The sky had 3 AM sunset going on...

It is summer in Fairbanks. Most of us think of this as late spring, the cusp of summer, when temperatures can turn cool and a weekend garden party has to have a backup plan. Especially in the Chicago area where it's been a consistently 55 degree bummer along the lakefront this year. Not Fairbanks. It was 85 degrees and almost blindingly sunny today. Summer starts early here, goes full throttle, then by July they tell me it starts to rain and act like it does in August-September down in the Midwest. But tomorrow I leave for the tundra, so this year I get to experience one or two days of Fourth of July heat followed by a nine hour drive due north from Fairbanks to the land of fifty degrees again. Or something like that. This is truly seasonal shock for me this year. Not to mention the sun never set last night. The sky had 3 AM sunset going on when I woke up to get a drink of water and so I never went back to sleep. But instead of setting the sun changed its mind and zoomed back up into the sky. Because of this they say everyone in Alaska gets a bit nuts, running around, getting summer projects done like squirrels on speed, the outdoor cafes and souvenir shops bustling with tourists, the roads and trails populated by energetic joggers and cyclists. I met a few locals on the bus today that were from the lower 48. They told me they came up for school or vacation, and never left. It is incredibly beautiful here. Fairbanks has its strip mall stretches like everywhere else, but the University is situated on the edge of seemingly endless spruce-birch forest, and the morning air was fresh with the smell of evergreen and wild roses that grow in incredible profusion under the trees. So I feel a little like Alice in Tundra Land, everything's subject to change like a psychedelic dream in very short order, and everyone is running around this weird beautiful landscape like a bunch of Mad Hatters.