A place where I would live but have never visited...Alaska
Alaska knows that it challenges me. The long winters and the prospect of days where the sun never makes an appearance are formidable. I once read a book about basketball in Alaska (not my sort of book at all but it was well recommended for young adults) that depicted the difficult lives of adolescents and their struggles to participate in competitive sport in a world where roads close for months, and teams are forced to travel to their competitors by plane. I once watched a reality television program about Alaska that focused on a family-owned plane company that transported people to and from areas where roads become impassable. These possibilities - the perpetual night, the roads that close for months on end, the foods that are unavailable for months at a time - should be warning signs; however, they intrigue me. They describe a way of life completely foreign to me, where life is forced by the cold to grind to an almost imperceptible stop, because wouldn't life be simpler in Alaska anyway?
I suppose that is what draws me to Alaska - the open simplicity; humanity is forced to accept that nature is bigger and bolder than anything we can dream up. The glaciers, the Northern Lights, the Grizzlies...they are spectacularly not man made, yet they are astoundingly foreign. The wide open spaces call to my introvert soul and whisper dreams about solitude and silence that can be found nowhere else. There is a life in Alaska where I would be myself out of necessity because my nearest neighbors would be miles and miles and miles away. The colors would be richer and the smells crisper, their edges tinged by frost. One day would fade slowly into the next, and time would stand still. I would learn to do without. My impulsivity would be forced into inaction. There would be nothing left but to be.
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