by Madlando Aver

Created on: August 06, 2009

North By Northwest

July, 2005
The trip to Anchorage was a sentimental one for me. I lived there from 1999-2000; one tumultuous and defining year in my development as a young man. Like so many other adventures, I was under cover of college-a national exchange program coordinated by a man named Carl Douglas (not of Kung Fu Fightin') through South Dakota State University and the University of Anchorage.

Whatever was exchanged in return for me was not enough. It would have taken nothing less than a Pope to balance the evil committed in that Great State. The endless darkness and the endless pot, and my subsequent experimentations with acid melted any hope of continuing classes. I held on a little longer as a columnist for the Northern Lights, the U of A's weekly paper. But that too ended badly. The last article I submitted* was days late because I had gone on a savage bender, ending with some unfortunate damage to the dorm I was in, committed with the aid of a plunger. The article itself reflected my frustrations and impending abandonment of college, out of both fear and loathing. Fearing that I could not succeed in the institutions common to the middle-class American way, and loathing that I needed college at all-a degree and all that entails to prove my worth to society-to prove my worth? But this was a new adventure. And it was an adventure of epic proportions, as all adventures set upon by men to the Last Frontier are conceived. And it began with a beckoning I will never forget.

Leaving Minneapolis at 10:30 pm after a 1-hour delay put us hot on the tail of the sunset. The Sun had gone down only 75 minutes earlier, and our speed of 500+ miles per hour North by Northwest allowed for a good race. In a strange twist of time, the sunset became brighter each minute and each mile. It was Northwest of Winnipeg when as the Old Man and the Sea, we began the long struggle to pull the huge bastard out of the murky depths of night. At first only a slice of juicy orange on a plate of dark clouds was served (a welcomed desert since Northwest had recently cut all food service). But more and more it beckoned us toward the atavistic Alaska, where the ancient mountains and the endless summers, as all else, are massive.

Little more than 400 miles Northwest of Winnipeg the sunset reawakens, illuminating, I believe, a string of clouds like the moon does the crest of a long and slow wave. Soon the clouds grow more green and appear to move, and

• 1
• 2
• 3
• ...
• 8
• Next Page >>