To Anchorage with love....

The other day I came across a couple of pictures of me and my husband standing on the Matanuska glacier in Alaska. We took a trip to Alaska the year after my husband graduated from business school, to visit college friends who had high tailed it out of Chicago, seeking good times and adventure in the wilds of Anchorage and the Alaskan judicial system.

Our friend Ken, never one to play it safe or easy, had spent a couple of years in France & Russia and later in Senegal Africa in the peace corp. He is a linguist and can speak French, Russian, Spanish and Wolof (a Senegalise dialect) but, has a hard time remembering names. Ken and I originally were buddies way back in college and then I introduced him to my husband. In addition to his many talents, Ken was also a drama major and a fine singer. Often times, he would walk across campus, in the dead of winter singing tunes from My Fair Lady at the top of his lungs. My husband, before he got to know Ken, used to think he was a little off his rocker. But, once I introduced them at a campus party, over a bottle of cold Russian vodka that Ken had brought back from his year abroad in Moscow, they became the best of friends...that is after they resurfaced two days later. Ken became such a good friend to us that he literally hitch hiked back from Senegal to be in our wedding. He walked, hopped buses, hitched rides on U.S military transports and jets, just to make it back in time to be our best man. After leaving the Peace Corp., Ken went back to school and got his law degree. But, not wanting to be totally conventional, he and his wife Becky, who he met in the Peace Corp., decided to move to Alaska and raise a family of two boys and one adopted Chinese daughter. He continues to litigate and even has time to act on stage in Anchorage and perform in local TV commercials.

But, way back when....before there were kids, we visited Ken and Becky in Alaska. The thing I remember most about Alaska are the vast spaces and endless drives. We would set out for a days excursion to go rafting and end up driving five hours just to get to the staging point of the rafting trip. A drive, that back in Illinois, would have taken us out of Chicago and all the way home to Lynn county and eastern Iowa. But, in Alaska...that was not a big deal. Space and lots of it...that is what I remember most about Alaska. Okay, that, and the daylight, the endless daylight... and, of course the glaciers.

So, living life on a glacier... not so bad. Not so bad when you are standing on one in the middle of a warm Alaskan summer, bathed in 24 hour light, that is. I have fond memories cavorting around the glaciers in t-shirts and shorts. Not so sure, however, I want to experience the glacier in the dead of winter. I will leave that to Ken, his wandering spirit, and his uncanny ability to endure long, dark icy winters, be they Alaskan, Russian, or Chicagoan. I instead, will continue to embrace living under the warm Californian, or even more preferrably, Tuscan sun.