I, too, am innocent of the natural wonders in Alaska except by conversations with my colleagues in the USAF who got stationed near Sarah Palin’s porch for watching Soviet military assets and by the films produced by National Geographic and similar sources.

There is a national park that is sort of shared by the U.S. and Canada park systems where, to this day, you can hike on the Chilkoot Trail — marked by the stuff gold-seekers had to abandon on their way to get rich from the Klondike Gold Rush. Like the “forty-niners” in California, more people got rich selling necessities to the gold-seekers than got rich from actually staking a claim.

While I was privileged to attend the fourth class for climate change science presenters — back when Al Gore taught the classes personally in Nashville — -my first notice of climate change came from Alaska natives on the Internet. In an Indian chat room, they puzzled over subsistence hunting getting harder as animals showed up in unaccustomed places and failed to show up where they had since the mind of man runneth not to the contrary.

Alaska was on my bucket list, but my bucket arrived sooner than I had hoped — is there a “good day to die” as asserted in the Sioux war cry? Dunno, but I have no complaints. I got a look at how things are going from two grandsons when I invited them on a road trip some years ago. They both insisted they could see the national parks on my itinerary from their laptops.

One grandson was pushed to go by his father and the other one stayed home. The one who took the road trip made me feel like a very good grandfather when he described our adventures to the rest of the family.

So I regret not making it to Alaska, but I can stack it up against the many places I have visited in my fairy tale life and complaining would make me look like an ingrate and a fool.