Other worlds and a journey west: Turning over the next page

Vantage Point

Sarah Leavenworth

I've always been in love with reading. As I child, I was drawn to books like Alice in Wonderland, A Wrinkle in Time and other tales of protagonists tossed from their comfort zones into fantastic and sometimes terrifying new worlds.

Perhaps I could relate to Dorothy, the heroine of the Wizard of Oz, and other literary adventurers like Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and the brothers and sisters of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, because my own environment growing up was in constant flux.

I was born in Pennsylvania, and my family moved to New York before I was old enough to start forming memories. Several years later, we crossed the country in a fire engine red Volkswagen van to California; new homes throughout California, Oregon and Iowa would follow.

Part of me dreaded the night before a move — the reverberation of sound off of the empty walls and the ordered outlines of boxes in the darkness. Leaving behind the known for the unknown, precious friends for strangers, and relative safety for the unknown was unsettling to me, like the instant before a blind leap.

With time, however, I found that the same instinctual, magnetic pull to the unknown that had led my dad in myriad directions was ingrained in my DNA as well. After college and entering the second year of reporting for a weekly newspaper in Iowa, I started pondering — almost like I had as a child, reading Where the Wild Things Are or turning the pages of Dr. Seuss- and Shel Silverstein — the possibilities new places hold.

I was in the last phase of my Peace Corps application, waiting to hear if I had been accepted into the English education program, when an out-of-the-blue e-mail threw all of my plans into a free-fall. The e-mail, from Lake County Leader Publisher Dan Drewry, proposed that I accept a reporting position in Plains, Montana — a place nearly as foreign to me as Kazakhstan, my intended Peace Corps destination.

Several weeks later, I lugged the last well-worn moving box down the stairs and through the door to my Honda Civic, noting that my car and I seemed to be similarly bending under the weight of our respective burdens. I tried to expel my doubts as I breathed in and out, secured my seatbelt and started to drive. I knew little more than, like Heidi, I was heading for the mountains.

I arrived in Plains with all of my worldly possessions shoved into every crevice of my vehicle. I couldn't help but smile as I caught my first glimpse of the tiny homes dotting the banks of the Clark Fork river, surrounded on all sides by mountains, clouds and an expanse of blue that reminded me of Iowa's limitless sky. My first months in Montana went by in a blur of sorts — I dove into the Clark Fork River for an article on Search and Rescue, rode horseback, camped and hiked in Glacier National Park and swam in Flathead Lake. I also worked a little bit, too; hard enough, it seems, to have earned an unexpected promotion to the position of editor at the Lake County Leader. I've spent some time in this area and — even before moving here — felt I had rarely seen anything so beautiful as the Flathead Lake against the backdrop of the Mission Mountain Range. I've only been a Polson resident for a few weeks now, and the hurricane-in-my-stomach, Dorothy-in-Oz feeling of diving head-first into the unknown has yet to dissipate. I'm learning, though, that the most rewarding experiences are usually on the other side of a leap of faith.

Reflecting on my past journeys makes me wonder if I'll ever have a firm grasp on where the path of my life will take me in the future. The heroes and heroines of my favorite childhood adventure stories, however, always seemed to find a new appreciation for "home" after their journeys, and I can relate to that. Maybe I've been lucky enough to find my adventure and my home in the same lovely place.