Letters to the editor

Published 2:30 am Friday, May 29, 2026

Grateful for support of our programs

The LeeShore Center would like to express our gratitude to ConocoPhillips Alaska for their generous $7,500 contribution! Funds provided by ConocoPhillips help us continue our Healthy Relationships Violence Prevention efforts in our local schools to students grades K-12. We appreciate your support!

Cheri Smith, executive director

The LeeShore Center

In search of Alaska’s silence

The shop near my London flat sells Scottish salmon under a light that makes it look fresher than it is. I buy it. It is fine. Now and then they carry Alaska salmon, and I notice the price first, the distance second: thousands of miles and a markup riding along with them. I usually put it back. Paying a stranger to ship me something I once had for free feels like pretending. Up there the sea was close enough that the fish still tasted of where it came from. I miss it, and the closeness that made it ordinary.

I spent a decade in Alaska and only understood its gift after I left. London is loud in a way I never had to think about, a constant hum of traffic and other lives pressed against mine. I did not know I had been carrying Alaska’s quiet inside me until the noise here made it impossible to find. I miss stepping outside on a dark winter morning and hearing only my own breath, the snow swallowing every other sound. That silence was not empty. It was the point.

I will be honest about the hard part. It is strange to be homesick for a country that feels, from a distance, as though it is coming apart. Some mornings I am relieved to read the news rather than live inside it. And yet the missing does not negotiate with the headlines.

The salmon I can almost buy back. The quiet I cannot. From five thousand miles away, some days that ache is the only piece of home I have.

Ray Morgan

Armed Forces Europe