Alaska in the Summer

The sun doesn’t set.

I feel like I need to write that again.

The sun doesn’t set.

I mean, we know this. Intellectually I have known this. I can explain why. But until you are there it just doesn’t make sense. In the way that some things you cannot know until you experience them because it does not make sense to your body.

Right now I am on an airplane, an hour and fifteen minutes from landing in Fairbanks. It is 10:00p.m. and there are no signs of twilight, evening, sunset, nothing. I am extraordinarily tired. Tired for sleep. I want to shut my eyes and sleep. But my body will not let me. I need all the other things that mean sleep: horizontality, freshly brushed teeth, ear plugs, a blanket on top of me, or sleep is just not going to happen.

Headache be damned.

And I have experienced this before. I have been to Alaska in the summer, I have felt the sun not set. Day after day. But every time it is new.

I have never been to Alaska in the winter, and I do not know if I could handle that. To never have the light, seems really unpleasant. How would you ever have any energy to do anything?