Moving to Alaska

Today I am finally doing what I should have done a long time ago. I am returning to Alaska. It has been fifteen years since I had to go back so abruptly from Alaska to Vermont, to The Green Vermonter Inn located in the northwestern part of Vermont, in order to be taken care of by my grandma, Dad’s mother, Sonia Josephina Jenkins, in Vermont, and by my two uncles, Uncle Jack and Uncle Brian, and by my two aunts, Aunt Jenny and Aunt Frida. I was merely ten year-old then, having no voice in the matter. I just was told to leave Alaska to be with my relatives. But today I am older. I am twenty-five. I made up my mind. I am returning to Alaska. I came by my own choice, wondering whether Alaska had changed much in my absence. At the moment of my arrival in Alaska, I actually had no interest whether Alaska had changed. My interest lay in going out to the small Alaskan cemetery up on the incline to be with Dad, not knowing whether his grave was still there or had been destroyed by the severe Alaskan winters or by the neglect with no one taking care of it over the years? Or possibly it had been ransacked by the tourists that were more and more coming to this land up northwest and wanting tokens with which to return to their homes on continental America to boast about their Alaskan trip. I had to secure a means of transportation first to get to the cemetery. I was lucky to find one in ways of a mule in Jeremiah’s stable. It was a reluctant mule though but once I had it going the way I wanted it to go it saw my need to get to the cemetery. I had no trouble finding the grave. It was there. I found it immediately. It was a bit overgrown by grass and weeds due to neglect. I did not care. I stood at it with only one question, “Why?” I was looking at the grave marker, now being hewn out of granite and no longer carved out of wood. The granite marker and its base were embedded in the soil at the head of the grave. The wood of the cross just did not make it through the brutal winter months and the writing on the wood was obliterated by the fluctuating weather, mostly by the whipping winds often tearing through the land. The rotten wooden cross rested on the grave, unmarked. It lay there on top of the center of the grave. No one apparently had the heart to remove it. It seemed to have a purpose just lying there. I believe its purpose was to keep Dad warm during the extreme coldness of late fall and the winter months. “Why?” I asked again. “Why did you have to die?” There was no answer. Did I expect an answer? Maybe I did and I was hoping for it. But there was no answer. *^* I had only moments ago arrived at the small Alaskan railroad station, if one can call it a railroad station. It was just a log building, lying low, with a hall and in the center of the hall a soot-covered pot-bellied stove stood, which year-round seemed to have a fire set in it. I believe it was to keep the passengers warm or, at least, to keep the people on duty behind the counter warm, if one can call that table a counter. I was not sure whether they had a stove back there where they were working to keep themselves from freezing. Was there even a back there? I could not concern myself with finding out. I had to go visit Dad first before I did anything else. Old Jeremiah Joshua, a friend of the past, a true friend, stood there outside the railroad station to pick me up, waving a white handkerchief. Behind him stood his buggy and his horse. He had spiffed up the buggy considerably—so unlike Jeremiah—and had brushed the coat of the old mare to a shiny silvery sheen. She seemed to know it and held her head high. Everything was shiny with Jeremiah that day knowing that I as a Vermonter, as he always had referred to Dad and me—Dad the Vermonter, I the Little Vermonter—most likely appreciated cleanliness in a buggy and shininess in a horse. He had me wrong. I enjoyed just as much being driven in the cluttered-up old wagon of his or his cluttered-up sled where everything was stored, which he might need, not actually needed that moment, but might need somewhere down the road later on that day: buckets, pots, knives and spoons, pails, hatchets, whipsaw, sacks—full and empty ones—and other such things, much like one finds strewn around the houses of the people of the land. And Jeremiah’s horse was no longer ruffled up from all the travels through the Alaskan hinterland, the wilderness as the hinterland was known, the coat full of burs and splotches of mud, a knotted mane, it was neatly brushed instead, and its mane was flowing in a momentarily tiny breeze. I liked to see the horse ruffled up. That is how I remembered it. The horse must be getting rather old now. It was growing out of his foal years when I lived in Alaska. Ruffled up and clutter is how I remembered Jeremiah’s horse and his wagon or his sled. This was a totally new picture for me to take in. Jeremiah was rather proud of that cleanliness as far as his horse and wagon were concerned. I could tell by looking at him.