Alaska moves now into winter.  After such a long and brilliant summer, my heart almost forgot about winter.  An equal entity.  Like good and evil, or male and female.  Summer and winter.

I'm considering the idea of taking more control over my life, and when I consider that, I look at this Alaskan winter as potentially my last.  One more winter, then one more summer, and then goodbye.
It's like jumping out of an airplane:  you go all out, knowing you're safe, and that it won't last forever.

My life, like that of everyone I know, is in a particular stage of senescence.  An early stage, to be sure, and to be hopeful, but, senescence none the less.  My body, my virility, even my mind - these things aren't as sharp as they were a decade ago.  And why should they be?  I don't want to cheat time.  We have our day, and then, that day is over.  And the next day comes.

I think about returning to the southwest and settling there.  Working part-time in primary care.  Having time to sleep in, or stay up late, or drink hot tea leisurely with something to read and my cat; time for mid-week hikes; for three, four, or five day road trips; for hunting; camping; touring; bouldering; piano; photography.  Time for friends, old and new.  And time for a home, for a wife, and for a family? The latter are such giant dreams they are difficult to know.

I wanted to write about what I've been doing up in Alaska, and share some of my thoughts about this place.  It may take me a while to get there, or, I might get to the point.

People will sometimes say, in earnest or with the hope of propagating the idea, that all places on Earth are beautiful, perhaps equally so.  I've explored that idea here and there.  I don't see the beauty of all places, but probably all places where the built environment is limited.  Nature really can do it better.  Has taken me years to figure that out.

There are many environments in Alaska, many of which have little in common with one another.  It is such a huge piece of land; of course it's a diverse place.  

The tundra in particular really is beautiful to me.  It's the landscape mostly ignored by the business of selling Alaska to tourists.  And it's the place where Alaska is most definitely sold to the business of energy.  No judgement here and now about that.

It's the starkness and openness of the tundra, macroscopically, along with the exotic tiny units that are it's building blocks, that interest me.  Fully aware of the relative nature and thus limited value of the adjective 'exotic', it still feels like the right descriptor.   Nothing strange or new about the tundra to the people and other creatures who have lived here for thousands of years, but in context to what I know and where I'm from, it is exactly those things.

I'm just learning the first things about the tundra, and these little things promise me a lot more discovery and wonder.  It's a fleeting place, as a prime example, and of course this makes for all sorts of make-the-most-of-it moments.  If I could sit still long enough, I'd write pages about the bog blueberries alone. If I ever got a handle on the birds of the tundra - where they're from and how they live their breeding lives out and when they decide to go - I'd lose myself trying to present that subject in a form that could fit into anyone's modern schedule of rushing around.

When I look out at the expansive rows of slopes that stretch for miles toward the modest ranges of mountains over there, or, the blue sea over here, I see inward.  Here in myself I see a scattered collection of life ways that would never fit here, that would have no place and would not last more than a season.  It becomes obvious, put plainly, what unnatural and therefore unhealthy things I'm stuck on.  The tundra, I guess, feels therapeutic.  

This is how I must begin to do it - describe my experiences in Alaska.  The cheerful, linear, and so easily accessible format of something like a photo-blog, my initial plan, I discarded as soon as I stared at a blinking cursor on this plain white screen.  The pictures I have don't tell much of the story.  At least not the back-story. Very few things are easily accessible here, and there has been little immediate bliss for me in Alaska, so offering up that feeling for a reader seems totally unsatisfying for me.  So that's it:  I embrace the opportunity to color your impressions of what things are like here.  Having been someone who couldn't see the beauty for too long, I'm afraid you'll miss it too, if I don't spell it out.  But, with an atrophic mind for writing these days, I'm not sure if you'll understand.  Will I get you to where I want you to go? Ha.

So much of the built environment of Alaska, especially rural Alaska, looks overwhelmingly shabby at first.  I don't think many people can get over this sentiment quickly, or ever.  It has taken me years to appreciate this genuine, beautifully pragmatic, aspect of human life here.  It makes me chuckle to see so many of my assumptions and paradigms turned over on themselves, as confusing as that can feel.  Spend some time in the tundra, and it feels lunatic to consider replacing anything for reasons of form alone.  You don't build beauty here; you live amongst it, and you add or subtract to it in small ways.

Wealth has a completely different meaning here, and a facade that betrays you, if you apply the dominant explanation for wealth to the people or built places in Alaska.  I have never considered that a non-cash economy existed anywhere on American ground, but, here it is, persisting underneath.  I have this vague feeling that potential answers to many of our modern social diseases might just be here with it.  No more about that, though.