Years ago, I drove from Alaska down the Al-Can into Washington, Oregon, and then a long straight shot to the east coast. I could have flown back to my parents' house - it would have been cheaper, certainly would have been quicker - but I had something to prove at the time. I had been an Alaska resident for one year and had packed that year full of lean times, cold cold nights in my cabin, a car accident, mono, and finally a worsening shoulder injury which proved to be the final straw, forcing me back East for arthroscopic surgery. After such a long hard winter, where I had created a life in which I could well have disappeared (off an icy mountain road, into some creep's truck) without my friends or work thinking much of it, I felt like I had changed as a person. I was more level, more grounded and cynical, and more self-assured despite it all. I drove out of Alaska to prove to myself that I wasn't running away, to make of a hard situation something epic and incredible. I think I was 22 at the time.
I lived out of my truck for almost 3 weeks with my dogs riding in the covered bed. I carried everything that mattered to me in the space of a little Nissan 2WD (not recommended for winter in Alaska, fyi). And although the Dakotas and, strangely, Pennsylvania nearly drove me out of my skull with their long sameness, I'd go back to that time in a heartbeat.
The movie 'After Life' imagines that after you die, you pause for some time at a quiet way station (in the movie, a peaceful private school-like stone campus) where a case worker helps you select your most treasured memory. You reenact that memory, and that moment - and everything you lived through up to that remembered point - is what you take with you into the next world. You retain nothing of what came after.
There are several quiet moments in my heart, but I could see choosing an icy May morning when I woke up in the Yukon Territory with just myself, my dogs, and my truck and that brilliant Arctic silence.
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