Like the Mountains

Arrival 5:45 am. After a six hour flight from Honolulu I was back in Alaska after a 35 year absence. Back then I had spent the summer working at Castleton’s Photo Lab. It was a transitional time, the summer when I moved from the back waters of Louisiana to the booming town of Atlanta. I stayed with a friend who also had been in the Army and worked in the same photo lab. 

Even before I got off the plane and walked through the Ted Stevens International Airport I recognized the changes that had occurred in the past years. From the plane’s window on the approach to Anchorage I saw Earthquake Park - full of trees. No longer was the angulated ground caused by the devastating 1964 quake visible for the thick green canopy hid the once broken earth. Afterall, It had only been nine years since that damage occurred.  In the distance I recognized a few building in the Anchorage skyline. Only the Chugach Mountains resting on the eastern horizon seemed unchanged.

This had been the place I grew up. Not in the sense of new born to adulthood. But here I had my first experiences away from home. At eighteen I had joined the Army. Spring of 1973, the end of Viet Nam. After completing basic training and my Advanced Individual Training (AIT) as a Photo Lab Tech my orders came down for Alaska. I was a bit bummed about this for most of my new Army friends were headed to Germany and they ribbed me about my assignment. “Dog sleds and mukluks are standard issue.”   

In the wee hours of the morning I boarded a bus at Ft Lewis to catch a military transport to Ft Richardson/Elmendorf.  I stared beyond my reflection out the window into the darkness at silhouettes of barracks and other undistinguished government buildings on base.  Home sickness overwhelmed me. The most lonely, isolated feeling struck my gut.  I longed for something familiar. I wanted to cry. I wanted to go home.  There was nothing adventurous about this trip. The next two and a half years of my life lay ahead of me. The rest of my life was beginning and I saw nothing but the reflection of a young soldier who was headed north to Alaska all alone.

When the plane landed the pilot announced it was fifteen degrees outside. I thought he said fifty.  I wouldn’t feel that until next summer. One of 30 women on base I was soon making friends and having a good time doing stupid things, things that are curiously all part of growing up. When I left the Army and Alaska, I was married, headed off to college and happy. That Alaska experience wasn’t so bad after all.  

Now I was back. My Army buddy, Mike was still here and so were 200,000 more people added to the town that was approximately 150,000 in the seventies. Dirt roads were now paved. The Glen Highway had additional lanes. The boonies now covered with strip malls. Here was Target, WalMart, Olive Garden and Bed, Bath and Beyond. We crossed North Lights Boulevard. Tudor Ave. C Ave. Nothing was familiar but the names. The bars and strip joints on 4^th Ave were gone.  Some things do change for the better.

As Mike took me around the city I had a faint feeling of a dream. I remembered bits and pieces of that dream, but nothing coherently ran together. It was as jumbled as the city after the ’64 quake.  I was sure I had done this before, been here once upon a time, but everything was different. Like hearing a movie score but not being able to recall the movie. Like smelling a certain fragrance, but not recalling from where. Like tasting a spice but not being able to identify it.  I knew this place and yet I knew little about it.

Except one thing.  I came down the airport concourse and immediately saw Mike, a friend who had kept in touch when keeping in touch was not as easy as a FaceBook post, a Google search, Twitter account or hitting send on an email. A friendship that lasted pretty much unchanged, picked right back up much like it was when we met for the first time in October 1973, forty years ago. Some things change. We might have more wrinkles, less hair, grayer hair, more weight and a few aches and pains of age, but the best things don’t change.  They last like the mountains.