It’s strange how you can live somewhere for months at a time, and still feel like a citizen of someplace else. For me, that someplace else is West. This feeling isn’t entirely something I can explain or put reasons to; it just is.

Thoughts like these have been spinning for the last few weeks as I anticipate my next visit Home. Sometimes people say that home has become the people they’re surrounded by, and that makes sense to me. Learning how to know others deeply and become known by them is the only way to build community, and really, the only way to love others genuinely and humbly.

But for me, Home is still a place place. There is no substitute for the mountains rising up out of the sea, and the towering cedars and Sitka spruces rising up out of the mountains, and the miles and miles of untouched land and unpolluted sky. Flying over makes you wonder if some of the ridge lines below have ever been climbed before. Hiking through makes you realize how small you are, scaled next to a pinnacle of granite. Meandering along the rocky coast and not seeing another human for hours (or even days, if you so choose) makes you appreciate the gift of solitude. There’s nothing like it.

It’s not that escaping humanity comprises the majority of my time when I’m home, but there’s something freeing in being there, and knowing I can leave the cares of life behind for a while to simply enjoy being a creature in the created world. When I’m home, I can be out of reach in minutes: all it takes is walking into the woods for a ways, or taking a boat down the channel, off to someplace with no cell service or wifi or carefully crafted amenities. When I’m home, there is always the possibility of getting too cold or too muddy or too rained on, and I just have to deal with it for awhile, because that’s the way that it is. Everything is not perfectly curated to make me (or anyone) physically comfortable. And that’s a good thing.

There are parts of being out East that I appreciate as well: the stone walls and mill towns and old churches and brick houses, the battlefields and monuments to the men and women who have fought and died for freedom, the opportunity to become involved in vibrant work and church communities, and, most of all, the people I’ve come to know and love here. There are people that feel like home when I’m with them, and I am grateful for that. There are also cities and mountains and ocean within driving distance — it seems like there should be something for everyone here.

And yet, there’s a piece of me that has no idea how to explain how much like a fish out of water I feel some days. This thought hit me again when I was exploring a few weekends ago. I went out to the shore and walked along the water for awhile. Near the north end of the beach there was a lighthouse I very much wanted to see, and from there, you could look across the channel toward a shimmering, metallic collection of skyscrapers and high rises.

My reaction to this sight startled me. Cognitively, I understood that many people are enamored with the magnificence of a city rising up from the water’s edge, but when I looked across the bay, all I could think of was how much I wished I was looking out across an inlet with trees on the other side while a common loon called from a distance and a great blue heron glided by with a dinner in its beak. The gut punch of homesickness surprised me. An awkward paradox, looking out toward a city of millions, and feeling so alone. The desire to explore the wilderness is scarce enough here that it’s tough to even find a hiking buddy or three.

And so, even as I reflect on another academic year, and appreciate the small glories, like peonies in bloom and back porch sunrises and fresh June strawberries, there is a growing joy when I think about being Home. Home, where the “everyday” looks like floatplanes taking off, and fishing boats mooring, and buoys bobbing, and harbor seals surfacing. Where “wanna go for a hike after work?” isn’t the most uncommon saying in the book, and waterskiing on a weeknight isn’t unheard of. Where the skies are dark and the air is clean and the nights are starry.

Alaska, you’ll be a sight for sore eyes.