Peace, Walk, Now: Chapter 5, Something Else

July 2017— 5th Annual Beer & Bacon Festival, Anchorage, Alaska

A month and a half before I didn’t join a disbanded cult in Española, New Mexico, I met Alice.

Read about my time in Española here:

Peace, Walk, Now: Chapter 2 & Peace, Walk, Now: Chapter 3

“I like your hat,” she said, introducing herself gleefully, beer in hand.

I spotted her long purple hair as soon as I got to the festival. Alice seemed to know everyone. She certainly stopped to talk with everyone—walking from one bacon station to the next, pausing to giggle with friends, lingering to chat with people she seemed to be meeting for the first time.

Now she was chatting with me.

“Thank you,” I said shyly. Alice was referring to the Italian-made, carnation pink hat I had yanked out of storage earlier that day, after making a last minute decision to go to this event and not sit by myself in the extended stay hotel room I rented after my ex filed for divorce.

“I wore it to the Kentucky Derby,” I continued. “My ex-boyfriend bought it for me in Miami at the Bal Harbor shops.” (It cost $800; $900 if you include tax. Tacky. I know.)

“You’re a porcupine,” she laughed, sipping on her beer. “Like me.”

“Ouch?” I mocked playfully. “Takes one to know one, I guess.”

Alice was, in fact, the friendliest person I had met in Anchorage.

Before she came up to me at the 5th Annual Beer & Bacon Festival, I was feeling somewhat—if not entirely—out of place. (Must have been the whole porcupine vibe I didn’t know I was giving off.)

At least porcupines are welcome in Alaska.

“I like your shirt,” I said. She was wearing a turquoise tee-shirt with a printed image on the back and a smaller matching image on the front. “Turquoise is my favorite color.”

“Mine too,” she said. “I got it from my Native Corporation. See…” She turned around to show me the large font Bristol Bay Native Corporation logo on the back of the tee-shirt. “But my favorite tee-shirts are the ones I make with my kids every year for our annual fishing trips to Ekuk. That’s where I’m from.”

“Ekuk?” I asked, trying to pronounce it the way she had. “Where’s that?”

“You have to fly into Dillingham to get there,” she said. “Then drive to Ekuk. It’s is a little village along Bristol Bay, Alaska. I grew up there. Us kids had to ride snowmachines in the winter to get to school.”

“Yup, that’s Alaska for you. Nowhere to put the snow,” I laughed awkwardly, realizing I barely knew anything about Alaska outside my former commute to and from Eagle River. I also noticed that I didn’t have a beer in my hand and was a lot closer to sober than many of the other bacon-eating event goers.

“My kids didn’t have to do that,” Alice said, graciously breaking my weird pause. “They grew up in Anchorage,” she continued. Eagerly and earnestly she began sharing her whole life story with me.