Alaska

I am up early at my desk, looking at a driving map of the Seward Highway in Alaska, a road that crosses the Kenai Peninsula through a vast, diverse, complex wilderness. I'm also on the computer. In one Firefox window, I have up four tabs: a pdf of the route map of the Alaskan Marine Highway System, the route map of Alaska Airlines, the route map of Air Canada, and the fourth tab displays Map Quest driving directions to Prince Rupert, British Columbia. It is exactly 1048.27 miles to Prince Rupert from Seattle. I feel stranded.

I feel at ends/at odds not because of money, although better planning would have enabled this trip to be done more cheaply. I'm frustrated not because I don't know how to coordinate this--of course I do. Given enough time and leisure, one can coordinate almost any endeavor. People have gone to the moon. I can manage to get my ass to Anchorage. What I'm frustrated about is the type of trip that I want. Here is what I envisioned:

I am on a boat, bitch. (Imagine me smiling.) I'm going up the inside passage and I see, this time, much more than I saw on my last trip, which was lovely indeed. But this time, I have the hop on/hop off pass that encompasses the communities along the entire marine highway. I sleep on the deck in my sleeping bag, rather than waste money for an exhorbitantly priced cabin--exhorbitant for a lone traveler, that is. On the Alaskan ferries, you can rent showers and get hot coffee and decent food. Sleeping on the deck in a huge lawnchair can be done in relatively heated comfort with fans that blow warm air on you to mitigate the chill, while you can look at the stars overhead and wake as you chug past glaciers or wind your way through the Wrangell Narrows. I've done this before, but I loved it, so in this vision, I do all this again, and then somehow, I'm magically in Anchorage and can drive the highway and then, I fly home. Heh. Done, finished, through. A complete romance in two weeks with no aftertaste or regrets.

Well, that's not likely in the time I have left to do this. My time in Texas begins August 26th - September 16th. Some small planning is needed for this trip as well, as I would like to take my mother to see the sea. I don't believe she's ever been to the ocean. I would like to show her this one thing, just this one thing I love. Maybe this is selfish, I don't know. I only know I want to take her there and give her that. To do this, we will need to drive her approximately 600 miles south to the Gulf of Mexico. I think about the course in coastal navigation I want to take this fall. I think about this or that thing, all the things I still need to do before I go, practical things, fanciful things, not-so-damned-smart-I-don't-give-a-care things. It's not logistics of getting anywhere, I've figured out--whether that's to the moon or just to Anchorage. It's the lack of time. It's so precious.