The Risk Taker’s Wife

Posted on | April 6, 2005 | 68 Comments

This was an entry for contest #8 at The Zero Boss: Blogging for Books. The subject was “RISK – about a time when you took a risk in your life on someone or something – a new romance, a new career, a new home, etc. Were you successful beyond your wildest dreams – or did you crash and burn?”

My entry was chosen as one of the seven finalists, but didn’t make it to the winning three.

Beware: This is a long entry, a little over 1000 words.
Be Aware: There are two kinds of people in Alaska – ones who love it and ones who hate it( and can’t wait to get out.)
Now read on, make sure you have some patience and some minutes to murder.

The Risk Taker’s Wife“Alaska! You are joking, right?!!”

Dark clouds of bewilderment followed by suspicious looks doubting our sanity descended on our friends’ faces when we disclosed our plans – about moving to Alaska.

“Only Eskimos live in Alaska, what are you gonna eat, whale blubber?,” the brash young crowd laughed us off. ‘Moving to Alaska’ was an unnatural act as far as our San Fransiscan friends were concerned. If one wanted to measure the lasting effects of this three word combo, all one had to do was to drop the bombshell at a Bay Area Indian party, as we did, four years ago.

True to the overly networked, clannish, looking-out-for-each other nature of the relatively new immigrant communities in the New World, every one was eager to offer their piece of advice. Some even took on the role of our absent parents, admonishing, “Why don’t you try somewhere else, some place a bit warmer perhaps, like San Diego, my niece’s father-in-law’s cousin’s son once stayed in Minneapolis, mind you it was nowhere near Alaska, but he almost froze to his death living there, these cold places are not for us,” an older, experienced friend tried to warn us, before moving on to stop other reckless young people like us from committing other foolish acts.

His fears, I had to confess were not totally unconfounded. Both of us, me and my husband, the prospective Alaskan immigrants, were born and brought up in a place that almost straddled the equator. At 8 deg N, at the peninsular tip of India, my mother would take out carefully wrapped woolen shawls and sweaters from her trunk if the temperature ever dropped below 70 deg F. During my two decades of life with her, she had encountered this situation only twice. Now you sense the wisdom in the old man’s words, right? I experienced my first taste of snow, at 21, at the foot hills of the Himalayas on a school tour and had been enamored by it ever since like most snow depraved people often are.

It was not just the Indian diaspora who were troubled by our announcement, the uber-cool crowd of silicon valley software geeks, of which my husband was an honorary member of, dismissed it as the craziest blunder a self-respecting dot-commie could ever commit. They strongly suspected that there won’t be more than a handful of Alaskans who knew how to read and write, not to mention programming and coding in Java or C++.

We did not decide to move to Alaska one fine morning, nor was this truth revealed to us in a dream. It came in the form of a man named David(not his real name).

************2001 had just showed up around the corner but the New Year cheer didn’t last long, for the things were hardly bouncy in the Silicon Valley. Winter had not officially exited California and the ominous chill of the impending dot com bust was creeping up the Valley. Six digit salaries were routinely making a habit of disappearing to naught overnight. Aging flower children and young nerds in condo communities conspired together and devised algorithms to move to Utah or Idaho.

My husband detected the first signs of the dot-com downfall when the CEO of his start-up showed up one fine morning with his hair in a neutral shade of brown instead of the electric blue which he had been sporting since he set up the company last spring. Then the pinball machine, the pool table and the truffle dispenser disappeared from their leisure lounge. A week later the leisure lounge itself disappeared, making way for a real estate office.

All could have gone well and we’d still be sipping orange juice in Orange county or Bay Area had not one of my husband’s best buddies, David, resurfaced in our lives one day on a friendly pit stop during a business trip. David lived in Seattle now and before that he had worked with my husband for two years in San Francisco. They were both independent contractors, with a lot of similar woes to share.

It was David who brought us the good news that Alaska was booming, the economy was roaring and there were jobs for everyone, even for non-citizens like us. David had family in Alaska, he had gone to school there and he told us that he, himself was planning to move back to Alaska once his present contract was over. He had contacts who could fix up some kind of contract job for my husband, though nothing was concrete at this point. For a moment you could almost feel the buzz of excitement as if it was the Klondike Gold Rush all over again.

One look at my husband’s face and I realized that the Church of Great Alaska of Latter Day Immigrants just gained itself one more convert. Later that night he broached the subject, to get my approval,

“Well, Alaska seems like a wonderful place, what do you think?”

“I remember reading a travelogue by this woman, she was an Indian or a Srilankan I think, she had incessant nose bleeds all the time while she was traveling in Alaska or maybe it was Iceland,” I replied, that was exactly the first thing that had popped in to my mind when David had mentioned Alaska earlier that evening.

“You heard what David said, his sister’s family and all her in laws live there, if they had any serious ailments like nose bleed, don’t you think he’d have mentioned?”

“Come on, David is different, so is his family. You know how it is with us, we are tropical people, there is not an ounce of eskimo blood in us. Alaska is Arctic tundra, how will we survive there? Moreover David has his family there, I bet there is not a single Indian of the brown kind in Alaska,” I couldn’t believe that my hubby dearest was really contemplating of job hunting in Alaska.

“What are you going to be this time, a whale hunter? A taxidermist?” I knew I came off sounding too harsh, but how could I allow him to swap our sunny Californian life for a slice of frozen eskimo pie, however sweet it might be, the competition was California, the number one city-state in the whole wide world.

My husband’s contract with his present company was getting over in a month and he had just secured another year long gig in Orange County. This was a time when jobs were getting scarcer by the minute and under the circumstances I couldn’t see the allure of Alaska. There sure was no solid job offer, just hints that there might be one. We didn’t know anyone there and for all practical purposes we were foreigners (or ‘cheechakos’ in Alaskan speak, as I would later come to know.) The extreme cold was another thing I really feared. I liked the snow, but I had read enough to know that winter in Alaska meant a meager four hours of sunlight.

I was processing all these thoughts in my head, when my husband played the trump card which kind of sealed the deal for us, “Well, you are the one who always insist on change, who exhort me to take chances, I feel this is it,” he paused to make the desired effect, making sure he had my attention, he carried on, “if we let go this time we might never be bold or free enough to do it, right now is the perfect time to take a chance, we don’t have any kids, you don’t have a job so you don’t have to worry about losing it, we are still young, this is the time for trying out new things. You had been complaining that Bay Area life was too monotonous – the same people at the same parties, about concrete and pavement taking over the landscape and all your poetic nonsense about living as one with nature, where’s your wild spirit when I propose a change?”

Oh yeah, this was his favorite tactic, he trapped me with my own words. But this time I had to give it to him. All the while I had been the one preaching change, but when a chance showed up at our door, I was apprehensive.

That night went down as one of the bleakest days in the history of wifekind, the day a woman agreed with her husband and we decided to move to Alaska. Thus we began the shock and awe treatment of our friends in party after party by disclosing our noble intention to move to the frozen frontier land of Alaska.

One month later we were on our way, North to the Future (the state motto of Alaska), after disposing off the last remnants of our Californian life in the trusted hands of Salvation army. Except for four suitcases filled with our clothes and other essential stuff we were completely free of any worldly possession. It was indeed a new beginning.

************And what a life it has been ever since. For all I know, Alaska could very well be another planet. Sometimes I park my car outside the Walmart in downtown Anchorage and meditate on the store sign just to make sure I am in the US of A. My husband landed a job a week after we reached Alaska, with one of the contacts David had hooked him up with. Contrary to the popular notion in the lower 48, we have come across a lot of Alaskans who can code and program in addition to being voracious readers and some of them are published writers as well!

The lack of an Indian community has opened doors to meeting people from various cultures – Americans ranging from re-invented hippies to devout Mormons, grand children of the original Russian fur traders, Australian bush pilots summering in Alaska, Icelanders who holiday here for a change, Pakistanis with whom we can ruminate about our common roots and finally Indians of the red kind.

For the first time since teenage, I learned a new skill/sport. I learned to ski and have been steadily conquering steeper slopes ever since. Carrying his adventurous spirit further, hubby dearest carves down double black diamond slopes like he’s a Nordic dude with a brown skin affliction.

For me, nothing compares to the beauty of the Alaskan landscape. It is like watching a movie at an IMAX movie theater after having watched 35mm movies all your life. Presented in the grandest of grand scales, from the majestic mountains rising right off the coast to the white vastness of the winter tundra, the landscape of Alaska makes living here a unique experience. How many of you can afford the pleasure of a Northern Lights show beyond your balcony window on a clear winter night? I can. It was something I had thought I’d never see in this life, but then I didn’t know I’d marry a risk taker.

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