Trying to look friendly I stepped into the doorway of a bar, thinking I needed a beer. One glance inside and I knew this was no place for an innocent white boy from the far south. The bar was lined wall-to-wall with dark, sullen, hostile faces, and in the middle of the floor two five-foot three-hundred-pound Athapaskan women stood toe-to-toe socking the piss out of each other. Just like down home: the Club 66 in Flag, the Eagle in Gallup or the Silver Dollar in Bluff, on the edge of the Navajo reservation—the only bar in Utah where you can hear squaw dance music on the jukebox. I withdrew. The sights, the smells and the noise were making me homesick.

The bars in Alaska are legally open twenty-one hours a day. From 5:00 A.M. to 8:00 A.M. they are required by law to close. It is then, say the white locals, that you’ll see “the moles crawl out of their holes.”

Resentment on one side, contempt on the other: the race war in Alaska looks as promising as it does most everywhere else on our overpopulated, much-abused, ever-percolating planet.

Les misanthropes must love it here.

Back, for godsake, back—to the decency and the sanity of the wild river. If there is a civilized society left anywhere on Earth it exists among the caribou, the wolves, the eagles, the bighorn and the moose of the Kongakut.

We camp today at a broad open place that Mark has named Velvet Valley. Under a spiny, purple, crenellated mountain that looks like Mordor, like the Hall of the Mountain King, like Darth Vader’s childhood playpen, like the home of the Wicked Witch of the North, extends a lovely valley clothed in golden tundra, a million bloody blooming flowers, the lambent glowing light of the midnight sun. (I dislike that word lambent, but it must be employed.) A soft, benevolent radiance, you might say, playing upon the emerald green, the virgin swales of grass and moss and heather and Swede heads.

The Arctic wind blows merrily; it takes four of us to get the cook tent up, our only communal shelter. Feeling a mite better now, I scrounge for firewood with the others, and soon we’ve got a good fire burning near the entrance to the tent, a big meal under way inside.

More time slippage. We’d eaten lunch at five in the afternoon, we’re having dinner at eleven. Time, says Einstein, is a function of space. Or time, said another philosopher, is but the mind of space. How true. And is everything finally only relative? It is not. The light is fixed and absolute. Especially the Arctic light. We’ll eat dinner at eleven and have a midnight snack in Seward’s Icebox at four in the morning if we bloody well feel like it. Who’s to stop us?

The sun shines all night long.

JULY 2—John and Mark catch a big char and a small grayling for breakfast. A fine kettle offish.

We go for a walk up the Velvet Valley, through the willows, through the muskeg, up onto the tundra, deep into the valley. Flowers everywhere, each flower concealing a knot of mosquitoes, but we’re accustomed to the little shitheads by now; they don’t bother us. We rub on the bug juice and let the insects dance and hover—patterns of organic energy made visible—in futile molecular orbits one inch from the skin. Like the flies in Australia the mosquitoes here become simply part of the atmosphere, the décor, the ambience. We ignore them.