Thoughts On Time

The Chilkoot Pass, the main route to Dawson City
and the gold rush, and the trail where Jeremy worked.

Back in the summer of 2009, Jeremy and I spent the summer working in Skagway, Alaska. He
worked for the National Park Service as a back-country ranger and I worked in the park service book store. Skagway is (was) a cruise ship town and the busyness of the store depended on how many ships docked in town that day. On days when there were only one or two ships, the book store was empty for hours at a time. I read almost all of the books in the store over the course of the summer. We only sold books pertaining to the Klondike Gold Rush since it was in the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, so it was a somewhat limited scope of topics. I got to know gold rush history pretty well.

One of my favorite books was I Married the Klondike, by Laura Beatrice Burton. It has been eleven years since I read it so I don't remember it in great detail, but in general it's about a woman who lived in Dawson City, and what life was like there. I remember a section where the author and her family took a many-week boat trip down the Yukon River, just for the fun of it. I remember being surprised by the idea that a regular family could just take off into the wilderness for weeks back then. The contrast between that and today's pace of life was stark, even to me then before I got married and had babies and got a real job. These days we're lucky to get ten paid vacation days a year, and most of those days are hoarded for the hectic holiday season between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Life in the time before COVID-19 was not non-stop, but was certainly barely-stop. No time to luxuriate in a weeks-long trip anywhere.

Now that we've been home for weeks at a time with no end in sight, I get to see what that yawning sense of time is like. It's not that our days are not busy. When a five- and eight-year-old set the pace, you're gonna keep moving. But we're not in the frantic cycle of work, school, home for dinner, sleep, do it all over again until you land panting on the shore of Saturday. Our pace is set by the weather, the sunrise and sunset, the farm animals, our internal compasses, our energy levels, our mental and emotional health needs. We are flexible in a way we've never been before. It is going to be interesting to see what happens when we're able to resume our former schedule. Will we pick up where we left off? Or will our souls rebel, now that they've been able to stretch out and bask in the sun?