Otto Lake, Alaska
Otto Lake at midnight I know that sometimes years of distance tend to make memories more nostalgic than they were in the moment. My memories of summers in Alaska were like that. The sense of endlessness to the landscape, knowing that if you started walking west, you could walk for the rest of your life without encountering anybody. The midnight sun shining on the dock as we gathered as wild and weird friends to play music or kickball and laugh uproariously into the wee hours, then wake up at 5 am and go white water rafting all day. The novelty of meeting a moose or a bear almost daily in the campground we all shared on the shores of Otto Lake. These memories make it easy to brush over the hellacious mosquitoes in the summer of 2013, the simmering resentment at the uncontrolled tourism growth that supplied our weekly paychecks, the general crankiness that filtered through the entire company from a few burnt out employees would never stop complaining. The constant reminde