Mon Ami

My final Mourning Would mens' breakfast on Mount Sentinel

I have had a lot of close friends in my life. Some live far away, and yet we stay in constant contact, while others are on the periphery, and we connect when we can.

Finding a new set of friends at 34 is a tough business. You spend a lot of time at work and the rest of your time with family. There are few opportunities for guys' nights or getting in some workout time with the guys.

But if there is one thing I take away from Missoula, it's the amazing friendships I've made during my time here. These are not throwaway relationships. These are lifelong friends that I won't get to see every day anymore.

I'd like to highlight a few of these.

The first two gentlemen I was privileged enough to get to know in Missoula are journalists, and therefore they hold a special place in my thoughts. The venerable Tristan Scott, reporter extraordinaire and the writer I'd most like to emulate. And Cory Walsh, whose fine news mind and analysis of life I have come to depend on completely. These two took me for a drink on my very first visit to Missoula, and we've had many a conversation over pints or drams of whiskey since.

Another gentlemen from the newspaper that I'd like to highlight is the one and only Michael Lee Moore. "The Other Micheal Moore," as he has come to be known. This southern transplant to Missoula has all the charm and hospitality of his roots intact, and he's become, aside from being a great personal friend to me, a friend of the entire family. My wife and kids adore him. It's not just his willingness to teach us the proper techniques of rock climbing, it's the way he earnestly engages with people.

A number of my Missoula homies have moved on, but we stay in touch. Graham Murtaugh, Bynum Boley, Adam Richards. You guys are not only the tallest friends I've ever had, you're some of the classiest. I miss you guys.

Wylie Carr, I know you're still here, and though we don't connect nearly as often as we should, the adventures I've had with you all over this crazy place will go down in whatever annals these kinds of things go down in, not to mention my notebooks.

Nicky T, I don't see you as often as I'd like to, but you came to represent the finest example of what I consider a Montanan to be. I'm glad I know you buddy. 

But every man has an inner circle. That group of guys that typify his character and in which he finds that rich combination of edification and criticism he needs to grow.

These are not easily found and rarely in one place. I was lucky to have stumbled into a perfect storm of friendships that were honed quickly in small but intense fires. Things like early morning hikes, backcountry camping, hunting, fishing and those refining conversations that are like reading the most illuminating chapter in an illuminating book.

From the first day Jon Lewis was a kindred spirit and yet the polar opposite of me. Quiet and contemplative where I'm loud and all too often obnoxious, he is the reflective nature I still need to develop. He's the listener I would like to be. The richest of friends, he offers an unconditional view of life that one lucky enough to be his friend can sharpen the dullest of tools on. In this sense, I am blessed to be sharper because of him.

Beau McBryde is not the person I would naturally be drawn to. A rugged outdoorsman with a passion for living that I have seen in very few people, Beau extrapolates man knowledge from some well that the majority of men have lost touch with over the years. Beau won't touch digital, his analog nature being more in touch with the natural things. Our friendship was forged over arguments related to his criticism of the industry I worked in. And I am fascinated by him. He knows how to smoke a wild turkey and skin and tan a hide. He has old knowledge that belies his age. He's a man in the way my grandfather was a man, a way of life most have lost touch with. Beau has put me in touch with elements that are some of the rawest ingredients of men, of friendships of life.

The good doctor. Chris Caldwell is, for lack of a better word, a specimen. Physically fit and imposing with a squared off jaw like a movie actor, he's the kind of guy that I couldn't stand in high school. I've always been round and jovial when I longed for tall and lanky. I'm sure there was carry over when we first met, and I assumed his personality would match his looks. What I found was one of the most thoughtful and intelligent people I've ever been privileged to know. What's more is he has that enduring quality, the heart of a child. That unequivocal view of life whereby everything is brighter and more beautiful than another person can imagine. Chris brings this view to friendship, which is sacred to him. I've learned more about myself from Chris than anyone else in my life up to this point.

Mike Lake is one of the nice guys. His reputation at work is that of someone who would bend over backwards to help someone else out. That is a rare quality these days. I came to rely on Mike at work on tough issues that needed a creative solution. But it was a simple lunchtime tradition of hiking to the M on Mount Sentinel that has meant more to me than anything else lately. With work becoming increasingly more stressful, Mike and I would venture up those 13 switchbacks every day talking through our problems, planning our futures, encouraging each other and burning off those work worries. Family, work, sports, it was all fair game on our hikes. We bounced ideas off each other and I'd give anything to be able to work with Mike again and restore that tradition. I don't  know if I'm going to miss Mike as a colleague or neighbor more. But I know that I won't have to miss him as a friend.

There are others of you who impacted me and continue to do so as my days in Missoula wind down. You should each get your own descriptions, but this is a blog, and I should follow the rules.

But these gentlemen have come to quantify friendship for me. These are not suburban friendships or casual in any way. These are guys who come in and out of my life on a daily basis, and if there is anything that terrifies me in this move, it is that I won't have that daily interaction that I've come to rely on.

I've never been one for goodbyes, mostly because I've had to live through too many. Let this serve as a reminder of what we built here over these last years. A rock pile by which to find our way back some day.

Thank you all,

Tim

Leaving the continental United States

The logistics of moving to Alaska are very much like moving to a foreign country. Some people actually refer to Alaska as a foreign country.

My conversation with several shippers yesterday went like this:

"I need to ship the contents of a small three-bedroom house to Alaska. Can you accommodate that?"

"Are you sure you need to move to Alaska?"

"... Yes, it's where my job is at."

"Well, we only ship within the continental United States now sir. We no longer have shipping to Alaska."

"Alaska is part of the North American continent. It's attached to Canada, which was still part of the North American Continent the last time I checked. You can drive there from here."

"That's contiguous United States sir."

"I know, I can access Wikipedia too."

"Well, if you want to move somewhere else, let me know, I think I can help you get a a discount."

And so on and so forth. I actually had several conversations like this. Turns out there are only a handful of people who ship to Alaska any more.

Another conversation:

"Can you describe the contents of your house."

"I've got a dark brown L-shaped couch, a lightly stained bookshelf..."

"No, sir, I meant an inventory of items you'd like to ship to Alaska."

"Oh, well, yes, we have a couch, a book shelf, five mattresses, a futon, two televisions, a lamp and maybe 20 boxes of belongings we'd like to bring."

"Wow, you guys travel light."

"That's the dream. The reality is we'll have twice that."

"Oh, ok, let me give you a dream price and a real price then."

Alaska is so near and yet so far away. It's a short three-hour hop from Seattle by air, a three-day journey by inland passageway via a ferry boat or a five-day drive from Seattle.

There is no cheap way of getting in or out.

I can't even begin to describe how grateful I am for our friends both in Alaska and in Missoula (former Alaskans) who have offered to help us navigate this move. You are all amazing people.

It's 2010. Why don't we have a teleportation device that could work for this kind of move yet? The concept existed when I was a little kid watching Star Trek.

As I type, my wife is packing the house and secretly jabbing daggers in my spine. I hate packing up a house. I like the heavy lifting and putting boxes in the back of a truck. Putting stuff in boxes is so not my forte. I think when I was young I never got one of those balls with squares, triangles and circles cut out and into which you'd try to fit the cut out pieces. I just don't have a good sense of fit.


Tim

Thirty seven days in the unemployment line

It looks as though I'm going to have to change the name of this blog. I was originally inspired by the government extension of unemployment aid allowing laid off Americans to collect for up to 99 weeks.

My position at the Missoulian newspaper was cut on Monday, September 30. I applied for unemployment immediately, and to date I've received nothing but slips of paper saying my unemployment aid status is pending.

Last night I accepted a job at the new director of digital content at KTUU, the NBC affiliate in Anchorage, Alaska. Somehow Ninetynineweeks just doesn't seem that appropriate any more. However, I don't want to leave any interested readers hanging, so I'll continue to chronicle the adventure as it progresses.

My wife and I spent a lot of time in Hawaii in the early part of our marriage. Having to move away after we had our first child, we vowed to find a way back some day. Since then, we returned to Oregon, spent time traveling and working in Eastern Europe and ended up in Missoula, Montana, which is not exactly a population center. And now Alaska, with an even lower population than Montana, is our our next destination. Things don't always make sense, but I find that big picture stuff is often a little fuzzy and distal. Probably for a good reason.

I have always loved the ocean, but I have come to love the mountains. Anchorage seems to have both in abundance, which is something very satisfying to me.

Several months ago I was chatting with a friend in Alaska about our various moves since we met several years ago when I was researching a story for a University of Oregon publication. We would eventually end up working together at the Statesman Journal in Salem, Oregon, and we founded the craft beer blog - "Will blog for beer."


On this evening, I was asking about life in Alaska, a place she moved after her husband graduated from law school in Oregon. To my surprise, one of the best print writers I'd ever worked with was now working at a broadcast station.


She took a few minutes to explain that the company was expanding beyond the traditional 5 and 6 p.m. broadcast news to a more web-centric model to provide news digitally in the way Alaskans are increasingly digesting their news.


She told me they were going to begin a search for a digital content director and asked if I was interested in having her forward my resume on to the station president.


I floated the idea past my wife the next day, and I got the reaction I thought I would get. She sort of frowned and cocked her head sideways with that look that says, "You're crazy, and I hope I didn't hear you right."


I let it go and didn't think much more about it until that fateful Monday.


After sort of processing the idea of being laid off and immediately formatting several plans, including grad school, self employment, international job possibilities and cobbling a bunch of local job offers together, I came back to the Alaska job and decided to E-mail my friend to find out if that search was on.


It was, and while figuring out how to navigate the unemployment aid system, I was corresponding with my future boss in Anchorage.


Finally we were invited to travel to Anchorage to meet with the team there and to check things out around town. I've usually done this part of the job interview process myself, but this time Cheryl came with me, as I knew she'd be the hardest sell.

Sunset from downtown Anchorage

Turns out we both loved Anchorage. The sun was just setting as we flew into the city over the tortured ice-bound world of southwest Alaska. I could see a monolithic shadow to the north, something so immense I had to scrunch down in my seat to see the entire mass. This was Denali. The snowless Chugach range framed in the twinkling lights of Anchorage as we landed.


Ocean and mountains. It's like a complete world for me, though neither of us have any illusions about how difficult winters can be up there. We're pretty big fans of the light.


A move to Anchorage is not taken lightly. Not by the prospective employer and not by those seeking a job in that state. So the drawn-out process has been a bit torturous as our funds have shrunk to uncomfortable levels.


To accept the offer last night was rewarding for many reasons, not just the physical need to know that our future is set. It's rewarding to know I'll be able to continue in the job that my journalism career has morphed into. Going from a traditional print reporter to mobile journalist and videographer to online reporter and finally a digital manager is something I didn't expect when I walked across the graduation platform at the University of Oregon, but it's twice the career I planned for and therefore twice as rewarding.


It's nice to know I won't have to wait around for unemployment checks that never come. And searching for jobs is a torturous activity in this day in age. I will not miss it.


Now begins the daunting task of getting ourselves to Alaska. You can drive, but it takes up to five or six days. Shipping items is expensive, as is flying. This blog will likely continue to explore the whimsical nature of family antics, the challenges of moving to America's last frontier and the interesting details of settling in a place that might as well be a million miles away from family for the ease of getting their and back.





Tim

Try a little perspective

At least two-days worth of growth

So maybe shaving my goatee off was not the best idea when the current rate of change around my house exceeds all of our coin jars and piggy banks put together.

My wife's reaction was harsh. She can't look at me without giggling, and she'll have nothing to do with me until my face grows back, as she puts it.

Change is rough on families. Our middle child, Carson, is feeling so much stress related to the possibility of moving to a completely foreign place, that he made himself sick this last weekend. The other two kids are feeling it too, but they are better about verbalizing their feelings, which in turn helps us process better with them.

Aside from my bad judgment regarding my facial hair, I have been playing the perspective game with my wife and kids the last few weeks. Yes, our situation is bad, but we've got a house over our heads and food in our refrigerator. No, I don't have a job yet, but if we need to go live with grandma and grandpa, I'm sure they'll be fine with that. (that's cool right, mom and dad?)

Nothing does the trick like taking their minds off the bad things and transferring them to good things or even new adventures on the horizon. Playing the there-are-starving-children-in-Africa card has never worked well on my kids, but understanding the complex set of issues around getting laid off has allowed us to communicate things and set goals.

We put the house up for rent this weekend, then my wife and I had a late talk one evening where she expressed sadness at knowing that all her dreams for this place, the color schemes she picked out, the decoration projects for the kids' rooms were all going away. Yes, we'll still own the house, but someone will rent it from us.

I can understand this. She waited a long time for me to get comfortable with the idea of buying a house. Somewhere last year before our closing date, I murmured the term, "watch us buy this place and then I get laid off." Harmless, seemingly innocuous, something everyone says when they buy a house, right?

It's a house, not the house we've always wanted, but it was our own for a little while. Just enough to start to get creative. We actually painted the mud room and made a flagstone patio. still, it's just a house, probably one of several we'll own in our lifetime together.

 Perspective.


I stood talking to a friend after church on Sunday when I felt someone stuff something into my back pocket. I thought it was one of the kids stuffing the church program in like they usually do, but when I walked out to the car I reached back and pulled out a wad of cash. We're not broke yet, but we've felt the pinch of having only a few weeks of expenses left in our bank account. A friend felt our need and blessed us with enough money to pay some remaining bills and provide a little breathing room.

Perspective.

Whenever I'd get the E-mailed goodbye notes from other friends laid off from the journalism field, I'd inevitably get depressed all day after finding out. But a day would pass, and I'd think about their situation less and less. A lot of those feelings came rushing back at me when I was laid off. It's a thin line between having a job and looking for a job.

When a friend was diagnosed with brain cancer a few months ago, we felt bad. The struggle for hope is something most people can only watch from the sidelines.

Getting laid off is a big hit to one's ego. It's a big hit to one's finances and a hit to family stability. It's a big deal.

Last week doctors gave my friend nine months to live.

Perspective.

Tim

Forcing the Dream Part III

Getting from Missoula, Montana to Jaipur, India is not the easiest of tasks. Start with a $300 ticket to fly out of Missoula, and you'll find yourself searching anything out of Spokane instead.

Itinerary: Spokane to Seattle on Horizon. Seattle to Frankfurt on Scandinavian Airlines, Frankfurt to New Delhi on Scandinavian airlines. Total flight time: 19 hours. New Delhi to Jaipur by automobile. Total trip time: 28 hours.

I was disoriented landing in a strangely foggy and somewhat chilly New Delhi. I found my bags and wandered around the terminal for about 10 minutes to collect my thoughts. I bought a Coke and a candy bar and phoned my friends in Jaipur.

The taxi sent to collect me was delayed in a horrific six-hour traffic jam coming into the city. For anyone unaware of what the Indian freeway system looks like, think about a post-apocalyptic Mardi Gras celebration with tank-like floats painted garrulous schemes of red, yellow, green and orange with green tarps. At most, they travel at a benign 15-20 kilometers per hour.

I was starting to fall asleep in my chair when my driver shook me awake. For a moment I forgot where I was, and the red and white color scheme on the Coke bottle in front of me and crumpled Milky Way wrapper gave me something solid to focus on.

We hopped in a tiny car and drove into what seemed like California coastal fog, a shroud that New Delhi wears something like 70 percent of the time.

Barely 15 kilometers from the airport, we ran into the traffic jam, something that reminded me of the lines at the passenger ferry terminals in Europe where you wait for hours to be loaded onto the big ships that cruise the Baltic Sea.

The taxi driver, who didn't speak any English, tried to communicate that we'd have to wait out the jam and pulled over, turned off the engine and promptly folded his seat back and went sleep.

If you can't beat them, join them.

Sleep sounded good, and although the excitement of being in a completely foreign place was starting to infest my mind, I put my seat back and went to sleep too.  Three hours later I awoke to the sound of a thousand trucks starting. It is not a pleasant sound, in fact it reminds one of the increasing drone of a hoard of angry bees flying in your direction.

I reached over and shook the taxi driver awake, and we inched our way into the slow-crawling line of trucks that make up India's commerce system. On a good day it's a six-hour drive from Delhi to Jaipur. On this day it was more than 10 hours with the delay outside of Delhi.

Once on the road, the darkness did what darkness does best. It lent a very mysterious blanket to a place the imagination couldn't quite conjure up. I found myself trying to stare out in to the field and envision the place, but I couldn't.

We stopped for tea as the sun came up. Thick, illustrious light raked the fields on either side of the road, illuminating farms and villages that might as well have come from a Dr. Suess book for all the familiarity they had to me. Large disks of collected manure sat drying in stacks in front of huts as burning fuel, and colorful saris decorated clotheslines like whimsical pirate ships.

The sweet tea tasted so good in the cool of the morning. We sat in the truck stop and sipped the tea and snacked on something akin to potato chips. The colors and smells began to resonate with me, causing the synapses to fire and begin the recording process.

 The desert region of northwest India offers the most vistas. Big sandy deserts, palm-treed, roadside oasis' and azure reflecting ponds that increase the beauty of long-empty palaces are a few of the eye-candy treasures. And Suessical images of elephants and two-humped dromedaries plodding along freeways are so magical you can't help but smile widely at the sight.

Jaipur is not an oasis. It's a city of three million people on the edge of the desert. An outpost of sorts, the last stronghold of the Rajputs, Jaipur, the Pink City, is a monument to what I imagine life must have been like during the height of Middle Eastern power. A gilded life of finery and luxury unequaled.

We were stopped several times by police men trying to confiscate the taxi for political purposes. If a politician needs a vehicle to get from point a to point b, he has only to have a traffic policeman find a good car and confiscate it for his purposes.

At one such stop we sped off through a tight alley, a feat that reminded me of some such scene in any one of several James Bond films. We slammed into a wedding party, not literally, but suddenly, and soon we were surrounded by drum playing men and women singing dressed in all white.

I looked over my shoulder half expecting a cop to be running after us, but such things are evidently practiced in India all the time.

We arrived at my friends house nearly 36 hours after I left Missoula. I was exhausted and absolutely enthralled with this place.

I had come to Jaipur to teach mobile journalism to a group of media students in the city. My purpose was to teach them storytelling through digital tools like video, blogs and slide shows. In one journey from one place to another, I would have many weeks of teaching materials to relate to the students, not to mention evenings and days spent around the city investigating the rich tapestry of Indian life.

My love for journalism was completely reborn on those dusty, desert streets. Storytelling as art, as life, as science, as the act of creation itself was more real to me in those two weeks in India than it had been up until that point. Sometimes the familiarity of our lives gets in the way of seeing the color and smelling the smells of storyscapes. To be outside of yourself for even a brief period of time, completely immersed in something totally new is an exercise in scraping the scales from our eyes.

Forcing the dream is expensive sometimes. I'm still paying off that trip, but it was the most worthwhile thing I have done for my career. No training, no seminar, no webinar could possibly open my eyes to the quirks of storytelling like my trip to India in the late fall of 2008.

Aside from all the exciting adventures I had in Jaipur, my sister and I were scheduled to stay in the hotel in Mumbai that was attacked by terrorists. Our reservations were for one day after the attacks. Instead of Mumbai, I traveled to Kolkata to visit with my father who was teaching in another Indian city for a week before traveling on to Bangladesh.

While there I filmed segments of video in the Red Light districts to help bring awareness to the plight of Nepalese girls who are trafficked into India. Some are as young as 10, and they are highly sought after for the light color of their skin and their friendly demeanor.

Here it was, the culmination of how far I had dreamed at the time. To travel to a foreign place where injustices occur with alarming regularity and shine a bright light on them was the goal that had driven me thus far in my pursuit of journalism.

After India I would dream new dreams and plan new goals. But forcing the dream along lines that I had never planned has been the evolving nature of a life well lived for me. I will no longer just dream unsustainable dreams. I will dream dreams so big and wide and vast that forcing them will take up the rest of my life.

Tim

"Fight Club" Refrigerator and watching the neighborhood go by

The question wasn't necessarily out of the ordinary. "Dad, why is there no milk or yogurt in the fridge?" But when I opened up the door spilling light on the contents within, I realized we were like that character in the "Fight Club." We had a fridge full of condiments and not much else. And strange condiments they are, considering my cooking habits. Fermented lemons, Costa Rican pepper sauce,

The truth is we're thinning down the typical grocery budget, and twice in the last week things have looked pretty basic in the Akimoff refrigerator. We're down to the last two weeks of severance money, and we've now received our fourth notice from the state of Montana stating our unemployment benefit status is still pending.

So it's time to pack it up, which is kind of tough not knowing if there is a job out there or not. But we've got a bunch of family just a 10-hour drive away.

The most difficult part was putting the house up for rent just a few weeks shy of a year since we bought it and moved in. I didn't think it would bother me, but after talking to my wife this afternoon, I realized the ridiculousness of it all, and we spent one last warm afternoon sunning on the deck watching the neighborhood go by.

It's strange to have a hard target. A job would be a hard target, but it would be a good thing. I'd know we could make a living. But a hard target driven by a rapidly diminishing severance package is another entity. It's filled with a sense of unknown and maybe a dash of foreboding.

Tonight I'm going to stock the cupboard with cereal and make sure I bring milk and yogurt in from the outside fridge. If for no other reason than to make the next two weeks a little less stressful on little minds.

Tim

Your job and your vocation...your money or your life

A friend of mine who was laid off from another newspaper in the last few months recently told me that after three or four weeks of downtime, he got rather bored and wished to return to work. Vacation, he said, was nice but not fulfilling.

Vocation is the centrifugal part of us all, so integral to who we are that it impacts every aspect of what we do.

"A society in which vocation and job are separated for most people gradually creates an economy that is often devoid of spirit, one that frequently fills our pocketbooks at the cost of emptying our souls." ~ Sam Keen



A little time away from the rat race of work is nice. It is vacation. It is a chance to clear the mind and refresh the soul.


But anyone for whom their vocation is centrifugally tied into their being will shortly grow tired and restless at not being able to fulfill their purpose. 


This is where I find myself now. 


I love being able to spend entire days watching my daughter perfect her art work next to me at the dining room table and to make creative lunches to share with my wife. I love being able to pick the boys up from school and deliver them to their various sporting activities in the afternoons. Our conversations are alive and I feel more involved with their daily lives than I have in a long time. 

"The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves." ~ Logan P. Smith


But they can sense something is wrong. They can sense the longing in me to return to my vocation. They ask me at dinner if I miss the ugliness of work, those instances where our most basic human issues rise to the surface and cloud our vocation with politicking, greed and envy.


No, I don't miss those issues, but they are part of vocation if your vocation involves others. Mine certainly does. 


Somewhere along the way we choose what we want to do. Or sometimes we are chosen for what we can do. I have worked many jobs in my search for my true vocation. Each one points a finger toward your destination, but the complicated life sometimes interferes and clouds our ability to recognize it.

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence." ~ Honore de Balzac



I loved construction and being out of doors and working hard with my hands, developing a strong mind and body. But I always knew it wasn't my vocation. It was something I did to pay bills and pass from one time period into another. 


I was never sorry when I walked away from that into another job. That initial rush of excitement at doing something new can be deceptive too. Sometimes, in a really fun situation, it can last a long, long time. The arrows pointing to your vocation become difficult to discern. 


But when you stumble upon it, as I did in my late twenties, you know you have found what you've been looking for. Work is no longer work, it's the satisfaction of your soul.


More often than not, people have told me they expect me to land on my feet. They've said they always knew I would be all right. They've wished me well and explained that my skill sets would serve me well in my search for new work. 


These people have not found their true vocation. In fact, I suspect that a majority of Americans who have jobs have jobs. I know many of those with whom I most recently worked have jobs and not a vocation. I suspect that is why it was easy for them to cut my position.


And for those who think it's easy to let go of one thing and move into another, it might be easy if it was just a job. But a vocation is deep within you, and severing even the most surface links like a paycheck and benefits is a painful injury to one's soul. 


Tim