So many of my memories of my father are of rituals that I hadn’t recognized as such. It seems like most activities we shared were traditions in the making—standing on 4th Ave. for hours every March, shivering, to watch the start of the Iditarod dogsled race. And in summer, when our time together was extended, the long days were filled with fishing trips in pursuit of the illustrious King Salmon. The Alaska State Fair punctuated each summer, drawing it to a satisfactory close—the long “ahhh” released after a thirst has been quenched. But our most often-preformed ritual came every weekend: the drive from my mother’s house to my father’s, and back again.

The drive from Anchorage to Palmer took approximately one hour, and covered 52.6 miles of the Glenn Highway. Just before entering the highway, my father would stop at the MapCo gas station to fill up the truck or buy coffee. He’d let my older sister and me buy a soda or a snack for the drive. As he filled his Styrofoam cup with coffee, he would remind us if either of us had to use the bathroom, now was the time because he was not stopping. There was really nowhere to stop. Along the way, the highway was dotted with a handful of tiny towns—half of which I never knew the names of, I only knew glimpses from the passenger side window of my father’s Ford truck, which featured a rack in the back window that held fishing poles year-round. Though we were imports, my father took pride in being an Alaskan. He was tall, stout, and looked like an Alaskan with his full brown beard, his checkered wool hat with earflaps, and his tee shirts, which always featured fish, moose, or bears—Alaska’s trifecta of wildlife.

My favorite part of the trip each weekend was the 5-mile stretch of road known as the Palmer Flats that curved around the Knik Arm, an offshoot of the Cook Inlet. This also served as the halfway point. In winter, the gray sky and gray water were stitched together with an invisible seam. I liked it better at night, when looking out on the horizon, all that could be seen were the calm layers of black—that is, except where the moon’s spotlight reflected the water’s rippled surface.

This was the newer and shorter way north; however, on the rare occasions that traffic was backed up, we’d take the “Old Highway.” While the old highway didn’t offer the hypnotic scenes of the water lapping at the boulders that lined the road, it did offer a view of Pioneer Peak looming overhead, with tall trees spanning the length of the winding road. We’d make this drive in the fall to see the stark birch trees with leaves of red and orange and brown still clinging to their branches. If time and weather allowed, we’d stop at Williams Reindeer Farm and feed oats to the reindeer—caribou—from our hands.

I last made this trip when I was twenty and was surprised to find it just the same as it had been eight years before. From the airport, we drove north through the short city blocks of downtown Anchorage in my father’s new extended-cab truck—still a Ford. The sides of the road were lined with piles of snows, dirty and deformed from melt and the grit of the sanding trucks. Just when I saw the streetlights guiding the way to the entrance of the Glenn Highway, my father signaled an unexpected right-hand turn—into the MapCo gas station. It was three a.m. and the sign outside the store advertised cigarettes, and below that, it promised “fresh coffee 24 hours.” My sister and I exchanged a knowing glance as we entered the convenience store. I walked the aisles in a haze of familiarity, exhaustion, and elation. I knew this place so well, in fact, that when I saw a “Bathrooms of Anchorage, Alaska” photo spread on the airplane, I could immediately pick out the gas station bathroom despite not having seen it in years. It seems funny how a gas station, such an anonymous and dreary place perfumed with the nauseating stench of gasoline and hot dogs, could hold such regard in my memory of the trip each weekend, and of that particular trip. I looked over one aisle to see my sister as she pulled a bottle of Canada Dry ginger ale from the refrigerated case. When she saw me watching her, we both laughed.

For the duration of the five-hour flight from Portland, my sister and I reminisced about everything Alaskan—Valley of the Moon park and trips down its rocket-shaped slide, the “One Step Beyond” educational toy store we frequented so often that the owner knew us by name, the restaurants our parents took us to, our classmates and neighbors, camping trips, snow forts, school field trips to Potter’s Marsh, Portage Glacier, and the former sight of Tent City, which was to grow into our hometown. This flood of nostalgia all began when the flight attendant placed a can of Canada Dry ginger ale before my sister, and we both remembered the radio jingle that used to play between pop songs.

In the truck, when my father signaled for a turn, I leaned forward from the back seat and reminded him of his cup of coffee sitting on the dashboard. The turn from the gas station to the highway entrance was a murderous one, though not at this late an hour. Normally at this turn, my father would swear and shake the steering wheel waiting for a break in traffic. During this, he would, invariably, forget his coffee sitting on the dash. When he whipped out of the parking lot, my sister and I, sitting side-by-side, would follow the mug’s travels toward the passenger side with our hands, hoping to catch it before it fell.

“Oh yeah,” he said, reaching for his cup. My stepmother was sitting on the passenger side, and I was unaware if she knew his painful habit of forgetfulness. “I guess I did leave it up there a lot, huh?” He chuckled sheepishly. My sister and I laughed, both of us recounting a time of being scalded by hot coffee at this particular turn, and the frequent near misses.

After the laughter died down and the silence reflected the early morning hour, my father suggested we sing songs to stay awake. In a psychic moment, my sister and I, in unison, belted out the radio jingle we had whispered to one another on the plane between fits of laughter: “It’s not too sweet, taste can’t be beat. Canada Dry ginger ale: it’s not too sweet!” My father threw his head back and laughed. My father laughs with his whole body—his shoulders and belly shaking to the same rhythm. When his laughter slowed to a chuckle, he demanded: “What the hell was that?”

When the option of singing was shot down, my stepmother fished a deck of Alaska trivia cards from the glove box. My father bought these cards on a weeklong trip he and my mother had taken when I was four, when they were first contemplating a move from our northern Idaho home. The worn box featured the “eight stars of gold on a field of blue” that made up the state flag as well as the opening line of the state song. My stepmother read the questions with a pen flashlight as we drove, plowing through the darkness, reaching speeds of 70 mph. I was disappointed by how little I’d retained. But I could hold my own as we all shouted out answers like “Captain Cook named it Turnagain Arm because he had to ‘turn again’ to leave” or “Susan Butcher is the female dog musher with the most Iditarod wins.” The only answer I knew that my father didn’t was the direction that Anchorage was built. “North to South,” I said, recalling the all-day walking tour of Old Town my 3rd grade class had taken on an unusually warm spring day. “Really?” my father asked when my stepmother announced I was correct.

I swelled with pride, and it suddenly didn’t matter that I knew nothing of the political questions that followed. Though I had embarrassingly mixed up Lake Otis Dr. and La Barr Ave. on the drive from the airport and had forgotten how to walk on ice—taking slow, mincing steps with my arms outstretched for balance while, next to me, my father moved with unexpected grace, gliding along as if there were blades bolted to his clunky boots, I had made my point. I still knew where I came from. Alaska feels more like home than any other place I’ve lived and while I’d always heard the old adage, “you can’t go home again,” I was beginning to doubt the accurateness of this when we approached the Palmer city limits. My eyes made out familiar landmarks, even in the dense night—the state fairgrounds, Pioneer Peak Mountain, the hospital with the orange metal roof where my father used to work, and the steep, two-mile hill my sister and I used to ride our bikes down to go to the library.

We spent the weeklong visit driving all around Alaska before we returned to Palmer to see my brother, my uncle and cousins—all of whom I hadn’t seen in years. We sat in an ice cream shop at the height of winter, eating sundaes, watching the falling snow swirl in the spotlight beam of the lamppost. This scene struck me as funny until I remembered that Alaskans consume the most ice cream per capita. It was always too expensive for my mom to afford, and we only ate ice cream on special occasions, like birthdays. Instead my sister and I ate snow. We would brush away the icy crust to reveal softer snow that crumbled in our bowls, glinting like sugar crystals. We’d add juice or maple syrup, or sometimes we would eat it as is and enjoy the cold tickling as it melted down our throats.

In the parking lot, after saying our goodbyes, I thrust my tongue out and aimed my face skyward, hoping to catch a few falling snowflakes as I trudged back to the truck. A quiet sadness was bubbling upward, a slow asphyxiation: we were leaving that night. The drive back to Anchorage featured a silence that was familiar—the same silence that filled my father’s truck each weekend as Palmer disappeared in the rearview mirror. Every Sunday afternoon we’d pile back into the truck for the long drive back to my mother’s house. And while it was the same drive, it seemed to take two, sometimes even three times longer than before. I had attributed the discrepancy to my child’s mind and perception of time, but found it just the same then, as the wheels slowly propelled us forward. Just as I had so many times before, I watched the scenery blur and felt the guilt and regret over what we couldn’t say fill the space between us. For the first time on that trip, I felt just as I did when I was a child.

As the glowing lights of Anchorage became visible on the horizon, my father announced with audible regret in his voice, “There’s the Sleeping Lady.” Out my window, I squinted out across the rough charcoal waters of the Cook Inlet and barely made it out—Mount Susitna. “The Sleeping Lady,” as its known for its uncanny shape of a woman lying on her back, with her arms crossed over her chest, always ushered us into the city. Each weekend, it had been my eyes fixed on the horizon for first glimpse of her before announcing, “There’s the Sleeping Lady!” I doubted my father could see it, based on the amount concentration required, but he made this drive so often he knew precisely where she laid down thousands of years ago to wait for her love to return from battle, as the legend states.

In the airport, we sat in the near-vacant bar. Our flight had been delayed, giving us a few extra hours together. In the bar, we laughed loudly, mostly at a man who argued with the waitress about his $80 tab, slurring his words into one long sentence without punctuation. Shortly after the man stormed out of the bar, my dad unexpectedly launched into a story from his childhood, about his family. It was what I imagined was on his mind during the long drive earlier that evening.