The curl of the waves, perfect. The sand: warm and soft, just like the morning light. The temperature, perfect. No bugs. Even the water is finally warm. It is the kind of morning in these islands that seems, well, perfect.
Perfect. As soon as that the word crosses my mind, I smile and am instantly transported back in time to a memory of Alaska, the Brooks Range, dogsledding and how it led to a search for perfect beauty.
It began this way: March, 1987. I was dogsledding up the frozen back of the North Fork of the Koyukuk River deep in Gates of the Arctic National Park following a braided thread of wolf and caribou tracks when the lead musher stopped ahead of me pointing at a gap in the mountains to the west. “There’s a valley somewhere up in there,” he said, his moustache striped with ice, “with a Nunamiut name that means something like ‘Place of Perfect Beauty’.” With that, he clucked to his dogs and moved off, leaving me to watch the pass vanish like a mirage in a curtain of blowing snow. Even as it disappeared, I knew what I had to do, someday.
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