ON THE ALASKAN RAIL
Looking out the window into a world of wind, snow, frozen streams and mountains (oh, those mountains), you look for anything that just might stand out and apart from the goldenrod and cobalt blue siding of the Alaska Railroad cars.
View from a TrainHeading north of Denali, towards Fairbanks.
When you’re not in your everyday element, you take things at face value ... given the fact that all these images arrive post-filtered through reason and common sense. A tree is a tree. A village, a village. So about 140 miles north of Anchorage, we passed the very small community (I thought 4-5 houses) of Sherman. Smack dab in the middle of what must have been Main Street was a turquoise blue, single story bungalow with bright letters painted across and under the gables: Sherman City Hall. And...this is where looks are (slightly) deceiving: it turned out that the brightly painted house was really just the home of Sherman's only residents ... homesteaders with a sense of humor!
City of Sherman City HallActually, the only housing in Sherman!
The Nenana River is frozen, all right. Well, not so fast. Even though the ice is over a foot thick, covered with snow and glazed over in parts by the high and bitter winds, there’s an awful lot of rushing water immediately under that pale white frozen hide. You notice it when you’re travelling along the river, deep below Healy Canyon....train track above, frozen water below. What is awesome ... is its beauty. The ice shimmers with aquamarine luminance due to the glacial runoff and the minerals it carries, transforming what ordinarily is pale (or dirty) white ice into a beautiful azure, cutting a blue-eyed path through the canyon, up from Denali and north to Fairbanks. At times there are big openings, free of ice, where you glimpse the rushing water that has been there all the time. Of course, I couldn't resist transposing these colors into dynamic monochrome, bringing out the lines and curves, light and shadow.
We continued traveling well into the backwoods ... the jumping off point for explorers, hikers and climbers heading to Denali and Mt. McKinley, as well as those just trekking through this awesome geography. In fact, the train stopped seemingly in the middle of nowhere, in a thicket of woods bookending the tracks. Five hearty souls disembarked from the supply car as we bid them safe travels and farewell. Actually, by this point of the daylong trip, my father and I were two of about four passengers left onboard heading up to Fairbanks.
Disclosure Alert: About 5 years ago, I was one of those trekkers ... but at quite a different location. A guide and I were flown into the McKinley range and landed on small Upper Coffey Glacier, just east of Ruth Glacier and the face of the “great one”. We spent two days there, camped on a pristine glacier bowl ... pure white light from all directions and hiking with crampons, ice pics and buddy lines. Awesome! BUT, that is another story for another day.
And the tundra ... all around us. The landscape was a mixture of whites and blacks; of horizontal snowscapes and vertical tundra branches. It’s very easy to look for wildlife because of the lack of trees reaching for the sky. So desolate, barren and uninviting. But, again, it’s not all that it seems. Obviously, it is rich with wildlife. All you have to do is look up from your laptop (I can’t believe I’m on my computer in the midst of this beauty!) and you see tracks indicating life.
But, wait, didn’t my father just say something. Yes! He’s been looking for bear all day. Or at least some sign of nature’s critters ... and then he spots "reindeer"! I keep telling him that it’s highly unlikely that the two big-antlered specimens he saw were, in fact, reindeer as they’re pretty rare up here. More often than not what he saw were a couple of Alaskan caribou. Their tracks are all around, as they forage for food by digging and rubbing their snout into the ground searching for greenery.
But, you know what? Our memories are made of more than facts. They are a combination of what we see, what we want to see and what we may later call flights of fancy that, in their totality, fill us with stories that we take back to our friends, family, chiropractors and coworkers. (Wait! Off to my right is the frozen river and, yes, whadyaknow....the ice sheet isn’t as thick as it seems! It’s actually thicker....about three feet separates the snowy crust from the torrent underneath.) And there you have it. Ice flows, like our memories, sometimes just aren’t what they seem. Sometimes, if we’re blessed (and we are), they are a whole lot more!
