It's pretty close to midnight but the mountains are cold and
clear as I look down upon them. The plane circles around the Chugach mountains
aiming towards Anchorage airport. Here is this place I have read and dreamt of enough
and within a few minutes I will be setting foot on its hallowed soil. All the
stories of adventures – bears, sled dogs and the great outdoors are going to be
within reach. National Geographic magazines and articles; all those Discovery
Channel documentaries - this was the base of them all. It was easy to imagine
myself as an explorer here, pretend that I wasn’t this urban mollycoddled inept
Indian. That there was so much natural light around at that time of night was a
reminder of the strangeness of the land I was in. Even though everything looked
similar once I set foot on the ground, it was hard to fight the feeling that
nothing ever would be the same.
[Part of the Series: Notes from the Last Frontier]
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