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HANGING ON ISLANDS
In the middle of three deep bodies of sea, a small pinnacle of rock escapes the waves; a light tower perched squarely on the island’s peak. As we motor past, hooks unwind from tubs and fling with regular rhythm out the back of Williwaw, my family’s commercial fishing boat. A steady whack, thwap, whoosh, as hook and bait are pulled from their coiled rest, sail through the air, and descend into the sea. The beat is mesmerizing. The hooks fly sometimes for over a mile. Once the last hook is overboard, my brother Nathan tosses the anchor and we watch as the line that connects us to the deep, runs swiftly out the back. Buoys away! I holler, throwing the last of the gear into the water. Deep in my center I feel a wild yearn. 66 million years ago they say, the earth faced this before, but not as swift. Airborne fossils swept through the sky, in clouds of carbon joined to two oxygen. The world cooked, but slower. A steady and increasing sweat, but many managed. Now, we are gassing the planet ten times faster than the greatest global warming event in the past 66 million years. No ocean core or ice column spells our future in its depths.
I feel the need so deep for spaces of rhythm, wind, and sway. Tide and swell
Sometimes it is enough to just breathe. My lungs rise and fall 11 times every minute.
They say we need to preserve half of the wild spaces of the world to save eight tenths of wild lives on this planet.
Walking into the cabin, a familiar mingling of fish, salt, and unwashed bodies wrinkles my noise. The stinky cloud of fishing boats is deep comfort. Grinning out at the Island, I take a moment to consider the rocky perch barely breathing above the water. My dad turns to me. How’d you like to be dropped off? At high tide, only the light tower remains above the waves. I imagine clinging to the ladder as the tide raises the ocean and absorbs the little piece of dry land. I give a little shiver part anxious the other joy. Maybe.
This winter I dreamt of being the sea. I tapped a plan outlining all the ways I might get to know her to my bedroom window. In an effort to make the transition as realistic as possible, I started visiting her everyday from the shore. A fingertip dipped in tide pools glowing sunset mountains. One night wading deeper and deeper until I raged cold and retreated. We live with feet on the ground. Always, some piece touching unless a brief leap or fall gives a taste of the air. A swim along the surface, a dive. But back. Always back. I can’t help but wonder what it feels like to live in space, to swing and glide and move through liquid, gas. Where is the ceiling for a bird? What is ground to a whale? Bobbing on the rhythmic ocean, we send lines down deep to entice the halibut that make their lives foraging in canyons, valleys, and vast plains below. Not so unlike us up here on the surface, waiting for the fish to bite. Occasionally we catch a sleeper shark who I’ve been told can live to be 500 (is that the right number?? Need to check with Dad…). We release them with a new lip piercing and I pray they will be ok.
I look out at the tops of mountains, with only crowns poking above the waves. Some are tall as a woman; others, higher than the clouds. All hugged round the belly by the sea. I think I might like to wear such a skirt of infinities, circling my waist in waves and zooplankton. When I was little I insisted fiercely about the intelligence of seal and sea star, bear and snail. I just couldn’t get down with the idea that humans were superior in braininess. I told my mom and brother. They said look. Where is their internet, scientific inquiry, agriculture, modern medicine? I lost words and I had no numbers so my argument drifted and was tucked aside. I am in love with her surface of infinities. To consider her depths means imagining nine tenths of earth’s biosphere. Every tulip, turnip and ant hill is great mystery. But the ocean is an infinite pool of it, less studied than the surface of celestial bodies thousands of miles away.
I turn to tides and halibut. Wind in my pores. Still, the whispers in my head. Bill McKibben. The world is never going to be, in human time, more intact than it is at this moment. Naomi Klein. What should we do with this fear that comes from living on a planet that is dying, made less alive everyday? Will Hunt, my friend and rationalist. The people who study artificial intelligence and catastrophe say that there is a 20 to 50 percent chance of human extinction in the next 100 years. With murmurs of catastrophe and oblivion reaching a scope that remains intangible and unfathomable for my 3 pounds of nervous thinking tissue, 8 ounces of pulsing blood pump, and 120 pounds of cellular cities, empty space, and mostly water--I turn to the sea. The world is more poetry and rhythm than any firing pattern our cranial constellations could dream. We are more ocean than not.
In a few weeks, I’m going halibut fishing with my dad and brother. When the fish rise from the sea, my brother will gaff them in their gills and shake them off the hook and onto the deck of the boat. Some halibut will be taller than any woman, and three times as heavy. I will puncture their lungs, red blood flowering onto their white bellies. Later we will clean their stomach cavities of spleen, heart, belly, and, blood line. With the hose, jetting water from the sea, slime and blood will slip away, and their smooth strong bodies will swim beneath our hands. We will wrap our arms through their jaw and heave and flop and slither them into the icy baths in our boat’s holds. In town, a crane will lift totes of these beautiful beings into the sky to be skinned and partitioned and shipped and eaten by the world that stands on two feet. The hooks will rest in their totes until the next year’s harvest begins.
World-Making I was in elementary school, watching the big kids play kickball. There was a really good kid with shoulder-length hair and a wide headband who wore basketball shorts. I ate my popsicle every afternoon and wondered if they were a boy or a girl. I wondered but I never asked. The desire to know is unsettling. I didn’t need to know. We put the kayaks in at Magic Island, slipping onto the surface of the water on a stormy afternoon. We spoke about the natural world as the water rippled, the constructed world as the water swelled smooth, the performed world as the rain moved in. The choppy waves rocked our narrow boats far out in the middle of the sound. Talk turned to the gender and the natural world, to what we’ve been taught and what we’ve had to explain. I said that gender and sexual orientation are socially constructed, and that the ways we determine or describe them are not inherently natural. I said that it all feels arbitrary, part of a larger system that seeks to discipline bodies and desires. I said that the way we perceive the world is socially constructed, and we see the world through the windows and prisms and structures we have created. But what about the blood running through your veins? you asked. What about the food and water you will die without? What about the storms that will kill you regardless of the words you choose?1 Sea lions barked behind us, porpoises and sea otters played next to us, gulls and eagles flew overhead. Humpback whales blew in the distance. We were surrounded by your questions. We were within something bigger than our bodies, we bowed to the forces that moved us. 1
You have “twenty or thirty minutes without a wetsuit but with a life jacket in Sitka Sound” before you die. Ord, Annika. 13 April 2016. Personal correspondence.
In The History of Sexuality (1976), Foucault argues against the idea that sexuality is a natural impulse that has been repressed (and thus needs to be liberated). He writes that “sex” was not repressed in the past but only recently invented, and that it is a disparate collection of ideas, body parts, feelings, and rules created in the 19th century by discursive practices.2 He writes about the way knowledge is made and how power is expressed through language, exposing how seemingly natural categories are created by our histories, memories, ideas, and cultures.3 He asks us to look at what we assume is normal, how something that seems so obvious to us might be a something only our particular lives let us see. How the books we have read, the places we have been, the foods we have eaten, the trauma we have endured, the people we have loved—how all these shape what we see and what we think of as true.4 When I consider gender, I think of certain categories, philosophies, words, behaviors, methods, and processes that explain what it means to be in the 2
Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, on sexuality: “The notion of ‘sex’ made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, pleasures; and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a casual principle, an omnipresent meaning, and secret to be discovered everywhere.” (5) See Discursive Formations (Hirschi 2015) for a musical exploration of this idea: www.annaleehirschi.com/music 3 Foucault calls this a genealogical critique created by discursive practices. 4 Culler writes, “What we think we know about the world— the conceptual framework in which we are brought to think about the world—exercises great power.” (8) Considering how truth is constructed and what evidence is used to create that sense of truth.
world. The language (and discursive practices) that we use to conceive and explain gender are not absolute truths; we create them based on what we see and experience. Collectively, we make up categories to explain the world; categories that too often oppress and punish.5 The ideas of “male” and “female” are not biological or natural, but processes that humans and society create and then perform.6 The things that let you know I’m female are things I’ve learned to perform; this doesn’t mean they are not real or that I don’t honestly feel and identify with them, but they are things I’ve learned, not things I was born knowing.7 Some of them are things I claim (wrathful protectiveness), while others feel like internalized oppression that I am constantly unlearning (hesitancy to take up space in group conversations). But none of these are because I’m a woman; I live them because I’ve been treated like a woman and taught to perform femaleness. Regardless of what identities I claim, I want to retain the right to define what that means and to consciously choose the qualities and social cues and pronouns that are right for me, “living in a body, full of need and desire.”8 From this performance emerges normalcy and deviance, two categories that are intertwined with structures of power and sanction the expression of selves. When 5
In a radio interview with Margaret Wertheim, On Being host Krista Tippit discusses the tyranny of absolutes and certainty saying, “The laws of physics are as tyrannical as the most primitive god.” (23 April 2015) 6 Although I quibble with biologists who purport gender/sex as natural categories; see Fausto-Sterling on gender and biology (2012; 2014). 7 Was I born knowing anything? Are we anything more than the cultural impulses we learn in the womb? 8 Kenyon, Jane. “Full Moon in Winter.” Collected Poems, 1998.
my sister was born, I saw her head cresting and wondered what she would be (I was so desperate for a sibling I told my mom I would “even take a brother,” but what relief! It was a girl). Normalcy makes difference deviant; it tells us, this way you are is not like anyone else. Poet Eileen Myles writes, “Everybody’s queer — everybody’s wrongly shaped for a culture that requires conformity.” Normalcy maintains a fiction about the way of the world and teaches us that this is the way things have always been.9 I think about the evolution of things that once were part of the natural order of things, things we now recognize as systemic oppression and perversions of justice.10 There were times when the “science” of phrenology “proved” white superiority by the shape of people’s skulls. Women have been “scientifically proven” to be weaker, domestic, hysterical.11 At various times, these were known to be objective, scientifically-proven truths. This need for conformity is a form of erasure, an expression of power and an intentional forgetting through language. But we can chose to remember and act through the words we assign to the familiar and unfamiliar, words that themselves can be actions, constructions, worldmaking. I think it might be like lifting the tree cover off this valley I am in, and seeing in the soil layers of animals, single-celled organisms, life-processes generating energy and heat and more life; and then also seeing the layers of the whole earth, the soil, clay, sand, and rock, macroscopic history moving concurrently with the microscopic cycles of the soil. 9
tbh the normalcy/deviance binary is another problematic. The emergence of the domestic sphere and women’s role in the home in the 19th century is another example. 11 Brunetta, Joan. Definition and cures for hysteria (which included the use of vibrators). 05 April 2016. Personal Correspondence. 10
I think Foucault’s “reflection on the implication of means of expression” might be a bit like that; impossible to see all of it at once with human eyes, but within the realm of our imagination and conceptual grasp.12 I like to imagine that if you lifted the tree cover off the valley I am in, you would find tiny interactions between people, the implications of a glance, a gasp, a grin, on the top layer. And deeper down in the skeletal layer, you would find the relationships between humans and landscape, bears and pine trees, soil and water, history and evolution and biology and ideology fused together and making the foundation of the physical and metaphysical place. I am in the mountains and love the intense greenness of this landscape and the way the fog rolls in over the mountains. This pleasure, the conception of those things as beautiful, and my awe at their grandeur may be a cultural inheritance (“And for all this, nature is never spent;/There lives the dearest freshness deep down things”)13 but that doesn’t make it less real. He asked you, What do we gain from the gender binary? What is lost when we get rid of the system entirely?14 I want recognition for those who do not fit in either the two choices they were given. I want existence to be possible. I want to fight what Judith Butler calls “exclusionary gender norms,” and acknowledge that deviance from this system is often punished. The gender binary might be traditional, but there are a lot of traditional things I don’t want to replicate. Once, joking around, I told my mom that I used she/her pronouns. She laughed and I said, “but 12
Culler, Jonathan. “God’s Grandeur.” Hopkins, Gerard Manley. 1877. 14 See bell hooks’ article, Understanding Patriarchy. It’s hard to abandon a system of violence if you’re benefitting from it, and it’s hard to have something that feels essential to you challenged. 13
you’ve never asked.” And she stopped laughing and said, “I haven’t.” We looked at each other for a long time, wondering. A few years later, for Mother’s Day, I sent her a card that said, “Gender is a universe, and my mama is a star!” She loved it. It is less a question of the nature of nature and more a question of the question. It is about our trust and comfort in form. Do we trust that this is exactly the way things are? Do we acknowledge the limits of our sight and systems? Can we look at our experiences of the world as a vast and complex web of significance than humans spin?15 Can we live and question and attempt to know and describe within this precarious and unstable place? What is wild, deviant, unusual, unnatural, unstable, uncouth, uncivilized, has changed and continues to change. These things that feel as solid as our selves, evolve. Our social, cultural and personal landscapes move incrementally, like glaciers; too slow to see moving, but fast enough for us to look back and notice all the ground left bare.
15
Geertz, Clifford: “Culture is a complex web of significance that man himself spins.”
“Killin’ buffalo’s just as good as killin’ Indians in this country.” John Wayne, “The Searchers”, 1956 In this quote from a deeply weird Western I saw a few months ago, John Wayne’s character is justifying the destruction of the American bison by pointing out that Native Americans in West Texas depend so heavily on buffalo meat that to deprive them of their primary staple is to doom them to starvation and death. A “good” outcome, to his mind. The literal, mathematical significance of the statement, however, is hard to ignore. Killing buffalo = killing Indians. Cancelling like terms, buffalo = Indians. Indians are animals. It is John Wayne’s prerogative to kill them, consume them, or leave them to rot in the sun. Wayne is establishing a hierarchy and an ethical justification he will later use in slaughtering a Comanche tribe. Wayne’s character is tracking down his niece, Debbie, who was kidnapped by a group of Comanche and has lived among them for five years. As the film progresses, Wayne’s warped intentions become clear: he does not mean to rescue Debbie and return her to white family. He means to murder her and thereby cleanse her of her association with the Comanche people (animals, in his view). Debbie, by consorting with the Comanche and even marrying one, has transformed into an animal, and Wayne need not feel any pangs of conscience about destroying her.
A few summers ago, I drove out to a grey-colored expanse of sagebrush in Montana to be a field grunt for a research project on prairie dogs. There was a group of us young ecologists and biologists living in a wagon circle of trailers about 4 hours from the nearest post office. Once, a small porcupine with an impossibly soft-looking face nestled in a fortress of quills ambled under our truck and would not be ousted. The porcupine clung to a back tire and looked at us guilelessly, totally unafraid. I was feeling devastated that I would never be able to pet it, and I made some dumb joke about how it might be friends with the prairie dogs. Another field tech, a recent undergraduate, like me, said, quite seriously “You know, you shouldn’t anthropomorphize them like that.” I registered this with a spark of indignation, but I mostly felt like I’d been caught sucking my thumb. His comment was innocent enough on its face, but what I heard, in my self-consciousness and my imposter-syndrome afflicted brain, was “Real biologists don’t anthropomorphize animals.” And, in the next layer down, “You’re too emotional to be a scientist.” As someone who is now well on the path to becoming a “real” scientist, I have heard some version of that comment repeated again and again, in real conversations and in media, from a man to a woman, instructing her to control her emotions, to resist her impulse to empathize, to cease projecting human sensation and motivations on non-human beings. Like my friend, chastised by a male colleague for proposing a perfectly sound ecological theory but couching it in too-human terms, for speculating about the internal ambitions and family dynamics of a wolf pack. “You can’t think of them like that. It doesn’t work that way.”
Like Fern Arable, savior of Wilbur, weeping before her bemused farmer dad - “If I was a runt, would you have killed me?” John Arable, with his big square farmer dad hands – “Fern, you have to learn to control yourself.” When John Arable reminds her that piglets and girls are not the same, Fern, who is navigating girlhood in postwar America, already knows that isn’t entirely true. “I see no difference.” Like the woman at the conference, interrogated in public for daring to claim that animals make decisions. She should have attenuated that statement with the reassurance that she didn’t mean animals make decisions in the way humans make decisions (using an unfathomable combination of logic, emotion, and experience), but in the way a computer makes decisions (using a complicated but ultimately formulaic set of algorithms). She flirted with a dangerous duality in the cold halls of science, and was corrected, rightly. In each case the person challenging the woman’s emotional display is convinced that he is not an animal, that being human is special, and that different rules apply to him. If you are a woman, or anyone in the lower levels of the hierarchy, you know that in some fundamental way this is not true. Your family can be rounded up and herded from place to place, your reproductive decisions can be made for you, and your flesh can be commoditized, just like an animal’s. So you make the mistake of imagining that animals also think and dream and suffer, like you. How could you not?
Near the end of the film, John Wayne finally locates Debbie and chases after her on horseback. Debbie is driven barefoot down a scree pile, and collapses, exhausted, at the mouth of a cave. Wayne lifts her up, like a kitten, and for a moment you think he really might murder her. But, of course, he decides not to kill Debbie. Instead, he swoops her up on his horse and rides her back to white safety. A happy ending, except that he and his associates still killed every man, woman and child in the Comanche tribe to GET white girl. He evidently decided at the last minute that Debbie’s humanity was in some way salvageable. Not so for the Comanche. Debbie was forcibly dragged up a level in the hierarchy, and now exists somewhere in the limbo between animal and man. But let’s be clear - she’s still a woman in a Western. Her ultimate role will be as an ingénue, or a sad mom, or perhaps a nononsense brothel owner. She will never be the hero. John Wayne pulled her up out of the mud onto the back of his saddle, but if she ever wanted to steer the horse he’d probably kill her anyway for trying.
So what can we do? We could repress our emotions, like we’re told, and smother our animal identities as best we can. I’ve done it, and I will likely continue to do it as I establish myself in science. But I’m not convinced it will get me far. A piglet can put on a suit and pass for a man in Animal Farm, but not in the real world. Because these hierarchies are imposed from above, they have to be smashed from below. You will be told to rise above your emotions, your empathy, but know that you can never rise up to the level of the ones who instruct you, to the peaks where they stay. Instead, step down, away from them, deep into the sagebrush valleys where the buffalo still graze. Step further. Walk with the herd, shattering thick plates of ice with each step and blasting steam from your nostrils. Let a cowbird ride on your head. Be calm, for now. But be ready to stampede.
BROOKE IVY. Anchorage Legislative Aide for Sen. Bill Wielechowski I was born and raised in Alaska. And I stayed. And it’s because of the natural beauty here. When I’m out in it, I’m fulfilling that decision. I’m maximizing my decisions to live and breathe and exist in Alaska. I have more to go. I haven’t counted, recently. I keep a list on my phone of all the peaks that I’ve done, and also peaks in the Chugach range that I want to get up when I’m home. Peak a week is the goal, but it doesn’t always happen toward the end of session. I’m sort of solo here — we’re all sort of solo here, to some extent. If I feel like having a beer, I don’t have to call someone to go with me. I just go.
MOLLY CARVER. Kodiak. Legislative Aide for Rep. Les Gara.
CHRISTINA ANDREW. Dillingham. Legislative Aide for Rep. Bryce Edgmon.
MEG ROWE. Atlanta, GA. Legislative Aide for Rep. Andy Josephson. I like to hang out with people that are non legislative staff. I made local friends when I got here. Because they have such simple problems. Their problems are like their roommates are leaving empty butter packages in their refrigerator. I think the problems we deal with here are less real, to some extent. A lot of people think that the legislature doesn’t really affect them. I like the law. I like ethics. I want to see how law is made so I can be a better writer. Philosopher. Lawyer. When you practice law in court you — it’s important to see how it’s made. Growing up in on the South Side of Atlanta there’s a lot of social inequality, and a lot of it has to do with environmental issues. So I got a law degree. There’s a lot of racial inequality here [in Alaska], still. Doing public defender work, the majority of our clients are Native or immigrants. In Atlanta it’s even worse ninety percent of the people they put to death in Georgia are black. So the reason I chose Alaska is because it’s some of the most severe conditions of our impoverished, the people in rural Alska. But I keep pussing out. Every time I go to do a job interview, I pussy out because I’m so scared. Loneliness. That’s the biggest one. Loneliness, and flat places. Like Bethel. I keep interviewing for jobs in Bethel. I want to — not sow wild oats, but have experiences. Before I settle in the same place for too long. That’s what drug addict’s say, too though — I’m just gonna smoke the rest of my weed, do heroin, then never again. That’s how I feel: I’m just gonna hook up with a couple more locals, I’m just gonna live in two or three more places. Oh, yeah. Oh, my gosh. I wanna be in the same place so bad. But I don’t wanna regret not seeing things. Everyone who’s older than me has said that.
BIANCA CARPENETI. Juneau. Legislative Aide to Rep. Sam Kito III NATASHA McCLANAHAN. Juneau. Assistant Legislative Director for the Office of the Governor Berries are my number one. I’ve been getting into fiddleheads and spruce tips. I want to get into seaweed as well. I have a five tray dehydrator. I’ve harvested some teas as well. Just whatever I can find. It’s a bit of challenge: you have to know your windows, ‘cause around here it’s so quick. Potatoes are easy and carrots taste really good. Also, snap peas grow really well here. It’s a bit of a challenge with lettuce — squash does well if it gets warm enough, but lettuce takes a lot more dedication because of slugs, and deer, and porcupines. You need more time than I’ve made in the last few years. I just taught myself really. I didn’t realize you could even grow vegetables in Southeast. What I do is more about public service than the job and the hours and the pay. Your voice is valid. You don’t have to compromise just because you’re a female. I feel often you can be shot down — you can say the same thing, but you’ll be questioned more just because you’re a female. And that’s where you have not back down, not question yourself. We have to shift that over time. Sometimes it can feel so painful. But there’s a lot of people who went through worse so I can be where I am.
ALIDA BUS. Juneau. Legislative Liaison, Department of Natural Resources
The culture in the building is workaholic-ism. But Sen. XXX was always like — finish your work and leave. We’re all humans, and we need to maintain, our relationships with family, with friends, our lives in the community. It’s easy to get totally consumed by the legislature. And feel really like that’s the most important thing. But I think in the general public, so few are as wrapped up in it. It’s important to leave, to be reminded of the real world. I think I have this unique position where, since Juneau is my hometown, and everyone comes to the Capitol city, I’ve always felt a little separate from the social life of the legislature — I’ve never done the bowling league. Because my family is here. Because my friends are here. I have all these other community networks. When session is here, I have to do more juggling. I respect people who come here and leave their homes and their families behind, and I know that’s hard, but I almost think it would be easier, to work twelve hours days that way. It’s hard for me because everything else is still here too. I think the building is a lot about relationships — not to try to use them to an advantage or manipulation, but just for the inherent fact that if you’re familiar and comfortable with someone and have some amount of trust, it’s easier to talk about issues and know people’s issues and what kind of perspective they’re bringing to a discussion and a debate.
GRANDAUGHTER, Speaker of the House Rep. Mike Chenault
MARY ESSAAQ SHERBICK. Anchorage. Legislative Aide for Rep. Bob Herron
I had never been in the building until the day I started work here.
ERIN SHINE. Anchorage. Legislative Aide for Sen. Anna MacKinnon I don’t do a good job of it, actually. I work and I sleep, and that’s about it. At the beginning, I meditate, I do yoga, and I run, I cook a lot. By the end….I don’t do any of that. I don’t eat well, ‘cause I’m surrounded by sugar and baked goods. At this point, it’s surviving. Which I think is how a lot of us feel. I think I can do it because I know there’s an end. And I actually feel like I’m doing good work. This pace is not sustainable, but I know there’s an end to it. My job is to say this is one way of looking at things, this is the next way, this is another way of looking at it. I didn’t put my name on a ballot, it’s not my reputation. I’m here to help in a process. It’s a terrible analogy, but I feel like it’s
an abusive relationship sometimes. It beats you up and puts you down. But then you get out, and you get some perspective, and you feel like you did great work. And you come back ready to do it again. It’s so disruptive. You have to move here, with a bunch of strangers, in a fishbowl of a world. Like, I’m here without my dog. That’s horrible. It’s like leaving a child behind. Yes. First week. He came by the first week. And started a conversation. Then he IM’ed the chief of staff in my office and said “Make Erin go to this reception so I can talk to her.” And then, through her, I made him go to the Perseverance play. We’ve been dating ever since then.
CORDELIA KELLIE. Wasilla. Legislative Aide for Sen. Donny Olson The legislature is. . . countercultural, I think. Sexism isn’t a thing the way I was raised, in my tradition. Both men and women had to be strong. . . because of survival. So the idea that one is less brilliant, less capable, less shrewd... is foreign to me. Because everybody had to be sharp in order to survive. Both men and women are needed. Ageism isn’t a thing in my tradition. When you’re young is the time to do the work, with the understanding that you have your elders guiding you along the way — when you’re young, that’s when you have the energy; it’s time to pull for the community. In the Legislature, I have to wait forty more years. I grew up in a tradition that really values love between one another. And love is such a foreign concept in the legislature — there is no room for love here. There are things I see in the building that I never experienced before. It’s so strange to me. I come here and I just think of all the stuff I’ve been asked to do by my mentors, and how much I’ve grown in such a short time, because that is the mandate. One of the staffers said to me earlier in the session, Cordelia! You are a force of nature. I said, I have mandate to lift up the face of my people. And I don’t take that lightly.
LAUREL STARK. Juneau. Legislative Aide for Rep. Jim Colver I think it’s just that you get so immersed that you stop relying on the other parts of your life to keep sane. You just have so many people working together with different viewpoints. It’s messy, and that’s okay. I think that there are just so many layers of conversations, and changes. There’s staff communicating with staff, in their offices, then with other offices — then there’s the legislators that are speaking with each other, outside of committees, and in committees. On the record, certain kinds of conversations are had. When I say conversations — sometimes they’re collaborative, constructive, and productive. Sometimes there someone calling an office over and over again asking for something or some piece of information and someone pretending they don’t know that information or don’t have it. So the conversations don’t always result in something. There are all the social, emotional aspects that get layered into these interactions — in committee, on the floor, and mostly outside of that. In my viewpoint, we’re all humans. There’s no direct path that anything takes. Just lots of loops and circles. And everyone has some little piece of information, but you don’t know how reliable it is or how up to date it is. It’s just all messy.
KELLEN PRIEST. Juneau. Assistant Chief Clerk
(front) COURTNEY SANBORN. Fairbanks. Special Assistant to the Commissioner, Department of Natural Resources. The longer it takes me to go into the woods, and get to my happy place in my mind, the more I know I need it — when I’m not busy I do that everyday. I step into the woods and I let go. Here, when I step into the woods, I have to go really deep before my mind gets clear and that’s my gauge for how much I’m holding on to. You can’t leave a place and leave things behind you. You carry all of that with you. You can’t leave yourself behind. Your relationship with yourself is the most important relationship you have. All other relationships stem from that. As long as you like yourself, and you can spend time with yourself, and you can sleep well at night with the decisions you’ve made and the things you’ve said, then all will be well. I am. I’m ready to go home so I don’t have to be determined anymore. I’m a pretty chill person in regular life.
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