Called to the Wild

As if being separated from my bride wasn’t difficult enough, I was fired from my position as promotions director at KOZZ in Reno as the new-year began. And while I still had a part-time job as on-air staffer, I was finding myself to be more and more emotionally drained from the constant tumult.

As it happened, I received a phone call from my Aunt Barbara, who told me my cousin Pammy was trying to get a hold of me. Pammy and her husband own a hunting and fishing lodge in Alaska and wanted to know if I’d be interested in care taking the place while they visited the lower 48 for a couple of months.

I jumped at the chance.

Without much notice to the station’s program director, Jim McClain, I bailed out of KOZZ and a packed my bags for the 17-hour flight to Anchorage. I was looking forward to doing something aside from being distraught over my marriage as it continued to fall apart.

Little did I know I would end up with nothing but time to think, worry and obsess about how bad I thought my life had become and how I believed I was a total failure as a human being.

Shortly after Pammy and her family packed up their Cessna and headed for California, a huge snow storm blew in and buried the area. It knocked out the satellite dish, the Internet and phone service and made traveling the 25 miles via snowmobile from the lodge to town nearly impossible.

I felt alone, depressed and was stranded in the middle of nowhere.

At one point, all I had as entertainment was a little chipmunk who lived in the woodpile by the backdoor. Unknown to me at the time, the little guy was unable to forage for food and I found him dead one morning.

That left me with a lot of time to shovel snow drifts, chop kindling and make certain the pipes didn’t freeze.  Eventually the snow let up and blue skies emerged and I was able to go outside and have a look around.

This lasted only a day as I discovered there were a couple of huge bears roaming the property. I figured it would be safer to stay close to the lodge as I didn’t want to become part of the food-chain by accident.

Much of my time was spent journaling and reading a book I had packed labeled, “The Yukon Writing’s of Jack London.” Inside of sixty-days I wrote 180 pages of material on how I felt and I ended up putting the book away before finishing it.

By the time my cousin’s returned, I was ready to head south, back to Nevada. I had enough of the solitude and needed something to take away the loneliness I felt in both my head and my heart.

I also discovered in short-order that I’m not cut from the same clothe as the character’s written about by Jack London.