Summer 2010

I am fixing my eyes on Alaska. For my summer escape. I spent five formative years of my childhood there, from 1971 to 1976, in Fairbanks. I recall well the drive from the lower 48 up the Al-Can Highway, then just a dusty, bumpy path through the wilderness. My imagination tells me that in the 21st century it must surely be paved, modern filling stations spaced every 200 miles on the edge of civilization, through parts of the map of the world that few ever get to know. Towns with names like Destruction Bay, Swift River, Yellow Knife. Names that invoke a past full of men untamed and untameable. I want to be one of those men.

Several plans have bubbled up in my conscious, the wildest and most daring being a drive from southern Georgia (where I currently reside) westward, through the plains states, into Colorado (for a first taste of wilderness) and then north through Wyoming, Montana, and into Alberta. Then I would hitch my wagon to the north star and let it lure me ever northward along the Al-Can Highway. How is it that trips through the wild inevitably lead us back to our childhood?