Leaving Alaska

Alaska is an improbable place. It is vast and rugged and cold. It has unreachable mountains and frozen seas, rivers and lakes. It has a capital city which cannot be reached by road - only by air or sea. It has a temperature swing of 150 degrees (F). But still there is life here. There is amazing wild life such as I may never see again. There is a remarkable history of the first inhabitants of this place, the Inupiaqs, the Athabascans, the Yupiaq, the Aluets, and all of the other groups that make up the 20 language groups of Alaska. They showed repect and love of the land and trusted that they would be given what they needed to survive the cold hard winters. And survive them they did developing along the way an amazing collection of stories and knowledge about the cylce of life in the frozen North. Then there are those who live there now. The 'outsiders' who most often come from somewhere else but have grown to love their new home and have undertaken great feats of engineering to make the hard to reach places easier to reach. They are the ones who thought to build a tunnel directly through a mountain that takes 10 minutes to drive through. They are the ones who have built bridges so that traintracks and roads could be laid. They are the ones who have seen to the development of airports and shopping centres and oil pipelines to ensure economic 'progress' in Alaska. Rightly or wrongly they too have their place in this place.
I dont know that I could live here. It is too 'other' for me. The mountains are too high and everything is too white. The seasons are too stark and the differential between day and night, light and dark, summer and winter is too much for me to want to adjust to.
I'm sure that people would say the same about where I live. Maybe that's why I understand why, improbable a place as it is, people yearn for Alaska and call it home.