Musings in a Familiar Land

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I can’t believe it snowed in September. I remember my first fall in Fairbanks. I arrived October 11th in a 737 on a dark evening with one piece of luggage. The sky was still thinking about dropping snow and ice cracked beneath my shoes as I walked across the parking lot. A week or so later the sky finally made a decision and the brown earth was put to sleep.

Two inches of the stuff fell Thursday night. It brightens the world, reflects the moon at night, and dampens the tips of my shoes. I love snow and the activities it brings, but detest the cold that also follows. The day is still warm enough to melt the roads and trees, but at night the air crackles with a dry intensity as the ground hardens and forms its own miniature terrain of mountains and valleys.

It may be my imagination, but there may be a taste of Christmas in the air. Forget Halloween and Thanksgiving, two holidays I will miss while being in South America, I am taking on a new life, or putting the current one on hold.

On Monday the snow made me buy my ticket. I spent most of the morning and some of my afternoon researching cheap flights through Orbitz and Kayak and other miscellaneous search engines. Tickets with layovers for interesting cities kept popping up, one particularly with stops in Las Vegas, and Mexico City, but when the “fees” added nearly $500 dollars to the already posted price of 1,500. I stayed with itineraries that included stops in Chicago and Houston, despite the adventure of other bookings. I am now $1,364.79 poorer, but feeling relieved that after months of telling people my plans, I am now entirely committed and am no longer worrying about what people would think of me if I didn’t go. Not that this trip is for the creation of bragging rights, but explaining to everyone over and over my reason, or reasons rather, for canceling the trip would have been depressing and in some form a reflection of my failure to act when fear grows too strong.

We all experience fear, however, in the inability to sleep in the week leading to departure, The sudden jump in heart rate when you remember something you forgot to do or pack, or perhaps the gentle musings of events missed with family and friends back home. Not that travel doesn’t give the individual amazing memories and friends, but leaving a place where one has nested can be a sad affair.

Before the snow two weeks ago, even before the frosts, I visited the Botanical Gardens on campus to photograph the flowers before they died. Men and women, caretakers in dirty jeans and Carharts, were uprooting potatoes and cabbages for the winter. I circled the paths, photographing snap peas and wild roses, feeling warm in the fall sun and thinking that winter was very far away.

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Photos

These...
...poor little buggers are going to die soon.