Alaska Travel

I often ask myself, “when does a trip end?”

Is it when you stop hearing the twirling water splash against the fiberglass canoe? Or when you no longer see the eroded river banks where spindly trees lean over the water like limp children’s fishing poles ready to tumble into the rushing currents? Or maybe when you stop feeling the pinch of muscle aches just under your shoulder after hours of paddling down the river? Or is it when the horizon begins to vanish at the end of your perception of a memory of a mighty river so far away you barely believe it was real?

I have not yet let go of my journey down Alaska’s Yukon though it’s been a week since we pulled our candy-colored canoes out of the river at a town called Circle. Circle, Alaska was not much of a place. It was a spot that punctuates the end of the road with a question mark.

I didn’t yet want to break through the membrane which keeps me there. I didn’t want to enter into my default life of built things — airplanes, plastic-wrapped food, and asphalt paths we call freeways that wrap around me like constricting snakes.

I wanted to hold onto my river adventure as if it were a dream I hadn’t finished dreaming.

Travel always does that to me, especially if I let it enter me. It’s easy for me to do that in the wilderness. 8 days of disconnecting from everything helped get me far away.

In the last decade of my life as a traveler I have sought out places that let me explore my own states of being. I do that by looking for the small moments that contain everything that sustains me whether it be in a ray of sun over water, a quaking aspen on the crusty banks, a backlit bluff jetting out the water’s flow, a caw of a raven on a bending willow, the riffle of water as a salmon swims up to spawn, the spongy soft marsh, the sucking mud on a sand bar island, and the crackling of a campfire.

The canoe trip with a group of German fans of my friend Dirk Rohrbach, an adventurer and river guide, delivered those moments of enchantment in spades.

From the moment I looked down on the snaking Tanana River and the vast tundra of muskeg marshes surrounded by the stunted forests of Alaska from my airplane window, I was hooked again.

Alaska The Last Frontier always delivers the extraordinary in its vastness.

The 49th State is more than a place, it’s a state of mind.

Alaska is far away, it is wild, it is abundant in space and a place. It is somewhere where you are smaller than anywhere else. The lower 48 states seem tiny in comparison.

I like that feeling of being small. The smallness of me frees me.

What does free mean?

It means there are no questions pressing against the wall of my insecurities about who or what I should be. I am, and that’s enough. I am just me in the wildness and accept it as if I have always been part of it.

Alaska takes me to my primordial essence like a story that I heard but can’t remember who told it to me.

Floating 156 miles down the mighty Yukon River, with the slush of the paddle and the hiss from the glacial sand echoing off the side of the fiberglass canoe, I felt as if she guided me with a gentleness I have never experienced. The hard, cold, crisp, brittle space of Alaska filled me with a softness. Mother Nature cradled me in her arms and carried me through a magical quiet place, a place with no answers because there were no questions.

The dime-sized water spider skirted along the mud-colored flow, her webs laced like delicate strings illuminated by the sun ten feet above the water. Was it the spider’s escape? Or was the web a lifeline? Or maybe just a means to an end?

Boiling water is what they call the spinning eddies moved by hidden obstacles deep below the surface of the river. Each twirl like a thought bubble or an unseen being letting us know everything will be alright if we let the river guide us.

A rippling rush of water in front of us was a subtle hint of shallow water and the presence of rainbow-colored river rocks that were carried a thousand miles from where they began their life in the mineral-rich pinnacles of glacial mountain ranges.

A steaming caldera of a volcano in the distance off to our right reminded us that the earth is alive, growing and contracting, always changing.

The exposed roots of the spruce, the alder, and the aspen, were shallow against the blocks of white permafrost visible where the river ice break-up tore chunks from the melting land. It was a sign that climate change takes no prisoners even on the edge of the Arctic.

The moose bull relaxing on the moss-covered banks stares quizzically at the flotilla of humans just as surprised to see us as we were to see him.

The brown backs of the mother grizzly hunched over and busy while showing her cub the fine art of berry hunting. The brown bears were not 100 yards from where we rested our arms and ate our lunch in the M&M-colored boats.

A flock of geese honked their disapproval. The birds were bothered by our movement as they feasted on the last fresh Alaskan vegetation just before beginning their journey south.

It all makes sense to me, a picture I will carry with me always as I slowly let myself come home and release the hold of a magical wilderness that simply doesn’t want to let go of me.

Maybe tomorrow I will wake up inside my ordinary life. I will step back into my world of bills to pay, laundry to do, and work to perform.

But not just yet. Today I will let the mighty Yukon take me with her once more wherever she wants to go.

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Audrey Stimson is a writer living in a green house with her husband and two dogs. When she is not writing essays and short stories she works as a television news producer. She is currently working on a forthcoming book about a bicycle trip across the United States. More about Audrey on her website .