A dream in the midnight dusk.

2:48 am

I don’t normally remember my dreams, even the one’s that soon slide away after I’ve woken from a start. And I have never written down the fleeting shards of a dream as it scrambles away in the first moments of wakefulness.

But this one… this ethereal experience… this one I wanted to keep.

We were standing in back of our new house which was in an old and spacious neighborhood on top of a hill that rolled broadly down to the ocean. A friend was with us, and the friend’s daughter and our daughter we darting around the unfenced yard, diving behind the detritus left by the former homeowner then reappearing through unkempt tangles of shrubs.

In the middle of one foray, my daughter asked if we would like to see the “tunnel” then disappeared into a hole in the middle of the abandoned street in our back yard. I followed, expecting that she had found some old manhole… expecting to find the kind of place that just wasn’t safe for kids. I stayed down there long enough to know that it was fairly safe, then I went back out, looked at my wife, and said “You gotta see this.”

The opening of the tunnel lead through a break in concrete wall buried beneath our new yard. When we stepped through, it was like stepping into a time capsule. The concrete wall belonged to a house, a house that I’d guess dated to the late forties, a modern/post modern house that was very Frank Lloyd Wright, a house that was so perfectly preserved that I kept expecting the owners to come in and chase us away.

The windows of the house were large plates of clear glass bordered by leaded frames of red and blue and green art glass. The windows lead to expansive views of the harbor below, of the hill sloping down in a broad curve of grass, of boats bobbing quietly in a clear summer breeze.

As we moved deeper into the house, the floors began to rise and fall in short succession. It was like looking at a single still photo of earthquake waves. The walls were split in places, allowing the sunlight to stream in, but everything inside was preserved like it was in a museum.

As we moved further into the house, I began to wonder if it was some kind of semi-subterranean museum, but then I realized it was a hotel, an opulent art deco hotel, and we were moving down a grand hallway on the ground floor. Along the hallway were open glass shelves lined with Depression glass vases and craftsman style crafts. The place reminded me of the Philbrook in Tulsa, but larger… seemingly endless.

Lots of passages led into the old hotel from the town above. It was obvious that the upper levels of the hotel had been dozed into the suburban lawns and shopping malls of our town. Some of the passageways were open, and evidence of looting was strewn about—broken pottery, torn wallpaper, soiled carpets.

We started talking about what a shame it was that our town had let this happen to this wonderful grand hotel. It was the last ideal example of its kind... and the people from our town seemed to not even care.

It was at this point that a charley-horse pulled me out of bed. As I hobbled across the floor, I realized that it was dream, then I realized that it was more than just a dream. The house-museum-hotel buried beneath the urban sprawl was a metaphor for what Alaska will be in the future.

At this point, let me say that I am glad that we moved here, but I and also deeply saddened by what I see going on around me. I am glad because I have gotten to see Alaska in all it wild, pristine beauty. I am saddened because I know that this beauty is short-lived. We are in the process of neglecting and looting and burying Alaska just like the people had forgotten and abused the hotel in my dreams. And no one seems to care.

That’s what my dream was really about—Alaska in the future when everything that made Alaska, well, Alaska, will be gone. The Great Land will have been crushed by the indelible thumbprint of America and people will find small pockets of wonder buried beneath the subdivisions and shopping malls. And everyone will go about their lives as if this is the way things should be. Our manifested destiny.