Know Your Home
In Ella Higginson's Alaska: The Great Country there is this charming moment, as the steamer approaches Grenville Channel on the trip out from Seattle, where the author asks her fellow passengers about Alaska. One of them, a laborer, offers her this bright little gem in response:
"Maybe you see a white mountain, or a green valley, or a big river, or a blue strait, or a waterfall—and like a flash your heart opens, and shuts in an ache for Alaska that stays."
I think about that often now that I live here again. I left the state when I was nine years old in the passenger seat of a crumbling U-Haul, down the Al-Can highway to the San Francisco bay. I spent the following decades in various stages of mismatch.
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