It is so hard to wrap my head around this place they call Alaska. What makes it feel so foreign? I let the questions float around in my mind and don’t even seek answers. Here in downtown Anchorage, a grid of streets hold multi-storied hotels and other concrete structures that seem to be erupting from the earth. At 10:00 at night, the sun still shines. Half the people of the entire state live in this small city. I still do not know Alaska at all.

The floatplane ride we took yesterday left me with a deep sense of quiet that has silenced my thoughts. Without warning, our plane gently hovered lower and lower and finally came to rest near a shoreline. We walked a plank to land. Sounds of babbling water, views of purposeful salmon and the swaying of wild flowers blowing in the breeze are the music and images that still linger. Alaska, like the universe, may be too vast to understand, but I want to keep trying.

On a floatplane above glaciers, valleys and streams

downtown Anchorage 10:30PM

earlier that day from the plane…what a contrast!

The evening’s catch.

Janet and Joel