Tonight on The Midnight Drive we bring our journey through Alaska to a close by reflecting on everything we discovered along the way.

Transcript

Tonight on the Midnight Drive, every place leaves us with something.

Sometimes it’s a photograph, sometimes it’s a souvenir tucked away in a drawer,
and every once in a while it’s a question that follows us home.

This week, Alaska has asked us about mystery, loneliness, hope, memory,
and what it means to stand in a landscape that has never needed our permission to exist.

Tonight, before we leave America’s last frontier behind, I’d like to take one
last drive through everything that we’ve discovered together.

But I don’t think Alaska’s greatest treasure was ever buried beneath the ground.

I think it was the perspective that each and every one of us found
along the way.

I’ve been thinking about maps again.

Surprise, right?
We started this week talking about them.

How they have this remarkable ability to make the
world feel smaller than it really is.

A state becomes a shape.

A mountain range becomes a
shaded patch of brown.

A river becomes a thin blue line winding across the page.

It’s also neat
and organized.

It’s comforting, isn’t it? Maps have a way of convincing us that we’ve already
understood a place simply because we’ve given it a name.

And then you arrive.

And suddenly the map feels almost embarrassed.

It never meant to mislead you.

It just couldn’t possibly prepare you for what is actually there.

What standing there feels like.

I think that’s been Alaska’s greatest lesson.

Not that the world is larger than we imagined,
but that our experiences always will be.

At the beginning of this week, I thought that we
were going to spend our time chasing mysteries.

Disappearances, ghost stories, haunted motels,
old mining towns swallowed by time.

And those stories are certainly part of Alaska.

Yes, but by the end of the week, I realized they weren’t the reason I kept turning the page.

They were simply invitations to keep learning more.

Each one quietly led to a much bigger
conversation.

The Alaska Triangle wasn’t really about missing people.

It became a conversation
about uncertainty.

Ghost towns weren’t really about abandoned buildings.

They became a conversation about hope.

Haunted hotels weren’t really about ghosts at all.

They became a conversation about memory.

And somewhere along the way, I realized Alaska
itself had almost disappeared from the conversation.

Not because it wasn’t
an important part of the conversation, but because it had become something
much larger than a destination.

It had become almost like a teacher in philosophy.

I’ve noticed that every memorable place I’ve ever visited has eventually done that.

At first,
you spend your time looking at it.

The mountains, the street, the architecture, the coastline.

You’re absorbing the details.

You’re taking photographs.

You’re trying to preserve the
experience.

Then, if you stay long enough, something kind of unexpected happens.

You stop
looking at the place, and the place starts looking at you.

It begins asking questions
you didn’t know that you were carrying.

Why does silence make you uncomfortable?
Why do empty places feel so lonely? Why are you so eager to explain every mystery?
What makes a building meaningful? What does it actually mean to belong somewhere?
Big questions, right? Those aren’t questions that you answer while reading a brochure.

Those are questions that appear while you’re paying attention.

I’ve started wondering if that’s what travel is really all about.

Not collecting passport
stamps, not checking famous landmarks off of a list, not proving that you’ve been somewhere.

Maybe, just maybe, travel is one of the few opportunities that we have to step outside
our routines long enough for a place to hold up a mirror.

I’ve noticed that it’s almost impossible
to learn something new about yourself while everything around you just stays exactly the
same.

Have you ever thought about this? Let’s break it down.

Our routines are comfortable,
predictable, necessary, but they also become invisible.

We stop noticing the roads that we
become invisible.

We stop noticing the roads that we drive every day,
the coffee shop that we visit every morning, the neighborhood we’ve walked through a thousand times.

We become experts at overlooking our own lives.

Let me say that again.

We become experts at overlooking our own lives.

And then we visit somewhere like Alaska.

Suddenly, everything demands our attention again.

The weather, the scale, the silence, the distances, even something as ordinary as seeing another town
in the distance takes on a completely different meaning.

This week, I kept coming back to one image from my field journal.

A traveler crossing hundreds of miles of wilderness.

Picture it.

Cold.

Tired.

Probably wondering if they made a terrible mistake.

And then, far off on the horizon,
they see a small but significant skyline.

Not like a big city, nothing like that, nothing like that.

Nothing like that, nothing like that.

But they’re able to see a handful of buildings.

Hope.

Not because the buildings themselves are beautiful.

It’s because where there’s buildings, there are people.

Warmth, food, conversation,
and most importantly, in an environment like this, safety.

A chance to stop surviving for a little while and simply exist.

I couldn’t stop thinking about that because I realized how many things in our lives
function the exact same way.

A familiar voice on the other end of the phone.

A porch light waiting when we get home.

Maybe we have a favorite chair.

The smell of dinner
when someone knows we’ve had a difficult day.

We rarely notice those things while we have them.

We simply expect them.

Maybe that’s why Alaska feels so emotionally honest.

It strips us
away expectation.

It reminds us that comfort is not guaranteed.

Community is not guaranteed.

Even certainty itself is not guaranteed.

Those are all gifts.

And like most gifts,
we usually don’t appreciate them until we’re forced to imagine life without them.

Hopefully, that’s not a depressing realization.

I don’t think it is.

I think it’s freeing.

Because gratitude becomes much easier when we stop assuming tomorrow will always look exactly like
today.

And maybe that’s why Alaska is stuck with me.

Not because it’s mysterious.

Not because it’s
wild.

But because it quietly reminded me that ordinary things I’ve grown accustomed to are in
fact extraordinary.

And that’s why I love Alaska so much.

Because it reminds me that
you’re listening to The Midnight Drive.

One of my absolutely favorite parts about making this show
is discovering that the stories are almost never about what I think they’re going to be about.

At the beginning of the week, I thought we were setting out to explore Alaska’s folklore.

Do you remember this? The Alaska Triangle.

Sounds ominous, doesn’t it?
Ghost towns.

Haunted hotels.

Spooky.

Scary Mary.

Terrifying.

Lydia.

Who is that?
On paper, it looked like a week filled with paranormal stories.

Then something unexpected happened.

The further we drove,
the less interested I became in the paranormal.

Not because I stopped enjoying the stories.

The
stories are all fascinating.

But because I became so much more interested in why those
stories survived in the first place.

I consider that to be a pretty important distinction.

I’ve realized that every legend is trying to preserve something.

Sometimes it’s a warning.

Other times it’s a memory.

And other times it’s a value.

Sometimes it’s simply a feeling that people don’t want to lose.

Take the Alaska Triangle.

It would be easy to spend hours arguing about whether strange things
happen there.

And people certainly have.

But what stayed with me wasn’t the debate of it all.

It was
the humility.

The quiet reminder that there are still places on this planet where our confidence
runs out before the wilderness does.

That isn’t something to be scared of.

It’s actually healthy.

Every once in a while, I think we need to stand somewhere that reminds us
we’re not the center of everything.

And then there were the ghost towns.

At first glance, they’re stories about abandoned buildings, weathered wood, broken windows, empty
streets.

But after spending some time thinking about them, I couldn’t shake a different image.

The first family who arrived.

Think about that for a moment.

Somebody looked out across an empty valley and imagined a future.

Every ghost town has a first occupant and a last occupant.

The first occupant is somebody who
believed enough in tomorrow to build a home there.

Someone else opened a general store.

Another person built a church.

Another started a school.

A blacksmith lit a forge.

A baker turned on the oven before sunrise.

Every community begins with a remarkable act of optimism.

That gets so overlooked in our modern culture.

We notice communities once they’re established.

Rarely do we stop and appreciate the faith that
it took to begin one.

Maybe that’s why abandoned towns affect us so deeply.

We’re not mourning buildings.

We’re mourning optimism.

And then came the hotels.

Scary Mary.

Lydia.

The historic Anchorage Hotel.

Again, I find myself drifting away from the ghost stories.

And I absolutely hate saying scary Mary.

I really do.

From what we talked about about that story.

Not a scary story.

It’s a heartbreaking story.

I digress.

Instead, I keep thinking about all
of the ordinary people who passed through the ghost town.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of
that.

Instead, I keep thinking about all of the ordinary people who passed through those hallways
in those hotels.

Imagine how many conversations happened inside those rooms over the last
hundred years.

The full spectrum.

Marriage proposals.

Arguments.

Family reunions.

Business deals.

Phone calls that changed someone’s life forever.

Whether it was good news or bad news.

Quiet evenings looking out a rain-speckled window, wondering what tomorrow might bring.

The building witnessed all of it.

And not because it was haunted, but because that’s what buildings do.

They outlive us.

I think that’s what fascinated me the most this week.

Not the stories themselves,
but the accumulation.

Every place that we talked about had become larger than its physical
structure.

The Alaska Triangle became larger than its borders.

Ghost towns became larger
than abandoned buildings.

Hotels became larger than brick and timber.

Each one had become
a container for human experience.

And maybe that’s all that places really are.

Containers.

Not for ghosts, but for meaning.

I started wondering if that’s why we are all so drawn
to places with history.

History gives us perspective.

It reminds us that countless ordinary people stood exactly where we are standing right now.

People who worried about paying their bills.

People who laughed with friends.

People who fell
in love.

People who lost someone they couldn’t imagine living without.

People who believed
tomorrow would come, just like we do.

There’s something comforting about all of that.

The older I get, the less interested I become in extraordinary people.

I become fascinated by ordinary people.

The miner in the coal mine who worked until sunset.

The hotel clerk who greeted travelers
with a smile.

The mother packing lunches before school.

The child running through muddy streets
during the gold rush without realizing they’d one day become part of history.

None of them
were trying to become legends.

They were just living their lives.

And somehow that’s exactly
what made them unforgettable.

Maybe there’s a lesson here that Alaska’s been trying to teach us
all week.

History isn’t built by remarkable moments alone.

It’s built by ordinary people
showing up day after day and leaving small pieces of themselves behind.

A porch they built.

A trail
they walked.

A story they told their children.

A kindness offered to a stranger passing through
town.

Most of those moments never make it into the history books, but together they become the
history.

And as we get ready to leave Alaska behind, I don’t find myself thinking about
mysterious disappearances or haunted hallways or abandoned buildings.

I find myself thinking
about people.

People who built communities.

People who waited.

People who helped.

People who kept
telling stories long enough for the next generation to remember them.

Maybe that’s what folklore really
is.

Not proof that extraordinary things happened, but proof that ordinary lives mattered enough to
be remembered.

And quite honestly, I can’t think of a more beautiful reason to keep telling stories
than that.

More on Alaska Next on the Midnight Drive.

Alright, so there’s a question that I have
been carrying with me all week.

Not because I expected Alaska to answer it, but because I don’t
think that it can be answered.

My favorite kind of question.

A good paradox.

What do we actually leave behind?
Think about it for a moment.

What do we actually leave behind?
It’s an interesting question because most of us instinctively think about the tangible things first.

A house.

A book of photographs.

A journal tucked into a drawer.

Maybe a watch that gets passed down
through generations.

Those things matter, yes.

They become anchors for memory,
but I don’t think they’re the first things that people remember.

Think about someone that you’ve
lost.

What’s the first thing that comes to mind? It’s probably not their address
or the kind of car that they drove or how many square feet their house was.

Usually you remember the way that they laughed, the stories they told, the sound of their voice,
the advice they repeated so often that you can still hear it all of these years later.

You remember how they made you feel.

There’s a wonderful quote by Maya Angelou about that.

Now I’ve started wondering if places work the same way.

Not because buildings have emotions, but because people do.

When enough people experience something meaningful in the same place,
that place quietly absorbs part of the story.

Not in a supernatural sense.

In a very tangible human sense.

Take Scary Mary.

Whether every detail of that story happened exactly as it’s been passed down
isn’t really the point anymore.

The reason her story survives isn’t because someone
proved there was a ghost.

It survives because everyone understands waiting.

Hope can become its own kind of home.

We’ve all waited for something.

A phone call.

A diagnosis.

Someone to come back.

An apology that never arrived.

The details are all different, but the feeling is not.

But the feeling is not.

That’s why Mary’s story still resonates.

Not because it’s extraordinary, but because it’s familiar.

I really hate that they added the name Scary to it.

Mary.

A real person who waited until she died.

Waiting on a fiance that never returned.

Then there’s Lydia.

I found myself thinking about her long after we finished yesterday’s episode.

Not because of the perfume people claim to smell or the footsteps on the old wooden stairs.

I kept thinking about how easy it is for history to flatten people.

A complicated human life slowly becomes a sentence.

Or a paragraph.

And eventually it gets whittled down to a nickname.

We do this all the time, and it’s not ever out of cruelty, it’s out of convenience.

Stories become easier to tell when they are simple.

But here’s the thing.

Real people rarely are that simple.

Maybe one of the greatest acts of respect we can offer the past is allowing people to remain complicated.

To admit that we don’t know everything.

To resist turning someone’s entire life into a souvenir.

I’ve realized that’s become one of the guiding principles of this show.

We’ve been evolving for several weeks.

And we keep coming to some of these same conclusions.

Wherever we arrive somewhere new, I’m much less interested in proving or disproving a story.

Than I am in asking, what was this place trying to preserve?
And how is it currently perceived?
Sometimes it’s grief, sometimes it’s resilience, sometimes it’s wonder.

Sometimes it’s simply the memory of people who would otherwise be forgotten.

That’s worth protecting.

This week also reminded me that history isn’t something locked inside of museums.

It’s literally happening all around us.

Right now.

Think about your favorite coffee shop.

The one where the person behind the counter already knows your order.

And that’s where history comes in.

Think about your favorite coffee shop.

The one where the person behind the counter already knows your order.

Someday, that place might close.

The building will probably become something else.

Maybe another cafe, maybe a bookstore, maybe apartments.

Someone driving past 20 years from now won’t know what it meant to you.

Unless someone tells the story.

The same is true for neighborhoods, schools, movie theaters, parks.

Even the roads that we drive on every day.

Places don’t become meaningful because they are famous.

They become meaningful because someone lived part of their life there.

I’ve come to believe that the memory is one of the greatest architects in the world.

It quietly builds invisible structures inside ordinary places.

A bench becomes the place where two friends had their last conversation.

A bridge becomes the place where someone gathered all of the courage in the world to propose.

A hotel room becomes a place where a family learned they were about to welcome a new child into the world.

Nothing about that physical space changes.

Everything about our relationship to the space does.

And maybe that’s what Alaska has been showing us.

All week.

Not haunted buildings.

Not mysterious disappearances.

Not abandoned towns.

Relationships.

The relationship between people and places.

The relationship between people and places.

The relationship between memory and the landscape.

The relationship between stories and time.

And perhaps the relationship between humility and wonder.

I’ve noticed something about wonder.

It never demands certainty.

Isn’t that awesome?
Wonder is perfectly comfortable sitting beside unanswered questions.

Think about it.

It doesn’t rush to fill every silence.

It doesn’t panic when a mystery remains unsolved.

It simply keeps listening.

The older I get, the more I think that’s a skill worth practicing.

Active listening.

Not just while traveling.

Everywhere.

Listening before concluding.

Observing before explaining.

Respecting before judging.

Maybe those are habits that allow ordinary places to become extraordinary.

Not because the place has changed.

But because we did.

As this week begins drawing to a close, I don’t feel like Alaska gave me answers.

I feel like it gave me better questions.

And I think that’s the greatest gift any place can offer.

You’re listening to The Midnight Drive.

At the beginning of the week, I thought Alaska was going to be a place.

A destination.

A collection of mountains, forests, glaciers, old hotels, forgotten mining towns, and stories that had somehow survived longer than the people who first told them.

I don’t think that anymore.

I think Alaska has become an incredible conversation.

Not one I had with the state, but one that I had with myself.

That’s the funny thing about traveling.

We spend so much time believing we’re going somewhere else that we forget another journey is happening at the same time.

The one within.

Every place asks us something different of us.

Some places ask us to slow down.

Some just ask us to listen.

Some ask us to reconsider what we thought we knew.

Alaska asked me to become comfortable with perspective.

It asked me to stand in front of something unimaginably large,
unimaginably larger than myself, and resist the urge to shrink it into something manageable.

What a wild thing to ask.

I’ve realized how often we do that.

We categorize, we summarize, we explain.

Not because curiosity is wrong, but because certainty feels safe.

If I can explain something, I don’t have to sit with it anymore.

The mystery is gone.

The discomfort disappears.

But this week, this week reminded me that some of my most meaningful experiences in life aren’t improved by immediate explanations.

They’re immediately improved by attention.

Think back over everything that we explored together this week.

The Alaska Triangle, ghost towns, historic hotels, Scary Mary, and Lydia.

If we’d spent the week arguing about whether every story was literally true, I think we would have missed the point entirely.

It may have been a fun conversation.

We may have made a nice time, may have made some memories along the way.

But it wouldn’t have been the same because none of those stories changed who I am.

It was the questions that did.

Why do empty places feel lonely?
Why do temporary places become permanent in our memory?
Why do communities matter so much?
Why are we so uncomfortable admitting that we don’t know?
Those are the questions that followed me long after the facts faded into the background.

Maybe that’s why stories endure.

Not because they’re perfect, but because they’re useful.

Useful in helping us think.

Useful in helping us remember.

Useful in helping us understand ourselves just a little more clearly than we did yesterday.

I’ve also noticed something that I didn’t expect when we began this journey.

This week wasn’t really about Alaska’s past.

It was about our presence.

Ghost towns reminded me to appreciate the communities I still have.

Haunted hotels reminded me that ordinary moments are often the ones that stay with us the longest.

The Alaska Triangle reminded me that mystery is not a flaw in the world.

It’s evidence that the world is still larger than my understanding of it.

Notice how those lessons aren’t confined to one state.

They’re invitations.

The kind that we can accept every single day if we’re just willing to pay attention.

Here’s a phrase that I’ve been carrying with me for a long time.

The map is not the territory.

It’s an old expression that reminds us that a representation of something can never become the thing itself.

A map can show you where a mountain is.

It can tell you how cold the wind feels at the summit.

A photograph can show you a ghost town, but it can’t recreate the silence.

A history book can explain the gold rush, but it can’t help you understand what it felt like to leave home,
believing that your entire future waited somewhere beyond the next ridge.

Experience always exceeds explanation.

Always.

Do you think that’s true of people too?
I kind of do.

We spend so much of our lives trying to summarize ourselves.

Think about how you introduce yourself to somebody new.

Have you summarized yourself?
Emphasis on our careers, our accomplishments, our mistakes, our beliefs,
as though a single sentence could ever contain an entire human life.

The whole concept of an elevator pitch, something used by people with big ideas for businesses,
just to catch somebody in the elevator to pitch it to.

You have that long.

We’ve done that to ourselves.

Society has pressured it to turn ourselves, our entire essence, into one single sentence.

It’s impossible.

We are all far more complicated than our introductions, far more beautiful than our biographies,
far more unfinished than we’d probably like to admit.

Maybe Alaska understood all of that all along.

Maybe that’s why nothing we encountered this week ever fit neatly into a box.

The wilderness wasn’t simply beautiful.

It was humbling.

The ghost towns weren’t simply abandoned.

They were hopeful.

The hotels weren’t simply haunted.

They were almost more human than the people who occupied them.

Every story resisted becoming smaller than it deserved to be.

And that’s a lesson that I hope to carry with me.

Not just when I’m traveling, but when I’m talking to ordinary people,
when I’m listening to someone whose life has been very different from my own,
when I’m tempted to jump to conclusions,
when I’m convinced I already know the ending of someone else’s story.

Maybe slowing down is one of the greatest forms of respect we can offer the world
to places, to history, and to other people.

And maybe even to ourselves.

As we pull off the highway and leave Alaska in the rearview mirror,
I don’t feel like I’ve solved anything.

I don’t know exactly what happened inside the Alaska Triangle.

I don’t know whether Scary Mary still waits by the window.

I don’t know whether Lydia’s perfume still drifts to the red onion saloon,
and everyone has gone home.

Strangely, I’m okay with that.

Because I think Alaska gave me something far more valuable than certainty.

It gave me perspective.