Too much smoke

Not long after I moved to Alaska I started having a recurrent dream. In it, I had traveled Outside and for one reason or another could not get back to Alaska. In time I learned that several other people had the same dream. In discussing it with one person or another we decided it was simply that this is where we wanted to be and had some kind of unconscious fear of losing it. Well, that dream faded after a while and I haven’t had one in years.

However, it has been replaced by another, I had one last night. It involves the East Pole. In it, I am making my way along the trial toward the cabin. I run into people along the trail, some I know some I don’t, it changes with the dreams. It is almost always in summer with four-wheelers and difficulties along the trail change also, however it always seems there are more people than usual. Sometimes they are headed for the town, or we can see the town or it involves getting something from the town, but that is not the most disturbing part, When I finally arrive at the cabin I find I can see others around it. but even that is not the worst.

The worst is that just over the hill behind the cabin there is some kind of a development, Sometimes it is a mall or shopping center and sometimes it is a cluster of townhouses but always an encroachment of development with paved streets, stores and traffic. Sometimes I wrestle with that or sometimes I wake up but that seems to be where the dream ends, when I realize that the sprawl of development has caught up and I either need to join and accept it or start over farther away.

Just some side notes on this: After 20 years someone has finally built a cabin I can see from the East Pole and I find that disconcerting. In summer when the trees are all leafed out i can't see it, but I know it's there. In winter it is very visible from the front deck. It is like the solitude is shattered. But the dreams began long before that. I think the new cabin just fulfills the apprehension from the dreams about people moving too close. It is like when you expect people to be around you can deal with it, but when you don’t it can be disturbing,

And I am not without fault. While I was building the cabin I made friends with a man who had lived in that area in a small cabin for the previous 12 years, from long before the land had been sold as a subdivision. One day he was helping me put up the ridge board (a story in itself) and I was telling him how this had been a lifelong dream. He said it had been one of his as well. At that point a startling realization came over me. Shocked, I looked at him and said rather sheepishly, "I am part of your problem, aren't I." He politely nodded affirmatively and we let it go at that, but that realization has always tempered my reaction to others who came out later. One man's dream is another's nightmare.

One of those trivial facts I remember from early history lessons or that I read somewhere is that Daniel Boone had said he always felt the urge to move when he could see the smoke from a neighbor’s chimney. He eventually died in Missouri. I have always wondered if expansion caught up with him there and he just gave up and didn’t move again or if he had reached the end of his trail before another neighbor's smoke pushed him farther west.

At any rate, it seems these days there is just too much smoke to get away from it all.

ADDENDUM: Lately I have discovered an awful number of young people have very little knowledge of American (or any) history so here's a little about Daniel Boone. As if to make my point a question on one of the sites asked "Wasn't he the one who died at the Alamo?" The article even pointed out he died in 1820, 16 years before that battle.