6 days….
4 ports….
144 hours….
This late in the contract it’s a constant battle against exhaustion, it’s like trying to swim against a current that’s consistently trying to pull you under. It’s not stress, it’s not anger, it’s just the tiredness born of 7 days a week over the course of a very long 5 months. These days, I crawl into bed and jolt awake several hours later without even any memory of closing my eyes.
But still it’s only a few more days, and then I can attempt to crawl back to something closely resembling reality 😉
We’re in Anchorage today, which surprised me by being a large but compartiviely sleepy city. The streets here are only letters and numbers, the kind of thing you’d normally see while you’re trying to read a map…which makes it surprisingly simple to find your way around – you only have to look for something at “the corner of 8th and C”.
Unfortuantely at the moment the city is cloaked in a thick pall of grey ashy smoke, barely burned off by the determined (and seemingly eternal) Alaskan sun. There’s a forest fire blazing some miles away and the smoke has been carried to directly over the city. Looking out the window it merely looks like fog, but once you step into it your eyes start to water non-stop. Perhaps that’s why there were so few people on the street.
The upside of town being so quiet (and it was, after all a Sunday, so I suppose a bit of quiet is to be expected), is that the museum was pratically empty. It’s been years since I had a museum almost to myself. Although not quite on the level of art galleries, museums come close to being my favourite places to simply exist and – being that this is Alaska – the Anchorage Museum boasted a beautiful exibit of native culture that rivals our own back home. It’s the little connections out here that whisper to you, and remind you that no matter where you are, or how far away, you’re never alone…
Not really…
Not ever…
I’ve needed reminders of that this season, particularly – perhaps – in the last month.
6 more days…