Janet Willie is a nurse at the Midland School in Los Olivos, California and a massage therapist in Bethel. Founder of Bethel’s Shy, Novice & Closeted Art Show, she has two older brothers, a younger sister and a mom who just turned 87. Her dad is deceased.

I was raised in Manitou Springs, Colorado at the foot of Pikes Peak. It’s the 14,000-foot mountain that inspired the poem America the Beautiful. It was what I woke up to and looked at every day.

My paternal grandmother, who was the mayor of Manitou in the 50s and again in the 60s, was one of the first woman mayors in the country. They called her the Carrie Nation of Manitou because she kicked the go-go girls out of town.

My mom, who became a teacher, grew up in Steamboat Springs. She was in a band that marched on skis. My dad who was also a teacher coached a middle school basketball team. He moved up to high school with them. They won the state championship.

My father was a real-deal, no-stuffing-needed Santa Claus. He had rosy cheeks and laughed like a bowl of jelly. My mom was Mrs. Claus. They wore beautiful Santa suit and rode in the Christmas Parade in a horse-drawn sleigh.

My family camped all summer. We would zip our four Coleman sleeping bags together and all get in, including the dog. Later we graduated to a little pullout trailer and traveled to all the national parks in the West.

I graduated from high school in ’79 and then headed to Nevada, Missouri to attend a two-year women’s college called Cottey College. Cottey is out in the middle of nowhere. We were 300 girls from almost all 50 states and nine to 11 different countries.

I spent my first summer in Anchorage, Alaska with my roommate, who was from there. Alaska was stunning. The people were hardy souls. There were outlaws and women who could drink a man under the table. At the bars, you checked your gun at the door. It was like walking into the Wild Wild West.

I worked with a bunch of Japanese men and seven women in a cannery that sent fish eggs to Japan. Japanese was the only language spoken. They were particular. We had to lay the salted egg sacks into boxes with the veins running just the right way.

My next job was an hour away in Ninilchik, which is a small Russian fishing village. There was a big old ma’am with a big skirt and a scarf around her face mending nets and men who wore peasant shirts with ropes for belts. The boats were all different colors. They looked like Easter eggs.

I worked with this guy who was 6’2”. We’d pitch seven to 15 pounders up over our heads and into a metal trailer. I’d be up to my thighs and sometimes my waist in dead salmon. We’d get slime down the back of our necks and sometimes over the edge of our boots.

We’d pitch for eight to ten hours straight, sleep on the lunchtime tables and then start pitching again. We’d fill totes with king salmon and pinkies and send them to Homer to be canned or frozen.

We smelled, but everybody did. They’d sell us a cup of vinegar to throw into our laundry to take the stench out. We ceremoniously burned our clothes at the end of the season. It was a fantastic job.

I went back to Alaska the next summer and had a whole range of crazy jobs. After I finished at Cottey, I enrolled at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks to study National Resource Management.

Like most students, we lived off-campus in a cabin with no running water and an outhouse. We had to ski or hitch four miles back and forth to school. It was 40 below zero for two weeks straight with only two hours of sunlight. At ice cream socials, we had to take the ice cream inside to eat it.

After I graduated, a guy I had met asked me if I would work on his dad’s mink ranch in Kroschel, Minnesota while he went to cinematography school. I said yes.

I lived with Ottie and Dora, who were in their 80s. I fed, cleaned, scooped and cared for 2000 mink, six silver foxes, a couple of raccoons, and a wolverine.

During the harvest, Ottie would break the minks’ necks and throw them into a wheelbarrow. I’d take them to the skin-shack where they were skinned, Then the carcasses went for dog food, the oil for cosmetics, the manure for the fields. From the eyebrows all the way to the toes, everything was used,

Subsequently, jobs took me to New York City. I saw ladies wearing fur coats in Rockefeller Center, people protesting in the furrier district, Hassidic Jews sewing pelts in the garment district and a man who lived in a cardboard box selling little mink pocketbooks and eyeglass cases in Washington Square. I saw the entire circle, which was fascinating.

I spent 10 years teaching environmental education all over the Northeast. Then, I spent my summers in Greenville working for Outward Bound. During the winter, I went to massage school in Colorado. After I got my massage therapy license in 1991, I decided to practice in Bethel.

In 2008, I went to nursing school at Central Maine Community College (CMCC) and then worked for Chewonki Camps on Fourth Debsconeag Lake. I also did a little per diem work at Gould.

On a trip to California, I stopped to see my friends Will and Marguerite Graham. Will was the Head of Midland School. I arrived just as their nurse gave her 30-day notice. A month later I had her job.

I now take the 3,500-to-4,000-mile-long “commute” across the country twice a year. My dog, Lily and my cat, Earl and I explore a different section of the country each time. We visit old friends and then have the true joy of coming back to Bethel. I could not have designed my life any better.