“Dreaming of Denali”

by Jessica Kuzmier

      The Klondike is a siren that beckons to me. Its allure comes subtly, when I least expect it, such as when I'm putting the trash out, or watching reality TV. When I go to the library, the section that has books on it entices me to sample its fare. When television commercials for it appear, I drop what I am doing and listen with rapt attention.

     I'm not talking about the ice cream bar. I'm talking about the forty-ninth state, the last frontier before you have to resort to Captain Kirk's final frontier. Alaska beckons to me like a prospective mistress tries to lure a man from his wife, or the way a fantasy of a bubble bath far away soothes a woman. I've never been to Alaska, but its majesty and magnitude, from what can be gathered on a third party media like photographs and video, captures my imagination, compelling me to its shores.

     It's somewhat a puzzle to me as to why it's such an allure. I haven't even read Jack London, the big avatar that has inspired people such as Chris McCandless to its land. The usual tales of gold hunters in the nineteenth century are interesting, but that doesn't do much for me. Dog sledding sounds interesting, but not enough for me to sign up for the Iditarod. I'd rather say I Did a Sauna. I'll give the dogs some nice ground meat, hitch a ride on a snowmobile, and see you at the lodge by the whirlpool.

     I don't have a really big yen to take a cruise there, either. I actually was invited on a cruise there, and didn't go. Maybe the idea of the cruise spoiled the point of why I would go to Alaska in the first place, which is to visit a wide open place. I may as well take the Circle Line around Manhattan Island. I've been on a cruise once before, in the tropics, and it was one big noisemaker. Maybe that's okay for a party place like the Caribbean. But it's not my idea of what visiting Alaska would be. It would be like having a drunken Mardi Gras party in Sistine Chapel. From my limited experience with them, cruises take on a life of their own. Maybe if I took a cruise to Alaska, it would become more about the soap operas on the cruise rather than about Alaska itself. How do you think all the melodrama on the Love Boat seems so real?




     Besides, glaciers are nice, but endless repetition of them renders them into nothing more than background noise. They're somewhat redundant when you live in a place like upstate New York, where many times there's snow until May. Instead of basking in the uniqueness of the Alaskan land, I'd be doing a double take thinking I was in Gore Mountain and planning on driving home that night. I'd be thinking I was near Mount Marcy, not Mount McKinley.

     It's the interior that intrigues me, the vast inland of unforgiving peaks that remind man that the Earth isn't as small as technology renders it. The sixteen highest mountain peaks in the United States are in Alaska. Only Colorado has more peaks that are at an elevation of more than 14,000 feet. With about one person per square mile, Alaska is the most unpopulated state in the country, and half of those people live in the cities like Anchorage and Fairbanks. It's the idea that I could walk for days and be the only human being on land. I'd only be reminded that people existed by the air traffic above me. It's the concept of the encroaching monster of civilization being halted, heeling like an obedient puppy to the mandate of nature's majesty.

     That being said, my ideal trip isn't to fly from Albany, then sit around Chicago or Seattle waiting for a layover to Fairbanks, and then once I get there, having to deal with reams of traffic getting to a crowded hotel, so I can book a reservation for a tour bus to get to see Denali Park. Again, not my dream of the frontier. It sounds like going to the Safari Park of Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey. Seeing that the point of going to Alaska is to experience adventure, I want to go by road. The ideal would to be to go by car; Denali Park is about 5,000 miles away from where I live. It would be an adventure just to get there. It isn't like I haven't been that far on the road before; my spouse and I drove round trip from Long Island to San Diego and Seattle in a month's time, logging about 10,000 miles onto our vehicle. The other adventure option is to go by bus or train to Seattle, and then go by ferry up to Alaska's coast. Seattle is a major link to what Alaskans refer to as "outside", insofar as cargo and domestic groceries go. "Outside" is what everyone else calls the "lower 48".

     Once there, I'd spend my time casing the Denali area, though I know Denali Mountain is not a peak that I'd scale any time soon. That's something I'd rather see than conquer. Wild dreams only go so far if one day you actually want to do them. Otherwise, I may as well say that one day I'd like to hitch a ride to Andromeda Galaxy; although, with technology, you just never know. As to when I would go to Denali, it would be mid-September. It's just after all the crowds leave, but early enough to sample some of fall's last glory before winter crashes in for the next eight months.

     Of course, adventures like that don't just show up. They require time, planning, and of course, money. There is also the reality that what sounds great in concept is different when it actually happens. Maybe I'd take Amtrak, and it would derail in the inner city of Cleveland. Or I'd get to Denali, and find it crowded with people who decided to avoid the crowds by going when I did, and I'd spend all my time in Fairbanks because the park's hotels were booked. Not to insult anyone who lives in Fairbanks, but hanging out in a city when you're dreaming of open land seems counterproductive.

     The bottom line is when you have high hopes and expectations for a place, it is possible reality will delude you. Not having ever been to Alaska, I can't speak for the place in detail, but I am convinced it is like anywhere else, in that it has its kinks and pitfalls. The story of Chris McCandless, the adventurer I mentioned earlier, should serve as example enough in this respect. McCandless came to Alaska to live in the wild, and in the course of his expedition, wound up starving to death, all because he made a couple of key mistakes in gambling with his surroundings. This is the ultimate example of expectations going wrong.

     This doesn't mean that I'm completely trashing the idea of going to Alaska one day. I really do want to go, sometimes so much that I drive those around me nuts with talking about the place. But if I don't, it is like I've heard someone say, I'm glad that its wild landscape is there. To that end, I believe that it needs to, at least in part, remain wild, or it won't really be Alaska. Jobs and industry need to be created because Alaskans need to eat like everyone else, but wild places need to rest somewhere on this planet. The idea of a wild place is a comforting one in the midst of civilization.

     In the meantime, in my own backyard rests its own wild domain. Today, the temperature reached a low of 9 degrees below, Fahrenheit. It's up to a cozy zero now. Meanwhile, Anchorage is four hours behind me, and is already 15 degrees above zero, forecasted to get to 22. Comparatively, I'm in more of an arctic refuge than half of Alaskans at the moment. My entire regional area is blanketed with at least a foot and half of snow, and there is more on the way. Maybe because it's home, it doesn't give the impression of wilderness, seeing that it is familiar. But this doesn't mean there is no savage beauty there. Maybe one day I'll go to Mount McKinley, but Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks calls as well. Perhaps what I seek from my Alaskan fantasy is to submerge myself in wilderness, eradicating the seemingly artificial demands that society places on me. To that end, maybe that drive to Gore Mountain sounds like a plan. Just not on the weekend when everyone else is there.