“A land where the mountains are nameless…”

Been trying to catch up on life recently – like that will ever happen – but I want to write. Logging in I saw the return of “Theme of the Week” and it sounds like fun.

The photo above is not mine – I found it online in a Google search and did not save the link. I left so long ago, I don’t have any pictures of my own right now that I can upload.

 

If I could live anywhere in the world, as much as there are certain places that I would love to travel to again, as much as my first thought is “London” or “Giverny,” my heart tells me that I want to go home.

I want to live off of the Matanuska-Susitna River(s), at the base of the Chugach Mountains in Alaska. A log cabin at the base of the mountains, in a meadow of fireweed and lupine, looking over the river.

I want to live in the “Last Frontier” again, where during the winter the sun rose South of me, and in the summer it never set. I want to see moonlight reflect off fresh snow, sending ribbons of light through black, white, and silver birch trees. I want to hear grebes and loons talking on lakes early in the morning, and beavers knocking on docks late at night. I want to watch eagles soaring in the sky, and hear wolves singing at twilight. I want to see the Northen Lights dancing above my head, looking up through them to the stars – in the dead silence, you can hear them, the Northen Lights; in my memories, they sound like static, or satin brushing against itself.

 

I left Alaska in the fall of 1999 to go to college. My family moved in the winter of 2001, first to Arizona, and now to where I went to college and where I stayed for my teaching career – 40 miles away. I haven’t been back since that last Thanksgiving in 2001. The last summer home before college, the places I remembered from my childhood were being plowed under to build houses. The place where I learned to ski, where I watched generations of moose feed on willows, watched generations of foxes grow up and play, where if I sat still long enough the wild mothers would let their babies come close to watch me without fear, it is all gone. The quiet places that I loved are being encroached upon by civilization with no regard for the wildness of the place. Damn cheechakos with no respect for the land, for nature. Flat-landers who think just by building they can tame the wild.

But I have seen bear tracks in my backyard, at *my* fishing rivers, that were so big that spreading my hands wide, I needed both the fill the pad of the track. I have watched wolves watch me and then go their own ways. I have watched thousands of caribou migrate, miles long mass of fur and bodies seemingly to the horizon.

I have known a silence and peace that I have never found anywhere else; a place that either eats you alive or lets you find your true self, because there is only so much you can do when night falls at 2 or 3 pm, and you are left alone with yourself and your thoughts. I know what it is like to be in total night; a darkness so deep you can feel it brushing against your skin, and sometimes so bright, lit by the moon, you can drown in the Milky Way.

I remember the Inuit stories of Caribou Woman, who called upon the spirit of Amorak to help save her people. The stories of spirit animals, and of them becoming part of your soul. I remember when my dreams told me those stories, and I know my spirit guide who will never leave me.

I was raised on myths tied to the land, making the land itself more real, more alive than anything else I can ever describe. I have not been back in 18 years, half of my life at this point, but Alaska is home.

“It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder,
   It’s the forests where silence has lease;
It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
   It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.”

Robert Service is perhaps one of my favorite poets and in his poem “The Spell of the Yukon” he perfectly describes it, the land, the openness, the fullness that comes from being there.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46643/the-spell-of-the-yukon

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December 16, 2017

Beautifully written. I hope someday you will be able to go back to Alaska, even if just for a visit. May that visit be long.

December 16, 2017

❤️

December 18, 2017

Vivid writing about a magical place I long to visit someday.

January 1, 2018

This is beautiful. I truly hope you can go back one day, for a nice long visit, or whatever you might choose.