E.T. Phone Home

I am unusually sensitive to drugs of all kinds. I don’t drink coffee and I break Benadryl pills in half if I have to take them. Recently, I used Lidocaine for the first time for some joint pain. After about half an hour, I went out onto the porch and told Troy that I was high.

He looked at me skeptically and said, “That’s not attested as a side effect.”

I responded, “I’m just telling you what is going on in my body!”

Troy teased me that the doctors were going to come and take me away to do experiments on me.

I said, “That’s actually a really deep fear of mine.”

When I was very young, I had a heart murmur and anemia. My memories of this are very hazy, but still scary, of men in white coats pricking my fingers and taking blood. This resulted in a lifelong fear of needles and having my blood drawn.

I was also very interested in sewing as a child, and started trying to sew when I was five or six years old. I didn’t really have the dexterity yet, and I was constantly pricking myself with needles. My parents joked that they didn’t need the doctors to take my blood because I was doing it myself. They laughed, but I found it upsetting.

These early memories also blur with the movie E.T., which came out the year after I was born. I probably saw it when I was about four, an age when I was still having trouble differentiating between reality and fiction. The scene where the men in white coats take E.T. away and perform tests on him was terrifying to me, and I conflated it with my own hospital experiences. I also had a little E.T. bike that I loved, most likely a hand-me-down from an older cousin.

When I relayed all of this to Troy, he said, “Don’t worry, I will hide you amidst the stuffed animals to protect you.”

I said, “I love that you cast yourself as the Drew Barrymore character in this scenario.”

I wonder how many kids who watched E.T. identified with E.T. instead of one of the child characters. It kind of makes sense, though, because I learned from an early age that I was from a strange place.

While my mom’s family has lived in Alaska for generations, my dad grew up in Oakland, California. We took pretty frequent trips to the Bay Area to visit family when I was young, especially during the years that my mother was working for Alaska Airlines and the tickets were comped.

In California, I was an alien. I marveled at the fruit growing on trees and how clean all the cars were. Inevitably, some other kids would find out that my sisters and I were from Alaska. We might as well have been from Mars. For these kids from the Lower 48, Alaska was a mishmash of Santa, igloos, and penguins (none of which exist in Alaska).

I would get a sense of unreality, trying to explain to these kids that I was just a normal person who lived in the same country as them. It didn’t really feel true.

This continued when I went to Santa Cruz for college. My roommate (a compulsive liar from the East Bay) greeted me with a stuffed moose and said there was a voicemail in “Esk*mo” on our message machine. It was a wrong number from someone who spoke Vietnamese.⁠1

When we read books about Alaska in my college classes, I was livid. I was angry at these white men from Outside, describing a place I did not recognize. For me, Alaska was fireweed and Denali, looking across the Inlet at Sleeping Lady, and staying up all night on Solstice. It made me furious to read about my home being used as a testing ground for masculinity and described as a baren, harsh landscape to avoid at all costs.

During this time, I called home every Sunday afternoon. I would talk to my mom first, and then she would pass the phone to my dad and then my sisters and brother. Anyone around would hear me having the same conversation five times in a row. We talked about sports practice and the community theater, who they had run into at the Fred Meyer, and which local restaurant had recently burned down.

I left Alaska when I was 17 and, other than a few summers, I never went back for more than a visit. I miss Alaska in my bones. But when I am there, I chafe at how small the community is. Even now, I run into people I know everywhere in town.

People from Anchorage who meet each other Outside⁠2 immediately ask where the other one went to high school. This question does a lot of the preliminary sorting: the high schools are class identifiers, and it narrows down who you might have in common. It also weeds out the people who say they are from Alaska but really grew up somewhere else. In a place where much of the population is transient (military, fishing, adventure-seekers, oil), the number of families that have lived there for generations is small, and we mostly know each other. My sisters and I have all been recognized by strangers because of our strong resemblance to our parents. It’s not a place where you can get away with much.

I am also wary of movies and TV shows set in Alaska. They are usually filmed in Canada, and they tend to play into the same stereotypes as the books I hated so much. However, I did like one character in the movie Insomnia (an otherwise utterly ridiculous film). Maura Tierney plays Rachel, who works at the lodge—a solid Alaskan job (tourism is one of the top employers for the state). She clocks that the detectives are from the Lower Forty-Eight by their walk,⁠3 and later she says, “There are two kinds of people who live in Alaska. The ones who are born here, and the ones who come to escape something else. I wasn’t born here.”⁠4

I was born in Alaska, and I escaped.

I dreamed for years of going to college in California, of sunny days and short winters. I wanted to get away from all of the people that I knew and be anonymous in a new place. So I left, like nearly all of my friends. The ones that were fortunate enough to go to college went off to Idaho and Seattle, Florida and Boston. Very few returned.

When I learned about brain drain in the context of African countries, I recognized the concept immediately. That’s what happens in Alaska. The best that the brightest students can do is go elsewhere, and then they stay away.

Sometimes I avoid telling people that I am from Alaska. It’s both a conversation stopper and starter, so I try to mention my hometown judiciously. When I tell people that I am Alaskan, I transform in front of their eyes from someone who seems normal to an alien. They have so many questions.

At the same time, I eat out on being Alaskan. It’s always in my back pocket. People love to hear the story about my grandparents’ plane crash in Seldovia and shiver at the thought of encountering a grizzly on a hike. They are fascinated by the enormous vegetables and endless nights, and everyone wants to see the northern lights someday.

Troy elbows me at the table and tells me to share statistics about how many bears live in the Anchorage municipal area (300 black bears, 65 grizzlies). He loves to joke about poor Star the Reindeer. And when he came home with me for Christmas, he witnessed one of our typical suicides: a man running into traffic at the intersection of Northern Lights and the New Seward Highway.

I still call home on Sunday afternoons. I talk to my family and hear updates about people we know: who is getting married, who had another baby, who died. We talk about the weather and how many minutes of daylight they gained or lost that day. Then I look at the lush trees outside my home in North Carolina and miss snow-covered mountains.

1. I only recently learned that not everyone knows “Esk*mo” is a slur. Alaskans use “Native Alaskan” or tribal names for indigenous people.

2. Alaskans call anywhere outside of Alaska “Outside.”

3. Insomnia (2002), 12:30

4. Insomnia (2002), 1:41:40