2021 was the year of the unpredictable. From top to bottom, start to finish, there was nothing this year which I could foresee.
I started off the year unemployed, for the third time during the pandemic. With a lot of time on my hands, and still living in my childhood home, I decided to throw myself into horticulture. Throughout the late winter you could find me perched on a ladder, tangled in a wild apple tree, wielding a mechanized handsaw – once in the beginning of a snowstorm. While not exactly unprecedented, it was certainly surprising and often cause my neighbors to stop and chat. During one conversation I learned that my neighbor’s ancestor had run away from Scandinavia on a fishing vessel and later purchased the land all our houses now stand on. His family assumed he was dead, as he never bothered to inform them otherwise, and it took generations for the descendants to reconnect.
But just as I was really settling into my wild witch of the woods aesthetic, I got a job offer to move up to Alaska and work on a trail crew in the Chugach National Forest for a summer. Very unpredictable as I hadn’t applied to the job. So, never one to turn down an opportunity, I packed my bags and flew up to Alaska in May. From day to day, I never knew what to expect. Sometimes I was taking a train to a glacier in the middle of the forest. Sometimes I was slogging through shoulder-high grass in the rain, looking for moose beds. Sometimes I was having adventures in the local coffeeshop like watching a woman teach her young boys to sign for her credit card and how much to tip the barista.
In the fall I drove across an entire continent! In a continuing pandemic! Didn’t have that one on my bingo card. But I got offered a job in Tennessee after the job in Alaska, so I had to road trip it. Some highlights included: outrunning a snowstorm across the Canadian boarder with my mother (ask her sometime why they almost didn’t let us in), pausing my travels for a week to get my Wilderness First Responder certificate where I met and befriended someone I had performed Shakespeare with in high school and someone from my same small town in Alaska, driving through Yellowstone, and returning to Medicine-Bow National Forest where I first fell in love with public land what feels like a lifetime ago.
By the end of October I had arrived in Tennessee – our last act in this spectacle of the unforeseen. My days are mostly a boring tedium of answering the same five questions at the busiest national park visitor center in the country. But occasionally there’s a day that stands out. Like the time I got to help cut the head off a roadkill deer for testing (not pictured). And how I accidentally caused a run on the bank when I wrote a Facebook post for the park that said descendants of original residents could be buried in the park and the archeology department was overrun by requests for gravesites. Or when my roommate told me that her coworker had told her that her mother had told *her* that my gingerbread cantilever barn I made for the Great National Parks Service Bakeoff and been on the local news. But overall, after years of being alone, what surprised me most was the friendly and inviting community I found out here in the Smokies.
I’ve given up on guessing what the years might have instore. This job ends in two months and after that is a long expanse of unknown. After three cross-continental moves, a medical diagnosis, what seemed like an end to the pandemic and then a heartbreaking continuation of the death toll, multiple job changes, and constant goodbyes, my goal for 2022 is to find belonging. Belonging to myself, belonging to land, belonging with family. I would hate for my life to become entirely predictable, but maybe a little consistency isn’t too much to hope.
Kesia Lee 