Life on the Outskirts

“The Hunt” Act I:

“It’s not at the restaurant,” my husband Mark says, starting to panic. He had used my cell to inquire about his own, which he thought he must have left at the restaurant where we had dinner an hour earlier.

“And you checked the couch?” I ask, because 9 times out of 10 it’s in the couch cushions.

“Yes! I looked everywhere!”

It was clear he had at least looked in every drawer of our house, as they were all still open.

Years ago I came up with a rule that I felt would keep our marriage intact. I told Mark I’d help him look for either his keys, wallet, or phone one thousand times throughout our lives together, and then no more. I thought the number was generous but he blew through it within the first month after the wedding.

“You have only 10 left,” I said to him back in 2002, “Are you sure you don’t want to spread them out over the next decade or so?”

“Can you help?!” Mark asks me now, “my patients could be trying to call me!”

This is where he always gets me. I grab my phone back from him.

“Did you check Find My Friends?” I ask.

Mark shakes his head “no.”

I open the app and there is Mark’s smiling face marking the location of his phone, and it is somewhere totally unexpected.

“Your phone is on the other side of Sterling Highway,” I say.

The other side of the highway from our neighborhood is mostly woods. There are some houses back there. You can’t see them from the main road, you just know they are there because you see the entrance to their driveways, marked by three or more “No trespassing” signs.

On the map we are given an exact address. Mark and I stare at it, confused.

“How could my phone be there?” He asks.

“I don’t know, did you visit your mistress today?” I ask.

“I don’t think so. Could someone have swiped my phone when we were at the restaurant?”

We had been seated at a high top table near the bathrooms, but no…this seems unlikely. Still, it was right there on my phone, Mark’s face on the map with an address.

“Let’s go,” Mark says grabbing the car keys.

“We’re going to just show up and accuse them of having your phone?”

“My patients could be trying to reach me!”

At this point I ask myself 2 questions.

One: Should I change out of my pajamas? My pajamas, by the way, happen to be hospital scrubs. I figure for Mark, after a long day working in scrubs and surrounded by people in scrubs there is no better sight for sore eyes than coming home to a wife who is also wearing scrubs.

I used to go out in public in these scrubs every once in awhile, like on a late night run to the grocery store. I figured people would just assume I had just gotten off my shift. Not only lazy but shameless of me, I know.

But I have stopped doing that. In these covid days, the sight of hospital scrubs in the grocery aisle have shoppers wheeling their carts around and scurrying away in the opposite direction or throwing themselves up against a wall of cereal to get away from me. Could be my imagination, but I don’t think so.

On this outing, however, I decide to stay in the scrubs. I figure it’ll lend legitimacy to our urgent mission to retrieve the phone.

Question Two: “Should we bring the gun?” I ask Mark.

These are words I never thought would come out of my mouth. Mark laughs at this, and I guess I am half joking. Which means I’m half not.

People who live in town, and people who live out of town:

“It’s the Wild West out there,” my in town friend says of those who live in the more remote areas of Alaska. One can and should assume every household has guns, and the further out you go, the looser the interpretation of law becomes.

My friend and I are taking our usual morning walk around her in-town neighborhood which I refer to as the trick or treat neighborhood. There are street lights, the houses are close together. There are a lot of families with young kids. And, it seems everyone knows everyone.

“Good morning Staci,” my friend waves at a woman across the street who is walking with a headlight. A man in a truck drives past and my friend waves at him too.

“That’s Mr. Sweeney,” she says.

“From the store?” I ask.

She nods. I’m referring to a hunting and fishing store nearby. It’s called Sweeneys.

There isn’t a person we pass that she doesn’t know. She says she feels safe in a neighborhood where everyone looks out for each other, noting if anything is amiss.

But, many people move to this state because they don’t want neighbors popping in, or keeping an eye on their home. They don’t want neighbors to even be able to see their home. 95% of the state is wilderness, so creating your own private world in the woods is easy to do.

But, we are now about to infiltrate someone’s private world in the hunt for Mark’s ever elusive phone.

“The Hunt” Act II:

“This is it, turn left,” I say looking at the map. And Mark does. We ignore the “No Trespassing” signs and head down a long gravel driveway, eventually we see house lights through the trees.

By the time we reach the house, the couple who lives there is already outside to intercept us.

I am a little relieved to see the house is a nice one, well cared for. The couple looks to be in their early 50s. You never know what your going to get when you head down a blind driveway, I was worried we’d end up in front of some meth lab structure because unfortunately, there are those in Alaska. It’s a problem. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/inside-alaska-meth-opioid-epidemic-701855/

As we step out of the truck, the husband calls out, “Can we help you?”

Mark and I stay next to our truck as Mark starts apologizing while simultaneously asking about his phone and how maybe someone in their house accidentally grabbed it from a restaurant, because our app says it is there.

I smile a lot and make interjections about how he’s a doctor and his patients need to be able to call him.

The two of them look at my scrub pants. I knew I made the right call wearing them.

“Well, my parents did go out to dinner, but they wouldn’t take your phone,” the wife says.

“Oh it’s an old phone nobody would take it on purpose but maybe we could ask..?” Mark suggests.

“They don’t have your phone,” she states, firmly.

There is a long tense moment of silence as we stare at each other. I look at Mark.

“Okay, well, thanks, sorry again for showing up like this,” Mark says, to my relief, “my wife actually joked before coming over that we should bring our gun for safety.” Mark laughs as if the idea of that is preposterous, but the husband and wife both nod. Makes sense to them.

“Nah, you’re good here,” the man says, relaxing, “but I wouldn’t go to our neighbors over here, or the ones behind us.”

He points in the two directions.

“Or the two properties over there,” the woman says pointing in the only directions that hadn’t been covered yet.

“And definitely don’t go to that big farm across Sterling,” the man says.

The couple suddenly becomes very animated as they tell us about their youngest son crashing his ATV (all terrain vehicle) on the farm, and the farm owner still won’t let them retrieve their ATV a year later. He said if they tried he would consider it trespassing.

“Can you imagine?” she asks, looking at me, “an 11-year-old boy is injured in a crash and he doesn’t even care. He made my son walk home!”

I shake my head, no, that I can’t imagine. And we all exchange exclamations of disbelief, and comments on how crazy people are. Now that we’ve moved past the question of whether or not there is going to be a shoot out, it’s starting to feel like we are leaving a friends house after a dinner party.

We chat a little longer and then it is friendly waves good-bye before we get back in the truck and drive up the long driveway. The wheels making their way across the gravel is the only sound as Mark stares silently ahead. He looks defeated.

I pull out my phone and look at the app again. Mark’s photo is no longer at the address we had just driven to. I can’t believe where the app is telling us the phone is now.

I Think I’m Turning into an Out of Town Person

I’ve always loved city life. Prior to kids I’d give up square footage for anything located next to the best restaurants. My studio in Beacon Hill, Boston was maybe 300 square feet, I could cook eggs from my bed as I started the shower.

After having kids, we have only lived in suburbia, in trick or treat neighborhoods. But since moving here and living in a house on the outskirts, I am not sure I can be an in-town person ever again. How can one go back from such privacy and 360 views?

https://www.crossnetgame.com

In our plan to eventually return to family and friends in Colorado, we are considering a move to a house in the mountains. Mark has always campaigned for it. It took a year living here for me to realize that I could get behind such a plan. (Unfortunately, I am a little late. Covid and low interest rates has made the real estate market in Colorado’s mountain towns explode.)

I would never live off the grid or some place so remote that there aren’t neighbors within walking distance. I like something in between, like what we have found here. As outsiders coming in, we might have been taken into the community fold in a quicker way if we had chosen to live in town. So, not only are we physically on the outskirts given where we decided to live, but we are on the outskirts socially as well. But then we have met people in Alaska who have felt they were never taken into the fold until at least 20 years of living here. But being surrounded by such beauty is worth it. Our two only and immediate neighbors on either side of us are amazing. And people do pop by on occasion. Most recently one of Mark’s patients came by to drop off a basket of veggies from his garden.

“You’re husband changed my life, I can finally garden again,” the man tells me, referring to his new knee.

“The Hunt” Act III:

“You won’t believe where it says your phone is now,” I tell Mark, as I look at the Find My Friends map.

“Where?” he asks, his hope restored.

“It says it’s at our house.”

“What?! Why did it give us this other address?”

“I don’t know!”

Only, I do know. It’s my frenemy Siri, getting back at me for swearing at her the other day. She could have been more cruel though, I decide. At least she sent us to the only people in that neck of the woods who didn’t come at us with shotguns.

End Scene:

Mark’s phone is found under a cushion on the couch.

Photo Credit for our family shot. We met Todd around midnight one night. We were all in a field outside Fairbanks hunting for the Northern Lights (but that’s another story). He offered to take photos of us the next day. I had no idea how lucky we were to have come across such a pro until I looked up his site. http://www.toddrafalovich.com