No Midnight Sun

To see the midnight sun you have to be above the Arctic Circle, and I never got anywhere near it. I flew non stop from Chicago to Anchorage the day after graduation, which was near the time of the Summer Solstice. I went through four time zones, so I had a little jet lag to deal with my first day there. One night I stayed up late just to see if it was ever going to get dark. I was standing under a street light talking to this guy, and the light only came on for about half an hour and then went back off again. It didn't get fully dark out, but almost. My road trip back was in October, so the days and nights seemed about normal.

The Alaska Highway, formerly called the "Alcan Highway", was the only road in and out of the state. I had to drive over a hundred miles north to pick it up in Fairbanks before I could go south. Most of the Alaskan population lived in the southern part of the state, but the route of all the roads in Alaska and Western Canada was dictated by the mountains, where there is no such thing as a straight line. I ran into some snow just out of Fairbanks, which was the cause of my little auto accident. We had to go back to Fairbanks to file a police report since nobody was injured and the cops said it was to dangerous for them to come to us for a little fender bender. By the time I got back to where the wreck had happened, it was getting late, so I stopped at the next campsite I came to. That was the last night I spent in Alaska. I had surprisingly good weather for the rest of the trip. I only remember one other snow event, and that happened while I was sleeping.

After Alaska came the Yukon Territory of Canada, which was all mountains. Then I cut a little corner of British Columbia before I got into Alberta, which started out mountainous and then broke into flat prairie. As soon as I crossed into Montana I was back in the mountains again for a few hours, and then it was prairie all the way through Montana and North Dakota. Minnesota was gently rolling farms and woodlands. Wisconsin went from woodlands to farms to the cities and towns along the Lake Michigan shore from Green Bay to Chicago. I had more adventure and saw more country on the ten day trip back than the whole four months I spent in Alaska.

I have never read "To Kill a Mockingbird" or saw the whole movie, but I think I saw part of the courtroom scene on TV once. It was all "Nigger this and Nigger that", which I found kind of depressing, so I either turned it off or changed channels. I read something about it once, and I seem to remember that the poor colored guy is convicted and hung in spite of the heroic efforts of his defense lawyer, which is even more depressing. I see enough depressing stories about race relations in the news media, I'm certainly not going to seek out more of the same in my recreational reading.

My books didn't arrive yet, but I think I ordered them a day or two after you ordered yours.