sometimes you gotta go not look for nothin'

"It is not only the land itself that faces us in the North today, as real as that is, but the entire drama of European life on this continent reenacted at a pace that leaves us stunned and gasping. The experience is hard to come to grips with; there are few names for it, and too many old responses. We see Alaska through cliches to save us from thinking: 'The Last Frontier,' 'The Great Land.' What do these really mean, aside from a great opportunity to grab? 'North to the Future,' that preposterous slogan once flaunted on the state auto license plates: the whole thing is a travel agent's invention. There is no place called Alaska, just as there is hardly anything today that can be identified as California. But of course there was, and is, such a place, though it can scarcely be found any longer for what we have done to it, and are beginning to do here. What I read about Alaska in magazines is for the most part the superficial message of the tourist--he who comes to gape, but not to understand."
-John Haines, "The Writer as Alaskan," 1979.
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"i love the opportunity to fit more life into a day than most people expect in a month."
-bvt