Days 3-4: walk a mile in my boots...

What really makes someone independent? It seems to me that we are all dependent on one thing or another, one person or another, to provide us with something we perceive as essential. We rely on our employers and our banks to give us the money we need, we rely on the grocery stores and shipping companies to bring us the food we need, we rely on microwaves and power companies to help us prepare meals. One of the things that I've loved about living in Alaska -- Skagway in particular -- is that I feel I'm less dependent on some of the things that people down south still are. I'm no longer dependent on, for instance, mass merchandisers and corporate outlets to give me the things i "need." I no longer rely on movie theaters to entertain me. I no longer rely on highways to get me where I need to go, and I no longer depend on microwaves and TV dinners to cover my lack of culinary knowledge.

At the same time, there are so many things that I do depend on. I am dependent on Wells Fargo as the one bank in town to give me access to my money. I am dependent on Fairway Market as the one grocery store in town to give me milk and produce. And I rely on the power company to keep me warm at night.

How can one truly be independent, then? I think we live in a culture that tells us to be DEpendent. Our culture tells us through mass media that we don't have the time or the energy to be self-sufficient and thus need to depend on things like fast food restaurants, weight loss pills, dating web sites, prescription smoking cessation drugs, and, the mark of the beast, iPhones. In this culture, are any of us as independent as our founding fathers were or as the natives who lived here before them truly were?

I like to think I'm getting there.

I've taken my physical fitness into my own hands, and I think that makes me a little more independent than I used to be. I go to the gym (another one of those human constructions that makes us less of what we really are) and spend time on the machines or in a class not because I need to-- because I'd surely survive without it, i've been doing just that for 25 years -- but because I choose to. I am healthy not because of weight watchers or Hydroxycut or Nutrisystem or bulimia, but because of my own efforts. My diet enters into this as well. I've taken the art of cooking into my own hands and learned how to cook in the last year-- and in doing so am more independent.

I no longer have a vehicle to drive. This makes me no longer dependent on an automobile to get me from A to B. This makes me more independent. As I walk the mile to and from work each day, I get there not by the efforts of a Ford factory's staff, but by the efforts of my increasingly-more-toned thighs and calves.

Stimee told me over the phone what was wrong with his car and how to fix it. I, standing outside in the rain over his hood with some wrenches, have been the picture of independence. Do i NEED this vehicle? No, I don't need it, I don't depend on it, I can function without it, but it makes life a little easier. Do i NEED to call someone to take care of it for me? No, because I'm learning now how to do it for myself.

On Sunday, I was the opposite of independent. I needed the help of thirteen individuals between Sunday and Monday to help me with things that i saw as essential. Today, Wednesday, I think I'm doing a little better. I just feel that it's difficult to really know what it means to be truly independent; and I also feel that it's not necessarily a bad thing to depend.