"In a dream, he saw himself ...
wandering through the romantic
waste places of the world."
Wallace Stegner

"Why do you want to go to there?" asked my friends and family when I told them I'd be camping at Denali State Park in Alaska this month. (as you read this I am already there).
Why would I ever visit a state whose motto is: "And you thought Buffalo was cold?"; a wild land where Grizzly Bears eat hikers for sport and use their walking canes as toothpicks afterward.

My friend, who is in a campground in Denali right now, invited me to visit: "I had my first bear encounter. . ." he recalled in his 4th letter to me. "The bear was resting near its kill about 1000 feet away. It got up and gave me a good looking over."

Indeed, I thought, "This is no Country Bear Jamboree."
One morning, Bob Hamel, (Soulcracker's drummer) , said uneasily over eggs over-easy, that a friend recently died in one of those little pond-hopper planes in an accident over Alaska. "Don't fly in the little planes," he declared.

Bob's warning truly unnerved me as once upon a time, I too, nearly flew into the sides a DC-10 in one of those little propeller fuggers.

Two other friends - Andrew (the girlish editor of SLAMM) and Esser (a nimble bartender from 4th And B) - told me I had to read Into the Wild.

Into the Wild is a novel by adventure journalist Jon Krakauer. Jon Krakauer is an adventurer badass. (He joined a climbing party to the peak of Mt. Everest to cover a story for Outdoor Magazine. That climb was the deadliest in the history of Everest).

In Into the Wild, Krakauer wrote about, Christopher McCandless, another adventurer badass. He was a bright young man with a promising collegiate future. Instead, he donated his entire 25 thousand dollar savings to charity, abandoned his car, burned the cash in his wallet, and headed west for a crazy dream adventure in the Alaska bush. He perished from eating a poisonous potato root.

But how crazy was he?

Krakauer often quotes Wallace Stegner, who once said: "No man, with any of the juices of boyhood in him, has forgotten those dreams."

Now I don't have any notion that what I'm doing is comparably as stupid or romantic as what McCandless did. But you can bet that I'm a little nervous.

So I asked Teddy Wigler -- a fellow bartender pal and quasi-experienced outdoorsmanguydude -- to take me to an adventure retail outlet called REI, and help pick out the manly outdoorsmanguydude stuff required to deliver me from a most untimely death.

"You'll need this," he said, putting flares into my cart. "And you'll need the Chanel #6 Wolf Repellant," he promised. "And a pair of water-safe, battery-heated, winterproof, Compass Gloves to the mix.

"Oh, and you're gonna need this too," he blurted excitedly, grabbing a pair of Smart Socks made from the intestinal lining of Martian Bovines and setting it into the cart aside the condom that also deploys into a parachute if needed.

"Don't fly in those little planes."

No less than three people suggested I bring a handgun. But considering my twisted relationship with fate, I knew the bear would wrestle the gun from my hand and shoot me in the head.

My Dad warned me about the earthquake of 1964. It was 9.2 on the Richter scale and it kicked Anchorage's ass.

My boyhood chum Dave warned me to, "watch out for avalanches -- they tumble without warning.

Yes, the great north is a beautiful yet scary place my friends, and there are many interesting ways to die in Alaska."

It's a classic human disease: fear of the unknown. And it flares up whenever you try to do anything fun. But I bet if an Alaskan were to visit San Diego, his friends would warn him about the vicious gangs of skate punks that "Circle you like covered wagons," whenever you leave the house.

My guess is there is danger everywhere.
When I booked Peru last year, everybody said if the altitude didn't get me, the banditos would.

And I believed it.

When I first moved to California, Gramma Lagreca warned me, "They are going to tie you down and make you do drugs!" And co-workers and friends informed me, as confidently as if they had read it in Britannica, that California was, "The land of fruits and nuts."

And I believed them.

Of course, nobody had to tie me down to make me do any drugs, and my closest friends ARE nuts and fruits; so I love you Gramma, but blow me.

But about Alaska: I'm listening to what my boss says. And Mike should know because he drinks Yukon Jack. He even has the motto on the Yukon bottle memorized: "A taste born of hoary nights, when lonely men struggled to keep their fires lit and cabins warm."

Mike said it best when he said over the phone, "If you see a bar in the middle of nowhere, you HAVE to go inside."
Then he shared a tale of a friend who was tooling around in the frozen bramble of Alaska and stumbled upon a strange bar built underground. The man descended into the bowels of the bar and met the woman he eventually married.

Now I don't think Mike's point was that I should hang out in bars; or that I should expect to meet chicks in Alaska, where the male to female ratio is 10 guys for every Caribou.

He meant that life is an adventure, and to explore anything that is placed before me.
Which is exactly what I intend to do.