Evoking Alaska

I think our heat wave has begun to break. Today was only 104 degrees. In the shade, with a breeze blowing, it actually felt pleasant. Amazing how temperature is all relative. Ten degrees cooler is a lot cooler. It reminded me of when I was a teenager living in Fairbanks, and a lot of my peers started wearing shorts when it got up above zero. That usually happened in March. Thirty to sixty degrees warmer is a whole lot warmer. I never got over being a cheechako (non-Alaskan) quite enough to don shorts in that weather, myself.

While the heat raged in the Valley this summer, I read this book. We have a signed copy, as G's dad works with the author, Ned Rozell. ("To G, from your dad's pal," it says.) Dreaming of the Arctic summer was the perfect escape from the burnt grass and the smog. Places I've seen echoed with crystal realism -- Bristol Bay, Denali National Park, Fairbanks, Fox. Rivers and streams, some lazy and wide, some brilliantly icy and rapid. Remote mining claims. Landscapes, sounds, people, all allowed me to rediscover the Alaska I knew. Sometimes I thought I could feel the air the way it felt when the sun was skimming the horizon while G and I canoed the Chena or picked wild blueberries in the hills in the middle of the night, the summer we were engaged and again the year after we got married.

Speaking of that. Even Rozell's frustrating aimlessness and unwillingness to commit to the girlfriend I was rooting for by the end of the book were familiar. I knew guys like that, up there. There are probably guys like that everywhere, but I think more of them congregate in the North and in other wild places. It doesn't impress me. At least he's honest. (I have to say, I'm awfully lucky to have found a smart, sensitive Alaska man without the fear and the semi-drifter status or the machisimo you sometimes see.)

He's honest about other things too. His ambivalence about the oil pipeline and mining, all while he benefits from those endeavors, and not just indirectly. That's a dilemma for all of us, but up there you're a lot closer to where damage is being done. You have to face what you're doing when you drive a car or wear a gold necklace. And you have to decide whether you really think it's worth it. Some people up there decide it's not.

I never traveled Alaska with either the exhaustiveness or the intimacy that Rozell did. But reading his book did make me determined to get my kids up there to see their dad's hometown and the place where God's hand took me to find him. There are a lot of wonderful things to take in up there.

Temperatures in the 70s and clean air are among them.