I fly out Wednesday for Alaska. I’m stoked about my 10 year reunion. I don’t think I was popular in High School, but I belonged to a lot of activities and therefore had friends from all the different social groups. There were 41 people in my graduating class in Valdez, Alaska.
I arrived in town three years after the oil spill and while I was furious at my mother for dragging me up to the ass-end of an arctic state, I quickly fell in love with Valdez, which is classified as a tropical rain forest because of the warm current that keeps Prince William Sound an ice free port all winter. Valdez is a lush, vibrant nook in the Alaskan coastline. The drive in to Valdez is flanked by canyons, waterfalls, and rivers.
When I was fourteen and came down the Richardson Highway for the first time – I thought we’d just arrived in a fairyland. My first winter quickly squelched that idea when I realized I was in fact, in a frozen hell. But for three months out of the year Valdez is to me, the closest thing to paradise I’ve ever seen. June, July and August – as well as the first two weeks of September are the best times to visit. There are greens you never knew existed, and a shade of blue in the ice at Columbia Glacier that I’ve never seen anywhere else. Not even captured accurately on film.
My teenage years in this small coastal town were the best years of my youth. When I reminisce I often drift back to the cliffs over Blueberry Hill, where I would hike with my coffee so I could write near the seagulls and hear the surf below. The small town atmosphere means you can’t get away with anything. Every kid knows the local cops on a first name basis, and you know – everyone knows your parents so, aside from the minor teenage stupidity – crime is virtually nil. Many nights I would climb out my window, and take my notebook down to the small boat harbor where I’d sit under a lamp post and write poetry.
While I’m a bit of a social creature, the opposite side requires solitude to compile and quantify all my sensory parts. Without this time, I’m a basket case.
I can’t wait to see all the people I went to school with. There’s a kind of bond that happens in small towns to begin with, but I believe the extreme bonding of students that have been virtually locked into a place for nine months of darkness and snow fixes a permanence that other kids from larger schools and open country will never fully comprehend.
It can be a love- hate bond to be sure. Yet even still, I wouldn’t move my four years to any other location in the world.
I’ll be staying with my best friend Ambria when I get there. She was my rock when I was a confused and irrational mess. She’s often a pole star when I’m lost. I don’t remember how that dynamic started, but I’m grateful for it. So profoundly grateful.
There’s a lot of healing left to do in me, and I feel like my trip to Valdez is a key. I might just take a coffee up to the cliff to write, or sit under a lamp post and listen to the waves at night. Valdez might not be a fairy land, but it is magic this time of year. With nature that abundant, how can it not be? I’ll try to post frequently as I go, so you can see pictures of the area. If you’re new here, go ahead and click the Photo link on the menu on the right, under Athena.
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