Alaska…the place of misfits and adventurers…and I am both🤣
Each evening the night swallowed the sun and gave the raven the sun’s energy. He stored this power in his wings, tinged with the blue of Alaskan skies.
–Suzy Davies
In 2012, I was in a position that I had just resigned from a company that had been bought out…the culture became unbearable…and I needed to remove a toxic person from my life…fast
My naivete, empathy, and sensitivity to other people’s pain put me in a relationship with a mentally unstable person…yet I just couldn’t put him out on the street again…he had been living in his car…taking the opportunity…off I went to take him home to Alaska…a bonus of traveling across country and visiting the land of glaciers, wilderness, wildlife…defiantly another crazy adventure that I had gotten myself into…
“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Looking back…I am grateful to have had the adventure…these are a few of my observations…the photos are grainy jpeg’s …yet, hope you enjoy the beauty and memories of one of my “Don Quixote” adventures…as I saw it then…possibly stir you to visit this place called Alaska (from an Aleut word, Alyeska. meaning ‘that which the sea breaks against,’) …for there is no possible way to explain the majesty of this wild and often unforgiving land…where silence can often be the loudest sound…
Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a b**** with a sawed-off shotg** the next. –Kristin Hannah
Sold everything…bought a van and despite everyone’s loudest admonitions …started out across country in October of 2012…taking a lot more time than I originally anticipated…Westward ho…
How fitting that one of the first memorable sights that I remember is seeing the 630-Foot Stainless Steel St. Louis Arch… a monument to Thomas Jefferson and his ideas for America’s westward expansion…how fitting was that…Interesting fact – The Arch sways up to one inch in a 20 mile per hour wind and is built to sway up to 18 inches.
The open road was not singing 99 bottles of beer on the wall …several glitches along the way…most of the country seemed flat and monotonous…until we came to Oregon and Washington…waiting for money to arrive I lay in the darkness listening to the rain and breathed…it felt beautiful…the cool breeze mixed with the aroma of the pines and firs…their tallness enveloping me with protecting coolness…
Crossing the Canandian border…getting passports checked before being allowed to continue on…and then the snow…cold…colder…and coldest…hitting the Yukon… the blizzard started…that’s when I really started to worry that I had misjudged the ability to get through this late in the year…although the Alaskan highway is open all year…there are less gas stations and stores open during the winter months…so the van was stocked with several gas containers…and I kept going…really not having much of a choice in the matter…in for a penny, in for a pound…
2012…First Contact
“The very thought of this Alaska garden is a joyful exhilaration.. Out of all the cold darkness and glacial crushing and grinding comes this warm, abounding beauty and life to teach us that what we in our faithless ignorance and fear call destruction is creation finer and finer.”
— John Muir ‘Travels in Alaska,’ 1915.
…to be continued
So beautiful.