Precious Female Friendships

It’s a small book, and one that I would never have picked up had a female friend not told me that it was a ‘must read.’ “Just trust me on this, you will love it,” my boomer buddy Kim promised. Well, boomers, I apologize for being so sensitive to the title, but I think you will identify with me here. The title is Two Old Women. The author is Velma Wallis, a native Alaskan Athabascan Indian from an isolated place above the Arctic Circle called Fort Yukon.

If I may digress for just a moment, I’ve been to Fort Yukon. It was an optional trip offered when I was tour directing in Alaska. Accessible only by air or off-road vehicle, it is nothing like one would imagine. I was there in the summer, and it was a muddy, rather depressing place with lots of skinny dogs and kids four-wheeling as I recall. The folks there were very friendly, and I do have a fond memory: standing by the Yukon River as this huge waterway carried icebergs rushing by so fast it was hard to even take a picture.

But back to the two old women. It is a story set generations ago as nomadic natives struggled to survive an unbearably cold, sparse winter. This particular band feels compelled to abandon two women aged 75 and 80, as they struggled to find food in an unforgiving frigid land. If you’ve watched some old movies about these peoples, you probably already knew that this was not an uncommon practice. In this novel, the two women decide to try to survive rather than succumb to the cold or the predators.

Calling on all the skills learned from birth, these women embark on an adventure we can barely imagine while forging a bond of friendship they had not previously known. In the long, dark hours they spend in the shelters they build, they tell one another stories and share intimacies from their long lives.

I found myself thinking about what it would be like to spend a year in such close confines with another woman. I’ve discovered that no matter how different another person may seem from me, that if I take the time to have meaningful conversation with them, that we are more alike than different. The human experience often meets in unexpected places.

Here, I’m thinking about conversations I had with women when I volunteered at a shelter for the abused. No matter where we are from, or what our backgrounds may be, women share a bond that goes down to our chromosomes. I believe that I could have a real conversation (one in which both parties actually listen) with most any woman I could encounter. I see this as one of the benefits of getting older and learning from the mixed bag of lifetime experiences I’ve lived through.

One thing I regret is that our generation of females couldn’t have the kind of adventures the boys had in the 1986 movie “Stand By Me.” I watch it every time I see it as I’m channel surfing. I love seeing the bond the boys have as they strike out into the wilderness and encounter numerous obstacles in their quest to find a dead body. Could you imagine doing this with girlfriends? No, slumber parties, watching scary movies, and scavenger hunts was about it for us.

After seeing the 1991 movie “Thelma and Louise,” my friend Sue called me up from Michigan and said that we should take a road trip. She flew down, and we hopped in my little convertible and headed for Key West. Happily, this was long before the cruise ships docked there, and it still had that aura of an isolated tropical small town. We had a few adventures along the way. Nothing too daring. Neither of us owned a handgun, and we didn’t run into anyone quite like Brad Pitt. But for we two boomers, just going where the road and our whims took us, and taking our time, it was exciting.

For me, the best part was the conversation we had on the drive to and from – just letting streams of thought flow with a trusted friend. As the quote goes, “…having to neither weigh thoughts nor measure words.”

I suppose one of the greatest gifts I could imagine is having a friendship such as that -  such as the ‘two old women’ had.

#   #   #