Is It Noonan Or Is It Not?

What I saw at the runway

Anchorage, Alaska —

The Aleuts, they’re Indians, sort of, if you like, but much more, yet less, no teepees, no curry, they’re indigenous, and they know the land as "Alyeska” . . . it means "Alaska”— see how close the words are? Language, yay! This is a big and vast and enormous and deep place, this 49th state, this Eskimo land is, this land of the midnight sun, this last frontier, this big . . . well, words fail, this one before Hawaii, near Canada, wide with caribou and animals and mountains and salmon and seals and rugged men and women with skin like burlap, dressed like warriors to combat the elements, though in summer, it’s more Rodgers and Hammerstein, Jews both, filled more with virginal damsels, whimsical lasses all, so lithe, prancing around Alaskan fields under Alaskan sunshine — I see daffodils, so yellow — than it is men, the mushers, who stand on sleds behind (and whipping) dogs yelling “Mush!” in the dark, gray snow.