To Alaska. With Love.

To Sam. With love. From Dad. Summer 1996.

Those are the first words I encountered in John McPhee's Coming into the Country.

Not because McPhee wrote them, mind you. This nameless father and his son Sam are unique to my copy — an old used copy that I've never cracked open properly.

It seemed fitting to remedy that defect starting today. McPhee's book is a deep dive into Alaska, and in a few hours time, I'll be doing my best to verify some of what he wrote nearly 50 years ago as I make my own two-week trip to America's final frontier.

Seeing that inscription stirred up many feelings. It's this weird time of year for me. Not historically, but recently. It's a stretch of time in between the date that marks the anniversary of my dad's passing and the date that marked his birth (as well as Father's Day, which reliably falls very close to his birthday).

I wanted to write a post in his memory on that anniversary because I'm still learning what it means for me to see that day come and go. First anniversaries are the ones that make sense to people; it's still recent enough to be raw and you're learning to navigate the world in their absence, with new meaningful markers. But nobody tells you how to grieve a second anniversary.

There's no right way, and intellectually, I know that. But it's an awkward milestone. Others don't necessarily know of the day's significance. There's not a built-in understanding of why things might be hard. It's just a quietly lonely day, no matter the strength of your support system.

It was a Monday this year. And while I thought I was ready to sit down and write something, anything really, instead I found myself looking for tasks to busy myself. It wasn't quite distracting myself — I was aware of what I was doing. My internal monologue questioned whether it was a good use of my time, whether I was just avoiding writing, whether it meant anything that I turned to tasks instead of sitting with my thoughts and feelings and trying to make sense of them (and then further still make something readable out of them).

Spoiler warning: I'm going to spoil an episode of this season of Top Chef in the next paragraph, so if you're watching and haven't seen the Restaurant Wars episode and want to avoid being spoiled, skip it.

Those feelings were (are) still raw. On a recent episode of Top Chef, one of my favorite contestant's father passed away while he was competing. He was in a leadership position for the competition, and through teary eyes, he resolved to work. His mother told him that his father wouldn't have wanted him to stop. So he did what he loves to do. I couldn't stop crying as I watched — his life upended in a moment, with a single phone call. Mine was upended in the course of weeks, and it was still too fast. When the dust of the competition settled, he was not only the leader of the winning team but the winning chef on that team. And all I could think about was how raw his heart will still feel not just this time next year but the year after that (and undoubtedly anytime he watches Top Chef in the future and the season reaches Restaurant Wars).

I haven't sat down to write since that aborted attempt that day. I've not done that thing I so love to do. I let the inertia get the best of me. Life came up — a mad rush of new job ins and outs, preparing for this vacation, hosting and myriad other considerations.

I don't know that I've made any better sense of my feelings since that Monday when I avoided it entirely. But I know this: I wish my dad were here to take this trip — with me, in my place, vicariously, in any way.

Alaska was always a place he dreamed of seeing. We stopped going on vacations as a family sometime during my baby brother's early years. Never something that was really talked about, probably because we all had other outlets for travel during our summers.

But as I grew older, I thought about all the trips that would be nice to do with him. Alaska was near the tip-top of that list. I mostly envisioned a fishing trip, because that would have meant so much to him (and even though I'd grown up dreading the moments he'd volunteer me to spend an afternoon fishing with him without the chance to say no). Maybe just him and my brother and me. Wouldn't that be nice, I thought.

I saw a small fraction of what joy he might have experienced the two times we drove to and from Wyoming together. It was infectious. It reminded me of the rightness of my idea.

And it's as close as I ever got to Alaska with him.

Now I'm getting to do this bucket-list trip — not so much my bucket-list as his.

It's hard not to feel conflicted about that. As excited as I am, I feel a bit sad. Sad because I miss him. And sad because he'll miss it — even if he weren't on the trip itself, I would have so loved to tell him about it.

As I finalized my packing this morning, I slipped on a watch — Garmin, black, plenty of bells and whistles.

"Taking your dad's watch to Alaska?" Courtney asked me.

I nodded.

But I like to think I'm taking a bit more than just his watch.

I going to try to keep up writing on this trip, posting to my blog (not overloading your inboxes), but if you'd like to see some of the sights and read about what I'm getting into, please check back regularly. I might even use, for the first time since it was created more than six years ago, my Instagram account to document some of what I see.