Alaska Immersion

I got back from China with $25 to my name and feeling like my tail was between my legs. I bolted straight for Pelican which somehow seemed like a safe haven. I was awash with emotions and mostly hid at my friend Paula's house for the first few weeks when I was not at work. But the cocoon did it's job and it wasn't long before I started spending time with a local guy of Russian and Inuit background who had grown up there. He was very outdoorsy and loved to go hunting and hiking through the wilderness that surrounded us. In the following months all of our spare time was spent traipsing through the muskeg and wandering deep into the wilds experiencing the natural vicinity of this place in which I had spent so much time but which I had never really known. I grew to be very attached to Alaska and found the wildness and enormity of Nature's boundless beauty to be breathtaking and so healing. We would take a skiff out to the ocean and go wave jumping through the surf then tie up at some remote location on one of the small unnamed coastal islands and wander off into the unknown, perhaps traveling in places no one had ever set foot on before. No trails or paths, just forging through the wild, sharing space with the very real threat of Grizzly Bears, hypothermia, storms that could leave you stranded and unable to return - just a few miles from town but completely out of contact... The danger attracted me. This idea of living on the edge of things. This was one of the things I always loved about living in China as well. The safety of life in America was always one of the things that left me feeling bored and unfulfilled. Ever since I hiked the Appalachian Trail and had a taste of a life where every day was a question of survival - it is like a drug I cannot get enough of. And the untamed quality of life is also intoxicating. There was some part of my soul that was finally rearing it's head with no trails or path burned in it yet - just a miasma of wilderness and uncontrolled emotions pulsing endlessly in a wild dark night. Alaska spoke to me in secret quiet ways. I could stand at the mouth of the inlet and look up at the mountains that stretched all around me up into forever. And the boundless stars made the sky into infinity. This period of time helped me regain my calm, refreshed me with a silence which I didn't realize had been missing during my time in a country with a billion people... It struck a chord in my heart and filled me with a deep love for this quiet corner of the world where everyone knows each other by their first names and would help even their greatest enemy in a time of trouble because that is what you do when death lies just around every corner. Alaska was cemented in my heart in a thousand ways it never had been before and I knew that it would always be a part of me.

I was there from September to December, and then I headed back into the world and spent the winter visiting family and friends who I hadn't seen since I left for China.