Is it a spiral galaxy? A pinwheel mid-spin? A comet with icy tail? Which is the best image for the grandest state of all the united?
Alaska.
No more; no less. It is still a mostly untouched and untainted piece of land that is incomprehensibly large at 663k square miles. Sure, you can fit the entire country of France into Texas, but you can fit three Texases into Alaska.
And, oh—it is grand.
I’ve been on a cruise. I’d say it’s not exactly the best way to experience Alaska, but it sure is a proper way to see it. Being on the water lends a distance, a framing of space and the time it took for the land to become itself that being ensconced in the wilderness does not provide. However, visiting a Bald Eagle rehabilitation reserve or a brown bear enclosure like a zoo are nothing compared to seeing both animals wilding in the wilderness.
The people of Alaska are a different matter, perhaps molded into difference by the wolf and the bear, the eagle and the orca. They are as close to the Wild West as you’ll find. A phone call to a local Anchorage restaurant ended with the woman who’d answered saying, “my legs will close only after you come, darlin’!”
Bold, daft, interesting.
There’s a Dakota “Ehy, guys” attitude too, a kind of Anglo chumminess that feels more from Canada than the lower forty-eight. It’s comforting if not convincing. But there is a regional diversity too, like my current bus driver, whose deep Georgian accent makes me wonder how and why she’s wandered up yonder north.
Alaska has a strange draw that overcomes regional habits and displaces everything but your accent and mode of expression, seeming as natural to the state as any for its unusually difficult hardships through 300 of the 365 days. Anyone is welcomed who carries guts enough to try.
Strange energies abound: magnanimous, exhibitionistic, rough. In a poison-you-in-your-sleep kind of way, or slash at your jugular in the morning before coffee—not anything truly unsophisticated for the Wild West. Of course not anymore that, but for a time that has past: one whose brutal history comes back like a ghost every winter to remind them. At its peak accumulation, Juneau gets an average of 350 inches of snow per season. Anchorage can get 700.
A dramatized thread of civility maintains. A sort of practiced irony: “if we had to drum up some outpost justice, it’d be fine, ‘cause that’s how we do things ‘round here.”
But hardship does provoke melodrama, theatricality, falsehood: all the easier to rob you blind when you’re looking too keenly at the entertainments.
Aside from a night in Anchorage (I don’t recommend its charmless transience) and a coach service to Seward where we joined the cruise, once we left port, we traveled south to what I’d call Alaska Minor, that southern strip between Canada’s western edge and the Pacific Ocean. I will return home feeling like I’ve seen more of British Columbia than Alaska-proper. That enormous spiral galaxy of a territory I’ll have left totally unexplored.
On one of our day excursions, we rode in a bus from port at Skagway, deeper into the wilderness and across into British Columbia, to a train that parallels the White Pass & Yukon Route, which was a 500 mile trek to the gold fields during the late nineteenth century rush. Of the 400,000 men and women who took to the trail back then, only 400 of them found enough gold to have validated what was otherwise upheld by high narrative, rumor, and quixotic dreams, a distinctly American Dream to risk life and limb for the prospect of self-enrichment, of complete self-abnegation.
The beauty and terrible expanse of this place—its wildness, its vastness, its indifference to life is fundamentally incomprehensible—ponder just one of its many mountainsides and observe your thinking brain dissolve into the pine scented spirit of the air—and it is only a small sliver of this most majestic and dangerous place.