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The last word on the Last Frontier

By Kyle Callahan on The Last Frontier

I'm no longer in Alaska.

Dawn and I left Anchorage on Thursday at 11:30 p.m and landed in Chicago at 8:30 in the morning. With the way the sun was working up there (I haven't seen a full fledged "night" since some time in late May), we had wonderful views of inner Alaska for the first 45 minutes or so. Besides the mountains, we flew over a huge-ass glacier, and not just the end part of it, which we saw on our Spring Break trip, but the whole "river" part of it, the part that actually carves the mountains and makes them as beautiful as they are. What's more, we had the fortune of having the entire horizon be a blaze of red for the first three hours of the trip. It was sunset for most of it, but then we got far enough east and south that the sunset became sunrise...and what a beautiful sunrise it was! I was kicking myself for not packing my camera in my carry-on.

But anyway, I'm not in Alaska anymore. And the one thing I'm going to hate now that I'm back is the question, "Hey Kyle, what's Alaska like?" So I'm going to talk quickly about it here and leave it at that. If you have any specific questions feel free to ask, but please don't ask anything about Alaska in general. That's just annoying.

First, let me say that I don't feel like I can speak any truth about Alaska, for several reasons. The first is that the state is built for people who love the outdoors: hikers, skiiers, climbers, campers, kayakers, fishers, hunters, etc. That's not me. It used to be me, or rather, it used to be the person I tried to be, but it's not me. I'm more of a stay inside, read a book, write an essay, talk to friends, drink a beer, smoke a bowl kind of guy. I don't hate the outdoors, not by a long shot, but I like looking out a window more than I do walking through mosquitos. So anything I say about Alaska should be taken from that framework. It's Alaska, mediated.

What's more, it's not even Alaska. It's Anchorage. And saying that Anchorage is Alaska is like saying New York City is the United States. It's simply not true. If you go even a couple of mile outside of the city, into the suburbs of Wasilla, for example, where my friend lil' Jessie took us to meet most of her family, you get the sneaking suspicion that Anchorage is more "America" than it is "Alaska." That could have to do with the fact that "going out" for us usually meant going to Applebee's or Friday's, two chain restaurants that look and feel the same regardless of your latitude, but even those times when we were out on the town, at actual Anchorage bars and restaurants (including one actual Anchorage gay bar), I never really felt like I was in an exotic place, the place you're probably thinking of when you imagine Alaska.

That's not to say I never saw the Alaska I imagined, because I did. But I saw that Alaska only when I was "away" on trips, not in the place where I was "living," if you get what I mean. To say I lived in this imagined Alaska is a lie. All I did was live in Anchorage.

So, the answer to "What's Alaska like?" must begin with, "I don't really know."

But what I do know is the weather, which is pretty much the first thing everyone asks about. First, it just wasn't that cold anyway. At least not this winter. My winters in Vermont have been much colder. We had about one or two weeks in Anchorage where it was cold, but we're only talking about 5 degrees, plus or minus, of zero. That's cold, but I was expecting it to be fucking cold. Like, 5 degrees, plus or minus, of -30. We didn't even get that much snow!

Put simply, the weather was beautiful about 95% of the time we were there. Even when it rained or snowed, it came about that time when you were sick of the sun and blue and craving something to fall from the sky, so even those days were beautiful. During the months of May and June, when sunsets are something you have to stay up for, it got to the point where I was craving a thunderstorm...to no avail. There's not much passion in Anchorage weather.

That brings us to wildlife. We didn't see any bears, but we saw a shit-load of moose. They're in Anchorage the way chipmunks are in Boston. They're not everywhere, and every time you see them, you still look and point them out to someone else, but after a while, you don't really stop what you're doing to watch them.

We didn't see any bears, contrary to what you may have heard. And we didn't see any wolves. We did see some eagles. But unfortunately, we did not see any whales, even though we spent some time at a place called Beluga Point. When we flew out on Thursday night, we saw something down in the water, but I'm pretty sure it was a boat, not a whale. Dawn really wanted to see a whale.

I wish she saw a whale.

All right, that's about it. The rest will come out in long pointless stories that no one will listen to.