Visiting Lower Alaska

Ever since a cruise ship took me up the Alaskan coast, I have thought of Puget Sound in a different way. Puget Sound looks and feels a lot like Alaska, or British Columbia, or as Shari tells me, the south of Norway. Trees, bushes, weeds and grass cover the ground.

Puget Sound is Lower Alaska.

Talking with Whidbey Island friends during our recent two-week visit to the North, the subject of weather necessarily came up. I tried joking several times about visiting South Alaska or Norway, but nobody got the joke. When you are inside, you don't get the view from outside.

Our first morning I desperately wanted to go home. It didn't help that we were sleeping on Costco futons on the floor of the empty, mortgaged house that we have been trying to sell for two years. But it was also all the green outside and all the water that fed and cooled it and everything that went along with it.

I know I was rude with friends and family who live in Lower Alaska. We arrived at the beginning of Puget Sound's summer, September 1, and left towards its summer's end a couple of weeks later. Locals were excited. They wore shorts and smiles as they sat outside in coffee shops. I complained. I missed the dry heat, open sky and palette of colors that extended beyond green, blue and grey.

The weather is reversed in Lower Alaska. Mornings are clear, cold and damp. A heavy dew settles on everything. About ten or eleven in the morning, it heats up enough to dry out and go out. The day becomes pleasant, then muggy from all the dampness, until the sun begins to set. By five in the afternoon, it's getting chilly. By the time it gets dark, it's time for several layers of clothes. Tucson is the opposite. Mornings and evenings are the precious times to be outside. It's during the day that you stay inside.

Of course, I failed to pack enough clothes. When daily temperatures exceed a hundred degrees, it's hard to think about socks, hats, layers and wool. I brought a hiking pullover sweater made of petroleum and a cotton cardigan and ended up wearing them every day, sometimes both together.

Something has changed in Shari and me. We both talked about it during our two week vacation in Lower Alaska. Nothing in Puget Sound's best stretch of weather for the year made us regret leaving. We were happy to have made the move to Tucson.

We took a long drive down I-5 through Oregon and California. (One could argue that Lower Alaska extends to the Willamette Valley.) We passed through the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys, then over Tehachapi to Barstow and through the Mojave Desert. Crossing the Colorado River into Arizona at Parker, we began to see saguaro, cholla and ocatillo, open sky, pink and brown rocks, and dry dirt. It's so stunningly beautiful. We felt at home in the Sonoran Desert.