I have gone to Alaska
I have gone to Alaska, and have not written in some time.
I regret the latter, and feel it as another example of me always being slower to reach the baseline goals I set for myself than I would expect – things I plan to do in a couple of days take a couple of months instead. I remember when I was a child, my Sunday school teacher drew a circle on a sticky note, and wrote “tu it” in the circle, and gave it to me – because I would constantly say I would get around to it (whatever it was that day), only I never did. But the more I talk to others, the more I feel this sense of chasing the asymptote of our own expectations is, actually, normal life in this world. At any rate, I am writing now, which is just as well.
As to the former clause, I don’t regret it at all (though I shall miss those in Washington). I moved to Anchorage in June, and I am thoroughly delighted. Obviously Alaska cannot compete with the greatest state in the Union, but it’s immense and beautiful and filled with adorable bears. I’m still perfecting my own bear spray recipe – at present I’m leaning towards a cocktail of salmon oils, fermented berry juice, and honey. By applying this to myself like a cologne, I shall soon fulfill my ambition to receive the world-famous “bear hug.”
I began my trip north by getting a filling at the dentist at seven in the morning. As we all know, this is the ideal state of mind in which to begin a twelve-hour drive. By Canada, the novocaine had fully worn off, and I proceeded up the Fraser canyon, along the river my grandfather spent his whole career on. Once you get past the town of Lytton, currently a blank space wiped off the map by fires two years ago, and climb out of the brown desert of the Thompson canyon, British Columbia just sort of rolls out forever as a green plateau of trees and pastures. I know how to read a map and how to use Google, and yet it was still somehow always further to go than I had thought. By eleven PM it was past dusk, and was actually fairly dark, though I could feel, already, that I was chasing the sun north, and that the faster I drove the slower the sunset would come.
I stayed in Prince George, and turned west the next morning, driving through more pinefield flats and river valleys, until, near the coast, the mountains finally began to get dramatic. It was there, in the twilight on the road to Stewart, that I saw my first bear cub by the road. Unfortunately it darted into the brush before I could take a picture, but over the next couple of days I saw three more bears, two of which were cubs.
Stewart, BC, is a small and absolutely silent town at the head of a very long fjord. Only a mile away, just around the bend, is the southern tip of Alaska (and also the abandoned mining site where John Carpenter filmed The Thing, substituting for Antarctica). I stayed in a hotel that must have been almost as old as the town; the room I was in had definitely been intended as a rectilinear space, but it had since deformed so that the floor sloped in bizarre ways. Across the carless street I found a boardwalk that spanned the marshy estuary, and walked out into the still gloaming, and felt very still.
The next day was the most isolated of the entire trip – just a long journey up the Cassiar highway, past endless mountains. I had to think about where the gas stations were, and the trees grew smaller and slighter the further north I went. But, truth be told, it didn’t feel nearly as remote as one might think; there was no trouble finding services, and the road conditions were excellent given the area. I stayed at Marsh Lake, along the Yukon, and the next day I detoured south along the route taken by the mad rush of humanity that exploded from Seattle onto the frozen gravel bars of the Klondike, in the story which is the founding myth of Seattle.
From the interconnected long lakes and rivers which meet at Carcross, I drove the highway over the snowy mountains, and finally entered Alaska for the first time. Skagway was, unsurprisingly, still a boomtown, only this time the boom is the foghorn of the cruise liner. The place is absolutely filled with tourists, though I was obviously in no position to complain.
Hmmm….
Armed with sumptuous frybread, I briefly scouted the abandoned site of Dyea, which has returned to nature, and then headed back up into Canada, through Whitehorse, to Haines Junction – a tiny town with a good bakery on the edge of mountains so close and big that it feels like the edge of the world.
At this point, the light was continuous; at midnight it was silent, but light.
The next day I drove all the way to Anchorage. By Kluane Lake I passed a desert of dust blasted by the wind of an unseen glacier – a glacier whose recent retreat has completely altered the hydrology of the region, leaving behind a dry riverbed, as water that only a few years ago flowed into the Bering now cuts south through the mountains to the Pacific.
In the final approach to Anchorage, I saw the Matanuska Glacier laid out in the flat valley below the highway, and realized immediately just how different the glaciers are here than what I’m used to. It seemed to spread out utterly unbothered by the warmth of the low elevation, the greenery, even the towns and subdivisions built higher than it. Of course, we know this is an illusion, and I wonder for how long it will continue to hold.
At the end of the road, I made it to Anchorage, where I now live, thanks to the mighty chariot.
