#I actually saw a bald eagle while I was down visiting the dam but the vid is really low quality unfortunately | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

glacierview-blog · 7 years

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It still rains all the time

Bear trash

Walking to our trailer home^

Where to begin since I last wrote? First and foremost, I forgot Brian’s birthday! I feel so guilty. I got so caught up this month with all our activities that it slipped my mind and he didn’t tell me until I was falling asleep last night. Doh! It’s the day after the fourth, and the 4th was spent watching cars launched off a cliff at Arnies in Glacier View. I had always imagined that we would be watching the cars launched from the top of the cliff, not the bottom. I definitely did not feel safe but it was a once in a life time thing to watch…hopefully. So, I just kept moving backwards with each car. I was told they were supposed to fly parallel down the cliff but the first car launched straight in to the air towards me and I jumped so quickly I almost knocked a little boy down the dirt pile some of us were sitting on. Here is a video of another

year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbMYzMUu06Q

Brian and I also made a trip to visit my old housemate from 560, Andrew, in Talkeetna. He looks so healthy now and is a rafting guide on the river there. He took us rafting down the Talkeetna River and it was amazing. I have never rafted before, let alone on a deadly river. The river itself was brown and murky, you can’t see the bottom and if you were to fall in you would have to ensure that your foot doesn’t touch the bottom because it could be buried and then you would simply drown. He showed us the first rope to grab after falling over and called it the “oh shit” rope. After that, he showed us another safety device were the first one to fail, called the “oh fuck” rope. Luckily, we didn’t need either. We took a path down the river that he has only taken once and isn’t usually allowed to take. It was gorgeous. So wild, and quiet. We didn’t see a single person forever. We did see a beaver dam, and I saw my first bald eagle perched above the tree tops. We stopped at Denali Brewing pub and had a couple delicious beers. Talkeetna overlooks Denali, and is the jumping off point for visitors to the mountain. It’s also the town that the show Northern Exposure it based off. I saw Denali but it took me a while to really see it. We stood at the foot of the raging river before Andrew had gotten off work and stared at the tall black mountains in the distance. It took me a while to realize that the white clouds above those black mountains weren’t actually clouds at all, but was Denali towering taller than I could have ever imaged over the others. Talkeetna was about a 3 hour drive to the west and north of us and on the way back we counted 11 moose on the road.

We also made another day trip to the town of Valdez. It’s a fishing village and known for its oil industry. Valdez is about 3 hours in the opposite direction of Talkeetna. The drive, and views were simply some of the best of my life. We didn’t google any images or look up Valdez before taking off so we were wholly unprepared for the splendor we were in for. The highway going in to Valdez is recognized as one of Americas most scenic highways, and rightly so. It was jaw droppingly, tear formingly, take your breath away enchantment. Imagine the tallest, greenest mountains you possibly can. Now magnify that times ten. Now imagine driving through the valley of them, the winding roads, the feel of sunshine on your face. The mountains would have waterfalls springing off the sides down the mountain, or a glacier protruding from behind. Some had snow piles dotting them like cow patterns. Others had huge caves. I almost cried. I wish I could have captured it in my camera but anything but being there fails enormously. It was like driving through the Scottish highlands, the Swiss alps, Alaskan glaciers, and Icelands countryside all at once. I have stood on the cliffen shores of Barbados and watched the Caribbean Sea melt in to oblivion at sunset, I have watched black volcanic waters on the gulf of Mexico melt in to crystal ocean, I have summited Haleakala volcano in Hawaii, watched the sun roll over the Midwestern deserts at high noon, climbed pyramids on misty mornings in the jungle, seen such beautiful things and yet- this highway dwarfed all of them in one drive. It was the prettiest place I have been and I’m so thankful for the journey.

Valdez itself was on the backdrop of these mornings, and infront of Prince William Sound seashores, making it beautiful to see. I could never imagine living there though. We stopped at the Safeway to get some lunch and it was a square concrete building attached to a liquor store where the homeless were congregating. The Safeway itself was so crowded you could hardly move through the aisles of absurdly priced merchandise, and many different languages were being spoken among the obvious poor of the town. At one point, a huge tall tattooed woman looked at me and said “I swear to god if people don’t get the fuck out of my way I am going to freak the fuck out” and I simply moved along. We walked down to the docks and saw that the water was glacier colored. Silver and blue and green. Like green lakes if it was opaque. We didn’t love the town and left almost immediately after putting air in the tires and gas in the tank. This was necessary because there are no other towns for hours. This is not a picture that I took, but is of the highway I mentioned, to give you some idea of the scale:

Last night there was a rainbow to end all raindbows in our backyard. It was so huge I couldn’t fit it in one picture without using a panorama setting on my phone. It was so vibrant as well. It stretched across the mountains, the river, and through the whole of Majestic Valley.

I’ve been reading a lot since getting here and that has been great. I downloaded a ton of books on to my kindle and started reading The Count of Monte Cristo, which is now one of my all-time favorites. I didn’t realize how long it was when I started and by the time it was over it was around 1500 pages. It’s not as “feel good” as an ending as the movie, but the plotting is diabolical and the writing very clever. After that, I read “The Call of the Wild” and it was awesome. I always assumed it was about some dude, not a kidnapped dog named Buck. I then read Jack London’s second book along that vein which is called “White Fang.” I didn’t love that one. Now I’ve started reading Brian “The Women Who Run with the Wolves” out loud because the myths inside this book make it one of my all-time favorites. For myself, I’ve started reading “White Trash: the 400-Year-Old Untold Story of Class in America” and it is really stunning. I didn’t realize it had just come out this summer. Some of my favorite books have been revisionist history like “A People’s History of the United States,” “1492,” or “Lies My Teacher Told Me” and this fits right along with those.

I still don’t know where I’m going next but I am trying to start planning. I know I/we will be visiting Jess in Honolulu! Yay! The flight from anchorage is only about 6 hours. I have started updating my resume, and looking for jobs in both Pittsburgh and Honolulu. I’ve also been looking in to schools in both places, and ordered flashcards, a TEAS entrance exam study guide, and some other learning materials to begin prepping. I’m so excited to learn and continue my education. I am also excited to settle down somewhere for a while. I cannot elaborate how grateful I am for the year I have had so far. 25 has truly been a gift for me to hit the “reset” button in my life. I wasn’t happy being in Syracuse, or working in the ghetto, or feeling stunted intellectually, professionally, or emotionally by a place I had wanted to leave for so long. Now, I have been travelling for 5 months. 5 months since I was with the people I love. 5 months since I have seen the upstate countryside, which I do miss terribly. I am so so grateful for all of the wonderful things I have been able to experience this year, the places I have gone, the people I have met, the opportunities I have had. Now- I am ready to settle in and get really cozy somewhere. I miss having my own bed. I miss having a dresser. I miss having a bidet. I miss all of my clothing. I miss having a couch. I miss having somewhere to go to have privacy from the world. I miss having the internet where I sleep. I miss Netflix. I miss my family. I miss my friends. I miss all of the amazing new York women I know. I am not necessarily homesick for Syracuse- because it doesn’t feel like my home. I’m homesick for a home, and I have to figure out how to make it somewhere.

hair is finally growing out.

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