Something That Happened In the Rain

I learned to love rain living in Ketchikan, Alaska. Actually that’s not quite accurate. I learned to hate rain there, too. Mostly, I learned to live with rain, to coexist with it on a daily basis. When you live in a place where it rains 13 feet a year, yes 13 feet, it rains a whole lot.

Thirteen feet of rain a year is twice as much as Seattle. If you’ve ever been to Washington State, you can begin to get some sense of the magnitude. There is always precipitation in Ketchikan, whether it’s a fine mist, a constant seeping drizzle, a downpour that drenches you in seconds, or a biting horizontal rain that pushes you across the street. The rare occasions when it was sunny for a whole day, kids were let out of school for a “sun day.”

I walked to work in Ketchikan. I walked from the wooden house I shared with Kathy Tibbles and her daughter Katrina, through the downtown, past the Arctic Bar and the trinket shops that sold miniature totem poles and mugs shaped like grizzly bears, past milling crowds of tourists getting on or off cruise ships, past real totem poles, past streets--complete with official street signs--that were nothing more than flights of sodden wooden steps, going up. In my rubber boots and wool socks, I slogged through the rain to my first professional job at KRBD-FM where I worked at a news reporter and later, as a talk show host.

Right outside the door of the radio station was a stream, nothing unusual in an island town where it never stops raining, but in this stream, we could watch female salmon, turning red as they moved toward egg-laying and death, flipping up a small waterfall right outside our front door.

The Sedimentary Layers

It started with my mouthpiece. I dropped it. Or more accurately it fell out of my mouth while I was sleeping. My mouthpiece is a hard piece of clear plastic made from a mold of my teeth. Designed by Dr. Darrick Nordstrom, the Nor-Snor treats sleep apnea and prevents snoring. It was a costly piece of plastic, $500 hundred bucks, but it’s created peace in my bedroom and someday my blood pressure will thank me. I’ve been wearing this device nightly for over a year, ever since I felt recovered enough from cancer treatment to indoctrinate myself into a new health regime. For the most part, I love my Nor-Snor, but sometimes in the middle of the night, it falls out on to my pillow where it waits patiently for me till morning.

A couple of weeks ago, the Nor-Snor fell out the night before our housecleaners was to come, and I failed to find it in its usual hiding places in the few minutes I had before racing off to drive the carpool. I figured it was tangled in the bedding and that I’d find it later. But later, it wasn’t there. I grew worried that one of the animals had chewed it up or carried it out into the yard (they’re drawn to the moist smell of saliva) or that our cleaner has inadvertently thrown it away. Karyn, who is universally known as “The Finder” because she rarely fails to find missing items, did one of her systematic searches, even combing through the garbage, but to no avail.

When I left to go on my big Walk, the search had to be put off. After I returned home triumphant and exhausted, I started looking again. I was even willing to do a major search of the no-man’s-land under our bed. I’ve shoved a whole lot shit under there in the two years since I’ve had cancer.

Laura's Walk: 60 Miles in 3 Days

Packing List for the 3-Day Walk

 Packing List: What to Bring on the Three-Day Walk

1. lots of chutzpah
2. the well wishes and support of my community
3. 1 sleeping bag
4. 1 sleeping pad
5. courage
6. a flag or other identifying marker so my pink tent stands out from 1000 others (still don’t know what that flag could be!)
7. 6 cotton kerchiefs, two per day….one to wipe sweat, the other to wipe snot