatement.  It's not just the weather and living at the end of the road, but a jumble of little things that you wouldn't imagine unless you lived there.  For three years I lived in cabins sans running water.  Every teaspoon of water for drinking, cooking, washing up, etc. had to be pumped at the Water Wagon (like a gas station, but for water), frequently at sub-zero temperatures, into containers and then hauled into the cabin.  On campus there were warnings about bears and irate moose.  In the summers forest fires choked the valley and exceeded all EPA hazard levels.  And the people who gathered in this place of extremes were typically cut from an unnaturally tough cloth, often leaving me feeling like a mere mortal trying to compete on Olympus with the gods and demigods.  It was simultaneously electrifying and exhausting.
   Alaska is a fundamentally fantastic place to live if you have come into balance before you touch down.  Unfortunately for me, my heart and head were all over the place when I arrived.  I was in transition in so many ways that I didn't know who I was or where I wanted to go.  I didn't even particularly want to go to Alaska and I will forever reply to the question, "why did you choose Alaska?!" with my standard and honest response that "I didn't, it chose me."  It's true, I really didn't see any other option and so, without so much as a decent winter coat, I bundled up my few trappings and all of my personal baggage to see just what Alaska could throw at me.
   We duked it out for neigh on eight years, Alaska and I.  It was a brutal love-hate relationship.  I've never wanted anything so badly as to be a 'real Alaskan'; to get out there and touch those mountain peaks, traverse the uncharted landscape, feed myself off of her back.  But I couldn't do it.  Something always held me back, curbed my enthusiasm and left me with a cloying unfulfilled desire.  I look back and I still don't completely understand what happened.  I watched my peers head out and embrace the wilderness while I stumbled into the role of city girl.  Somehow Alaska had the opposite effect than what was expected; instead of tom-boy-cum-mountain man, I started reading Glamour magazine and fell in love with Sex and the City!?  For the first time in my life I cared deeply about my wardrobe and fantasized about long luxurious baths in some weird backlash to the extreme disheveledness around me.
    For better or for worse, Alaska forced me to dig deep and really find myself.  The process was neither straightforward nor painless.  I continued to struggle with friends and relationships, but I got better.  Sometimes it was one or two steps backwards for every two or three forward, but I made progress all the same.  Near the end of my life in the North I started receiving the best complements I could ever have asked for: I was a much more likable person than when I arrived and people were actually going to miss me.
   For years up there I teetered on the edge of madness, but I'm too damn stubborn to just give in and completely loose my marbles.  The control freak in me just won't hear of it.  It took a lot of counseling, some amazing friends and the most incredible yoga teachers ever, but by the time I left I could feel that I was just starting to come into balance.