I had an urge, for a long time--years--to join the Indian Health Service and take a job somewhere in Indian country.  I wanted to take my nursing skills to a place where I could work and live with a Native population.  I started the application process several times, but never completed it; a couple of things held me back.  One was the history of horrible ethical violations committed by the IHS (such as sterilization of Native women without their consent).  Another was the sneaky suspicion that it would be a bureaucratic nightmare of a government job, and the application process seemed to reinforce that suspicion.
Alaska was on the top of my list of places I was dreaming about...and I read about the various remote Alaskan communities with IHS nursing job openings.  Barrow was one of the most remote, and I daydreamed about what it would be like to spend some time there.

And here I am.  The Alaskan Native Health Initiative returned management of healthcare to the people, and I began to think more seriously about working here.  Then a co-worker took a travel nurse position in Barrow, and that rekindled my interest.  I kept track of job openings for nurses at the hospital in Barrow, and joined a travel nurse company. I was blessed with an enthusiastic and hard-working recruiter named Leslie, and in a whirlwind of paperwork and emails, fingerprinting, drug testing, and travel arrangements, found myself flying west and north for a 13 week travel nurse position in Barrow.

It's hard to know what to pack when you travel to Barrow. It's like trying to decide what to pack to take to the moon.  This is a fly-in only town.  In other words--there are no roads in or out of Barrow.  (Actually, the only roads in Barrow are dirt roads and they are under snow and ice much of the time.)  I wasn't sure what kind of groceries would be available. I wasn't worried about clothing; I know how to pack for cold weather and I know how to pack to be ready for almost any social occasion, but I wasn't sure how to pack for 3 months of working and living and still fit it into 1 big suitcase and 2 small wheeled ones. I packed one big box and mailed it--it had things like raw nuts, ground pepper, tea bags, shampoo and condition, toilet paper, and ground turmeric.

Did I mention that I'm not fond of flying?  It is a long way from my hometown to Barrow. I hate goodbyes, and I've said too many of them in my lifetime. The crazy drama and stress of getting all my documents, licenses, fingerprinting, and applications together kept me so busy and preoccupied that I didn't really think about the leaving part until I found myself at the airport, saying goodbye to my husband and daughter.

Life is short and it's fragile.  None of us ever knows if today is the day we will say goodbye to a loved one in the morning--and never see them again. But when you are preparing to fly 3,000 miles away, it is terrifying.  So many things could happen and it would be too far to come back in time.

I was also leaving at a time when things were...tenuous...in my marriage.  I was leaving in part because things were tenuous in my marriage.  Somehow, I hoped that distance and time apart would help me see things more clearly; in my mind I imagined a kind of clarifying process in the remote Arctic reaches.  A contemplative separating of wheat from chaff...
Instead, I stepped into an utterly alien world.