Not About Politics

A friend of mine was looking over the blog recently (there's one!) and said that she liked the pictures, which reminded me that I haven't put up any pictures in a long time. So here, for no other reason than that, is one from Alaska:



And to accompany it, a wee story about those halcyon Alaska days of yore. I took the picture about ten years ago, in Glacier Bay, on a trip with the family; but for me it was a return. When I was only a few months old, my dad needed a good job, and his Navy credentials hadn't helped as much as he'd hoped. But then RCA hired him for a very good job--trouble was, it was way deep in Alaska. Eighty miles southwest of Fairbanks, to be specific, deep in the interior, at the Clear Air Force Base. He was hired to service radar terminals watching for those pesky Soviet missiles that never came, so we piled everything we owned (and by we I mean my parents, because I was, as I said, a little young to be piling things other than poop) into and on top of a VW bug, and took off--for New Jersey. (Training first, for a couple months.) After that, then we drove on to Alaska. I leave it to you to decide whether Alaska or Jersey is the wilder place.

(And by the way: if you remember what the VW bug was shaped like, let me just say that strapping a big wooden toy chest filled with your stuff on top of the car doesn't seem like such a good idea anymore when you're going up a very steep hill, you know what I'm saying?)

We were there for a year and a half, all those miles away from Fairbanks, which is where the nearest grocery store was. So you shopped once a month and bought a lot of powdered milk. There was a river between here and there, and no bridge, only a ferry in the summer or a place to drive across the ice in the winter; so if the ice was either forming or breaking up, you did not get across the river for a while and had better hope you bought enough food the last time you went to the store.

Dad had a job; Mom didn't. And there wasn't much to do where we lived (even when I went back ten years ago, the place was little better than a trailer park outside the AFB). When I knocked the radio off the table, afterward it would only get Russian radio, so Mom learned some Russian because believe me, she had the time for it. Television was mostly soap operas and travel documentaries on places like, say, Miami. I think Mom once said that for a while she found herself teaching Spanish to the natives, so if you're ever up there and you encounter a fiftyish Athabascan who speaks Spanish, now you know why.

Snow drifts so high we could open our second-floor windows and go for a walk; bears that would come up and knock on the front door because they wanted to share your nice warm apartment with you; days of eternal sunshine, and nights that would never end. After about a year and a half, we went back to Miami and that was the end of that. But for Dad, it had done what it was supposed to: once he had RCA on his CV, he was pretty much all set.

And for me, despite the fact that I can't remember a bit of it (that's why the trip back was so important to me), Alaska has always had a romantic appeal that no other place on earth has. For me, at least--I don't think Mom feels quite the same, but then she has real memories and not just the amusing stories that substitute for memory in my head.