Shaped by adventure

Jan. 22—Five years removed from his arresting days as a Pullman High School student-athlete and several years after ditching his college football career and the scholarship it afforded, Ryan Harms embraced a mantra that would guide his life.

The year was 2004, and Harms was in his early 20s and a newbie bartender in what locals call Glitter Gulch, Alaska, a short stretch of tourist taverns and souvenir shops just outside the northeast boundary of Denali National Park.

This would be the first of two summers Harms worked at the Overlook Bar and Grill, having been lured to Alaska and the new adventure by his older sister, Kassandra, an Alaska resident who had gotten word of the opening and thought of her little brother.

Day after day, Harms said, tourists would crowd the bar. Many of those tourists, "interesting people from all over the world," Harms remembers, were older and physically unable to hike Denali's trails or experience its beauty beyond what they could see a few steps from their vehicles.

They would meet Harms, young and adventurous and fit, and become flush with nostalgia and perhaps regret.

"They would all tell me, 'I wish I would have done this when I was your age,' " Harms said. "My immediate thought was 'Why didn't you?' That experience absolutely shaped me. I knew then I wanted to experience life while I was capable. I wasn't going to wait around to do the things I want to do."

Fast forward many years and many adventures to January 2022. Harms is back in his hometown of Pullman, renting a room from an old friend and substitute teaching in his old school district.

Now 41, Harms is "willfully underemployed," as he calls it, perhaps unknowingly becoming part of what is being called the "Great Resignation" of 2021, where millions across the country are reassessing work and life goals, most leaning — if they can make it work — toward quality time instead of the almighty time clock.

In June, Harms left his job as a physical education teacher and basketball coach in Galena, Alaska, a village of less than 500 people along the Yukon River. The city has just 16 miles of roads, most of that leading to the city dump, Harms said. Galena is inaccessible by car. Travel in and out of the village is by small aircraft and a brief season of river barging each year.

Aside from its remote location, the pipes in Galena tend to freeze solid in the winter and Harms swears temperatures dropped to 76 degrees below zero last winter, though his neighbor claimed it was only negative 65.

Because of COVID-19 and concerns about the spread of the virus, Harms said Galena was essentially locked down in 2020. Harms did not leave the village from March of that year until June when he packed up his belongings and made his way back to Pullman to visit his parents, who he had not seen for two years.

Jerry and Rosalie Harms, both retired teachers, served their entire careers in the Pullman School District. Jerry was a high school English and history teacher, while Rosalie taught third grade at Franklin Elementary School.

Harms said he is committed to taking one school year off to see if he will stay in the "lower 48" or go back to Alaska.

The Galena job was one of three teaching jobs Harms had in Alaska on and off for the past decade, working at the middle school and high school levels teaching English.

Yet since his days of bartending near Denali, Harms has lived anything but the traditional college degree-to-day-job drudgery. Awakened in Glitter Gulch to the possibilities life provided, Harms has taken full advantage.

After two years as a student-athlete at Eastern Washington University and two more — sans the athlete — at Western Washington University (see related story), Harms has been a walking adventure.

After Denali, he tacked on two more summer seasons bartending near Glacier National Park in Montana. Those winters, he spent traveling to Australia and New Zealand, at one point backpacking for three months.

Harms then spent 2006 and 2007 in a study abroad program in Oaxaca, Mexico, returning to Alaska in 2007 to help his sister and her husband build a cabin in Fairbanks because, he said, "there were skills in construction I did not have."

The next year, he was a substitute teacher in Healy, Alaska, followed by two years in Mexico training to be a Yoga instructor, a decision that makes some sense only when he shares the backstory.

In high school, inspired and enamored by the PBS show "Wai-Lana Yoga," Harms said he taught himself Yoga, feeling it would give him the "muscular balance" he would need in athletics. "I got into flexibility pretty heavy," he said.

Harms parlayed his Yoga knowledge into running a Yoga study for a season back near Denali in 2009 while beginning work on his master's degree in teaching, which he achieved in 2010 before embarking on his teaching career.

That career was interrupted for a six-month stint soaking in the small beach-town culture of Costa Rica while he earned a certification for teaching English as a foreign language. Toss in several other trips overseas and many years intentionally living in a dry cabin — in part to test how little water he could use — and you have a good sense of the Ryan Harms experience.

But for now, Harms appears content back home, enjoy his hometown, substitute teach to pay the bills and spend time with his family.

"Life comes with tradeoffs," Harms said. "I don't have children, I'm not married and I don't have a 30-year-mortgage. Material consumption is not shaping what I have to do with my time. Right now I need to give my parents that time. It's a luxury I am very happy about."

Staszkow can be reached at cstaszkow@dnews.com.