For those that don't know, Fairbanks is a small town right in the middle of Alaska. If you've a mental image of snow-capped mountains surrounding cabins, warm yellow glowing windows, with small trickles of smoke walking towards the sky, on a frozen lake with giant christmas tree in the middle, you are sadly fucking mistaken. If you're looking for picturesque, you might try Anchorage, Denali, Juno, etc. Tall, mountains and evergreens, caribou and moose, and ponds surrounding the airport filled with small planes that have pontoons rather than wheels.
Fairbanks looks a lot like High Point, the place I was born, with a population of about 35,000. Yes, on clear days you can see the alaskan range in the distance, but there is no looming crags, or mouth-agape vistas like you find in Denali. Instead you find Mcdonalds, Burger King, a small mall, a 14 screen theater, too many bars, car lots, Blockbuster and just about ever other normal small town staple that you probably drive by everday.
What makes my mind return to it isn't the glaring differences, but the small peeks behind the curtain that during the course of a normal, ho-hum kind of day, alerted me to the fact, "yes, Todd, you are in Alaska". I would Frequently see 7 foot tall moose walking across the lawn of the local Burger King. Though it was too bright in town, many times on training exercises with my unit, out in the wilderness, we could see the Aurora, and I swear to God it looked 10 feet away and so vibrant I could actually 'hear' the lights as they folded and blended like nothing that I've ever seen. In the winter, in the parking lot of my barracks, it would be about 20 below zero and the ice crystals would actually stop in midair as the street lights shone down and through them it looked like giant pillars of light reaching 100 feet in the air. Rabbits were the size of bulldogs. Metal posts in every parking space offered outlets in which to plug in an extension cord from the front of your car in order to keep the oil pan and battery from freezing. 100,000's of thousands of dollars would be bet each year on when a small tripod would fall though the ice as the temperatures warmed. Darkness for months, or twilight rather, as the sun would tease and come just to the horizon threatening to peak over, then slowly rotate through-out the day, taking a lazy lap around the world before settling back into complete darkness again. People playing golf at 2:00 in the morning because the same fickle sun would not go down in June.
Of course what I miss the most is the snow, like clockwork every year. It used to snow here in NC every winter (by snow I mean a legitimate covering of the earth, not this pissant flurrying and small shower stuff we have now) but those days seem to be gone. Val said maybe we should move to Canada when Kira is older, since we both miss the snow (actual proof of winter) and the fact they are the only country whose economy is thriving right now(along with a surplus budget and universal healthcare, imagine that). I don't know if that will ever happen, but i do think now and then of taking my family up to Alaska during the winter sometime, to see the small things I was talking about. Let them go to the only state that makes fun of Texas for being small. Eat giant pancakes and see the borealis. Watch a bear on the side of the road and some emerald lakes and sapphire glaciers, so old the oxygen trapped inside them has turned them blue. Maybe we'll take a sled.
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