Willing to Go to Any Lengths
The Web Committee is pleased to welcome Brian K. as our guest blogger for March!
Hi, I am Brian, an Alcoholic.
I got sober in 1982 while living in Denali National Park, Alaska…it was known then as McKinley National Park.
I went to my first AA meeting in the Fairbanks Alaska Alano Club, 140 miles north of Denali while there on a grocery shopping trip.
The first summer I depended on my home group of three or four members and an occasional court ordered member, in Healy, AK that met once a week. A couple of us would drive 50 miles north once a week to Clear, AK for a meeting in a guy’s house and 25 miles south once a week for a meeting that no one else ever came to in Cantwell, AK. We had been asked by a village elder to bring the Athabascan Indian band that lived there a meeting. We did it and stayed sober…but the only one who ever came was a curious local preacher.
During the second and third summers of my sobriety I lived 50 miles out in Denali National Park at a road camp and I could only get to an occasional meeting. I joined the L.I.M. or Loners-Internationalists and Homers Meeting and subscribed to their newsletter. I wrote to people all over the world who where in a similar situation. They could not get to regular meetings and got and stayed sober through correspondence. What a gift that was! Every night I would sit down for at least an hour, say the Serenity Prayer and have a meeting by answering letters from my new friends. Several of us would exchange tapes of ourselves as well. This of course was before the advent of the computer and internet as we know it today and I am sure that is a welcome addition to loners now. For the first three years, I would go south for a part of the winter to the lower 48 and take in a lot of real meetings and that felt very good.
The fourth summer I lived there we had the local home group meeting of The Tri-Valley Trudgers and the Cantwell meeting was started up again by a new resident of the town. That however is another story as I also had a new wife and she was in AA as well….we are still married 23 years later and have both been continuously sober the entire time, thanks to our Higher Power and the program and members of Alcoholics Anonymous. One of the blessings I have today is abundant AA here in the little town in southern New Mexico that I live in and can and do go to two meetings a day.
May God Bless all…my as yet, unmet friends. Thanks for listening and thank you for my sobriety.
Brian K.
Truth or Consequences, New Mexico