Tomorrow we are on the way. Today there is a little more fear and trepidation. A glance at the Atlas proves to be downright shocking. Anchorage is north of Oslo, Helsinki, Stockholm and Moscow. Not a warm burg among them. The Germans while sprinting to Moscow in WWII had to build a fire under their tanks in order to start them. I have contemplated the possibility that I might have to build a bonfire under our car but there is probably some military proviso that states “do not try this at home on in your garage.” The other geographical note worth mentioning is that are many glaciers to the south of Anchorage: the Harding Ice Fields, Glacier Bay and the Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau. We are not talking Prudhoe Bay or even Fairbanks where it is projected to be minus 15 degrees tomorrow night. It is still November folks. It is far easier to think of former governor Jay Hammond shivering in his outhouse on Lake Clark than to think warm fuzzy thoughts. I know that in the South in the midst of winter it used to be customary to light a page or two of the Sears catalog and throw it down into the outhouse before reposing oneself there but it might take an entire catalog or phone book to do any good at all in the freezing temperature. That should not be a problem since we have indoor plumbing unless everything freezes up. It is not like I have never experienced cold weather. I spent the winter of ’68 in Vienna trudging off to the Nationale Bibliotheque to do research every day and the only warm spot I found was in the lunch room sipping hot kartoffel soup at lunch time. I was in the prime of my youth back then and today I am…well…not. Research tells us that there are two types of people who do not experience cold: the very young and the insane. I don’t believe that I fall in either category. On the other hand going to Alaska for the winter might put me in the second category. But if I am in the second category I should not experience any of the cold. However, since I can definitely feel the cold already it simply proves that I am not insane. Oh! Well! Back to fear and trepidation.

the ghost of Sam McGee

# posted by north to alaska @ 8:44 AM 0 comments

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 0 comments