sonora2sonoma

My first trip to Alaska, now nearly forty years ago, was borne of an urge to “get out of Dodge,” an attempt to flee the scene before my ex-wife did likewise, taking the kids with her, to Idaho, with her new boyfriend. It was 1981 and I was sorely in need of a change.

I had grown up in the same house, in the same neighborhood, from infancy to adulthood. Over those years I’d formed many friendships only to see each of my friends move away, leaving me with the sense of loss such forced separations often engendered. 

This time I was determined not to be the one left behind—the pain would have been too great—so I decided it would be me who would do the leaving. Friends in Alaska, Nome to be exact, had been encouraging me to visit for several years. I had always resisted the journey because the idea of leaving someplace temperate for somewhere colder seemed a crazy choice for a person who, like me, worshipped warm weather.

But it was the first of October, and, with the prospect of winter’s cold drawing nearer regardless, going north seemed, under the circumstances, not too great a price  to pay for a change of perspective. And besides, wasn’t the temperature a matter of relativity anyway?  So, I went.

The trip involved a number of “firsts” for me. I had never before flown on a commercial airliner, had never ventured so far from home, and the only international boundary I had crossed at that point was the one between the US and Mexico.

Excited but apprehensive, I boarded an Alaska Airlines flight bound for Anchorage with a layover in Seattle to change planes. I was surprised to learn the distance I would travel was nearly 3,500 miles. Since much of the distance from Seattle northward would take place over water, I paid rapt attention to every detail of the flight attendant’s explanation concerning  the safety measures in place in the event, however unlikely, that we might experience an ocean splashdown.

My close friend and host-to-be in Nome, Dave, had used stark imagery in enticing me to come to his part of the world. Dave, a former Marine paratrooper turned general contractor and aspiring bush pilot, embodied an ironic pragmatism in his approach to life. I remember him telling me, by way of dangling what he viewed as an attractive proposition to persuade me to come visit, “Come on up. We’ll have some fun, do some flying and, if we’re lucky, we won’t crash and die.”

Oddly, considering the turn my life had recently taken, his sales pitch hadn’t sounded that bad.  

When I deplaned in Anchorage an experienced, if not seasoned air traveler, Dave was waiting for me, having flown down from Nome in his single-engine Cessna 180. After stowing what little I had brought with me in the plane’s cargo hold, Dave proceeded to pay the mechanic for the work he’d just completed on the aircraft. Sensing my curiosity, Dave explained that the plane required two alternators, and that one of them had malfunctioned on his trip down. Asked if that sort of thing happened often, and if it was something to be concerned about, He assured me it wasn’t any reason for worry.

The approximately 500-mile flight to Nome, Dave told me, would take two days, with a stopover in a village called McGrath. We would be largely following the route taken by the famed Iditarod dogsled race. We would spend the night in McGrath with friends, he explained. McGrath sat practically in the center of the sprawling state, on the banks of the Kuskokwim River.

(To be continued)

Tim Konrad