Melt Down

Years ago I spent two weeks in what they call, “Bush Alaska.”  An area that is all tundra, forty miles from the Bering Sea.  The town of Bethel is on the banks of the Kuskokwim River and has no trees and lots of big mosquitoes.  The only way to get there is by plane or boat, and I would not recommended it as a vacation destination.

The town was settled in 1884 by Moravian missionaries and grew into a support center for 50 some villages along the river. It is now a town of 5,000.  It’s usually 50 below zero in winter, and can get down to 110 below, which will kill you. The summers are only a few months long, with a rare high of 70 degrees.  Being blessed with a sunny day in the summer, also means getting cursed by the dust coming off the roads, because only seven of their twenty miles of roads are paved.  It’s not fun being covered in dust.

The whole reason I went there was to visit my husband.  Kory volunteered six weeks of his time that summer as a construction supervisor, building a house for the Director of Christian Education for the Alaskan Moravian Church.  I found the way they build houses up there to be quite interesting.

Bethel, and much of Alaska, sits atop perma-frost tundra.  The ground, two feet down, is frozen solid year round.  In the summer, just the top layer melts and boots are a necessity to go for a walk, as every step sinks into the muck.  Boardwalks are all over town, as the muck gets pretty deep.

Before they build a house, they set 20 foot posts down 16 feet into the perma-frost for the foundation, then lay beams across the posts, and build the house up from there. They need four to five feet of space between the house and the ground it sits on, otherwise the constant contact with the heat from the house would melt the perma-frost and the house would sink into the muck. The buffer zone under the foundation is crutial.  The very thought of that turned my mind toward motherhood.

The way I figure it, every mother is the “foundation” of the home.  She’s pretty much the one that holds things together and keeps track of details, but just like the houses in Bethel, she’s not meant to be in constant contact with everything or surely there will be a melt-down. This is why mothers need a break – a buffer zone - whether it’s just a cup of coffee with a friend, a trip to the spa, or a weekend away. 

I remembered these houses in Bethel this past week as I was trying to figure out how to propose to my husband the fact a girlfriend called to ask if I wanted to go with her to Jamaica.  I implied if a melt-down is going to happen, it’s best done on a warm beach far from home.