Between Two Worlds

The outside world falls into chaos yet somehow order, and I press my face into the back window, like a prisoner against the glass, not gone but already longing for this place, this landscape, too magnificent to comprehend. I see ridges, flutings, gargoyles and towers, spires and fairytale spines of snow, ice, and rock, the Alaska Range rising and falling forever. Justin and I are crammed into the back of a single-propeller ski plane alongside our ridiculous heap of gear, the flight an airlock between the natural and the constructed. Our pilot, Jok, speaks little. When he does, his voice crackles over the headset, mostly to converse with the woman in the passenger seat, who works in the office at Sheldon Air Service in Talkeetna but until now has never flown into the range.

Jok and the woman are older than we are, easily in their sixties, and I’m suddenly struck by how little time they have left on this earth, which triggers the realization