A trip to Alaska — and back in time

A trip to Alaska to visit family and friends once again — one way to evade this July heat. 

By plane, we’ll arrive in a matter of hours. Forty years ago, this month we loaded up our four elementary school kids — and the dog — and drove a station wagon 2,500 miles to our new state. It took days, not hours. 

You don’t know how it’s going to turn out. 

Alaska was definitely Terry’s expansive dream for our family. I would have stayed in our familiar Spokane suburb. With four decades in the rearview mirror, I can cheer those barely 30-somethings who really had no idea what they were doing, but they braved it. 

The modest home and tidy yard we left behind were an estate next to the single-wide mobile home with the dilapidated front entry — a kunnichuk if you speak Inupiaq. It backed up against the woods — and there were moose and bears in those woods. 

What did I learn from that humble dwelling? Gratitude for shelter and that I could live simply without humiliation. Not sure I’d heard the term “trailer trash” back then, but there’s no such thing. 

We bought a house four years later. One year it nearly burned in a raging wildfire. The close call taught me that everything I have is a gift. That secret pride over anything is such a waste of head space.  

We had more room in our two-story wood-frame house. We filled it with people — especially bringing the world to us through foreign exchange students. We hosted Germany and Japan and Brazil and Azerbaijan. Our kids saw beyond their turf and learned to take an interest in others and value global cultures. 

They grew up tougher in Alaska. Maybe the word is more independent. No cellphones back then. The unlimited outdoors was theirs. I learned to set them free in the right sort of way — no fire-breathing mom monitoring their every move. It built their confidence. They are still fearless. 

I won a national writing contest, scribbling away in our trailer house. I told the story of how I came to embrace Alaska. Living there 14 years I kept writing my experiences for this publication, and they kept publishing. 

It had been my dream to write but I had to trip over Alaska to do it. The Far North gave Terry his dream of all the outdoor adventures he could handle. The 13-year-old boy who had visited his uncle for an Alaskan summer returned 20 years later and was not disappointed.   

The friends we made are the same ones still there who we’ll be making the rounds to see this month. Alaska is like an eagle and once you’re in those talons, it doesn’t let go. Sharing that life makes for deep relationships.  

Alaska threw so much nature at me I can’t live without it now. I learned my limitations. I will not hike off tundra and attempt rock — even if the view is spectacular. I will never get near a cow moose and her calf on foot, after listening to one snort beneath me while I stood on the deck. And probably I won’t paddle a canoe upstream again in grizzly bear country when the reds (salmon) are running.  

This is a handful of the wisdom and experiences I collected before Terry’s career moved us south to Minneapolis — a direction not commonly associated with that city. Should we have moved to Alaska in 1984? There are some dreams worth tripping over.