A Ship for Me

Yesterday I was in one of the used book stores I stop by every once in a while on my lunch break. I was browsing through the painting and photography books as usual and came across a book I had never seen there before that started me dreaming. I spent forty-five minutes just looking at the pictures, reading snippets, and dreaming. It was a book about Alaska.

There are the obvious reasons why one would dream about Alaska... The last frontier, moose, Northern Exposure, sea kayaking, float planes (1 out of 50 people in Alaska is a pilot.) I bought the book and dreamed a little more before i went to bed last night. I checked out some Alaskan blogs, looked up graduate courses at the University of Alaska, read about some of the places... Anchorage of course, Valdez, Ketchikan, Kenai, Nome, Sitka, Skagway, and Kotzebue.

What is this fascination with Alaska? Is it the cold? Yes. Is the nature? Yes. Is it the last frontier? Yes. But the answer is really so simple, and I didn't realize it today until I got a package from Amazon. I had totally forgotten what books I had ordered (one of those spur of the moment, orders where i was moved by something great I read on some site somewhere). The package contained two books of poetry by Don Blanding, the Vagabond Poet whom I wrote about a week or so ago.

The first poem I opened the book to held the answer of why Alaska is so appealing.

	NAMES ARE SHIPS
Names! The lure in names of places
Stirring thoughts of foreign faces,
Ports and palaces and steamers.
Names are ships to carry dreamers.

	Pago-pago, Suva, Java,
	Langour, lotuses and lava,
Everything a dreamer whishes,
Buried treasure, flying fishes,
Cocoanuts and kings and corals,
Pirates, pearls and pagan morals,
Rum and reefs and Christian teaching,
Gin, and jungle parrots screeching.

	Kobe, Nikko, Yokohama,
	Views of sacred Fujiyama,
Bales of silk and bowls of lacquer,
Dragons on a sugar cracker,
Temples high on pictured mountains,
Purple goldfish, perfumed fountains,
Amber, obis, geisha dances,
Almond eyes and slanted glances.

	Places that I pray I may go,
	Rio, Terra del Fuego,
Condors soaring in the Andes,
Cloying Guatemalan candies,
Pampas grasses, pink flamingos,
Spanish girls who call us "gringos,"
Llamas, lizards, smoking craters,
Armadillos, alligators.

	Cairo, Carthage, Congo...CONGO!
	Names that like a savage gong go,
Paris, Venis, gay Vienna,
Cocottes' kisses, genius, henna,
Gorgeous vicious mad Manhattan,
Misery, motors, rags and satin,
Moose and mice and sin and sago,
Yaps from Yap or Winnebago.

	Every name a ship with cargo,
	Brass from Burmah, wheat from Fargo,
Pots and prunes and precious metal
Mined on Popocatapetl,
Chests of carved and stained catalpa,
Letters from Tegucigalpa,
Linnen from an Irish shanty
For a store in Ypsilanti
	
	Sailing ship and ocean liner
	Bringing stuff from Asia Minor,
Ferry boat or lazy freighter,
Folks from China or Decatur,
Mozambique or Madagascar,
Slav or Serb or savage Lascar,
Barber, Berber or Brazillian
Clad in blue or bright vermillion.
	
	Fascinating names of places
	Stirring thoughts of foreign faces,
	Ports and palaces and steamers,
	Names are ships to carry dreamers.
	
 P.S. There's a place I want to go,
      A place called Paramaribo.
      I don't know and I don't care
      Where it is or who lives there
      But just as sure as Fate I know
      I'll go to Paramaribo.

From Vagabond's House by Don Blanding