Fear and trepidation

In August after having spent three glorious months in Alaska camping out in a field of fireweed at Anchor point with Mt. Iliamna and three other volcanoes as a backdrop and a couple of nights at Chena Hot Springs and a hosts of spots in between my wife and I began to wonder if there were someway that we could extend our stay a little longer. Suddenly a door opened and we were invited to house sit for the winter in a beautiful house up on the hillside on the south side of Anchorage. Having heard from many of the locals about how global warming was effecting the winter climate and that in the throes of deep winter the thermometer might occasionally dip as low as minus ten but overall winter had become downright balmy by Alaskan standards, my wife and I decided this was an opportunity that we could not turn down. A hundred plus miles of lighted cross country ski trails with moose and winter hares and a lynx ot two as spectators summoned up long forgotten memories of Thumper and blotted out any thought of unpleasantries. Now it is early November and we are sitting in our house in New Mexico facing some stark realities. Anchorage has already dipped to minus one and a plus two. What could we have been thinking? Thumper dancing on a frozen lake? A search of the web revealed a harsh truth—Anchorage has 182 days of 32 degrees or below. The bitter winters of Jack London and Robert Service were for real. While I am not from Tennessee but a couple hundred miles to the south and recently removed to New Mexico I could have been Sam McGee himself. Dear old Sam died in the frozen north and his body was burned in a furnace and when his friend opened the door to see how the cremation was going, Sam sat upright and told him to close the door because he had not been this warm “since I left Tennessee.” Now here we are headed north to join the company of Sam McGee. Many of our forefathers walked into an English pub for a night on the town to wake up a bit groggy and halfway across the Atlantic murmuring to themselves “what could we have been thinking?” Now I don’t know about you but I am not nearly as hearty as my forefathers who by the way had to have a nip or two of grog to make it through Sunday services. Tomorrow we leave for the land of Sam McGee with a great deal of fear and trepidation and no grog.

If there is such a thing as reincarnation just maybe Sam McGee is I.

--the ghost of Sam McGee

# posted by north to alaska @ 1:38 PM