Alaska is stunning

I was raised on an island in Alaska. In the days before the internet, before cable. Hell, it was the Paleozoic. I was pretty much untamed, and lived in the forest, and sea. I remember fantasizing about Passenger Pigeons; the flocks that took days to pass overhead, and the Carolina Parakeet in the vast canebrakes.

Basically about living someplace that was verdant, like the rainforest that covered me like a blanket, but was warm.

When I was 11 we took a trip to France, and, having been isolated from family for my entire life, we took a cross country road trip (our family of five in the front seat of an old Chevy pickup) and visited weird things like 'cousins' (which I had heard of, but never really knew what they were). Finally we got to the fabled East, where were the magical forests of hardwoods, turkey, bear, elk, puma, and the land that fed those inconceivable flocks of Passenger Pigeon.

I don't know how to describe the anxiety of the drive from Boston to New York, where we were to board our flight to France. Prior to this trip I had never seen a highway, and from Boston to New York was just concrete, or so it looked to me. Buildings and houses without end. My eyes frantically darted back and ahead, searching for a tree.

When I saw one I couldn't look away until it passed from view, even when my sisters complained I was jabbing them while craning my head to see what little life I could find, what little life was left, for hours and hours while we careened down the highway...

In my mind, from my experience at the time, I expected the lush, fecund world of life had been battered, but this.. this was.. dead. I had nightmares for years of cities built of bones, roads paved with bones, tables and chairs, cups and saucers, all of human remains...

Maybe seeing the Catacombs in Paris somehow contributed to that. Ever since then I have a clenched fist in my gut, a knot of tension, and an inchoate fear that the doom has already come. That was 1976.

There was a time, in reality, as well as in my heart and head, that all the world was every bit as wild and fertile as the Alaska you picture.

I have never lost that anxiety.

May you never lose that vision of Alaska.

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