by Jewel
ten
a sea change
I didn’t have much to move in with, other than a few cups and dishes my dad gave me from his storage shed, as I had been living out of a duffel bag for years. I was so proud when I moved into my little cabin. It was a tiny one-room box with an outhouse in the backyard. A kitchen counter with no sink. No plumbing. No refrigerator other than an icebox outside, a wooden box lined with foam insulation. You could put a chunk of ice in there and keep milk cold for a few days. There was a single bare bulb that hung from a wire in the middle of the room. A bed on posts, so you could store things underneath, a plank of plywood on two sawhorses for a table, and a window looking out at the trees. There was enough grazing around the cabin to stake a horse out on, which was a lucky thing, because I would need to ride my horse to work, as I was too young to have a driver’s license.
Work was in town, about fifteen miles away, so I rode my horse two hours by beach if the tide was low. I would stake him out in a field at my aunt Sunny’s, who lived near town, hitchhike the last three miles, then ride home, thankful again for the long hours of daylight. Horses lack headlights. Sometimes I could be seen on the weekend at the McDonalds’s drive-thru, my horse in line with all the other cars. He would stick his head in the window as if ordering his own fries.
Other times I’d hitchhike, though it could be hard to get a ride home late, as few people go that far out of town after 7 p.m. or so. Sometimes I’d be stuck, unable to catch a ride, and stayed in town with a friend for a few days. I always carried a backpack with some extra clothes.
I returned home once, after being gone like this for several days, to find the plastic tub of dishes I’d forgotten about had grown a mountain of mold on them. I was thoroughly disgusted. I had run out of the house late one morning, intending to do the dishes when I got back that night. No such luck. Days had passed before I got home and I was now staring down a nasty chore. Not only did I have to contend with the mess, but I had to run to the creek and get water, fill up the five-gallon jug, wrestle it back to the cabin, and heat it up on a camping propane burner. Dishes were a real sore spot for me. I can’t tell you how many fights took place over washing dishes. My dad yelling that I wasn’t doing it good enough, me rewashing them, failing inspection again. Redoing them again. This went on so long once that I was grounded until I’d cleaned the house with a toothbrush. I hated dirty dishes. I hated the sight of them. Then it dawned on me. There was no more Dad. No one could make me do them. I was an independent woman, and my own boss. I grabbed a shovel from a neighbor, went outside, dug a hole, and buried those dishes. A perfect fifteen-year-old’s solution to a problem.
The next day I bought paper plates. They were also a good fire starter for the wood-burning stove. Another solid solution, I thought to myself. Plus, fewer dishes meant more time for writing and reading after work. It was time to take everything I had been theorizing and philosophizing about and see if I could apply it to my life. It was time to work on an internal ladder that might get me out of where I was. Could I use my reason and my mind to change my internal landscape enough to climb out of what seemed like a predetermined cycle and beat the odds? Nature versus nurture. I had to try. I knew I didn’t want to be a human full of holes. I wanted to be a whole human.
The first summer on my own was a great summer. I turned sixteen and eventually got my license, though I still had no car to drive, which meant I hitchhiked a lot. I was headed into town for work, and an older guy, maybe in his twenties, picked me up around Fritz Creek. He introduced himself as Lee. I said, “I’m Jewel Kilcher.” I didn’t know it at the time, but he was a friend of my cousin Dylan, who had told him that I was a singer. About a week earlier, Lee had been working on a fishing boat and overheard some of the crew talking about this blonde Kilcher kid, Dylan’s cousin. So when he realized who he had picked up, Lee wanted to warn me to be careful hitchhiking. He started out by saying, “You know, you’re a very pretty girl, you should not be hitchhiking.” I said, “Thanks, I’m pretty careful.” This didn’t seem to satisfy him, so he said it again, “You are pretty. You shouldn’t just hitchhike around.” “Got it, thanks,” I said curtly. “I mean, you could get raped out here.” He said it again, and I got the creeps. I pulled a four-inch skinning knife from my boot and swiftly stuck the tip neatly under his chin while he drove, and said, “Are you gonna fuck with me?” I don’t know what I was expecting, but his response caught me off guard. He laughed. Hard. I could tell in an instant that I had misread him. He was a nice guy who was genuinely concerned for my safety. As I slipped the knife back in my boot, he added, “That was so hot!” Ah. And he was gay. We were destined to be best friends.
Lee was a real source of support. He knew I never had firewood at my place and would drop some off for me. I never had money for food, so he would feed me out back of the restaurant where he worked as a chef. I also went down to the docks, and took all the halibut heads the tourists had thrown away, and cut the cheeks out. They were a delicious cut of fish, and best of all they were free.
Lee often drove me out to my cabin if I was stuck in town, or let me crash with him in the converted old school bus he lived in. He introduced me to his friends, although I never told people how old I was. I was embarrassed by it. I just let people assume I was older. Lee heard the first drafts of my early songs and later toured with me through the heights of my career. Today he lives with me, and in addition to being my best friend, he’s manny to my son, Kase.
It was harder than I thought to make ends meet, because shortly after I moved, my dad announced he could not sing with me anymore. He said he had talked it over with his therapist and it was just not healthy. Well, most likely it hadn’t been healthy long before this, but to stop now when I really needed the cash was a huge blow. I didn’t know how to play guitar, I was just backup and sang harmonies mostly, so getting a gig on my own was not a real option.
I got busy finding other jobs. I worked for a cowboy on the Spit, giving horse rides to tourists. He would run a string of horses and take folks for rides on one side of the beach, and I had my own string that I was in charge of farther down the beach. It meant long days in the saddle, and you always had to be on your toes, but I enjoyed the work. It just didn’t pay a ton.
One day I saw a flyer posted on the docks for a dance clinic that would be in town for two weeks. I had never danced but thought it might be fun to try. As it turned out, I was not a promising dancer, but the teacher, Joe, found out I could sing. I usually stayed after classes asking questions, and as we became friendly, I invited him to a show my whole family was putting on as a lark—a Kilcher talent night. My aunts, uncles, and cousins are all very talented and had decided to get together and have an evening of entertaining each other. After Joe heard me sing, he told me he thought he might be able to help me get a scholarship to the school he taught at in Michigan, called Interlochen Arts Academy. I was flattered he thought I had the talent to go, and the idea of going to a private school like this excited me.
Joe got me the forms I needed. I wrote the essays required and we got my school records together from the six different schools I had attended. The hitch was that I had to submit an aria for a vocal scholarship. What the heck was an aria? I was a bar singer who belted out blues songs and did covers of Jim Croce and the Eagles. I had no idea where to start. I told my mom my problem, and she helped me audit a music class in Anchorage. I picked a French aria and learned it by ear. As I could not read music, I asked the teacher to help me learn melody. A friend of hers loaned us a studio and somehow a nylon-string guitarist came on board. I had never sung in my falsetto before, and I enjoyed the soft, clear sound. I did not have much volume in that range at that time, or fullness, so I relied on purity and clarity of tone. No vibrato. I had no idea whether my pronunciation was correct. It had an innocence to it that I hoped would be appealing, because I didn’t have much else to offer as far as technique or education. I recorded it and shipped
it off, never thinking I would be accepted. I was wrong. I got a letter a few weeks later saying I had been awarded a partial scholarship, and I could attend if I paid the balance of tuition. A mere ten thousand dollars. And if I wanted to enroll for my upcoming junior year, I had to come up with it in three months. Shit.
My mom proved helpful. She taught me a system I still use when looking for a solution to a problem.
Her: Write your goal down on a piece of paper, Jewel.
Me: To go to Interlochen in the fall.
Now write down what you need to accomplish that.
Earn $10,000.
Now write down ways you can earn that.
I thought and thought and finally came up with the idea of a fund-raising concert. I wrote that down.
Now write down a date to play the concert.
I chose one month before school started.
Now write down what you need to do in order to pull off a concert.
Get help organizing it.
Who can do that?
Maybe friends will help.
What else do you need to do?
Find a venue.
And there it was in front of me. How to transform an idea into reality. All I had to do was execute what I had written down. And that’s what I did.
My uncle Otto’s wife, Charlotte, was a graphic designer and helped me design a flyer. Otto’s ex-wife, Sharon, was an accountant (I often babysat her kids, Eivin and Levi) and offered to help with the books. Nikos’s mom suggested I get local businesses to donate items we could auction off during intermission at the show. I got the local high school to donate the theater for the evening of the show and set a date. I taped flyers everywhere and advertised the fact that I was going to be doing a concert to raise money for school on the local radio station. We were all set except for one problem. I couldn’t play a solo show. I didn’t play an instrument. I would need to hire a piano player or a guitar player. An old family friend, Jimmy Anderson, played piano, and so I asked him to help out. I went about learning enough material for a solo show, mostly Cole Porter songs. The entire town turned out to hear me. The auction went off well. I had no stage banter, and had never carried a show before, so it was a bit jilted and awkward, but I got through it somehow. And the hometown crowd was more than kind.
Sharon tallied up the total, and I was still five thousand dollars short. That’s when local celebrity Tom Bodett (it’s his voice in the Motel 6 commercials saying, “We’ll leave the light on for you”) wrote a check for that exact amount. My aunts showed me how to write thank-you notes, and I wrote hundreds of them. Practically my entire hometown of 3,500 people helped me get to that boarding school.
I still had to earn money for a plane ticket, and managed to scrape it together just in time. My dad was kind enough to buy my horse from me, which gave me a little extra money and also meant I wouldn’t have to buy hay for him while I was gone.
When fall rolled around, I packed my trusty duffel bag with my few things, and made sure I had some blue flannel shirts in there. I bought some khaki pants from the thrift store in town so that I would comply with the school’s dress code of navy and khaki, and I boarded the plane for Traverse City, Michigan. As I sat on the plane, I was filled with excitement. I had no idea what lay ahead of me. All I knew was that it was going to be a change. And that couldn’t be too bad a thing.
eleven
turn toward the pain
After many connections, delayed flights, and canceled flights because of weather, complete with nights spent unexpectedly in hotel rooms the airlines had to pay for, I finally showed up on campus a little worse for the wear. I had long messy hair and a vintage leather biker jacket, and was dragging my duffel bag down the main road of campus, garnering a few stares. I was promptly escorted to the dean’s office and nearly kicked out of school my first day on campus. Apparently showing up with a large skinning knife fastened to your side was frowned upon in classier establishments. The dean asked me where I was from, and when I said Alaska, he seemed to relax a little. He explained that I was welcome at school, but that my knife was not. I promised I would keep it locked away.
I was shown around campus, but someone may as well have been giving me a tour of Mars. There were kids wearing crisp navy blazers and sharp pleated khakis and pearl necklaces. They all seemed to feel perfectly at home on the sprawling campus. And there were parents. Everywhere. Parents unpacking their kids in dorm rooms. Parents sharing meals with kids in the cafeteria. Parents handing kids their schoolbooks for the semester. Wait. Schoolbooks? Schoolbooks! It had never dawned on me that I had to buy books for this place. My dorm counselor sent me to the bookstore, where I found out how much it was going to cost me to have books for school. And for food. I was such an idiot. I’m sure the paperwork said something to that effect somewhere. I must have missed it. I had no money for books. Or food.
Back to the dean’s office I went. I remember him asking whether I had parents or if anyone was helping me. I explained that I had, indeed, been conceived through the traditional methods. He only smirked slightly. Apparently smartass humor was frowned upon as well. I explained how I’d gotten there, how my town sent me off, and how I didn’t have all the funds needed. He said he could help me find a job on campus and that in the meantime he would help me procure some used books.
It was arranged for me to be a model for a sculpture class during my free period. I was not thrilled about this job, as I had to dress in a leotard and tights and stand on a pedestal at the front of the room. Mortifying for any teenage girl. But I sucked it up (and in). I felt fat, but did it anyway.
The harder part of school for me was the social aspect. I had gotten quite used to living alone and making my own rules, as well as hanging around Lee and other adults in their twenties. The strict regulations of a boarding school for young teenagers made me feel claustrophobic. I didn’t like being told what to do and when to do it one bit. We were not allowed to swim in the lakes. We were not allowed out of our room after curfew. Lights out at a certain time. Walks through the woods at only a certain time. It would take some getting used to.
Apart from the few friends I’d made and left in Anchorage, I had never spent much time around many kids my own age. I went to school, but kept to myself, engaged with teachers, and sang in bars. I had been around so many adults, and dealt with so many adult emotions (even though I had a limited understanding of them), that I rarely had much in common with other kids. They looked at me like an alien, and I them. Many of the kids at school were a new breed as well. They were not hardscrabble do-it-yourself-ers like most Alaskan kids; they were privileged and entitled and their minds seemed to know a lot about specific things but lacked common sense. But then, I was the one wearing ridiculous pink tights and a leotard, standing on a podium for them . . . I really had no room to judge.
To make matters worse, I began to suffer from panic attacks. I shared a room with a roommate, and a bathroom with suitemates. When I was younger and the stress and anxiety of my life became too overwhelming, or when fights with my dad got too bad, I would go running outside into nature. The mountains were my church. I would go off by myself like an animal to heal. At boarding school I could not leave campus and there was nowhere to be alone. I think that the tension, combined with enough distance from home to feel somewhat safe, is what brought the attacks on. It would be years before I learned such terms as “PTSD,” “trauma survivor,” and “trigger.” When I felt panic coming on, I would sneak out of class, go back to my room when it was empty, curl up in a fetal position, and cry from way down deep in my bones. I learned to pet my hair as I rocked back and forth, to soothe myself. I learned to tell myself things as if I were a parent caring for a frightened child. Sometimes I could find words for my sorrow. I’m scared. I’m lonely. I don’t know what I’m doing. I was on my own. No family, no safety net, and I was hurting. I turned to my pen for comfort, trying my best to
feel my feelings rather than numb them.
Once I came back to my room between classes to find my suitemate crying on her bed. I figured she must be having a panic attack. I went to her and petted her hair and after a time I asked what was wrong. She looked up at me through tear-stained checks and stammered, “My dad won’t give me a Porsche when I come home if I don’t get all A’s.” I was a bit stunned. It was my first encounter with real wealth. I remember looking at her and thinking, Holy shit. Being spoiled is worse abuse than being hit. At least I knew that being hit is wrong. But being spoiled ruins you. This girl was a great person, but her life had robbed her of the opportunity to find strength in herself and a sense of self-worth. This was the same journey I was on as well, but I felt fortunate in that moment because I knew it was up to me to make the changes in myself. I developed tools for dealing with my panic attacks. Under extreme duress, especially as a child, I would disassociate, just shut down and become robotic when the stress or emotions were too overwhelming. I could basically pop out of my body. Shut down my thoughts and leave. The effects of dealing with long-term stress were more subtle; I was not even aware I was doing it. I just got tough, and a bit desensitized to the anxiety. It was a dangerous habit, because our feelings are our best defense system; if prolonged trauma becomes the norm, you become desensitized to pain, and cut off your ability to perceive danger as well. We learn to tolerate the intolerable—a problem that would vex me for decades.
At school I learned better coping mechanisms, ones that allowed me to keep my feelings intact. Instead of escaping or shutting down, I learned to get in touch with my body and mind more. This seemed the opposite of a good idea at first, because my body was often the source of so much pain. But the only way to actually be safe was to turn toward the pain, not away from it. I practiced a meditation when I felt panicked or anxious. I would visualize myself as an ocean. On the surface were frightening storms and turbulence—raging winds, lightning strikes, and huge waves. Then I would imagine myself swimming deeper down into the ocean of myself. The farther down I swam, the calmer it became. I reached all the way to a smooth and sandy ocean floor. Rays of light filtered in, like enormous beautiful curtains dancing in the body of the water. I would notice the colors change from stormy grays on the surface to rich and tranquil sea greens near the bottom. I would change my breathing to be deep and rhythmic. Several counts to inhale and longer, slower counts for the exhale. This regulated my heartbeat and brought calmness into my body along with the visualization. I would imagine the sounds around me muted, as if I were underwater. With the lightning far above me. I would look up at the surface and from this safe distance I could watch the storm far away, not so frightening. Sometimes I would stay like this for a long time. Other times I learned to take quick trips here, when I needed a calming or relaxing moment between classes. In time I learned to take the exercise further, and I began to see what was triggering me, or what was frightening me, and I would ask the storms for answers to my questions. What do you fear? Not knowing. Why do you assume you don’t know? Because I’m just a kid, and I keep getting into jams. If you knew the answer, what would it be? And often the solution was right there in front of me. Start at the beginning. Get a job. Take a step. Take action.