21. Alaska

            Alaska is an unbelievable space. I think it is representative of American ideology in every way:  frontier, open spaces, beauty, and unfettered wildness. I love all of that.  I love the Alaskan coastline in the southeast where the rain endlessly pelts the unending forests.  I love the mountains that reach as far to the sky as they can, frozen in their stature as glaciers slowly bring them to their knees.  I love that the rivers turn to ice in the winter and give access to villages that in summer become marooned in swamps and clouds of mosquitoes.

            I have been to the tundra and walked across its spongy surface watching clouds of mosquitoes rise to ravage my face in spite of deet dreams of shooing them away. Grizzlies have shaken the school bus I rode into the wilds of Denali National Park, curious to see if we’d come out to play.  A moose has towered over the car I was in and I almost felt I could drive between her legs.  While the sun might momentarily set in Fairbanks in August it doesn’t get dark enough to get much sleep.  And the whales breaching the surface of the bay not far from where glaciers calve causes me chills just in its memories.  Nothing is small in Alaska, not even the jokes about Texas.

            While part of me gets a little spooked by the great expanses where I might be the only person for miles, mostly that just thrills me.  I would cower at the darkness of winter but probably not the cold (I am from Idaho…).  In winter I could see myself turning alcoholic like so many others have.  But overall, I just love that huge expanse of beauty stretching from the rainy southern coasts to the frozen arctic and I just want to go back for another trip to its beautiful expanses.  And even while Alaska or that type of place may not be everyone’s cup of tea, we need to be grateful that it’s there and work in any way we can to keep its landscapes and cultures intact and as pristine as possible because they balance our world.