Read from "Being Peter" in Rock, Water, Wild: An Alaskan Life by Nancy Lord:

"In John McPhee’s 1977 classic, Coming Into the Country, he describes a typical Alaskan yard full of tarps, tires, oil drums, and dismantled snow machines, and comments that “when you drive along an old back road in the Lower Forty-Eight and come across a yard full of manufactured debris. . . you have come upon a fragment of Alaska. The people inside are Alaskans who have not yet left for the north.” He’s not mean-spirited in this; he makes an honest and reasonably accurate observation about what it takes to live in the north.

I long ago absorbed McPhee’s remark into my own psyche, and in my travels I occasionally meet people whom I think of as “Alaskans who just haven’t left yet.” I mean that positively, and I mean that I recognize a kinship — perhaps in someone who’s never even thought of Alaska. That person has a certain restlessness of spirit, a comfort in space being way and quiet, and more than a streak of independence. He or she is capable of self-invention, or reinvention.

Alaskans—those of us who came here from somewhere else—tell similar stories: I came over the hill (or to the beach, or into the forest) and knew I was home.

And so it’s clear to me that I was an Alaskan long before I knew I would make the physical move. I was a child with imagination, a sense of adventure, and a longing for something indefinably more. I would live in woods and by a lagoon, and I would fly. I don’t mean airplanes. I mean really fly.

I became a sort of prototype of a future Alaskan.

I was Peter Pan."