Alaska vs. Oregon

Midway on my morning run. The sidewalk offers a detour away from the traffic of Debar Road into the densely buffering woods of Russian Jack Park. More often than not, I keep to the sidewalk, but ambient music pipes from my iPod and the aesthete in my brain is demanding more appropriate scenery. Last second, I choose the woods. It’s fall and the paper birches are shaggy and almost sepia in color as if a nostalgic memory of the landscape. Good decision, I think to myself

Before the scenery can transport me to a meditative state, I hear a crackling noise over the gentle harmonies in my ear. I rip my earbuds out instinctively as my sympathetic nervous system takes control. I’ve been intensely phobic of bears since early childhood, and thirteen people have been mauled in Alaska this year alone: a new record. Rationally I know I’m more likely to die a million other more mundane and domestic ways, but to have your neck clamped in the jaws of some brutal animal trips off the amygdala in a way slipping in the shower simply does not, even if bathrooms have claimed more scalps than bears ever will. Still, every fellow born-and-raised Alaskan I know has had bear encounters and I figure I’m well overdue.

Fear is a drug, and in large enough doses, a powerful hallucinogen, but there is undoubtably something large barreling through the dry foliage thirty feet to my right. Still in my periphery, my stalker remains a blur, not definitively a bear, not definitely anything really. I could be overreacting but careful deliberation is not a luxury right now so I max out my pace. Normally, the best deterrent for a bear attack is being as boring of an object as you can possibly be. Encountering a bear while running is the absolute worse scenario, but it’s too late to alter survival strategies. Something falls out of my coat pocket with a jangle but I don’t look to see if it’s change or my house keys. My focus is directly on the end of the detour where the trail meets Boniface Parkway.

*     *     *

Cut to six years later: I’m living in Portland, Oregon and my face, thankfully, isn’t a jigsaw puzzle I use as a conversation-starter at parties. I made it to Boniface Parkway and never did find out what was chasing me or what fell out of my pocket (it wasn’t my keys). Even though objectively nothing really happened, I still think about that harried moment whenever outdoors if only to contrast the mindset the two states induce in me. Nature seems so benign and well-behaved here, as if I view it through museum glass. While Alaska is imperious, chiseled, muscular, and vast, Oregon is lush, floral, brimming, clammy.

I run a lot more now than in Alaska, and if the trail I’m on offers a forested detour I always take it. I regard being outside a peaceful activity–to the point of being enervating at times–rather than alarming. Yet my interactions with my present surroundings seem mitigated by a kind of passivity and so it remains a low-engagement relationship. When people ask me about Oregon, I give them observations. But when people ask me about Alaska, I give them stories.