Midnight Sun Blues

There is something about the light here this past week: soft and heavy and long nearly through the night; long and soft and ineffectual. I find it vaguely depressing, sometimes not so vaguely. An hour of blessed sunshine makes it worse, knowing it will go away and take the mountains and the spectral highlights, the sparkle, with it. The sun, slow to come, always going away, soon. I know I shouldn’t feel this way about the North. I feel guilty about, which doesn’t help any. All the beauty; moose, bears, lakes, mountains, and still snow patches and sometimes glaciers. But the light is just not there, just not right, yet.

There were days during the months we spent in Iceland

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Alaska Summer Camp, Deadman Lake.

Not long after entering Alaska from Yukon Territory, Claire found a small lake with free camping through the Escapees listings. It was a short drive down a narrow dirt road, just small enough to keep out the big RVs. We were fairly early in the day and got the best lakeside site. We saw quite a few birds, Claire heard a loon, and I saw a pair of tundra swans patrolling the shore.

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