Maggie Goedeke deferred an interview as she prepared on a recent day off to head out on her sailboat across the lake to a trailhead where she planned to hike to a glacial lake to see the icebergs that had calved off from the main glacier floating in the lake.
“It was stunning,” Goedeke said, speaking by phone from her home in the rural coastal city of Homer, Alaska a few days later, and describing her experience.
The city has been home to the 2007 Parsons High School graduate since she completed college. She attended Wichita State University and got a BSA in music theater in 2011 and then immediately started physical therapy school from which she graduated in 2014.
The combination of degrees may seem odd, but Goedeke said both were a natural fit for her, and both have served her well in life.
Music was cultivated in Goedeke’s life growing up. Her grandmother, the late Kay Lawrence, was a music teacher with the school district, “forever.” Both her parents and grandma sang in the church choir, which led her to do the same. Mrs. Charlotte Ecoff was her music teacher in grade school at Garfield, and the late Jim Kindall and his wife Ruth both strongly influenced her in high school, in music and theater.
“I was just kind of funneled in that direction,” she said. “Music was part of my life, but so were sciences. I grew up on a farm. We had animals. I wanted to be a veterinarian for a while.”
Ultimately, she chose people over animals, as you can coach people and help them make better choices, she said. One of the experiences that helped solidify her interest in the sciences was the chance to attend a science camp at Emporia State University when she was in middle school, with the help of a grant.
“They had chiropractors come talk to us. We did sutures on a fetal pig leg… all sorts of cool stuff. We got to visit the Wolf Creek Nuclear Power Plant while we were there. It was really cool,” she said. “So, coming out of middle school we met some chiropractors and they did some muscle energy testing using some magnets and did things like candy versus vitamins and showed us there’s non-medication and non-surgery ways of healing.”
After her sophomore year of high school she left her part-time waitressing job to work as a physical therapy rehab aide at Labette Health, “before the CORE was the CORE and it was still located in the hospital.”
“The women who work there, they are all so amazing, and were absolutely so incredibly inspiring,” she said. “I learned how to be around people who were in pain and talk to them, because it’s kind of scary if you don’t know how to talk to somebody directly post-surgery. That’s really intimidating. So, watching those women work, their passion, and seeing them performing skills I developed are always helpful in any type of job, in an interview or anytime you meet somebody new. You put on a smile, put your best foot forward and read what they need in that moment to get engaged in conversation and it will be interesting to them.”
“Science was always a huge part of my life, but music was also a huge part of my life, so I got the first degree in music theater because I wanted to do it and I wasn’t sure what else I wanted to do at that time,” she said. While pursuing the music degree, she was still taking hard sciences, fulfilling prerequisites for chiropractic school, which served her after she received her music degree and pivoted to becoming a physical therapist.
“If I had only stuck with the sciences, I don’t think I would be as good of a physical therapist as I am with the arts. I’m really grateful for that diverse background,” she said. “It was greatly valuable. Of course, the arts are so much character building, and it ties so much into the real world. I’ve used so much of what I learned. …Lots and lots of life skills.”
Her story of her career path wound down, but what about what led her to move to Homer, Alaska?
“I jokingly say I watched a little too much ‘White Fang’ and ‘Iron Will’ as a child, but in second grade at Garfield Elementary, Libby Riddles, the first female Iditarod winner, came to my school and we studied the Iditarod that year. Mrs. Pendleton, our teacher, made this huge cardboard, life-sized Iditarod dog team and sled.”
After that, Goedeke said, “There was always this little spot for Alaska in the back of my head.”
“It turns out, Libby Riddles actually lives in Homer, Alaska and I got to meet her again. When I came up and told her she came to my grade school, she thought that was super cool. She was super nice,” Goedeke said. “It was this crazy full circle moment to have that. Grade school, little did I know, tipped me in this direction.”
Once there, Goedeke said she 100 % fell in love with Alaska.
“Homer is a town known for being at the end of the road. We are on the road system, which is a big deal, so I can get in the car and drive four hours to Anchorage where there is the big international airport,” she said. “We live in a town where there is no Walmart. There is like a small general store. Mostly, you are just in the great outdoors. Being in connection with nature is what really makes the winters bearable.
“Every season has its beautiful gift. In the fall, September-November, there is usually a week or two of ice skating on what we call wild ice. So going out on the glacial lake, we ice-skate it. It’s accessible. It’s like two miles across the lake to get to the glacier. We take a boat across the lake to get to the trailhead. You hike in and then you ice-skate two miles to get to the glacier and it’s just absolutely magical. It’s the only way I can describe it,” she said. “In winter we are usually cross-country skiing. We have good snow years, and we have like 30 miles of ski trail that is groomed by a local community group that grooms the ski trails. There’s Alaskan wilderness views of the mountains the whole time. It’s just gorgeous.”
“Springtime is always exciting because the sunlight is coming back and you are like, ‘Oh, I’m going to ride my bike,’ but it's pretty muddy and kind of gray and the plants haven’t popped yet,” she said. “We all live for summer. Summer is the best. In June, summer has started for us. Everything turns green. The baby moose are all over town because the moose have adapted and learned if you give birth in town there’s less bears. Fishing starts. Salmon fishing, that’s a blast and we get to fill our freezers.
Goedeke said all the people that she knows there love being outside, which is the primary draw for her.
“There’s a saying in Alaska, ‘There is no bad weather. There is only bad gear.’ We don’t care if it’s raining. We don’t care if it’s snowing. We don’t care if it’s going to be 20 hours of bright blazing daylight or darkness.”
When not at play in the Alaskan wilderness, Goedeke is happily at work.
“I’m very excited. Right now, I am in a big transition, shifting away from working at the hospital and into doing my own private practice. I also am in the process of starting up a sailing charter business in Homer,” she said.
She first sailed in 2015, bought her first sailboat in 2017 and got her coast guard 6 pack charter boat captain license in 2022.
“I’m working on that and learning what it is like to be a business owner. It’s a huge learning curve. I’m still learning so much as my interests keep expanding because everything is so exciting. Everything is interesting to learn. I feel I am always growing and always in process because there is so much more to do,” she said. “I’m thrilled with where I am at and thrilled about where I am headed.
“If you had told me when I was in high school that this is where I was going to end up, I’m not sure I would have believed you.”
To the young people still in school who do not know yet where life will be taking them, Godeke passed on a few words of wisdom.
Firstly, she said, “I think knowledge is really power. Public school gives you access to knowledge. Take advantage of all the benefits you get as a high school student, like being able to take college credits for a cheaper rate. I was almost a sophomore (in college) I think when I started at the university and had to pay full price.”
Secondly, she said “It doesn’t matter where you get your knowledge from. Anyone can teach you something. That is definitely something I have learned up here. It doesn’t matter what the package looks like. Everyone has something to teach you. Everyone knows something you don’t know and you can learn from them.
Lastly, she added, “Don’t be afraid to dream big, because knowledge of some kind can take you anywhere. Be a sponge.”