Flight to College: Dropping Romay off for her first year at UAF

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“You going to make it out of here in this?” Myra asked referencing what was becoming a decent rain with gray skies all around. 

            “Ruby is showing no clouds and it is supposed to be good all the way to Fairbanks from there,” I answered.  “We should come clear of this just outside of Galena.”

            I sipped on my one cup of coffee for the morning.  The best way to assure I would need to use a bathroom mid-flight was to put me on a plane without plumbing.  Our little Tripacer definitely was not equipped.

            Romay had packed the night before, and as we shuttled her stuff from her room to the back of Myra’s Scout, it appeared that she had included all of her worldly possessions save her shot gun.  They would, after all, not allow her to have that in the dorms.

            The next day was scheduled to be her freshman orientation at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and much like my parents did when I went to Hope, I was going to go with her to assure she was set up.  Unlike when I went to school, we didn’t have the luxury of packing two cars with the stuff she would survive on for the year. 

Mom and daughter under the wing and out of the weather before Romay and I left for Fairbanks.

            I credit both playing Tetris as a kid as well as learning from a dad who packed and unpacked UPS trucks for a living with my ability to cram as much cargo into as little of a space as possible.  When Romay and I squeezed into the plane and out of the rain, all we had was a small spot that looked like it had been molded to accept our bodies, my guitar from college gently squeezed between the top of the pile and the headliner.

Just before getting underway... how do normal families do this again?

            Galena has a long runway, but even loaded to the gills, we easily got off the ground and climbed, the ground dropping away below as we pointed east toward Fairbanks.  The Yukon River was a brown ribbon marking the basic path we would take.  Five minutes, and the rain was no longer coating the windshield, and a warm sun began drying the fuselage.

            “You want to take the controls?” I asked over the intercom?

            “No, I’m good,” Romay answered, “I just want to enjoy the ride.”

            Five more minutes, and she was snuggled against my shoulder and breathing the deep contented breaths of a hard sleep.

            As a freshman in high school, Romay had often visited with the guidance counselor just as a place to hang out.  Romay has always liked to joke, and the counselor liked to laugh.  On one such visit, a boarding school student unfamiliar with Romay walked in on the conversation.

            “This is Romay,” the counselor had introduced the two girls, “she is Mr. Harris’ daughter.”

            “Oh wow,” the girl had said, “you sure look like your dad.”

            “Yeah, pretty strong genetics,” Romay had answered straight-faced, “I get that a lot.”

            The counselor just laughed knowingly without correcting the newcomer.  She knew that Myra and I had adopted Romay when she was eight.  She also agreed how uncanny it was how like me Romay was in looks and demeanor. 

            “You’re the only Eskimo I know with a northern Michigan accent,” I had laughed when Romay recounted the story to me.

            The village of Ruby, once a bustling town on the short list to become Alaska’s capitol, sat quietly below and to the south of our path.  Romay shifted, pulled out her phone, snapped a picture, and then repositioned her head against the passenger window.  I could not even tell if she woke in the midst of the process.

            Our first meeting replayed in my mind.  A five-year-old Romay bounced around in the waves at the beach just north of Unalakleet in Bering Sea water that had been ice just three weeks before.  Short pigtails stuck out from either side of her head as she giggled and danced to a music only she could hear.  The sun was warm, but the cold of the water was evident in the light breeze.  She played until her lips turned purple and voiced her protest as we adults insisted that she come out and warm herself by the fire.

            At that point, I had no idea that I would become her dad in three years.  I was still trying to figure out how to convince the woman who would become her mom that I was worthwhile to keep around.  But there was something magical about the little girl.

            A little turbulence rocked the wings of the plane and Romay awoke, “Was I asleep?” she asked groggily. 

            “Yeah, you were twitching,” I responded.

            “Late night.  I hung out with Sweetsy, and then didn’t start packing until after midnight,” she confessed.

            Awake now, but just dazedly looking out the front of the plane at the terrain passing below, it was like she was still asleep.  I thought back to another early meeting.

            “Jason!” Romay squealed as she headed full speed down the road, rubber boots splashing through the puddles as I knelt down to meet her.

            I had come to Unalakleet for teacher meetings and was walking down the road with some other educators on our way to the store.  I opened my arms for a hug and was nearly knocked over backward, Romay never slowing down before throwing her arms around my neck.

            Romay was six and a force of nature.

            “When did you get here?” she spoke with a light in her eyes.

            “Just this morning,” I smiled back.  “I’ll be here for a couple of days,” and just as quickly as she had tackled me, she sprinted back through the mud and water to where she had left her friends playing.

            “Dad,” Romay brought me back to the present, “where are we?”

            “Uh, just south of Tanana,” I looked out my window to see if I could spot the village, “little over an hour left.  How you doing?”          

            “Fine.  You would never think we started in rain, would you?” she asked.

            The day had become beautiful.  One of those late summer interior days with crisp yellow light.  The air, for the most part, was smooth, and only a few wispy clouds could be seen in the distance.  A line of hills that marked we were getting close to Fairbanks came into view.

            I thought back to when she first called me dad.

            “So, can I call you Dad?” she asked as she plopped down next to me on the couch of our apartment in Koyuk.

            She and her brother had been living with us for a couple of months into what was only supposed to be a year to help out her mom at that point.  A small voice at the back of my head warned me about getting too close to a kid I would be sending home at the end of the year.

            I ignored the voice, “I’ll never make you call me dad, but if you want to, it would make me proud.”

            It was as though a switch was flipped.  One moment I was just some adult in her life and she was just some kid I was taking care of, and then the next moment she was my flesh and blood as though she had always been mine.  She was just always with me after that.  Hunting, fishing, out for a ride, Romay was with me.

            “We must be close,” she commented as a car drove below us on the road between Fairbanks and Nenana.

            I dialed in the weather report, got the information I needed, contacted approach, spoke with the tower, and got cleared to land straight in at Chena Marina.  It was not my first landing on the little strip bordered on one side by tall spruce and on the other side by a float pond.  It had looked ribbon thin the first time I had landed on it, and that was how it appeared to Romay as we closed in on the ground for her first landing there.  The mains touched, the nose wheel came down and we slowed in order to be able to turn around and back taxi.

            “Glad it was you flying,” she commented over what had been an eerily quiet intercom coming in.  Evidently, she had been concentrating just as hard as I had on putting the plane down smoothly.

            Our friend and mechanic, Steve, met us at the strip and shuttled us to the rental car place, we got a car, drove back to Chena Marina, unloaded the plane into the rental car, and at that point the trip to college became just like every other kid heading off to school that fall loaded into the family sedan.  On campus, Romay’s new roommate helped us haul boxes to the closet the school called a dorm room.

            We made store runs, we picked up a computer, got her books from the book store, got her settled in, and it came time for me to do the final drop off before heading back to Galena.

            I got out of the car and smiled, wrapped my little girl in a tight hug and reminded her, “your mom and I love you very much.”

            “I know, Dad.”

            “Be good, be safe, have fun,” I fell into the stereotypical father departure speech.

            “I will, Dad.”

            “Okay then.”

            “Thanks for everything, I love you,” and she turned and walked up the stairs away from the parking lot and toward her dorm building.

            I sat in the car and watched her until she crested the hill and out of my sight.  Then I just sat in the car.  Childhood passes so quickly for parents.  A parent who starts with a kid who is eight sees that childhood slip by that much faster.  My little girl.  I waited for my vision to clear enough to drive, slipped the car into gear and became just another dad dropping off his daughter for her first year of college.

Romay saying goodbye to her little sister before getting in the plane headed to college.

Village Sisters: When blood does not really matter.

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My wife and her best friend from school days sat giggling like two junior high girls as I walked by their spot in the stands at the volleyball game.  Rolling my eyes and shaking my head only solicited more raucous laughter.

            Later that night, I mustered the courage to ask what the joke was, “So, what were you girls laughing about tonight?”

            “Oh nothing,” and Myra began giggling to herself again.  “Oh, just something from when we were kids.”

            “You girls make me nervous,” I confessed.

            I have told Tera the same thing.

“Good,” she laughed wide-eyed and good-naturedly.

According to Tera, she knew that Myra and her would be fast friends the instant she saw Myra enter Mr. Kimber’s second grade class in her first day of school dress, placing a hand on each side of the doorframe and scoping out her new environment.  Myra was the new kid in town, but she lacked no confidence.  Just the kind of kid a girl my mother-in-law nick-named the Tera-izer would pick for a partner in crime.

Myra and Tera grew up like sisters in a town that kids could safely walk the circumference of in around a half-hour.  Thirty-seven years later, and thankfully little has changed about that.  Kids are still kids, and though there are now cell phones, village life has been slower to change than that found on the road.

The Original Unalakleet Three Amigos: Laureli Ivanoff, Tera Cunningham, and Myra (Slwooko) Harris

           Tera’s house might as well have been Myra’s when she was a kid.  The girls would walk into the kitchens at either house and help themselves to what they found in the fridge.  Tera’s dad was “Uncle Dave,” Myra’s mom was “Gram”, and both sets of parents kept equal tabs on the kids as though they had been family since birth.

“I started wearing contacts,” a sixth-grade Myra pointed out as Tera sat thinking.

“I bet I could put on my moms,” Tera said as she came to what appeared the obvious conclusion.

“Yeah, that would be cool,” Myra encouraged.  “Let’s go try it.”

And the girls made their way into Tera’s parents’ bathroom.

Tera’s mom, Annabelle, wore the hard pebble-like contacts that all mothers wore in the 1980s, and Tera now stood poised to place it into her eye which she had opened the size of a saucer.

“You just put it in,” the experienced Myra directed.

Tera mustered all the confidence her twelve-year-old frame contained and pressed the contact lens to her eye.

“Owwwww,” she laughed nervously.  “Owwww,” she continued (Tera is the only Inupiaq I know who says ow with a Minnesotan accent).

            “Uh oh,” Myra added.

            “Get it out, how do I get it out?” Tera continued to laugh in pain.

            Between the two of them they finally figured it out and I am unsure if Annabelle ever discovered their experiment.

            Now with kids of our own, we watch ourselves in the little bodies running around with seemingly endless amounts of energy.

            “Dad, can we go ask Harper if she wants to come over?” Ellen asked.

            “I can just text her dad,” I answered.

            “We could ski,” she said as she scrambled for snow pants, hat, mitts, coat, ski boots and skis for the 50-yard expedition to her friend’s house.

            The two girls are three and have known each other ever since they were… two.  Somewhere in there they became sisters.  Maybe it is a village thing, maybe it is a girl thing, but blood does not evidently matter.

            Ellen stood at the base of the stairs with her skis still on, “Go knock on the door, Dad,” she directed.

            I knocked with no answer.  There was no car parked out front after all.

            “Just go in!” Ellen yelled.

            “I’m not just going to walk into somebody else’s house, Ellen,” I answered trying to impart some kind of knowledge on social interaction to my little girl.

            “Why not?  It’s just Harper’s house,” she pointed out, and since they are sisters in a way that I can’t understand, it all makes sense to her.

            “They aren’t home, Bub.”

            “Well, let’s go check on Charleigh,” and I helped her ski back down the little hill.

            Thirty years back in time, and a young Myra and young Tera stood outside West Coast Aviation looking at a large ice burg washed up on the beach during break up.

            “Let’s go climb it,” one of the girls voiced and they found themselves six feet above the beach on an ice shelf.

            “Okay, I’ll count three, and then we’ll both jump,” Tera said setting the plan.

            Tera counted three, Myra jumped with both feet high up in the air, and came crashing down on the shelf at the same time Tera took two steps back. 

            Myra lay on the beach in a pile of ice with Tera laughing hysterically above her, hands on her knees, tears in her eyes.

            A present-day Ellen removed her skis, walked up the steps of Charleigh’s house and opened the arctic entry door.

            “Bub, it doesn’t look like anyone is home,” I said again noticing no car in the drive.

            “Come on Dad,” Ellen motioned for me to follow.  Without knocking, she opened the inside door, took one step onto the laminate floor and fell into a heap, another victim of slippery cross-country ski boots on a slick interior floor.

            “I’m okay,” she quickly said unsolicited, “but looks like you were right, Charleigh isn’t home.”

            Charleigh makes up the third member of the amigos.  As a teacher once pointed out, “I don’t really worry about Charleigh, when Ellen and Harper are getting into trouble, she just kind of stands back and watches.”

            For some reason that didn’t really bring any comfort.

            A car drove up as we walked down the steps of the house.  Charleigh got out and gave her standard greeting, “Aghghgh.”

            “Oh, hi Charleigh,” Ellen answers.  “Want to come over to visit?”

            Charleigh gave some answer that Ellen understood, she turned to her Mom who then consented, and I figured what was communicated was affirmative.

            “Come on Chuck,” I said, “Let’s go.  See you later Brittany,” and we bid adieu to Charleigh’s mom.

            Harper’s house is on the way home from Charleigh’s and by this time Harper had returned.

            “Can I go visit Ellen?” Harper asked, and at that point I was being followed by three girls none of whom were above my waistline in height, but all who have confidence levels around that of professional athletes.

            Once inside the house, it looked like all three had been raptured by the immediate piles of snow pants, boots, socks, hats, mitts, coats, and neck warmers that miraculously appeared in little piles throughout the living room.  Even the girls had disappeared, but the giggles coming from upstairs reassured me that they were still in the house as I tried to bring order to the chaos. 

            A half hour into the visit and nearly every toy had been taken out, played with, and then discarded for the next, at which point the plane I had been waiting for flew over our apartment signaling a need to pack the three girls up into the car to go and pick up the students who would be staying the night at the school.

            In 1990s Unalakleet, Tera and Myra climbed up onto the bench seat of Uncle Dave’s 80s era F-150.

            “You know how to drive a stick?” Tera asked Myra before sliding over to make room.

            “Yeah, no problem,” Myra answered having learned that year in a family friend’s little Escort.

            As Myra depressed the gas pedal and released the clutch both the difference in horsepower as well as the size of the clutch became apparent.  The engine surged with life as the clutch came shooting up at her foot, the truck bunny hopping its way out of the drive.  The journey through town became one marked by a series of engine revs, shooting gravel, a hopping truck, and two teen-age girls giggling uncontrollably.

            As they exited after the drive, both girls continued laughing while holding the backs of their necks.

            “We’re going to feel this when we’re older,” they laughed.

            The three girls I was responsible for somehow all ended up with the proper winter gear on and out the door.  Even I managed to somehow get a coat, hat, gloves and boots on before prodding them down the porch steps.  All the girls piled into the back seat of the car, lifted one at a time into their spots just in time for Charleigh’s parents to pull up to get her for dinner.

            Somehow the three of us made it out to the airport just before the plane pulled up, the girls not allowing me to get one word in as they talked in their only volume in the backseat.  Harper’s dad was at the airport where he helped me get the visiting kids from the plane to the school where they would be sleeping and he assured they were fed.  Somewhere in there, it was decided that Harper would come home with us to continue playing.

            “I’m hungry, Dad,” Ellen exclaimed as I pulled fish from the oven while the girls played in the living room.

            “Harper, would you like me to check if you can eat over?” I asked.

            “My mom and dad are making dinner for me at home,” she said as I got a plate ready for Ellen with silver salmon and braised cabbage.  “But maybe you could text my dad,” Harper continued as the smell reached her nose.

            Permission granted, the girls sat side by side at the kitchen table inhaling food with the only words being requests for more.  Evidently salmon baked with salsa and braised cabbage cooked with bacon are the perfect foods for three-year-old girls as I had to fend them off the last little piece of fish that I was saving for Myra who was at basketball practice.

Where do they put it all?

            “Can I have more fish, please,” Ellen asked eying the one small section left in the baking dish.

            “We need to save some for Mom.”

            “Why?” she asked.

            Back at play, the two girls pulled out a Duplo Lego box filled with dress up clothes, found two sets of wings (one set of bee, one set of ladybug), and proceeded to chase each other around in tight circles the evidently high sugar content of wild salmon and braised cabbage kicking in.

            Myra came home, sat down with her plate to bring me up to speed on basketball practice and continually shooed a hovering Ellen away from the fish she was eating.  Brendan came over to retrieve Harper and act as reinforcements with adults finally outnumbering kids in the sense of numbers, but far outmatched in the sense of energy.

            Brendan is the father of three young kids with Harper being the middle child.  The craziness occurring in our living room was soothing to him, and so he sat down in a recliner for a visit.

            Somewhere along the line the wick burnt short and Harper began to fall apart.

            “Well, Harper, it is about bed time.  Why don’t we say good night and head for home?” Brendan prompted.

            “I could just sleep here Dad,” was Harpers epiphany.

            “I don’t think that is a good idea,” was her Dad’s quick reply.

            “Yeah it is,” came out just as quickly.

            “Harper, we would happily have you sleep over another night, but this is a school night,” I came to Brendan’s aid as Harper melted into a puddle on the living room carpet.

            “Yeah,” Ellen ever the peacemaker added, “you can stay over another night, Harper.”

            The next day at work I pointed out my observation to a coworker who has known Myra and Tera forever, “I think Harper and Ellen have the potential of becoming another Tera and Myra.”

            “Uh oh,” came his very deep voice.  “Which one is which?”

            “Does it matter?” I replied.

            “Get ready,” he laughed.

            Well, if nothing else, the ride should be fun.

Two girls ready for their next adventure (photo credit: Brendan Ellis)