A touch from the Past.

So today is Friday and I am now sitting in the Anchorage airport. Free Wireless is a wonderful idea I think. Am I nervous? Am I ready for stepping aboard and meeting the crew? To get out on the high seas and start dealing with live crab? You betcha! I watched the sun sifting through the clouds, striking the mountains of Anchorage today, it was ruggedly beautiful and dull. Alaska is no place for a city and the contrast of tall buildings to an awesome sky left me anxious to get out to the Aleutians. I remember the allure of the water, the coastal towns, the crusty fisherman I met as a kid along the British Columbian and Washington coasts. They are what brought me up here with open and searching eyes.

It is a bit strange to be considered a biologist, and to now be one who is doing something to help preserve that way of life. I have wandered and travelled in a gigantic circle; from the wonderstruck eyes and captured spirit of an excited youth, to the young man I am today. I never dreamt that circumstance or chance or anything would have happened for me to be sitting here now. I wonder if this experience is a borrowed dream from an excited child.

Those of you who have known me the past several years in College may wonder where the sudden desire for the sea, for fish comes from. Lord knows I was not chomping at the bit to be on boats in Boston. The idea of being on the water was more a piece of home, family that stuck with me from my past and I shared as an adventurous story. A small bit of grinning and pride as I recounted my experiences fishing and exploring the coastal waterways with my dad, mom, Maiken and Joe. Even then it was like I was on a tour of other peoples lives, their passions, adventures and freedoms that I hungrily devoured and revelled in their generous sharing, always wondering but too timid to hope I might stake my claim in a similar style of life.

My point is that the root of my adventures is only now beginning to stem from me, the unknown is not a shared experience now, but one in which I have driven head first on my own iniative and free will. I have experienced something like this before as I stepped out of the car onto the Boston College campus, again as I boarded my flight to Germany two years later and embarked on my own interesting escapades, but never before has the journey been one that played so heavily upon the memories, dreams, and curiousities I had as a child. Memories I stored away, and now I unpack to flesh out and build upon again.

I thus embark, into the jaws of adventure cognizant of the familiar flavor I tasted as a child, but also knowing that something significant has changed. Not entirely sure of what that change is, but I do know that now the flavors of experience are of my own making and I pray that they live up to and surpass the secret questions and curiosities and adventurous spirit I harbored as a child.