Coming full circle

I often get reflective, introspective, or even downright existential on long trips. One might call that the product of boredom, but I prefer to think of it as the luxury of unstructured time. Sitting, thinking, and staring out the window can be surprisingly relaxing when there's no guilt that you're not being productive.

Over the past month I've had numerous instances for this kind of mental wandering, and I'm writing this blog entry (to be uploaded later) from the window seat of an Alaska jet from Newark to Seattle. The weather outside my window is grey, cloudy, featureless: just about as interesting as a blank page at the end of a novel. Perfect. Here we go.

Well, I haven't written on this blog in quite, quite some time. Sorry about that. The summer and fall slipped away in a long rash of busy weekends, busy days at work, and catching up on sleep in between. I'm finally coming back to Nome from a month vacation (Nov. 13-Dec. 13), spent mostly around New Jersey, where I grew up, but also in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, and along the hurried stretches of highway and rail lines that connect these densely-populated states.

It's been fantastic. On Thanksgiving weekend I was lucky enough to meet with many high school friends, some of whom I haven't seen since we were last in cap and gown, and eager to get out of Dodge. Everyone seems to be doing well. The marching band to which I once devoted so much time has gotten bigger and better; former classmates are on their way to becoming doctors, lawyers, and teachers; people are getting married, having children, or approaching higher degrees; and our post-college lives are laying down roots on all corners of the world, from Japan to Jersey. Under the amber canopies of an unseasonably warm November, everything old was new again.

My family also had many reasons to give thanks this past Nov. 22, whether it was enduring health, birthdays, the bizarrely temperate climate, or just the preponderance of stuffing and pecan pie. We drank wine, talked about Eric Clapton and delinquent phone companies, and wiled away the afternoon.

De-facto homecomings also brought me up to New Haven, Connecticut and Cambridge, Massachusetts, allowing me to bracket my month off with reminiscences of college. Harvard trounced Yale at "The Game" (football), the Harvard Glee Club imbued several concerts with "unity and joy," and it seems like my fellow Crimson alumni are enjoying life outside of the Yard.

This was a month, however, not just for updates and reunions, but also for lifestyle comparisons and hypotheticals. Living in sparse, rural, sub-Arctic Alaska for fourteen months - and then coming back to one of the most densely populated places in America - has been an incredible opportunity to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of two very different ways of living, and to ask myself what I want after my current employment contract in Nome expires (August 2008).

Nome vs. New Jersey, Nome vs. Boston - the differences in many ways couldn't be more striking; the disparity between frontier simplicity and urban overabundance could not be laid more bare.

But on these train rides between college and the Garden State, and now as I glide at 30,000 feet above the Upper Midwest, I find again and again that there is much that these two regions could learn from each other. And in both, I am convinced there are some of the best places in the world.

As an Alaskan (albeit a new one) I admire the zippy internet speeds and plentiful shopping possibilities of the Northeast; I love its patronage of the arts, its acceptance of a wide diversity of peoples, its political progressivism, and its street-smart, cosmopolitan, sophisticated sensibilities.

This month I have been delighted to rediscover small, wonderful corners of the East Coast. The Harvard Book Store immediately comes to mind. Its aisles brim with bright, fascinating volumes that would escape the bestseller shelves of a Barnes & Noble. Photographic retrospectives of Ansel Adams cohabit the discount shelves with Umberto Eco and Albert Einstein and Bill Bryson. While the subway rumbles by underground, bookish patrons browse, buy, and pay homage to learning and new ideas. Somehow these new books - and the air of academic excitement that embraces them - always seem to mean something intangibly good, something that you can't put your finger on, but that is nonetheless redeeming for humanity. I may exaggerate, but as I walk back out onto Massachusetts Avenue and flank the gates of Harvard Yard, life seems all the more worth living.

(Oh, for a good bookstore in Nome!)

But as one who came of age in Union County, New Jersey - within whose borders there are an average of some 4,000+ people per square mile - I've also come to appreciate what a small town can offer. I love the genuineness of Nome's community; the earnestness and unabashed happiness of its people; its calm rejection of pretension; its comfort with simplicity.

The residents of this region live in one of the most inhospitable and challenging places on Earth, and yet their hospitality and easy-going adaptability easily exceeds many of the far more comfortable (and wealthy) places of the lower 48. Blizzards blow through, the ocean freezes over for months at a stretch, wind chills fall below -50, and gas prices keep going higher ($4.30/gallon for unleaded, as I write). But Western Alaskans, I've found, tend to make it through; they bundle up, watch their budgets, and don't waste much precious hot air on complaint.

Nome is the first small town in which I have ever spent more than a weekend, and after over a year here, I've found so much that I could have never discovered in any corner of the urbanized, affluent East.

New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Nome is a place that treasures restfulness and calm. And there's something to be said for both.

A Starbucks on every corner and a New York Times in every mailbox, or salmon in every river and Arctic entryways in every home? I realize, as I fly westward, that this next life choice looms over my return voyage.

What to do next? Well, I don't know for sure. But it's been a fun month off.