Alaska,,Where Mother Nature Lives
Alaska Field Notes · Foreign Land
Where Wilderness Is Therapy
Glacier Bay, Juneau and Ketchikan: blue ice, rain country, living mirrors, and the wilderness that reduces the ego to its proper size.
The Call
Marjorie Glacier: Living Geology
None of these landscapes are ugly because they are natural and wild.
I learn geography by travelling on ships and geology the day after a huge event. Earthquakes, hurricanes, ice, rivers and glaciers move every day somewhere on the planet.
Answer the Call
Connected to Everything in the Universe
When I attempt to pick out anything by itself in Alaska, I find it connected to everything else in the universe. Yet I feel my smallness because of its vastness.
The wilderness is therapy. Only by going alone in silence—without baggage and buffets—could I truly enter its heart.
All other travel, including ship travel, can feel like karaoke travel: an imitation of complete immersion. Yet it is still worth doing. I can hear the ice-sheet music of a glacier calving and the bay written in river lines.
Foreign Land
Wash Your Spirit Clean
Trials
By the Time I Recognise This Moment
By the time I recognise this moment, this moment will be gone. But I will bend the light and pretend it somehow lingered on.
I am not swimming with sharks in New York City. I am keeping company with glaciers in Juneau. Rain, cold and ice are able to remove every bit of conceit, reducing digital narcissism to zero.
My analog eyes do not see our digital world. Internet—or InterNOT?
The Deep Trial
Mother Nature: Unconditional Love
Travelling through places without electricity is less a voyage of discovery than a ritual of reassurance.
Nature becomes the only voice: unconditional, indiscriminate and unbridled love for anyone who arrives.
This was my second week in a row under the influence of a river of ice moving slowly into the bay and breaking off pieces the size of SUVs.
Travelling is a life sentence. We yearn for journeys as prisoners dream of rooms without bars. Alaska grants time off for good behaviour.
Comic Relief
If a Man Speaks in the Forest
If a man speaks in the forest and there are no women around to hear him, is he still wrong?
Sometimes the deepest truths are found in the simplest observations. Wilderness strips away pretence and leaves what matters.
Revelation
I, the Land
I know I have the best of time and space and was never measured and never will be measured.
Not I, nor anyone else, can travel that road for you. You must travel it for yourself.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know. Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.
Tranquility Base: the ego has landed.
Conquering mountains, owning the ocean, the weather or the wilderness does not work. Competition breaks us. Collaboration with Gaia begins the idea of I, the land.
The Elixir Approaches
Snow and Ice, Fire and Rain
Nature is more. Man and cruise ship, less.
A fjord forms when seawater floods a valley carved by a glacier. I have cruised New Zealand’s fjords and Norway’s. Tracy Fjord is equally astonishing. The fjords are Alaska’s ecstasy.
Ecstasy means stepping outside ordinary routine and into an alternative reality. Blue glacier ice makes the invisible visible.
Glaciers appear blue because dense ice absorbs longer wavelengths of light and leaves more blue light to return to the eye. The clearer and denser the ice, the bluer it appears.
I met a man named Art. I took him to a museum, hung him on the wall, criticised him, and left.
Juneau · Nature's Living Mirror
Being There
The Call
North to the Future
The geography of bliss is Alaska—and its weather. A change in it is enough to reboot the world and ourselves.
A land of promise can still feel rugged, wet, unfinished and absolutely alive.
11,623 Eskimos can’t be wrong.
Foreign Land
Happy Mountain Raindrops
Trials
As Near the Heart of the World as I Can
As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing.
I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm and the avalanche.
I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.
Ketchikan · Rain Country
No Bad Weather. Only Good Clothing.
The Call
Some Get Wet. Others Dance.
It is the locals—some emos—who simply get wet. Others, poets, go dancing in the rain, hoping to be struck by lightning.
Chaplin liked to walk in the rain because nobody could see his tears.
I do not cry, like Charlie, because it is over. I smile, like the Big Kahuna, because it happened.
Foreign Land
Abundance Without Ownership
Companion Route
Last August in Ketchikan
Return to the earlier Alaska field note and the humour, weather, and local logic that made Ketchikan unforgettable.
Read the Companion StoryThe Elixir
Alaska does not ask us to conquer it. It asks us to become correctly proportioned inside it.The glacier moves, Juneau reflects, Ketchikan laughs in the rain, and wilderness returns us to the scale of truth.