(I just happened to be both)

When my parents divorced, I was seventeen years old. By that time, my alcoholism was in full swing. I came by it honestly.  Alcoholism runs through my father’s side of the family like a brush fire. 

I wasn’t self-aware enough at the time to understand that my thirst for alcohol was a combination of genetics and a desperate desire to feel the way other people looked. Even if someone had told me this back then, I probably wouldn’t have cared.  In fact, there was very little that I did care about.  I certainly didn’t give a shit about my own well-being. 

My drink of choice was Rumple Minze, which is basically peppermint flavored gasoline.  Being underage, I couldn’t drink whenever I wanted, but I found plenty of opportunities to indulge myself.  No, I couldn’t just walk into a bar and order a round—and I didn’t drink every day—but a steady stream of booze flowed my way.

The drinking itself would have been bad enough, but my penchant for self-destruction meant I was escalating the risk.  In one instance, I made the almost fatal mistake of mixing booze and codeine.  I was on the prescription for a dislocated knee.  My friends and I skipped school to get drunk.  We gathered at the home of someone I didn’t know (and never bothered to ask).  I passed out in a back hallway, and was dragged back into consciousness by the slaps and screams from my best friend’s girlfriend.  My eyes slowly opened to see her straddling me like a paramedic administering CPR.  Boy, was she pissed.  I stopped drinking for as long as the codeine lasted—about a week.  As soon as the pills ran out, I was off and running again with the booze. 

I burned hot and bright.  Within about eight months I’d gotten to the point where my body started to react … unfavorably to the alcohol.  It’s difficult to describe the sensation.  Imagine a hand grenade going off inside you. Small sips of air were all I could manage because breathing made my insides burn.  I couldn’t stand up, could barely talk.  Before long, this happened most times I drank. I kept landing in the same emergency room over and over.  ERs shouldn’t treat minors without parental consent, but I had learned the magic words:  emancipated minor.  To be clear, I wasn’t an emancipated minor, but they never asked me to prove it. 

My dad had split town after the divorce, and my mother was openly dating the man she’d been having an affair with.  So, neither one of them were, um, “present” during this period.  Which means they didn’t know about my drinking.

I would wake up every morning with the same thought in my head:  Fuck.  I went through my days in a haze of self-pity and despair.  Drinking was no longer fun—it was like playing Russian Roulette with half the chambers loaded—but I wasn’t about to stop. 

My mother could tell I was significantly more miserable than the average teenager.  Which, you know, is saying something.  Eventually, she decided I needed a geographic cure for my despair. She suggested I get a seasonal job at Denali National Park, Alaska, where my uncle, Eddie, worked. I thought it was a damned fine idea. I headed up there after finishing my junior year in high school. 

Of course, what I didn’t understand then was this simple truth:  no matter where I went … there I was.

Eddie and a friend of his—who went by the name Maui Wowie—picked me up at the airport in Anchorage.  The first thing we did was go to a pub called The Peanut Gallery, where we had dinner.  Eddie ordered beers for all of us.  Theoretically, the legal drinking age in Alaska is twenty-one.  But the culture of frontier independence there is really hard to appreciate until you’ve seen it in action.  So even minors like me didn’t have much trouble drinking openly.  I drank the beer politely and did my best to look like I was enjoying it, because liquor was really my thing.  The best part was when he ordered a round of Duck Farts.  These were shots containing Kahlua, Crown Royale, and Bailey’s Irish Cream.  It kind of looked like a duck had shit in the glass, but wow did that taste good.  After dinner, we went to a liquor store, stocked up, and drank the night away. 

The next morning, as they were nursing their hangovers, I walked straight to the refrigerator.  Inside was the last wine cooler, left from the night before, and I downed it.  I saw the questioning looks of disbelief on their faces so I gave them the most honest answer of my life:  “I’m thirsty.”

The next day, my uncle drove me up to the Park.  I got a job working for one of the hotels and found plenty of hippies, burnouts, criminals, and drifters to hang out and drink with.  I didn’t like half of these people, but I wanted to be a part of the fun.  This turned out to be a real problem because now I had no easy access to an emergency room.  The closest hospital was 120 miles away.  When the inevitable explosion would take place in my body, I had one option:  lie there and take it for hours on end and hope it would stop.

Drinking had become dangerous, but it didn’t faze me.  The physical pain was bad, but the emotional pain was worse.  The risks I took distracted me, and the bigger the risk, the better the distraction.  Looking back, some of the most dangerous things I ever did in my life were done stone cold sober.

When I first got up to the Park, I learned there was a Post Office just inside the entrance—about ten minutes away from employee housing by shuttle bus. I had the addresses of some friends in New Mexico, and I wrote each of them regularly.  It was something of a source of envy for my coworkers because they didn’t get nearly as many letters as I did. 

“You’ve got to write ‘em to get ‘em,” I used to say smugly.  It was one of the few times when I felt like I had something that others wanted, and I liked it.

One evening, I decided to take the last shuttle bus to the Post Office. There wouldn’t be a return shuttle for the rest of the night, but I was never one to think beyond what was right in front of me. Even now, I have trouble thinking more than two steps ahead of where I am.  It’s a structural problem with my brain that’s too involved to get into here, but I wasn’t aware of the problem at the time. 

Anyway, I got to the Post Office, checked my box, and found it empty, again, after almost a week of no letters.  This happened sometimes, but I never got used to it.  I always felt like I’d been left to twist in the wind.  So I was both depressed and pissed off, because I’d managed to maroon myself at the P.O. for nothing.  I couldn’t stay there, so I began what felt like a trek of a thousand miles—but was really just two—on foot back to my employee housing unit. 

A few minutes into my walk, I came to a railroad crossing. A freight train just happened to show up right before I got there, and those suckers can be upwards of a mile or two long. Plus, the train was going maybe thirty miles per hour, tops, so it felt to my seventeen-year-old self as though it would never end. 

My approach to barriers for most of my life could be summed up in the following way:  square peg, round hole, bigger hammer.  This mode of operation, combined with my emotional state at that moment, was never a good combination.  It wasn’t long before I decided that I needed to find a way to beat this little obstruction. The first thing I did was start timing how long it took for the front and rear wheels of each car to pass over the same spot. I thought I could just lie down on the road, roll once to get under the train, and then roll again to get to the other side.  But even my limited capacity for recognizing danger was telling me this was a sure-fire way to get sliced in two—the long way. So, I had to come up with a Plan B.

By this time, a long series of empty flat cars had arrived, and I realized that I could just jump onto one of the cars, roll over, and jump off the other side. Easy peasy. No sweat. There were several vehicles parked on my side of the road, waiting patiently, and the people in these cars watched me as I ran straight at the train and jumped.

I easily made it onto the train car. Unfortunately, I didn’t consider how physics works and my momentum, combined with the train’s forward motion, made me slide halfway down the length of the car.  My knee slammed into the end of a steel I-beam that was left on the deck. That hurt. But there was no time for me to worry about it because I needed to get off the train.  So I rolled over and hung my legs off the other side as I prepared to jump again.

That’s when I realized that thirty mph when standing on the road was a very different experience from thirty mph when sitting on the train.  It was moving much too fast to just casually hop off. I was sitting there, watching the ground whiz by, and for a few moments I was frozen.  What got me going again was the understanding that if I didn’t get off this train right now, I was going to end up in Anchorage, over two hundred miles away, with no way to get back.  So, I steeled myself, spotted a clearing coming up, and launched myself off the train.

Miraculously, I landed on my feet and didn’t lose my balance.  I was pumped full of adrenaline, and I threw my fists in the air in victory as I kept running and whooping and hollering because that was fucking awesome!

Just then, a park ranger vehicle came into view, and I immediately dropped my arms to my sides and slowed to a casual stroll. Doop-de-do, nothing to see here, officer. Luckily enough, he didn’t seem to notice me.

By the time I got back on the road itself, the train had passed and the cars that were waiting started driving by. The pain in my knee had kicked in and I sported a noticeable limp. I couldn’t help but see the looks of shocked disbelief and outright contempt from the people in those cars.  But I thought to myself, “Fuck ‘em—I jumped a train, and it was worth it.”  I mean, how many people do you know who have done this?

That wasn’t my only trip to Alaska, but I haven’t been there in over thirty years.  I hope to return at some point soon.  My wife has never been there, and it’s definitely the kind of place that everyone should visit at least once.  Particularly in mid-August, when the sun goes down enough to see the Aurora Borealis while the Perseid Meteor Shower flies overhead.  It’s simply stunning.  Back then I would forget my problems and focus on the magic above me.  I remember time would come to a complete stop, and I’d feel like staying there forever.  Those were the fleeting moments when all the pain went away. 

My life has certainly improved since then.  But sometimes I still miss the feeling of looking up at that Alaskan sky.

– Andy Finley

Author’s Note: This was a period that I look back on with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it was definitely an exciting time. On the other, I was drowning in undiagnosed trauma. I hope I was able to communicate that effectively.