In 2009 - although it could have been any year in which the Earth was round and spinning and tilted and people understood it was round and spinning and tilted - I was traveling in Mexico, and toward the end of the long bus ride from Durango to Mazatlán I glimpsed a rust-eaten roadsign with "Cancer" on it. After a moment, I inferred that we had crossed the Tropic of Cancer. It sure wasn't obvious. Nor have been any of my many crossings of the Tropic of Capricorn, which happens to run right through the city of São Paulo. Not that I ever saw a sign there saying that, and not that the excitements it might promise could rise above the baseline bedlam of any Brazilian city.

These abstractions I nevertheless thought about as I arrived in Anchorage, which is nowhere near a tropic but pretty near a circle. I never have crossed either the Arctic or Antarctic, but I have sensed them - well, just the Arctic. For that matter, I have sensed the Equator. Again, though, I cannot say I have some native faculty or flair for it. These are just the things I think about now.

I like to think that nearness to the top, bottom, or belly of a sphere is immediately or soon perceptible. Something in the air; or the way people who've lived long in such extreme places have made those places look. Iceland's buildings looked not exactly small or shabby, but certainly not spacious or pretty either; likewise those of the Northwest Territories. But also likewise of Slovenia, which is not real northern whatever you may think of the Slavic world: there are palm trees in Slovenia. (Not many, but some.) As for Anchorage, it was mainly the apartments that had that tight tidy look¹. Houses were slightly more showy (and down in Girdwood they were darn big, with many big windows).

Iceland looked stark not because of climate or latitude but because it has gigantic blocks of solidified lava all over the place. On the other hand, the Northwest Territories looked stark because the trees were all stunted from the climate and the latitude. In Alaska, the trees I saw between Wasilla and Chickaloon at least were hardly lush but hardly humble either.

Likewise, inhabitants' (and plants') actions near the Equator do not become more telling the closer to the Equator. Central America doesn't really feel close to it. Nicaragua is 10 degrees north of it yet according to a story I read in a newspaper there, its school year is March-November, like Brazil's. You won't confuse Quito with Macapá, although you may confuse Guayaquil with Belém². Cape Verde³ (which is near the same latitude as Managua) and São Tomé⁴ are too African to confuse with anyplace normal. Thus I must admit as aware as I may be of latitude, much of the rest of the world isn't! It's just not behaving in much of a systematic or geographically-dictated way.

Still, I like looking at maps and guessing that stuff way above me or way below me, but not too far below me, really reflects where it is. I don't just duck into an airplane one place and pop out of it some other place.

Which brings me to something which might seem yet another artifact of my imagination, but isn't: when I have flown to sub-Arctic or Equatorial localities, it has pretty consistently been the case that I have arrived in the night. Well, maybe that is an artifact of my own having lived most of my life at 30 degrees north, and also in the Americas, which run not so much north-south as northwest-southeast. Well, whatever the reason, while I have never been crazy about showing up in profound darkness, I have very much enjoyed exiting the plane and walking across the tarmac to the terminal. It was so in Keflavik, and Manaus, and Praia. Night air says so much, and even more across broad flat space. Unfortunately, my arrival in Anchorage was through a jetway: in this case, I indeed did the aforementioned in-ducking and out-popping. I regret that.

But Anchorage couldn't hide its charms forever, and within a day I would confirm a geophysical truth I had long doubted: close to the poles, twilight really is prolonged. On or near the Equator, I had never believed what mostly British authors said, about the sun plunging below the horizon and night instantly falling. Sunset at least, I mean the diminution of solar light, seemed the same as always and everywhere to me. But taking a post-breakfast walk in Anchorage in November - which is not Reykjavik in May or Fort Simpson in August - I did at last see a glow that took a good two hours to turn into verifiable sunrise, and not just because there were mountains in the way. My idea had always been that the angular velocity of the Earth is everywhere 15 degrees per hour, so whether the Sun is descending straight down or on a slant, its obscuration per unit time should be the same. Right? At last I rethought my vector arithmetic, and also imagined I was at the Arctic Circle on the summer solstice and obviously seeing the Sun at its lowest point skimming the horizon at whatever the sideways equivalent of 15 degrees per hour is, and I tried not to look like a journalist doing long division in his head, and I figured things out.

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Driving around or rather south of Anchorage, and at last figuring out from the landmass just visible through the fog across the water that I wasn’t looking at an ocean but rather a bay, I recalled the time I took a little time during a drive from South Carolina to Texas to see more of Mobile Bay. It’s nice. I was surprised, although I should not have been. Likewise, I was surprised, and should not have been, at Turnagain Arm. But I was.

Anchorage, Mobile⁵...who mentions these places in the same sentence? Maybe just me!

Yet I compared them. That’s just me!

This was a simple trip, fly up for a weekend and then fly back, unlike my first visit to Alaska. In 1990, I’d bought a Greyhound Ameripass in El Paso, bussed all the way to Bellingham, Washington, boarded the Alaska Marine Highway ferry, and slept in a deck chair in my sleeping bag; lots of people billeted themselves likewise; it was truly festive and fun. And even though there is almost nowhere to drive from or even within Ketchikan, I rented a car, because I could park on the wharf, bring the back seat forward and make a flat space large enough for me in my sleeping bag, and sleep while wind rocked the vehicle. Later, I’d ferry back to Prince Rupert and resume bussing, all the way back to Texas. En route I lingered a day in Lubbock⁶, where I’d been proposing to move, and to facilitate inspection of potential living quarters, I rented another car, again just for a day. Thus for me there will always be a similarity between Ketchikan and Lubbock and I always have a good reason to mention them in the same sentence.

But that’s just me!

My last evening in Anchorage, I walked from the hotel over to Lake Hood, which claims it is the largest seaplane base in the world. I didn’t see any in flight, but then landing or taking off in one in darkness sounds really hazardous. Anyway, I was more attracted by the lights across the water. Those would have been residences or businesses, not boats. Nevertheless, I was reminded – and I admit this is just ridiculous – of Mindelo in Cape Verde, which somehow had comparable illumination. Not across a lake but a strait, to another Cape Verdean island. Or more likely, such lights as there were yonder would’ve been ships’, and in any case the glow was really much brighter along this city’s shore. Nothing Alaskan about any of it. But it’s what came to mind.

These aren’t at all useful memories and such ability as I retain to call them up is seldom tested. They just resurface. But as I say so often of travel, the memories are something you always have. They are a perfect mix of the active – you brought yourself here – and the passive – once here, you mostly just watched as other people, such as the locals themselves, did questionable things. Whatever you did, the memories of it will not embarrass.

Although mine could if I really worked at them. I don’t. I keep their filing and retrieval involuntary; I take almost no pictures, hardly ever keep diaries. I may fail to remember stuff, but that is no disaster. Only after I walked from my hotel all the way to the airport and back – good exercise, and a successful quest for postcards! – did I recall I had once walked all the way from the airport in Birmingham, Alabama to downtown, there to catch a bus. And only after this trip did I remember why I’d ever even bought an Alaska roadmap: years ago I had the idea of a bicycle trip hereabouts. As I recall, I rejected the idea because at the time proposed, the weather would be cold and rainy. I considered alternate places to bicycle, and – you’ll have to believe me here – Uruguay was projected to be just as unpleasant. In the summer of 1985 it had been perfect, but in April or May of whatever year I was casting about for a bicycle ride, Anchorage and Montevideo⁷ had strikingly similar meteorology.

And who compares those two places? Now you know!

Now for a comparison that isn’t silly. It seemed to me, on my 1990 visit, that Alaska rivaled Texas for state flagwaving. I am unsure now how or why I ever came to think that. On this visit, I saw not one Alaskan flag. Did I in 1990 see so many on the ferry and then in Ketchikan and then on the day trip over to Metlakatla and back that even if the rest of Alaska had no flags at all, it would still top Texas? Maybe. I just don’t remember!

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¹ In Anchorage itself I sought to figure out how homeowners decorate their yards with plants but November just isn't a good time to check. The Alaska Botanical Garden was by the way closed.

²Or not. Guayaquil had lots of floating hyacinths in its river. Also, yard-long borderline-incontinent lizards in its trees. I have seen neither anywhere in Brazil.

³Does anybody plant anything at all anywhere in Africa? OK, Cape Verde isn't in Africa. Plus it's a bunch of desert islands so maybe it gets a pass. It is certainly a geographic exception. My only memory of anything home-grown is the La Parisienne bakery. Great bread, made better by my having wandered a long time around the poorly-lit capital before finding it. The employees worked hard, in a hot place in a hot country. That seemed so lonely, and made their art look all the more willful.

⁴In São Tomé I did ask some kids what flowers bloomed when - and more specifically if they bloomed at different times of year, as if those were at all detectable so close to the Equator. The kids had hardly troubled to notice. I think that wherever bougainvillea gets twice as big as you, things pretty much all look the same.

⁵Mobile has an Azalea Avenue. I recall none along it or anywhere else in the city but there could have been!

⁶Lubbock, Texas has nowhere near as many trees as Regina, Saskatchewan, but it is still very nice.

⁷I find now I have no memory at all of what people in Montevideo planted, ornamentally or at all. Yet I have never forgotten the many tall but isolated stands of eucalyptus elsewhere in Uruguay.

© 2019 J.A.Hutter

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