What I miss most about living in Alaska is the fishing.
People are always asking me about eskimos, but there are no eskimos in Iceland.
There's one place, and one place only, to see polar bears in America. You have to travel to the country's northernmost point, the very apex of Alaska's North Slope, to the permafrost shores that stretch out on either side from the Inupiat town of Kaktovik.
Alaska itself is an unusual state.
In 'Snow for Mother', a mother waits for her little boy to grow up so that she can take him to Alaska to experience the real snow, which he never knew as a little boy in the tropics.
I grew up in New Hampshire. My closest neighbor was a mile away. The deer and the raccoons were my friends. So I would spend time walking through the woods, looking for the most beautiful tropical thing that can survive the winter in the woods in New Hampshire.
My parents live in the part of the United States that is Canada. It is so far north that Minnesota lies in the same direction as Miami. They have four distinct seasons: Winter, More Winter, Still More Winter, and That One Day Of Summer.
Iceland, though it lies so far to the north that it is partly within the Arctic Circle, is, like Norway, Scotland, and Ireland, affected by the Gulf Stream, so that considerable portions of it are quite habitable.
The Arctic has huge glaciers, frozen waterfalls and floating ice. This is scenery on which man has left no mark, which has stayed unchanged for centuries, wild, bleak, hauntingly beautiful; it is a part of God's creation we have made no effort to tame.
We do not even see the sun for several months in the north of Sweden.
Northern Sweden holds a special kind of magic. It's cold, lonely, and the people are tough and silent, or so the stereotype says. This is Asa Larsson's home turf and I find as much joy in reading her closely observed descriptions of the environment, as in following her intriguing plots.
The whole band is from Alaska. It's like growing up anywhere else.
Kids in Alaska don't know they're growing up on the Last Frontier. It's just what they see on the license plates, and it's something tourists like to say a lot because they've never been around so many mountains and moose before.
Alaska ... is an inhospitable, wretched, God-forsaken region, worth nothing, but a positive injury and incumberance as a colony of the United States.... Of what possible commercial importance can this territory be to us?
I grew up on the edge of a national park in Canada - timberwolves, creeks, snow drifts. I really did have to walk home six miles through the snow, like your grandparents used to complain.
Traverse City sits halfway between the North Pole and the Equator, and our summer days are long. The light seems to take forever to vanish from the sky, and when it does, it goes out like someone folding a white sheet in the dark. A flare on the horizon. Then a rustle: Goodnight.
I remember little of the Yukon or what I wrote there.
