the journey of riverchickadee: arrival
by robin brown

February 2, 2004, Rexford, Montana. Days 6-10 of my Journey from Alaska to Asheville, NC

After arriving safely in northwestern Montana where my family lives, I spent a few days visiting family and regrouping. The oldest member of my family, Grandma Brown, had just been moved to a nursing facility. She has made a journey of her own and has had to leave most of her belongings behind to live at Brendan House. I look around to see what she has chosen to bring with her to her tiny room. She is surrounded by family photographs. Her hands shake and she can no longer write in the birthday cards that she has given me every year of my life. My aunt helps her with that. Even so, she still sews and spends her whole year making Christmas presents for her Great Grand Children. Only recently was she convinced that the Grandkids were old enough now and will understand if their Christmas gifts are not handmade.

Grandma is so deep inside of me. I know she is a part of me that will live beyond her years on earth. I have known her love each and every day no matter where I was or how long since I had seen her. Even as a teenager, when I thought about the kind of person I wanted to be, I hoped that some day I could be a Grandma like my Grandma Brown. Everyone who came to her house was welcomed, offered a meal and a place to stay the night. The house would be full of aunts and uncles, grandkids and cousins, but there was always somehow room for more. Tables would be shoved together and every chair and stool pulled up for a family dinner that included anyone who happened by.

Grandma and Grandpa lived for years on a homestead with no running water and an outhouse. Even after they moved to town and Grandpa built a real bathroom and the outhouse became a tool shed, they still hauled their drinking water. They didn’t have a lot, but they were happy and so were we. When Grandma hugged you, you felt like you were her only one. It was secure and unshakeable because we knew she loved every one of us the same – with all her heart.

She cried and hugged me. I sat and held her quaking hands and talked. Only a year and a half ago she had flown to Alaska to visit my cousins and me. She rode in the river boat out to our cabin, went for a 4-wheeler ride and even joined me in the sauna where I had the privilege of soaping and scrubbing her back! I left Montana not knowing if I’d get to see Grandma again.

February 5th, 2004. We got an early start as we always do when traveling with dad. Now it was his turn to pull my trailer. It was a good thing because even his big Dodge truck had to work to pull it through the Rocky Mountain passes on our way south to New Mexico. I continued to drive my little Ranger with the canoes & bikes on top and my pup Kootenai in the cab with me. It took us 2 days of driving to get to my brother’s house near Moriarty. On the way we went through Moab where the beauty of the red rock and cactus made me realize the change in latitude from where I had begun my journey. Even more, was the wonder at our creator’s handi-work. It seems that creative beauty has so many forms and all that the divine hand has touched is wondrous whether it be white frozen mountain peaks or red baked pillars of stone. Mom and Dad stayed at Moriarty and I continued on with only my truck pulling the trailer, my brother riding along and helping me drive. It took us three more days to cross the southern states and arrive in Western North Carolina. Though the landscape went from desert to vegetation again, it didn’t seem as drastic. It was still February and winter. I was amazed to find that there were still trees and shrubs east of the Mississippi River! I had never been this far east and growing up in the west, was under the impression that everything east of the Mississippi was paved. That’s why the mountains of North Carolina had been so attractive to me. I knew they’d never be able to pave the mountains, at least not completely.

I have written of the harshness of the north, and the beauty. I have written of my grief and the process of leaving things behind. I think back now over the last 10 of my 18 years in Alaska; especially those years because they were the most challenging. It seemed I was struggling with every aspect of my life. I feel as if I had drifted away from myself. I gave myself away, for a time.

Can a person change nearly every exterior thing about their life and remain the same person? No and yes. Though I have traveled so far to begin anew, I realize now that I have only truly changed perspective and the way I see myself. I am still the same person, the same soul. The things that have changed are the things that I had thought defined who I was. The real freedom is that I remain. I remain… defined by what’s inside me, not by my vocation or geography or culture or even by my life partner. I am free to discover who I am and who I am to be and oddly enough, I feel like I’m coming home to myself. The closer I get to North Carolina, the closer I seemed to be to the beginning of my dreams. My dreams? Yes, to become a massage therapist, to help people, to be in love again with a lifelong partner, to be a grandma like my own Grandma, to have a home where anyone is welcomed and all are loved. Those are my dreams and they are beginning again in North Carolina.

Robin Brown lived for 18 years in Alaska. In January she left job, ex-husband, friends and life as she knew it to move to North Carolina. She and Kootenai, her one year-old Australian Shepherd, are adjusting very well to life in the South. Robin has fallen in love and is engaged to be married two days after her graduation at the end of August. She and future husband, Tim Gibson will travel and work together throughout the southern states.