"You're Going Where?"

My trip to Alaska is now exactly one month old - ridiculous how quickly the first 31 days went by. I arrived on August 27 and started work on the 28th.

There's so much to write about from my first month of the experience: getting to Nome, Nome itself, working at the radio station, etc. So I guess I'll just start with the trip out, last month.

Getting out of Newark and then going through two successive airports - first Portland, Oregon and then Anchorage, Alaska - was mostly uneventful, although in retrospect, it was pretty funny how much confusion and complication we ran into at Newark. None of the Continental Airline employees working behind the airline counter seemed to have ever heard of Nome before. ("You're going where?") When my mother went to a nearby "Information Desk" to verify that we were standing in the correct line (we were), the person working behind the counter had the initial reaction of - and I do not exaggerate - "Oh, Alaska. That's international, so you'll want to head upstairs for the international departures desks." Wow.

But sooner or later - and at the time, it definitely seemed like later - all of my bags, and I, somehow made it onto the plane, despite clogged ticketing lines and rude security personnel.

For some reason I couldn't bring myself to sleep on the first plane, out to Portland. After all of the preparation and packing that had preceded actually walking out the door, it was nice just to sit and read and listen to my iPod for a few hours. I even got to write a little.

The in-flight movie was "Dr. Doolittle 3," which is one of those movies that you can basically follow perfectly well without listening to its sound, and even with the constant, high-pitched whirring of plane engines saturating your ambient noise. Apparently it never made it to the theaters and was released straight to DVD, and I think I know why.

Airports are strange places in the middle of the night, though, especially when you have long layovers. Portland's airport architecture probably looks open and inviting during the day, but at night the terminal has a strange abandoned quality to it, with almost all of its kiosks closed and with random people sleeping in gates, outstretched on connected bench seats and using their jackets for pillows. With carry-on bags slung tiredly over one shoulder, you suddenly feel like you're a refugee of a war fought over bad airline schedules, and as you're fleeing for safety in the gate of your next departure, there's this strange sense of solidarity with all of the other passengers that you see, napping in their seats. For the time being, you have no home, have nowhere to go, and are all in this together: stuck in a limbo of fluorescent lighting, a no-man's-land of soft muzak piped through tinny overhead speakers, a Twilight-Zone of looped segments from CNN Headline News.

And since all of the food places are closed, too, but since I was pretty hungry, it was a choice between junk food and soda, from the still-open newsstand, or nothing. And so peanut M&Ms and root beer it was.

It was kind of neat to finally arrive in Anchorage, even though I didn't really have enough time to go outside, especially since it was in the middle of the night. You can tell you're in Alaska, though - there's a full-size model of a propellor bush plane hanging in one of the atrium lobbies, and as the sun began to rise (around 5am), you could see the mountains, which surround Anchorage, silhouetted against the blues and purple-reds of the brightening day. And yet they still had a Starbucks and a Chili's - probably the last time I'll see either of those chains in a good long while.

It wasn't a great place to sleep, though. For whatever reason, the Anchorage Airport has a PA system which automatically announces the time every half-hour, and rather loudly, so even though I had a good five hours to sleep before my connecting flight to Nome, it was more like having ten consecutive naps of 25 minutes each.

That last flight, though, was beautiful. For starters, the plane was only half-filled - an advantage, I'm sure, of traveling to a remote Alaskan town - and you could see the sun rise, to our right, over the vast fields of clouds beneath us. Really breathtaking. And to our left, you could see the snow-topped mountains outside of Anchorage.

About an hour later, we finally touched down in Nome, and thankfully, so did all of my luggage. I met the director of the radio station for which I would shortly be working, and the year had begun.