This week we're hearing from Stephanie Seber in McCarthy. Seber is a massage therapist who moved to McCarthy in 2009 from Colorado.
SEBER: It was I guess tragedy actually that got me here. The bottom falling out of life. It just seemed like the right time to make a move.
I did some rambling through the Lower 48, mostly to the mountain states: Montana, Idaho, I spent a little time in Vermont. And I feel like it was always just kind of in the plan to come to Alaska. It just felt like the direction my life was moving.
I ended up driving up the Alcan in the very beginning of March, I believe, in a Jetta. A fully loaded Jetta. So it was an adventure to get here, couple snowstorms. I found myself in McCarthy, Alaska, which was this great little net, and felt like a warm hug for my soul.
My first winter was awesome. I actually got to stay in my neighbor's cabin, because it was before I built mine. And so it was still like living out of a duffel, which I had done for years. But it was great. It was cold. The Northern Lights that winter were off the charts. McCarthy in general has a pretty strong sense of camaraderie, and I think that in the wintertime, it's just exemplified even further.
I may wish that all my water was hauled, but I actually have to go and do that: haul the buckets, clean the buckets. There's steps here to living that aren't like other places.
It was great to be able to just slow down and to read a book for an entire day maybe, or go cut some trees down for an entire day, without the thought of, "Oh. I have this to do tomorrow." Again, this cumulative list of things to do doesn't really exist here in my mind. It's just doing.