Home Is Where You Keep Your Stuff.

We’ve seen it all on this trip, from the one room rustic cabin to the multilevel mausoleum, from the double wide mobile home to a beat up truck topper on concrete blocks in a Wal-Mart parking lot. We seen single containers with smoke stacks and we’ve seen stacks of containers with a roof over them. We’ve even seen mobile office units set up as motels. We’ve seen abandoned homes, homes for sale, homes with rivers running through them and even homes under construction. It doesn’t matter what you call home, it just matters that you have one. With the weather conditions as extreme as they are in the state of Alaska, there is still a large homeless population. When the weather turns bitter, the police and some church groups drive the back streets, looking under bridge overpasses and in parks for people who are at risk so they can get them in where it’s warm and maybe even get them a hot meal but they can’t make them stay. So what do you do? You thank God for what you have and make the best of the situation because no matter where you call home, there is always someone out there in worse shape than you. Oh, and there’s one more thing. I always wondered about the amount of “collectibles” there always seems to be around the average home in AK. Now, I’ve seen it first hand and the photos and television shows don’t exaggerate. There is stuff everywhere, left to deteriorate among the elements. And it’s not like there aren’t places to take the stuff but I heard one guy tell another at a gas station today, “ If I throw it away, that’s when I’ll need a part off it”. And so you have the universal reason why humans as a race have become packrats. It’s because they might need it some day.