We’ve just returned from our third cruise to America’s last frontier. Each time we go there, the realization that we’ve but touched the fringes of it sinks deeper.
For it is so vast that travel writers exhaust superlatives in vain attempts to describe it. After all, it encompasses 580,000 square miles (as large as England, Italy, Spain, and France combined). It has more shoreline than all the rest of our states combined. It is blessed with 150,000,000 acres of national parks and forests, wildlife refuges, and other designated preserves; 38 mountain ranges, 3,000 rivers, and 3,000,000 lakes. Of its 15 national parks, only 5 can be accessed by road. Much of it is barely charted, let alone touched by the human foot. Indeed, of the 670,000 people who live there (about the number who live in Fort Worth, Texas), almost half of them live in only one city, Anchorage.
And it changes dramatically with the seasons. That reality became evident during this our first spring visit to Alaska. Especially was it evident in towns such as Juneau and Skagway, that we’d experienced previously only during summer or fall; during those seasons, they seemed to be rather typical semi-frontier coastal towns, but now, in the spring, against the backdrop of towering snow-capped mountains, it felt like we’d suddenly been transported into the Swiss Alps! It was a magical experience.
But why so few people? Part of the answer to that question came to me in my research for “A Thousand Miles to Nome” (the fascinating epic story of the Great Serum Run of 1925, when dog-teams alone represented the difference between life and death in that northwesternmost Alaskan town, in the midst of a deadly diphtheria epidemic). It was in the dead of winter, and ice had cut off all access to the town by sea until May—only by dog-sled teams could the life-saving serum make it through in time. Of the ten lectures I gave to the SAGE group on board Royal Caribbean’s Rhapsody of the Seas, this was the only lecture open to the entire ship. In that lecture, I noted that, during winter months, added to the bitter cold and frequent blizzards, it was dark 20 out of every 24 hours—only the hardiest and bravest could stand it. Offsetting this, of course, in the summer 20 hours of light each day made it difficult to sleep.
Not surprisingly, given our fascination with Alaska, our seventh story anthology of The Good Lord Made Them All series will feature Animals of the North. It will most likely be released by Pacific Press in January of 2011.
Wednesdays with Dr. Joe 