alaska

When we landed in Anchorage it was near midnight, but it wasn't until we  walked out of the terminal that "land of the midnight sun" really  meant something to me. It was so light that we could see 20,000-foot Mount McKinley in the distance. Betsy pointed out that she could also see what looked like her worst far-north nightmare: a snowfall swirling in the air all around. Not snow, our Alaska friend Venable Vermont assured her, but millions of cottonwood seeds drifting on the summer breeze.

It's five a.m. and I'm in Valdez, a small fishing town and the southern terminus of the Alaska Pipeline. When I walked outside before disappearing into the stuffy one-room business center to complete my weekly column I could see three hanging glaciers around the head of the Valdez Arm. It took us a full day to get here— two hours by car from Seward, and six hours on a slow ferry from Whittier, a town at the end of a 2-mile tunnel through high ragged mountains. We worried we would hate Valdez. An oil terminal, though an important part of Alaska's story, was not something we wanted to explore. We were looking for another part of the story: Alaska's legendary wildness. Betsy wanted to see a wild moose. I wanted to feel, as the painter Rockwell Kent once did, at the top of the world and miles from nowhere.