Una nueva experiencia

In the last couple of years I've been keeping friends up-to-date through slightly more private channels, like phone and facebook. However, crazy new developments en mi vida call for something drastic, specifically, a return to blogging.

And now, for a ridiculously rapid update of the last two years: I got pregnant, had a horrific pregnancy that resulted in an awesome kid, referred to here as LittleBit (or LB for short). The husband passed the Colorado Bar Exam and will now be referred to as Esquire, even though he dislikes that term. He's been freelancing and doing of-counsel work at a small firm. The legal market in the Denver area is pretty saturated and finding enough work to regularly make ends meet was a rough game. In an insecurity-induced stroke of madness I told Esq., "sure, go looking for a job in Alaska", and lo and behold he found one. In the bush. Off the road system. In a place accessible only by plane and the occasional boat, when it can get past the ice pack (and you didn't think God had a sense of humor).

Entonces, here I sit in a hotel room in the frontier town of Fort Nelson, British Columbia, an outpost on the AlCan Highway, with Esq. and I trying to keep a one-year-old happy while ferrying him and a slim portion of our earthly possessions across the Yukon and into Alaska. It's pretty up here in an I'm-alone-in-the-wilds kind of way, and I imagine it's prettier if and when they have summer. They've clearly missed the memo about spring starting in March. I could easily have mistaken today for a dead-of-winter day in Colorado.

I would like to tell you all that I know about the place we'll be living, but the truth is there isn't much to tell right now. Information about Bethel, Alaska, is disappointingly sparse on the usually reliable interwebs. It's about 400 miles west of Anchorage, on the delta of the Kuskokwim River in the middle of the tundra. Swampy tundra, only 6,500 people, and the largest town for hundreds of miles. It's remote and everything has to be flown in, so the cost of living is high. Milk reportedly costs $10/gallon, and a bottle of Tide detergent sells for $25. Ouch. The main source of entertainment is high school basketball, and we're told that in the winter people get around town with snowshoes and dogsleds because motorized vehicles struggle in the extreme cold. Highs in August soar up into the low 70s.

I'm not trying to be negative, I promise. The wee problem here is that Esq. is at heart a small-town boy whose dream is to live in a last-frontier place like Alaska, while I am in truth a spoiled city girl who only likes to play out in the wilderness, then go home to a hot shower and have dinner in some little ethnic bistro with my citified friends. I like a bit of adventure, but living on the frontier is a definite compromise for me. I'm more into tropical or equatorial adventures than Arctic ones. My husband just happens to have gotten a cherry of a public defense job in a less-than-ideal place for his family.

So, that's what's going on with s these days. We've gone through the insanity of packing up our place to move, wrapping up our affairs in Colorado, finding good homes for our things or putting them in storage, and cramming our poor Ford Explorer full of a few essentials for the long cross-continental haul. So far LittleBit has been an extraordinarily good sport, considering the long stretches that he has to endure his car seat when what he wants is to practice his favorite new skill of walking. At present I'm watching him buzz around the hotel room, singing to himself. He's a great kid.

Stayed tuned, mis amigos. Further reports from the frozen north are forthcoming.