My husband’s family is practically Alaskan royalty. His grandparents carved a life out of the remote wilderness with a hatchet and a dream. The quintessential American pioneers, they homesteaded hundreds of acres and started a town and settled in. My children, MJ, Kenai, and Cora, are the fourth generation to grow up on that land.

My family was different. We came to Alaska in the seventies. It was a turbulent time, full of protests and marches and bombings and kidnappings. Young women were being abducted from college campuses. The Vietnam War had divided the country.

We came to Alaska to run away from that world. Like so many cheechakos before and since, we planned poorly. We didn’t have enough food or supplies or money. We had almost no skills. We moved into a cabin in a remote part of the Kenai Peninsula and learned fast that we didn’t know enough. Even our car—a VW bus—was a poor choice.

Someone said to me once that Alaska didn’t create character; it revealed it.

The sad truth is that the darkness in Alaska revealed the darkness in my father.

He was a Vietnam veteran, a POW. We didn’t know then what all that meant. Now, we know. In our enlightened world, we know how to help men like my father. We understand the ways in which war can break the strongest mind. Then, there was no help. Nor was there much help for a woman who was his victim.

Alaska—the darkness and the cold and the isolation—got inside of my father in a terrible way, turned him into one of the many wild animals who populate the state.

But we didn’t know that in the beginning; how could we? We dreamed, like so many others, and planned our course and duct-taped our Alaska or Bust banner on our bus and headed north, unprepared.

This state, this place, is like no other. It is beauty and horror; savior and destroyer. Here, where survival is a choice that must be made over and over, in the wildest place in America, on the edge of civilization, where water in all its forms can kill you, you learn who you are. Not who you dream of being, not who you imagined you were, not who you were raised to be. All of that will be torn away in the months of icy darkness, when frost on the windows blurs your view and the world gets very small and you stumble into the truth of your existence. You learn what you will do to survive.

That lesson, that revelation, as my mother once told me about love, is Alaska’s great and terrible gift. Those who come for beauty alone, or for some imaginary life, or those who seek safety, will fail.