The daily high temperatures in Austin are currently in the upper nineties.  Like vapors of bad juju, heat radiates upward from the asphalt and takes my breath away.  Our black, Chow mix dog has gone into hiding under the porch, and won't reappear until October unless he is pulled out by a John Deere tractor.  Even our gray ground squirrels listlessly lie on their backs with their tongues hanging out. 
     It's too hot to go barefoot.  This doesn't suit our seventeen-month-old grandson, who is generally opposed to shoes.  Summer just doesn't seem to be his season.  Whenever we take him to play in his plastic wading pool, he quickly bails out.  We try to entice him to stay, but nothing works.  He makes a run for the back door and knocks on the glass until we take him back inside.  He'd rather play upstairs in the bathtub with a fleet of florescent orange toy boats.  After all, it is cooler inside and there are fewer bugs.
    Each year, it is about this time in June when I'm struck with a serious case of Alaska fever.  It takes all of my inner strength to refrain from bolting for the airport.  You know what I'm talking about, don't you?  Visions of deliciously cool days spent in a far away place where wearing a sweater is required?  
    Just thinking about Alaska is better than eating an entire banana split covered with nuts.  If you have been there, then you understand.  Pristine lakes and rivers surrounded by Douglas fir trees, punctuated by the occasional log cabin or grazing moose.  Ubiquitous snow-capped mountains teeming with Dall Sheep, gray wolves, and grizzly bear.  Along the Inside Passage, blue thundering glaciers surrounded by packages of floating ice somehow remind me of a perpetual Christmas.  Further inland, Denali National Park has scenery so exquisitely beautiful that the human brain can't absorb it.  One must see it over and over again to fully digest its magnificence—an argument I soon plan to present to my fabulous husband.  
    Like the clouds that ice the great cake of Mt. McKinley, Alaska has yet another penultimate attribute for which I am truly grateful.  I've been told that not even in its jillions of acres slithers one single SNAKE!  If so, it must truly be a paradise trimmed by a garland of perfection.  Neither animal nor bird is to be missed.  Bald eagles circle overhead while folks with good voices might feel prompted  to sing, America the Beautiful.  That wouldn't be me or anyone else in my gene pool, of course.
    I can visualize myself napping on a bearskin that blankets a frozen bed in the Ice Hotel of Chena Hot Springs.  This is above Fairbanks, and I am eons away from a Texas summer.  I am surrounded by a giant ice chess set and wild Maurice Sendak animals in a Lewis Carroll-like collage.  They are the artistry of a world champion, chainsaw-bearing sculptor.  These carvings are all rather surreal, but comfortable in an elementary sort of way.  My cell phone won't work inside an ice palace, which makes me so happy.  The rooms have a frozen Popsicle quietude that can come no other way.  Finally, I am cool and will wait patiently until my black Chow telepathically gives me the o.k. sign to return home.  You might have to get a tractor and a rope to drag me out.