Anchored into Place (written 2010)

            The sun broke through the horizon and threw its first beams of light onto the city of Anchorage.  The midnight blue that had dominated the horizon now brightened into the break of yet another day, awakening the city.  The Chugach Mountains, now halfway covered with snow, turned from a deep glacier blue color into whites and browns with the oncoming sunlight.  The sun would rise up, but would not reach the heights directly above the city in the season of fall; and each day would lose 35 minutes of daylight descending the sun closer to the southern horizon in its path toward winter.

            I arrived in Anchorage in late September, and with the sun only appearing mostly to the south, it felt like I had settled upon the top of the world.  With exception to the hearty few that clung to the barren branches, the deciduous trees had already lost most of their leaves, and the season’s shade cover was now left scattered and dead on the earth floor.  In later years, I would find myself earlier in the season with tripod and camera, heading up to the nature center in Eagle River and taking colorful hues of red, yellow and orange, mixed in with the greens of spruce, and other coniferous trees; scenery that would parallel New England.  Fall, being among my favorite seasons, I was happy to arrive in this new destination I would later call my home.  Anchorage had become, like many who’d arrived before me, a chance for a new life.  I stood intrigued with the dust of snow on the mountains around me, and a mystique began to grow in wonder as I thought about the wilderness beyond the metropolis of concrete canyons around me.  I hadn’t come to be a part of Anchorage, but of Alaska, and the lands that surrounded the largest city in the state.  As I settled into my new home, I began to wonder about living in such a large city and how it co-existed with the natural environment.  Has humankind driven out the wildlife, or has nature found a way to work within and coexist with man?  How far would I have to venture forth to see the wilderness that I had been longing for; that wilderness that filled my dreams and romanticized my imagination.  I had to start somewhere to seek and sort it all out.  So long as I lived in the city, it would be my foundation, anchoring me to the opportunity to explore within and beyond the city limits.  For me, the adventure was only beginning.

            Despite the population of over 260,000 people, Anchorage is teaming with wildlife.  Black and brown (grizzley) bear, moose, dall sheep, wolves, coyotes, lynx, beavers, bald eagles, Canadian geese, as well as other migratory and resident birds can be seen from time to time within and around the city.  The most common sightings of wildlife for me were moose.  It wasn’t uncommon to see a gangly moose sauntering down Northern Lights boulevard, or standing idly in someone’s front yard.  The first season I lived in Anchorage, a moose cow wandered into my yard one weekend before the snows started falling, and took a nap there for a few hours.  I didn’t take it personally.  I figured this had been her home long before I got there and in some strange sense I saw a touch of wilderness in my own back yard.  She would come back into my life at seemingly strange and significant moments of my life as the seasons went by.  In a way, she became a long and trusted friend that I would remember the rest of my life.

The Chugach Mountains dominate the city, and I learned quickly it gives the inhabitants there methods of measurements in several ways.  Because the mountain range covers the entire eastern side of the city, it provides a compass for which to find your way through town.  As a barometer, it also provides the announcement that winter is on its way.  The peaks will begin showing a snow line that during the fall, will continue to descend down the mountain.  When it reaches the valley levels, Anchorage will see its first taste of snow for the winter.  The locals call this “termination dust”, terminating summer and announcing that winter has indeed arrived.

Deep within the winter months of November, December and January, the sun peaks out over the southern horizon, remaining low in the southern sky as if nothing more than to give the residents of Anchorage a reminder that the light of the sun does exist during the darkest months.  It rises for only a short 4 hours on the winter solstice, December 21st, coming up at around 10 a.m. and setting before 2 p.m.  The lack of sunlight seems to add to the winter cold that shrouded the area. 

            As winter set in, I found myself habitually watching.  Despite the fact I lived in a regular neighborhood on the east side of town with not much to look at besides the neighbors across the street, I found myself looking out the window in constant vigil as if something would happen:  a snowfall, a wandering bear, the return of my moose, or some other adventure I wanted to be a part of.  I didn’t want to miss a thing.  On top of my evening vigils, I found habit enjoying coffee on a Saturday morning looking out at the falling snow, contemplating life, and looking at the change in mystery around me in wonder for much the same reasons.  I also wanted to find meaning in it all.  I wanted this world to change me, cover me just as the snows did all around my little cave called home and immerse me in the wilderness of the unknown.  But I wasn’t in the wild.  I was in the city where humankind has replaced the natural habitats of the native creatures with skyscrapers, houses, bike trails, airfields and hundreds of miles of road.  These things were the comforts and survivability of humankind, but in a way I saw them as flaws, those things that have scarred the land and laid waste to what was.  As I watched the snow come, it brought nature back close to me.  It falls where it will and covers all of the man-made flaws in the world around us.  It blankets us in change, and enables us to hibernate in some way from the contrasts of vivid reality. 

            Late one evening, I stopped to look out the front window at the night sky.  It was glowing from the city lights and enhanced by their reflection upon the snow.  It had been a clear night, cloudless, and stars could be seen through the city haze.  There were also two green trails not unlike aircraft smoke trails that glimmered dully across the sky.  I hadn’t seen the Northern Lights before, and I suspected we had just been introduced.  I wanted to see more.  I jumped into my truck and headed a few miles north of town to Arctic Valley drive, a road primarily controlled by the U.S. Army.  It was far enough away from the city lights to give me a better view of the sky.  As I got out of the truck and looked up, the two green trails had mutated into shimmering streams of crystal white that primarily formed what looked like a huge cone, a floating teepee of sorts.  It was like I was looking up into the center of the cone and could even see stars within the narrow funnel at the top.  I looked down for a moment long enough to notice the world around me was glowing brighter.  I looked up quickly to see the cone had changed to what looked like shards of ice and glass showering down upon me as if it would crush me in certain impact.  The awe-inspiring act lasted only but a moment before retreating back into long streams of light, ever changing, reflecting upon my very existence.

            The winter of 2001/2002 was the longest in memory, when thinking of actual cold and snow.  Although the initial dustings of snow occurred in September, the first real storm to substantially remain hit the Anchorage bowl on October 11^th.  We didn’t see the bare earth again until May the following spring.  It was also the winter that shut the city down for 2 days.  Sunday March 17^th.  Even after two years in Alaska, I still found myself on my evening ritual of looking out the front window.  I turned off the lights in the house and glanced out at the street below.  Everything seemed quiet.  Deep snow blanketed the yards of the neighborhood while piles stacked up from the constant need for plowing.  The houses seemed dark, a ghost town, as if I were the only one there. 

            Then I saw movement across the street in the dark between the houses.  Looking closer, I discovered it was my friend the moose cow.  I hadn’t seen her in over a year and wanted to go out and see if she had some stories to tell.  I went out on my deck for a closer look, and not only received a better visual, but an audio impact as well.  The sounds of hooves beating the snow-packed ground along with her snorting could be heard as she seemed to be aggravated by something.  She was facing a young sapling that stood in the yard near the street as if the tree were a threat.  She moved to the other side of the tree by the road, but never gave up her stare of the threatening oak.  As if startled by something new, she ran a full circle around the tree and disappeared back into the darkness between the houses.  She didn’t even say good bye.

            After a moment of silence, I returned to the warmth of my living room resuming my evening duties.  Moments later, I glanced out the window to see the initial flakes gleaming within the streetlight.  Within minutes, they fell thick and heavy.  It took no time for the plowed and tired-scarred road to be covered in a thick white-gray blanket.  It continued to snow deep into the night.  I got up once in the middle of the night to discover it was still snowing.  By the time I woke in the morning, over 2 feet of snow had fallen.  Everything seemed different.  The world had indeed changed.  Roads were gone.  Houses were hobbit holes.  Cars were mole hills.  The 4 foot chain-link fence in my side yard no longer existed, completely buried in the glacier that seemed to have fallen overnight.  Schools were closed.  Grocery stores and businesses were closed.  The military bases were completely shut down.  The only businesses that remained open and employed for the next two days were fire, police and medical services.  And snow plows.  They wouldn’t reach my meager street for over a week. 

I sat in wonder at the event of the past 12 hours, the moose, and the snowfall.  My moose must have felt the oncoming storm and was gearing up for the impact.  It all seemed connected somehow to the natural order of things.  Moose come equipped with waterproof fur shielding the cold along with long gangly legs giving them the tools to tramp through thick snows with heights taller than most animals to forage into the higher branches in search for winter sustenance.  Mankind, on the other hand, has had to use brain and technology to find shelter and transportation, and warm clothing to survive winters in the arctic while destroying the very territory that remained with the moose for thousands of years before the onslaught of human entrapment.  She had warned me of the upcoming snowfall.  I also began to wonder why she had infringed upon my neighborhood.  Or was it I that was infringing on her world?  If we continue to spread out, build more roads, buildings, mine sites, oil rigs and automobiles, what will become with the last remaining wilderness that is Alaska?  Will the moose, lynx, bear, muskox, caribou, and the arctic ground squirrel become extinct in this part of their world?  Was the city pushing out the wild places, or had they adapted in some profound way to coexisting in the world we live in? 

            The thick snow had added to the mystique that had become my Alaska.  It had become part of the adventure.  I spent these moments in wonder, thinking about the changing world, and how snow covers up the flaws of man and returns to nature: the natural order of things.  Northern Lights open up a dark winter replacing the sun with mazes of shimmering light.  Reflections of snow off the city also plays a part in creating light in a dark winter.  As I drove my man made four wheel drive suburban through the unplowed streets of my neighborhood and stopping to help out a stranded Nissan, my moose friend gave me yet one more appearance to cap the event of the past 12 hours.  As I stood there next to the open door of the Nissan, she bolted back out between the same two houses and ran two circles around our vehicles in the street.  She was almost close enough to reach out and touch in her race around us.  She then disappeared up the road.   It was the last time I saw the snow fall like that in the city.  It was also the last time I would ever see that moose.

            When I think back on those cold dark winter months, I often wondered why I was so attracted to living in such a place when many want to retreat to the golf courses of Arizona and California.  Perhaps it’s the transition from seasons that creates a parallel to life as we follow the transition of the sun and the tilt of the planet.  Perhaps winter was that time to slow down, see the world from a different perspective, gaining perspective and appreciating the warmth of new life in springtime.  Perhaps it’s just a change from knowing life in the days of summer when fishing, hiking and camping are a constant, and the season gave me time to slow down, relax and reflect.  As I write these words, I’m more in awe that the winter world I experienced up there brought nature to my very doorstep, lit my skies with the Aurora Borealis, and gave a comfortable place for a moose to nap.  Whether it be change or adventure, I will always remember that time as special, and it will always keep me grounded within myself,  and anchored into this place.