The Great Escape....

Yes, it's been a while. I'm not dead or maimed, or imprisoned, or living within a commune of naked Wikipedia addicts (god, how fun!) Thanks for wondering, though! Actually, I've just been, well - um, hmmmm...gosh! I've been........
here.

When I moved back to the Norway/Iron Mountain/Spread Eagle area (yes, Spread Eagle) it was after the turmoil that was called IOWA, a 2-year experiment in how- many- things -could- go -wrong- in -2 -years? sort of deal. I swallowed my gram of pride, packed the car, and moved to Norway, to my mother's house; a move that was "just temporary! I'm just saving up money so I can move to....."

So over the past six years, I've explored many different ways of extending a "temporary" move. I came out; had a relationship on a farm full of cows and chickens; worked with heroin addicts and old retarded people; delivered pizzas and industrial hydraulic equipment; started a grease fire; became a real firefighter; became an EMT; went on record as the fastest typist to ever take the Michigan Works! typing exam in Dickinson County; finally got my 14-year-old student loans in deferrment status; learned how to drive a tractor; worked in an Emergency Department for over a year, during which I could honestly say, "I see dead people" ; lost my dog, who I never really appreciated until his final months, and then I fell in love with him; and saw some really weird shit go down with my family. Pretty hardcore stuff to go down during a "temporary" stay. And funny, none of it was planned; none of it really made me happy (except the chickens, and my dog, and the retarded people.)

This summer, I checked my email box and almost skirted right past a spammy-looking message from "classmates.com" - it looked like the same old shit. But for some reason I opened it, out of a curious bit of curiosity. When I saw the subject line, I just about had a seizure at the shock of who it was. All it said was

"A set of keys has been found."

and that was all I needed, because I knew EXACTLY who it was from.

My senior year in high school was nothing but crap, which is saying a lot, because in all actuality I never HAD a senior year. My parents decided to pack up and move to Rochester, Minnesota from Cortland, Ohio - in August. My mother took me to the high school for a tour, during which faculty and other staff prodded me at every corner, asking if I played football (I was a large band geek, but apparently all that showed through was the "large" part.) On the first day of school, I thought of ways to sneak out. On the second day, I thought of ways to get expelled. Luckily the third day, I found out that I could take credits at the community college and bypass my senior year - something that was unusual, as most high school students only took one or two classes in the afternoons. But I think the guidance counselor and my mother could see by the steaming angst on my face that they better figure out a way to get me out of that high school and into college, which they did - I started the next day.

That was a relief, but I still was never happy. I wanted to go back to my friends; I wanted to experience senior year and all the stereotypical elements of it. I really missed one friend in particular - Erin, who had been the first person to introduce herself to me when I spent my first day of high school in a new town - that being Cortland, Ohio, just four years prior. Erin and I had struck a bond right away, because we both had a taste for music, artsy stuff, and just being ridiculous. And during the three years I knew her, we had been raucous and foolish; we had all kinds of secret sayings and people that we imitated. We drank alcohol out of shampoo bottles from Erin's locker, that was usually creme de cacao or something equally horrible, but tasted like the shampoo bottle. We spent hours and hours on the telephone, because Erin's mother and evil cop stepfather would ground her for months at a time, so we secretly talked after school every day until her mother got home at five. When I left, I suddenly had nobody; I was shy and not enthusiastic about the move, which added to the difficulty. And as the year passed, my hopes of escaping or convincing my mother to let me return to Ohio started to fade out. Erin was joining the Army, to be in the Band, and would be leaving in the summer.

I think I heard from her three more times. The last time would have been in 1992, my freshman year of college, when she called me out of the blue. By then, things had changed; I had moved on and finally left home, and college treated me well. I might have tried to call her again a few months later, but the phone number was no longer in service.

In 2000, when I got my first computer and discovered the internet, I gradually learned that it was possible to find people through searches. I found my old band director, who had died at the age of 90; I found my best friend from early childhood, Scott, who had been killed in a bar fight in Arizona. But there was no trace of Erin. The fact that her name was "Erin Dunlap" didn't help either, because there are literally millions of Erin Dunlaps out there. And for all I knew, she could be married, or, like my band director and childhood friend, dead. Whenever she would cross my mind, I would go online and do a little bit of "Erin Dunlap" searching. Once in a while I would think I had found a lead, but they invariably proved futile.

So it was quite a shock when I opened that email, and the message inside made me laugh until I was crying, both from laughter and from joy. (The "set of keys" subject line was in reference to a practical joke we pulled on a teacher, which turned out so well that we both would never forget it.) Erin was living in Seattle - she was a newcomer to the city, and was living in a hotel-like apartment building with rent by the week. She arrived there from Anchorage, Alaska, where she had lived for several years with a boyfriend, working as a waitress and a dj. Before that, she had lived in Austin, Texas, where her mother had moved (after leaving her nasty cop husband), and basically had lived there for most of the 90s. She had left Anchorage when her relationship went sour and ended - she decided she needed to get away from the constant reminders, and she hopped a plane with her cat and her things, and landed in Seattle.

Why Seattle? Well, she just decided to move somewhere that she WANTED to live. It was neither a temporary nor permanent move - just an experiment in starting over somewhere exciting, beautiful, and bursting with opportunity. There was no planning involved, other than the plane ticket and the hostel-like apartment building she lived in. She found a job as a waitress, and became as settled as she could in a one-room apartment with a feisty cat. Things were neither wonderful nor terrible - there was some of both - but she was happy and found excitement every day in the newness of her surroundings.

Wow. I had forgotten that it was possible to do things solely on the merit of WANTING to do them. My mother had always pounded me down out of space with her constant reminders that "we have to do things we don't want to do, just to survive." Well, I was sick of "just surviving." I told my mom that, if that were so, how did the people in poor equatorial countries cope? A life of "just surviving" in the UP of Michigan was at least somewhat comfortable, and I never had to starve or have my eyes washed because they were crusted shut from disease. Yet, I was SO unhappy - I hated my job, I hated the horrid, nasty, horrid weather that we are so blessed with here, and I hated the fact that, after a bad breakup, I had lost most of my friends, and my desire to look for new ones. If things could suck this bad in middle class America, then it must REALLY suck in the Sudan, right? Obviously, Sudanese people find ways to be happy, otherwise their lives would not be worth living - plus they live in constant fear of being murdered. There are 6 billion people on the planet, and they aren't all just "doing what they have to do" to survive. Otherwise there wouldn't be Disneyland and Richard Simmons.

So, to pull this to a close - I took Erin's example and planned my next destination. I had never been to Seattle, but I had always wanted to go. The beauty in the Pacific Northwest is everywhere - within an hour of Seattle, there is ocean beaches, snowy mountaintops, rain forest, and desert. There's an energetic but relaxed pace in the people, according to Erin - and the Liberal mindset rules there. I might get there and hate it, or love it, or starve, or just "survive." But, for once, I am going somewhere because I WANT to go there. No matter what happens, I will learn a lesson just from the fact that I made the decision myself, and my future is mine for once.

Well that's enough of that. I have to go paint. Next time I'll write about the fun and peril of being a new landlord...........

Doug