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This year for vacation we traveled to the top of the world, or at least the most “top” I’ll probably ever get as I realized that dog sledding through the Artic Circle was never going to appear on my top twenty list for must-have experiences. Fairbanks Alaska then, would be the most north we will ever travel. About a hundred miles shy of the official Artic Circle. Still, that was enough to give us summer light well into the night. At midnight, it was indeed, still light, and Thomas, who is our intrepid wake up dude, says that the sky dimmed down to twilight during the hours of 1:30am to 4:00am and then the sun came right up again.
When the natives talk about the summer, they always mention the solstice and how much light they were able to enjoy. They make passing comments like “yes, on that day we had 22 hours, 45 minutes and 5 seconds of light.” Or, “we are now losing light at the rate of 9 minutes per day.” I’m sure that just as there are probably many words for snow, there is a corresponding consciousness of how much light is available on an hourly basis. If you are plunged into days of darkness during the winter, I’m not surprise that the light takes on enormous significance.
The light was wonderful in volume but not necessary quality. The sunlight is while, thinner than the thick golden light we enjoy in California, or the heavy, moisture filled light of the mid-west. And the light made me restless, I felt I shouldn’t waste perfectly good 11:30 pm light and should go for a walk. But I didn’t I dutifully and regretfully closed the curtains of our hotel room and went to sleep.
The new Centennial license plates here in Anchorage (more cars, Anchorage is the biggest city) depict a long line of men, black silhouettes marching up Chilkoot Trail to the Yukon to discover gold. I just saw that very photograph on Wednesday for my class because Jack London traveled up to the Yukon for gold, but Jack only stayed a few months and mostly in the bar at that.
Our room at the Anchorage Marriott overlooks the bay and the mud flats that will suck a person down into the mud like quicksand and then the tide, which is the highest in the world, reaching 40 feet back and forth under the moon, comes in at a terrible speed and the mud trapped person will drown. We were fascinated by this, and had we been on a Catharine Bramkamp tour, part of the tour highlights would be to race right down to those mud flats and throw large rocks into this mud to watch what happens. But we spent the first part of our trip on a Holland American tour (three days before we boarded the ship) and we had no control over our lives for that amount of time.
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