All Alone In the Night

The last post ended with me returning to the hotel at Quarter to 12pm. It is the drive not the work that brings this post to me. As always I write around work, avoiding specifics which can lead to trouble and honestly no on cares about a day to day log of my life up here. So I look for slices that stand out above the noise of work and the silences of snow. Though out here some times the absence of contrast can be as out standing as the brightest of days. For there is something humbling about the north.

And Down right scary at times, this though is not the gland stimulated rush resulting from a stuck snow mobile on a narrow trial, but something more demanding. After I expending my energies unstucking my self successfully finishing my Friday I had to get to the hotel. To do that I had to drive an ice road. The rout was marked, heck as long as I took the first turn as a right not a left I was headed to town no trouble. The trouble became mental.

It was Prosperous Lake, one of the larger lakes in the Yellowknife area. The roads on the larger lakes are plowed wide, to let the ice thicken and to leave room for the big haulers. So there I was Miles from any were, a faint red glow reflecting of the clouds to the south that was Yellow knife, and every thing else was white and black. It can shake me of my normally sanguine attitude.

It was real night time, no moon no stars and civilization. At the edge of my field of view was the white snow banks that defined the side of the ice road and the odd patch of white that was snow drifting across the road.

Were it not for the clouds in the sky, that icy plane surrounded by black could be any of a dozen or more small worlds speckled through out this solar system. It was just me and the truck, A self contained world 3 meters long located in neutral territory All alone in the night.