It’s been over a year since I last set foot in Alaska, and there were a lot of things I’d forgotten about it. I’d forgotten how it feels for one thing.
The ship I’m currently working on allows for a wonderful view that provides a nearly 180 degree sightline from my desk chair. When you look up at the moment, all you see for miles is mountains, and acres and acres of silver water. It looks as if you could walk on it, or take a knife and shave a piece of it off the top to wear around your neck like liquid jewelry.
They say that Alaska and Antarctica are the last bastions of true wilderness in the world. I can’t vouch for Antarctica since I’ve never been privileged enough to lay eyes on it, but I can vouch for Alaska. Things feel different here. It’s one of those places where we’re reminded as human beings that we are very very, new, and very, very small. This land, if we remain smart and don’t end up destroying it, will be here long after the last of us has taken our final breath. Just as it was here long before the first of us cried at the desolation of being brought into the world. Alaska doesn’t care, Alaska just is. In all its stark, sharp, silver and green beauty, it just is.
I grew up studying the works of Robert Service. I had to; it was part of the school curriculum back then. Since then, the only occasion I’ve found to use my (now limited) knowledge of his poetry has been when I operate Ghost Tours in Victoria during my brief excursions shore-side in between contracts.
A few people have come up to me after those tours, including my fellow guides, and commented on the fact that I have more passion and pacing in my voice when I reference Service’s most famous work in the course of the narration. Part of that is due to the simple fact of my acting training, which allows me to read a crowd and place my voice accordingly. But that’s not all of it. A lot of it comes from knowledge – even small, limited, knowledge provided from small , limited, experience. Because truly, you look at Service’s work differently when you realize….there really are “strange things done, in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold, and the arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold”