Rethinking Alaska

“We were breathing hard now, sweating in the afternoon haze and mobbed by a few thousand mosquitoes each. Every square inch of exposed skin was smeared with Vietnam-issue jungle juice, stuff that dissolves plastic buttons and burns like acid in your eyes. It kept the actual blood loss down to a level that didn’t threaten death, but that wasn’t the real problem. It was psychological warfare, airborne water torture. You felt the constant patter, and knew your back was crawling with living gray fur, hundreds of relentless snouts probing for a chink in your armor. A hand wiped down a sleeve would come away sticky, smeared with corpses, and you strained them through your teeth. Up your nose, in your eyes and ears, there was never a moment’s rest. The blur of perpetual assault and the wail of wings brought on a creeping panic you had to ignore. They were simply a fact of existence, an elemental phenomenon like rain. You could ask, ‘Is it bugging out today?’ Yeah, a downpour. A bloody, bloodthirsty downpour” (Jans, 1993, p. 77).

Taken from a book called The Last Light Breaking by Nick Jans - a man who wrote about his years of living in an Alaskan Eskimo village. This paragraph alone is enough to make me rethink the wisdom of going to Alaska.