Exiting the Door
It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to. - Bilbo Baggins
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
It is t minus 3 days and an armful of hours before I board my first plane to Alaska. The world is swimming in my head. In a few days, I will be hundreds of thousands of miles away from the house that I grew up in. I have sent two bins of belongings ahead to herald my arrival, and I am working on sorting out the necessities from the wants and unceremoniously shoving them into my suitcases. In lieu of my precious (yet heavy) books, I have begun to amass a digital library on a Kindle.
How did I get here?
I suppose it all began with the family vacation brackets. My family and I have several unusual but fun bonding activities, and one day, we decided to create a randomly seeded bracket of 64 different vacation destinations that we wanted to experience. Among such locations were the rainforests of Costa Rica, the beaches of south France, the stark beauty of Antarctica, and the rich history of the Holy Land. However, as we all completed our brackets, “Alaskan Cruise” was at least in the final four of all our brackets, winning most of them.
Eventually, this playful exercise became a reality, and my family and I piled onto a plane leading us to Anchorage. I still remember staring out the window, transfixed by the existence of mountains.
Mountains.
I had traveled to West Virginia to visit family and I had also been to the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, and they were beautiful. But these mountains, these snow-capped juts of earth reaching heavenward, these were true mountains. These were the mountains that inspired stories of dwarf-halls and dragons’ nests. These were the mountains that brave people climbed perilously to experience Nature’s unrelenting grandeur and might. These were the mountains that called to me.
The entire cruise, we traveled along the Inside Passage, our massive ship overshadowed by the ever-present mountains. As I spent my free time crafting a world, their simple, subtle music weaved into my soul and implanted a lodestone in my chest that pointed northwest.
What do you do when you’re lost? Follow a compass.
I had just graduated college with an English degree, cum laude, and wanted so badly to teach high school English. Unfortunately, due to the winding path I had taken with my education, I had not acquired a teaching certificate for Ohio. No matter; once I was hired at a private school, I would apply for a non-tax teaching certificate. Yet, try as I might, I was ignored or rejected by the schools that I applied to. One school even rejected me the very day after I interviewed. I was beginning to spiral. I knew that I wanted to teach, but I needed a certificate to get a job, and I needed a job to get a certificate. The classic job-experience paradox.
Lost as I was, I spent time thinking about what excited me. What enthralled me. What sparked my inspiration. I was once again pointed northwest as I explored the Alaska Teachers & Personnel website. This website contains a great wealth of information for any teacher, aspiring or experienced, to learn about living and teaching in Alaska. I eagerly searched for high school English teaching positions, found a few, and applied to them. The human resources department at the school district was prompt to respond and excited to interview me.
And so I sit at my desk, collecting my thoughts for the journey. One can never truly be sure what might happen when they walk out their front door. Hobbits become adventurers. Thinkers become writers. Dreamers become artists. A suburban boy from Ohio becomes an Alaskan teacher.
