Burketown

Today, 19 years ago my parents, brother and I drove into Fairbanks for the first time.  Words really do fail me at this moment, but let me simply say, to my parents: thank you.  God is gracious and good and faithful.

The Spell of the Yukon (excerpts from)

There's the land. (Have you seen it?)

It's the cussedest land that I know,

From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it

To the deep, deathlike valleys below.

Some say God was tired when he made it;

Some say it's a fine land to shun;

Maybe; but there's some as would trade it

For no land on earth -- and I'm one.

The summer -- no sweeter was ever;

The sunshiney woods all athrill;

The grayling aleap in the river,

The bighorn asleep on the hill.

The strong life that never knows harness;

The wilds where the caribou call;

The freshness, the freedom, the farness --

O God! how I'm struck on it all.

The winter! the brightness that blinds you,

The white land locked tight as a drum,

The cold fear that follows and finds you,

The silence that bludgeons you dumb.

The snows that are older than history,

The woods where the weird shadows slant;

The stillness, the moonlight, the mystery,

I've bade 'em good-by -- but I can't.

There's a land where the mountains are nameless,

And the rivers all run God knows where;

There are lives that are erring and aimless,

And deaths that just hang by a hair;

There are hardships that nobody reckons;

There are valleys unpeopled and still;

There's a land -- oh, it beckons and beckons,

And I want to go back -- and I will.

There's gold, and it's haunting and haunting;

It's luring me on as of old;

Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wanting

So much as just finding the gold.

It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder,

It's the forests where silence has lease;

It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder,

It's the stillness that fills me with peace.

 -- Robert Service

Images were taken by my mother on our journey to Alaska in the Spring of 1993.