Saturday, August 13th, 2022. 6pm.
Breathtaking. Ecstatic landscape. This is real. Is this real? So many endless hours of dark and heavy sky from behind the glass cocoon of my windshield. So many potential vistas trampled into the mud by the rain. But now, here, even if it doesn't last... just to see it...
Tears sting my eyes. I roll down the window. Shove my head into the wind and yell.
Earlier, 9am. My friend Jamie's house in Anchorage.
I sleep in. Cuddle with Pilot. Post on Hive. Jamie has some family business to take care of before we explore Anchorage.
Pilot and I take a walk.
Grey morning. Rain. We follow a trail to a school. Find bear shit and an amanita and a shy raven that doesn't want to be on the internet.
I'm still shaken from Pilot's near-death experience the day before. Still blue from all the rain and the hormones. But being here feels good. The fear of neighborhood bears is oddly uplifting. The air is fresher here than in most cities I know, including my own. And there are corvids here. So many species. I see Magpies and Crows and Ravens and Blue Jays and I think I even spot a Steller's Jay in a tree. There are worse places to be in a funk.
After our walk we head into town to see the sights before I hit the road again. I feel excited to resume my journey, but sorry to be leaving so quickly. I've missed Jamie, and Emily is such a free-spirited little sprite. Gentle and authentic and excited about all the things kids get excited about: malls, bubbles, gumball machines, intricate little details about the world, funny faces.
Anchorage is a cute city. I decide I want to come back in winter one of these years. Get a feel for the yin side of life here. Part of me has always wanted to live up here, far north. Part of me thinks of it as the home I don't know yet. Maybe the home I remember from other lives, from ancestral memories, if I believe in these things.
Anchorage is also, still, a city. Has its ugly side, like all cities do. Has unhoused native people bundled in cheap blankets under awnings of buildings built by generations of white settlers and conquerors. A horrible wrongdoing for which some people in this culture are still affected. And the continued dysfunction of humanity that perpetuates the concept that it's ok to let anyone believe they don't deserve love, not even their own. I don't have answers, but that doesn't mean I'm blind to the injustice.
And it doesn't mean I don't like it here.
But after a few hours my tour ends. My time with Anchorage is over. My time with friends is over. I give Jaime a hug. Give Emily a fuzzy pink scrunchy and a fairy princess lip balm I bought at the mall.
"Bye, Annabanana!" she shouts as her mom closes the car door.
I stop at the grocery store for supplies on my way out. It's a museum experience, what with the prices and the odd things I would never see in a Portland Fred Meyer.
Then Pilot and I hit the road. We're headed to Denali National Park. Two nights of camping, two different campgrounds. But the ride is rainy. Heavy rain. I can barely see the scenery. I contemplate getting a hotel, but my heart is set on camping, even if it's miserable. The clouds lift a little. I see some mountains, maybe see some hope.
We keep going.
I get to the park around 5pm. Still raining, can't see much. I check in to my camp site at the Riley Creek Mercantile. Outside tourists mill around, charge phones, do laundry, stand about looking soggy. Inside there are souvenirs. And hoodies. I buy one. Put it on and wear it for the rest of my journey. Maybe the rest of the year. It's soft and warm and roomy and it's sporting the mountains I think I will never see. My sulky consolation prize that is in no way related to the excitement I feel in being here in spite of the double damn rain.
One day it will be old and tattered.
Shit, so will I. I'm glad to be here.
It's going to be light for hours, so I decide to see what the drenched DNP looks like. Wind along through woods on an asphalt road. We get out of the woods, and, like magic, the clouds lift and the rain stops.
That's when the yelling happens.
Nothing fancy, just your average
WOOOOO HOoooooooooooooooowhOA
which comes to an abrupt stop as the car in front of me puts on the brakes for a moose family.
I drive us to the end of the road and turn back. The sky gets lighter still. Takes my mood up with it.
Back at savage creek campground I make dinner for the both of us.
Afterwards we wander about in the late, long, northern day, taking it all in before bed.
Eventually the rain comes back. I listen to it patter on the roof of the car while I journal in bed in the back seat, my sweet Pilot curled up next to me.
Read Day 14 here.
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