Couple Days In

The hours between 7:30 and 11:30 PM in Anchorage in May have a strange feeling. People talk about the "midnight sun", but that seems to imply a scouring, bristle-sharp light careening down on whitewashed plains. It is true, the sun does shine at midnight. But until midnight, it does something slightly more than light the world. Sophie and I rode a good 6 miles or so (rounding my day out to a rough 25) down the coastal trail to a rocky beach where the water laps on black skipping rocks and Air Alaska plains fly directly overhead into ANC. As we rode, Sophie spoke about being a kid, about how the things we were doing were all the things you weren't supposed to do as a young child in a perfectly innocent judicial system. Let me explain.

I had eaten an entire loaf of bread over the course of my workday, so by 7:30, I didn't really need dinner. So, instead of finding real food, we had ice cream for dinner - single sugar cones of Mt. McKinley blueberry and crowberry ice cream from a downtown shop. We then rode down the coast, far away from our homes, taking in the water and the muddy marshes and the far end of the bay and the bright sunlight of 9:00 PM shining through the trees. We got thirsty at the beach, and headed home. Stopped by Fred Meyers to get juice, and due to the irresistibly low prices on a 2-1 deal, some candy bars. We ate these around 11:30. All of these things, Sophie explained, were the kind of innocent crimes you would commit as a little child and could indulge in now that you are something resembling an adult. And all the while, the entire city was suffused with the light that shone on us as we rode smaller bikes after dinner was over 15 years ago. The light that shone right before dusk, right before someone called out for you to come home and shot you clean through with the implied knowledge that if you didn't come home right now, something horrible would happen. And that knowing made that last drop of light the most perfect light, the last refuge you had before the kingdom of evening took power. In Anchorage, in May, that single moment of special sunlight lasts 4 hours. The moment that you want to write about, dream about, relive, have every day, is stretched out over 4 hours. The midnight sun shines, but it is more like a midnight dusk. The sun is bright, but it is greenly warm and melancholic. It is mossy. It is fading. And yet it takes hours to fade.

I was writing this poorly organized venture in my head as I rode home from Sophie's apartment on Nelchina and 15th to my new room on McRae, in Spenard. At the time I was writing it, it would have ended with a platitude like this:

"This is a beautiful and strange place, and I hope that whatever I do up here helps to preserve at least part of it that way."

These words were forming, insipid and vague and pudding-colored, in the back of my mind as I rolled down Northern Lights.

"Hey, faggot!"

Hurled out of a shaved head shoved out of a white coupe heaved out of a quivering dusk. I shook a little bit, and slowed down, and kept going. As I reached Northern Lights and Spenard, the clock struck 12. I hadn't been outside for it before. It was midnight. The sun, dim in its bedclothes, was shining pink. Echoing in my ears.

"Hey, faggot!"

So this piece isn't going to end with wild-eyed wonder and pussy-footing promises of the kind so quickly offered, and not without cause, at the first blush of Alaska. There are a couple new things on my mind.

To have this happen after a weird, magical evening is nearly perfect. It is important to remember that, hunt and fish though they may, speak a simpler language though they may, look sternly through my urban walls of expression though they may, they are not our little white brothers. They are regular people. Or, to be exact, they are anything but regular, and hence, they are people. You can love this land and the weather and the strange smiles on the face of nearly every passerby, but you also need to remember that this is the sticks. The city is set in a pearl necklace of pristine wilderness and most of the population can't afford the boats and planes needed to access it. There is a huge problem with meth, gun crime, alcoholism, and poverty. It's beautiful. But it's the sticks, just like any other sticks. It will bite your faggot ass back.

This doesn't make me not want to help. It grounds my desire to help even more. What it really does is ground my desire to work, not to help. The state of Alaska, the city of Anchorage, was doing what it was doing just fine before this Monday when my little plane touched down. Wherever it's going, it's going. From my particular point of view, it's going somewhere unhappy - somewhere controlled by the interests of its strange trinity of guardians, the oil industry, the military, and the fishing industry. These industries, these futures, are bad for the future I want - the green future, the sustainable future. But as I learned not a few times in school, there's no such thing as bad to the environment. There's just change. There's change I don't want, there's change I want, there's change they want, there's change they don't want. "the great CHANGE/dear to all those things not to themselves endeared."

I would not like to think that I am endeared to myself, but it is a difficult thing to lie to yourself about. The fuckhead in the white coupe can burn for his homophobia, this is true, but I owe him at least a bit of gratitude. For waking me up from the natural dream. Today was magical. The midnight sun is magical. But Anchorage is real, Alaska is real, and whatever happens in the next three months will be real.

It damn well better be.