Anchorage Anxiety

In a recent post, my virtual father figure gave us all a much needed history lesson about a little place called Times Beach, Missouri. The bottom-line for my Internet Pappa, is that people ought not live in known disaster areas, and then expect the rest of us to bail their dumb asses out when Mother Nature decides, and she inevitably will, to kick them in their collective nut sack. "Amen!" I thought. Call off the Google-sponsored paternity test, surely I must be of this man's click-stream.

Then, in a rare fit of putting myself in someone else's' shoes, I tried to imagine what exactly drives a person to hang on when they know that the backyard is a future swamp, fault-line, or volcano. Other than bone-drying, brain-baking heat, the regions of Texas I tend to reside in really have no weather-born predators. Too far from the coast to really be effected by Rita's sisters, too far northeast to be assaulted by roving gangs of Mexican drug dealers in search of cool tropical shirts and clean bathrooms. We do of course get the occasional little tornado, but nothing to uproot people to the magnitude of Katrina or Rita.

What then, drives this bizarre behavior? Group neurosis? Saccharine? Nocturnal emissions beyond the levels allowed by the EPA? The emergence of Krispy Kreme and Starbucks into every vestige of American society? A modern, innate shared death wish brought about by a combination of over-worked, under-recreated citizens working too hard to enjoy their lives or raise their children, mingled with a desire to simply find a better way to live in a modern South that increasingly has neither a Dunkin Donuts location, nor an independent A&W Root Beer outlet? Why are two million of my fellow Texicans turning I-45 into a south bound parking lot back into Houston, when there is no question that the greenhouse gasses from all those idling cars and burning busses will lead to another Category 5 coastal blow before the end of the season?

What is it I am missing that would make me act the same way? In a word: home.

I am not missing my home, a child hood home, nor the dumpy little house I am consigned to now. If there was one place that I would feel compelled to wait out Mother Nature, one place to disregard all of the open-letter warnings and all the obvious signs of of trouble, my heart and mind draw me back to Anchorage.

The International Airport sits on the edge of the Bering Sea, on top of land that just 40 years ago was 12 to 20 feet higher in elevation than it is now. Up until the yuletide tsunami last year, most folks had forgotten the little tremble that echoed out of the then future grave of the Valdez. As a result, miles of new beach front property were created around Anchorage, extending south to the mystical scrap of land known as the Kenai Peninsula.

It is just a matter of time before it happens again. The airport will be suitable only for water taxis and float planes. With the exception of an air carrier that shares paternity with a current NHRA team, I don't think that many manufacturers will try to put floats on a 747. Homes, shipping, businesses, historic buildings and tourist destinations will be rendered useless, save for acting as a spot to anchor one's fishing boat. People, undoubtedly, will die. Lots of people. Lots of good people.

I have looked in the eyes of the people who live and work there. You ain't gonna pull them off their mountain, our out of their streams, or away from the glacier. All of the faults and failings of modern day life, all of the unrequited desires, all of the disappointments of a job well done, are all washed away by the silent buzz of the Northern Lights. Bathing in the emotional warmth of the glacial glow of Denali cleans the soul of the soot of modern America and restores the mysterious lifeforce of a man's marrow. My commitment to the Church of the High Agnostic and the Holy Ambivalent was forever shaken by the divine fingerprint of Anchorage.

SO, my beloved greybeard, I promise that I won't complete the move to Anchorage until I have sold enough books or won a big enough lottery to support myself and my family through the next earthquake. I won't come to you with hat in hand asking to rebuild my beautiful Anchorage when it sinks into the Bering; because, once I find my mountain, I know you won't ask me to leave my home. I know you won't ask me to be Formerly Living.

[Blogger's Note: I truly do admire greybeard, and don't want any of my three devoted readers to think any differently. Read his blogs, read his comments, he is a kind, thoughtful, inquisitive soul. The world would be a much more miserable place without him.]