Home Away From Home

Gooooooooood morning, Fairbanks! Arrived yesterday afternoon to find the temperature a startling 79 degrees Fahrenheit. For the first day in a week, I am without road details to pass along apart from having to catch myself from keeping up with the two fighters taking off from Eielson Air Force Base yesterday. The runway parallels the road, and before I knew what was happening, the speedometer read 80 mph! I let them go--soaring off into the wild blue--and continued at a more sedate pace into town.

Back in Delta Junction I stopped to photograph the end-of-highway monument (and a pipeline pig), so I have now--officially--trekked the entire Alaska Highway from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to Delta Junction, Alaska. This was my fifth trip on the Highway, and each pass puts me in greater awe of the accomplishment that constitutes the construction of this road. To punch even a crude road through 1,500 miles of wilderness (in nine months) is mind-boggling. That it has become practically a superhighway is even more amazing.

With each mile I relaxed more. I love the city, living there, enjoying its stimulation and the proximity to movies, bookstores, shopping, but it is on the journey through the wilderness--hundreds of miles of nothing but trees, mountain vistas, cloud-filled sky--that I feel my soul, compressed by people, noise, obligations, schedules, expanding into completion. With no distractions, my eyes can see outward and inward to horizons not visible in the city.

The road, as metaphor, is hackneyed, and to say more sounds vaguely hysterical. But metaphors, like cliches, work because, while overworked, they're true. Perhaps they become cliches because by nature attempts to put experience into words fail. Words are our stab at description of the indescribable. Elusive, the thoughts flit into the brain only to fly on before achieving form--and so remain inchoate.

So here at home 3,500 miles from home, at the end of the first adventure (the road trip), I breathe freely and smile at the approach of the next: the summer's work in Denali National Park. I'm refreshed and rejuvenated, if unable to say completely how.

Excelsior!