I found the key to my dad’s safe deposit box
Plus I was featured as a Wow! Woman
I went to Alaska this summer to spread my dad’s ashes after he died two years ago. I hadn’t been able to do it sooner because I’d been traveling so much for work the year after he passed and the pandemic grounded me the year after that. Then, in a frenzy of quarantine cleaning, I found a forgotten letter he’d sent to me in 2005 with a key to a bank safe deposit box in Oregon taped to the back. I had no idea what was in the box and I had no recollection of him having sent me the key. After a blood test confirmed I had the covid antibody, I felt safe enough to go and planned a solo drive that would take me from my dad’s birthplace and stomping grounds in Northern California through Oregon, then onward to Alaska.
A couple months before the trip, my friend Kate e-introduced me to Olga Shmaidenko, who’d been driving around the U.S. for two years with her husband. She was photographing and writing about women she met along the way for a platform she founded called Wow Woman. Olga said she wanted to feature me if our paths ever crossed. Turns out, she was going to be in Washington State around the same time I’d be driving north toward Alaska.
We met in a tiny town called Roslyn, about 90 minutes east of Seattle. I felt like I’d found a kindred spirit. She reminded me of a Dutch woman I met in Costa Rica 20 years ago on a terrifying bus ride along a narrow, twisty mountain road in a thunderstorm. We survived and she told me to call her if I ever visited Amsterdam no matter how much time had passed, because true travelers always welcomed each other into their homes. “See you around the world!” she said when we parted.
After Olga took some photos of me around Roslyn, she invited me over for lunch. Obviously, I said yes. We talked for several hours like old friends on a deck high above the trees, Mt. Rainier in the distance. I’d needed to process the extraordinary thing that happened when I opened dad’s safe deposit box before heading to Alaska to spread his ashes. I hate it when people say things like, the universe provides blah blah. But it sure came through with this fellow traveler to help me along the journey.
See you around the world, Olga!
(Story of what happened with the safe deposit box forthcoming!)
