Looking Out: Contemplating the call of the wild
My beloved wife, Marsha, and I took a trip to Alaska. We traveled by air, van, train, bus, boat, on foot and by ship.
Since returning, people have asked us about our favorite experience.
Marsha has been quick to answer: “The excursion to Denali.”
Denali, formerly known as Mount McKinley, is the largest mountain in North America. From Anchorage, where, as we experienced, it never gets dark on the longest days of the year, we traversed the beautiful wilderness full of mountains, forests, tundra, rivers and wildlife for many hours and many miles, enjoying every minute. At last, we saw the snow-covered mountain. Then, back again, through the wilderness. It was a great experience, from beginning to end.
But for me, answering the favorite-experience question was tougher. The Denali trip was amazing. So were the other parts of the vacation. Rain forests, volcanoes, fjords, a grizzly bear. Moose. Deer. Whales, dolphins, sea lions. Birds. Trees. Big trees, humongous trees. Moss, fungi and more moss. Endless vistas of forests, snow-covered mountains, wooded valleys, and lichen covered tundra. Quaint towns. Local characters. Fishing boats and float planes. Oceans, lakes, rivers, glaciers.
But after much cogitation I came up with my answer. What did I like best?
Wilderness.
Where we traveled for hours and hours and hours, even days and days without seeing houses, roads, power lines, cars or stoplights. Where the only sounds were the rushing of water, the birds singing, the wind sloughing in the trees — it was and is beyond my ability to describe.
“Show us your pictures,” says a friend.
“Here’s one,” I say, opening my phone and showing a view of a deep valley with a raging stream coursing through the spruce forest with snow-capped mountain peaks in the background.
“Wow!” says my friend. “Show me more.”
“Nope,” I say. “That’s enough for now.”
And it is enough for me for right now. It’s simply more than I can quickly digest, more than I can share until my mind is done processing the experiences. Photos are great, but memories are better.
I’m not ready to go through the “This is the first whale we saw, and this next photo is moss in a rain forest we hiked through” business. Not yet.
Odd, isn’t it? That I, loquacious as I tend to be, am at a loss for words.
My mother grew up in a wonderful country town of 2,000 people and then, with Dad, raised three kids in the same town. They insisted that we experience a wider view of our world, or at least of America. We traveled. We experienced big cities and ocean beaches and more.
Marsha and I have also covered a lot of territory together since we’ve been married. We’ve seen wondrous places. We have met interesting people and tasted life in lots of far corners. We’ve stared at the Matterhorn. We’ve stood on our skis in the dark, dark winter night, in sub-zero temperatures to watch Old Faithful erupt with not another person there to see it. We’ve seen elk and eagle, bear and moose, the Empire State Building, castles, cathedrals and sand dunes.
What we’ve both been pondering in the days since our return from Alaska is whether our cameras, our minds and our memories are big enough to hold wilderness.
Jim Whitehouse lives in Albion.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: Jim Whitehouse: Contemplating the call of the wild
