As I stood on the trail behind my house, facing east, the snowy path extended in front of me for a few dozen meters before a low-set long wooden sign stood in a fork of the path with carved black letters marking the “Tony Knowles Coastal Trail.” The sign was illuminated at that early morning hour by the incandescent glow of the lampposts lining the trail, and I could just barely make out the letters of the sign through the thick, silent snowfall. The Chugach Mountains bordering Anchorage on the east weren’t visible yet that morning through the falling snow, but knowing they were there comforted me nonetheless on my walk to school.
         The new snow that had fallen during the night formed a light layer of about four inches, still accumulating slowly as the large flakes continued to make their leisurely way down to the ground. My booted feet made a muted creaking sound on the powdery surface not packed down enough to make the typical crunch of snow, and I was glad that the municipal trail workers hadn’t yet come through with their snow machines to groom and flatten the path and carve out parallel grooves on either side of the trail for classic Nordic skiers. I had the delightful feeling that my footsteps would likely be filled in with new snow by the time the next person passed by.
         Years later when I started college in Vermont, the images of that morning were often in my mind—of over a decade of daily walks to and from school, that walk deep in the winter of my last year in Alaska was the one that came to represent familiarity and comfort.
         As I began walking at a pace quick enough to keep me warm but not so fast that I couldn’t enjoy the stillness of the morning, to my right the frozen surface of Westchester Lagoon spread out in an oval shape, lined by a tree-covered slope up on the far side. Following the trail along the edge of the lagoon I thought of how today would be a good day to go out skating on the snow-plowed and hot-mopped loops maintained by the city—but it looked like no early morning skaters had made it out just yet.
         Through my hat and hood I heard skis gliding over snow, poles punctuating the smooth movement and the ground; a Nordic skier approached from the left side of the fork in the trail ahead of me. At first just a shadow obscured by the thick snow in the air, as she neared her form became clearer, and she moved to the side of the trail to make room for me to pass comfortably. We exchanged a nod to acknowledge our shared experience of the untouched morning trail, before she resumed her wide skate-skiing strides once behind me.
         It didn’t occur to me at the time, when still living at home with my loving mother and sister, but once I left Alaska and my family I realized the importance of small heartening encounters like this one to my contentment with life. Sharing pleasant moments with others as with the skier that morning brought meaning and joy into my life when I felt isolated, as I did during the first weeks of college.
         Approaching the bottom of the hill that bounded the eastern edge of the lagoon, my eyes moved out of habit to a dark patch of pine trees where moose sometimes lurked. It was a fairly usual occurrence to meet moose on this trail, but it was always best not to surprise or be surprised by one of the bulky and easily startled herbivores. So I peered carefully at the shadows of the pine branches before passing by the clump of trees once I determined no large furry forms.
         I turned right to follow the trail up the hill, and the lagoon began to fall away to my right, blocked from my view by more pine trees as the path rose. The relaxed traffic of seven AM on a weekday glowed with sleepy red eyes along the four-lane Minnesota Highway connecting downtown to midtown Anchorage. The few cars that took the exit toward West Anchorage High School that paralleled my trail up the hill didn’t bother the still morning, as the snow in the air and on the ground insulated most sound.
         As the hill rose higher and I began to peel off some of my layers as my body warmed, to the west the shadowed form of Mt. Susitna rose from across the Cook Inlet, the water body that surrounded Anchorage on all but its eastern side. The mountain’s gently sloping outline was just barely visible through the white flakes that had begun to thin.
         The thought rarely entered my head on those winter mornings that these images of Anchorage would come to define home once I left Alaska. The assumption underlying my education was that if I wanted to do something useful in life, I would leave Alaska for college. This I simply accepted, and never once considered attending the University of Alaska in Anchorage—UAA was for the underachievers in the culture of West High School.
         It didn’t occur to me until later how unusual it was to non-Alaskans that I encountered moose and Nordic skiers on my walk to school, or that I went skating on the lagoon behind my house for exercise. The short winter days with many feet of snow were never extraordinary until I moved away from Alaska and realized what the rest of the world considered normal winter. The mountains surrounding Anchorage on all sides never seemed to me anything other than beautiful but formidable boundaries that I would have to climb out of to access the rest of the world.
         At the top of the hill I could see my goal—the pale face of West Anchorage High School, lit by the dulled yellow of streetlights, a huge mural of an eagle painted with outstretched wings grasping an anchor in its claws on the wall next to the front doors. What lay beyond high school was just as clear in my eyes as the mural—but was intangible until the day I walked on to a college campus as a freshman at Middlebury College.
         I paused at the bench on the top of the hill to put my scarf and hat into my schoolbag, as I had taken them off as I got warmer climbing the hill. West High cast fluorescent light from the windows and doors onto the street in front of me, and my breath clouded the air as I exhaled slowly before crossing the street to walk towards the front doors. For the moment, it was just another day—but looking back, it was one of the precious last days of my childhood in Alaska.