Abbie Kirkpatrick

One thing leads to another and then one day you realize it's 10 pm and still 90 degrees inside your house... you find yourself praying that the electricity will hang in there so the fan won't stop... outside insects are buzzing in the bamboo, the frogs are singing in the rice fields, and the random truck occasionally roars down the highway... your house mates are a large pack of dogs, one brave cat, many small bats (yay!), cockroaches (boo), cockroach-eating spiders as large as your hand (yay!), the occasional (sometimes deadly poisonous) snake, and mosquitoes as numerous as the New Mexico stars (go bats go!).

At least, that's been my experience.

After high school I wanted to perfect my Spanish, so I applied to be a foreign exchange student. I was accepted and sent to Bodø, a town north of the arctic circle in Norway. My Spanish didn't improve at all, but I did learn Norwegian. Ocean, boats, dried cod, crazy cross-country skiing, dark winter days (no sun! even at noon!), midnight sun in the summer... I was incredibly lucky not only to have been sent there but also to have been placed with a wonderful family who I love to this day.

After Norway my high school choice of college in Washington state no longer felt right so after just a semester there I jumped onto an Amtrak train and high-tailed it home. That was one of the best train-rides of my life. The next semester I spent at Los Alamos Community College; the classes there were a revelation! I had a philosophy professor whose lectures were like spaceship flights to unknown planets (you came out staggering), an amazing writing course taught by the writer Jim Sagel (I miss him now), and some kind of math class (who can remember...) with a class full of absolutely passionate students (I mean... they wanted to be there... they actually LIKED it). It was wonderful being back in LA.

Then I went off to the University of Texas at Austin. I thought I hated all big cities but I loved Austin. Magnolia trees and oak trees and biking everywhere and swimming in the town creek and contra dancing. I liked the fact that the school itself was larger than my entire hometown and that you could hear about 10 different languages being spoken in the time it took just to walk from one library to another on campus.

Summers through college I worked at Skogfjorden, a Norwegian immersion "village" (summer camp) in Minnesota. (Concordia Language Villages: Norwegian was uplake from German and French, and downlake from Finnish... these days I hear they even have an Arabic village.) The work among so many passionate (crazy) teachers and our amazing director changed my life. Coming up with skits to introduce such words as "sardine," "tomato," "bread," and "cheese," and impersonating a polar bear (white garbarge bag costume) being freed (thrown) back into the North Sea (local lake) taught me skills which often still come in very handy.

Back in Austin each semester I studied linguistic anthropology and the theory of translation, and for my major I had to take just one semester of a non-Indo-European language. My random (yet futurely significant) choice was to study Mandarin Chinese.
All I actually absorbed from that course was how to say "thank you," but the beautiful Chinese characters would one day come back to haunt me.

Colder climes beckoned and as soon as I graduated I found a job on a pig farm in southern Norway. (My reasoning is lost to me now... I remember I actually turned down work at a horse farm/riding school!...) The pig farming community was small and the neighbors all gawked at the stranger (me) and my happiest times were when I was alone mucking out the barn full of hundreds of squealing pigs. (Pigs really are smart... and very cute when they sleep all cuddled up together.) It was a sad job, knowing that when I sat by a birthing sow all night, it was all just so that her babies could grow up to be slaughtered and turned into sausages. (Even the slaughterer was sad: he told me he had once dreamed of becoming a professional trumpet player.)

When I finally saw the light, I quit the pig farm and went to work as a butler for a lovely, incredibly kind, and busy (hence my job!) couple. My swinetending and butlering were in just the right place and I was lucky enough to blunder into lots of Norwegian folk music and dance.

When I came home to the states I decided to make my childhood dream come true... The stunning postcard scenes, the park brochures and maps, the trail names, the ranger-led programs... I wanted to live in a national park! I volunteered with the Student Conservation Association and went to work and live in Arches National Park in Utah. Sandstone! Cryptobiotic soil! Walkie-talkies! The Fiery Furnace! The Devil's Thigh! I was one of 3 dewey-eyed volunteers and two of us drank vast quantities of carrot juice each morning so we could turn our skin as orange as the sandstone... The job was "park interpretation" and many days my main duty was to "take a hike." It was paradise.

Then I became a real ranger (the green pants! the the grey shirt! the Smokey-the-bear hat!) and went to work in Acadia National Park in Maine... I wept to leave the desert but was soon consoled by the ocean. I found out why many rangers are more cynical than their volunteer counterparts but the dew stayed in my eyes because of the whale-watches! tide pools! beavers! peregrine falcons! mossy forests! seals! seabirds!

Acadia at that time was a couple ferry rides from Prince Edward Island in Canada; the kind people there tossed me a fiddle and told me to play along; no one cared that I had never played before in my life. That winter Maine was thankfully blanketed in about 6 feet of powdery snow for months and months; there was nowhere to go and nothing to do and no neighbors and my playing was muffled to the outer world so that I was able to progress from the sick cow stage through the the angry cat stage and beyond without killing anyone.

Though I couldn't bear to leave Maine, I accepted an interpretive rangering post at Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior. Wolves roamed free there (though I never saw one!) and moose sometimes looked in my window or blocked me on my hike to work. Loons and the beautiful, treacherously icy water often tempted me to linger in the lake until hypothermia set in. On some hikes (50 miles) across the island to visit my boss I met not a single soul; four days of silence. It was magic. I wanted to live there forever.

But... I couldn't shake a small, unreasonable urge to learn Chinese... I decided it should take only about a year if I immersed myself so I said goodbye to the US parks and headed off to Taiwan where the written characters are still traditional and beautiful.

I took the long slow way to my new job in Taiwan, via Ireland, Scotland, the Shetland Islands, the Faroe Islands, and Norway, choosing ships over planes whenever possible, just to get the roaming bug out of my system before I signed a contract and became forced to stay in one place for a WHOLE YEAR.

Being fresh from wolf and moose-land I asked for a job as far out in the country as possible. I was set up to teach English in Luodong, a "very very small town" (they assured me) on the eastern coast of the island. I got off the train and knew I had been tricked. Cars and motorcycles were everywhere, and there were buildings in every direction. I couldn't sleep at night for the neon lights and the noisy traffic. I was miserable until I bought a bicycle and a map and realized that though the town was densely packed, it was in fact small and that a shortish bike ride would take me either into jungley mountains (butterflies and monkeys and waterfalls!!!) or to the edge of the Pacific ocean itself! And soon I'd found a house where I could live close to nature once more (a little too close: frogs in my rainboots, snakes on my bed, bats in the sheets).

My plan was to learn Chinese real quick and then take the long way home across China and Siberia. I thought it would be incredibly difficult to stay here one year but now it seems I've stayed for nine!

On my first Chinese New Year I picked up a stray puppy and then found it hard to ignore others... I have a sweet six-pack of my own dogs now and a few foster dogs too. I try to help the ones I can and I try (with varying degrees of success!) not to let the project get out of control: the number of stray dogs here is endless. Lizzie Foley mentioned us already (thanks Lizzie!: I hope you can come to Taiwan soon!) and I'll mention it again: look at this link if you'd like to see the foster dogs living with me and my friends: they're all up for adoption: http://air.freeshell.org/?Rehoming%3A_Adoption:Adoptable
that page belongs to the "Animals Ilan Rescue" site at http://air.freeshell.org
It's often hard to find a good home for a dog here and it's actually easy to send dogs from Taiwan to the US.

Though the dogs seem like a full-time job, I have a real job too. I had no idea that I would come to love my students as much as I have, it's fun teaching them! (though I secretly believe that they should all be freed... open the windows! escape from the classroom!). The education system here is brutal but I use my position to save as many students as possible by introducing them to Calvin and Hobbes and other enlightened thinkers.

I also had no idea that I'd still be learning Mandarin even after nine years. It was not the piece of cake language that I had imagined. Now I can understand and speak, and I can read a little... but I have been lazy... little children are better at writing than I am.

I discovered martial arts and have been putting my all into learning taijiquan, also wing chun for when you just want to punch someone. Twenty years ago I would never have imagined that I'd one day think fighting is fun, but at least practicing sure is!

My county Yilan's claim to fame is that it's the rainiest county in Taiwan: water we do not lack. Here following this bio o my New Mexican friends are the most exotic photos I can think of showing you: lots of water.

I've come home to NM as often as possible (which is not often enough) and I've been so lucky to have many visits from family and friends... my mom and dad and brother and sister and bro-in-law and my Norwegian mamma and pappa and my best friend from Norway and even LAHS' own Mark White (who tends to time his visits with really big earthquakes!). I miss my family and wonder how I can still be here so far away. I'm an aunt now! I'm torn... I love it here, yet I miss Los Alamos all the time. Sometimes I dream of the canyons and the mesas and skies with millions of stars at night and the way it smells right before a rain.

There's this thousand year old Chinese poem... by He Zhizhang... kids here learn it... someone taught it to me 8 years ago and said I should take it as a warning. At the time I didn't understand what I was being warned about but now I get it:

"I left home young and came back old;
my accent hasn't changed but my hair is white;
the children I meet don't know who I am;
cheerfully they ask, "Where do you come from, Stranger?""

yikes.

This bio is long and late... well it's still July 7th at least in New Mexico if not in Taiwan! Thanks so much everyone for writing your stories. I have smiled at so many and cried at a few. Thanks to the organizers of this website... lots of work! It's wonderful.
Have lots of fun reunion people!

If anyone else out there finds yourself in this neck of the woods, please do contact me; you can stay in my place; I promise I won't let the snakes get you. abbie.sea@gmail.com