On October 21, 1986, a Twin Otter buzzed down out of the clouds, gently popping the ears of seven Yup'ik Eskimos and one kass'aq strapped into seats behind the cockpit. A pile of freight, mail, and baggage filled the space behind them, secured with yellow nets of rope.

One wing tilted toward the grey sea, the plane banked left under grey clouds, and I caught my first glimpse of Nelson Island. I did not know, then, that during the next five years I would learn some of the most important lessons a person can learn. Nor did I expect that my journey -- the inner one and the outer, the one I have been making since before I can remember -- would begin to become so clear. I had a premonition, though.

It happened in the Anchorage International Airport. I arrived on a dark, sleeting Sunday, the only day of the week when buses didn't run downtown. Not looking forward to a four-hour layover before boarding the flight to Bethel, yet not wanting to spend $20 on a cab, I took a walk around the airport.

The Kodiak brown bear, the snarling wolverine, the bald eagle, and all the other animals and birds frozen in glass display cases only heightened my sense of disconnection. They reminded me of the one other time I had been in the Anchorage airport -- with Michael, my former flute teacher, the man I had dragged to Alaska from Boulder five years earlier for a rainy three-week ferry-hopping, hitchhiking, train-riding trip that he would describe later as "nothing but a miserable nightmare."

Not everyone sees things the same way.

At the baggage-claim area, I decided to walk outside. I stepped out the door, turned left, glanced up, and stopped. Denali, the tallest mountain in North America, shone in the distance just beneath a thick band of grey clouds. The rounded summit, touched somehow by a ray of sunlight, gleamed white.

One of the reasons I had wanted so much to return to Alaska was my memory of the backpacking trip Michael and I had made up Sunrise Creek, deep inside Denali National Park. We had surprised a grizzly in the willows, backed off safely, and watched her for two hours through our binoculars. Her twin cubs boxed and chased each other as she alternately napped and gorged on berries.

A few days later we had camped at Wonder Lake, 85 miles inside the Park, and "the Mountain" had cleared off completely: a rare sight in summer. Cerise fireweed burned against centuries of snow.

Now Denali greeted me as Michael never could.

Smiling, I walked down the sidewalk. The wet air stank with automobile exhaust fumes, though. I decided to go back inside and find something to eat.

I knew prices would be high, but I bought a bowl of Manhattan clam chowder with oyster crackers anyway, for $2.50, and sat in the almost-empty cafeteria at a table next to the windows. No view here. Sleet began to drum against the glass. I swallowed the soup slowly, enjoying the warmth and the salty fish taste, but distance and loneliness crept in again. Maybe moving to Tununak wasn't the right thing to do after all. I could still change my mind.

Last chance to back out?

I was 34 years old. I had never been able to talk any of my "gentleman friends," as my father called them, into moving to Alaska with me. Not even Michael, who knew all the birds in Gregory Canyon by their calls and spent hours wandering the trails above Boulder looking at lichens and sedges, listening to leaves, breathing the butterscotch smell of ponderosa pine bark.

If I really wanted to live in the Alaskan bush -- and I had wanted to, ever since my first visit to Alaska in 1973 -- I should do it now. Plenty of my other dreams had failed to come true. On the other hand, if I actually thought this wasn't what I wanted, then I should be honest enough to find a pay phone, call Phil, and tell him I had changed my mind. It would be much better to tell people now than later. I had seen the phone outside the cafeteria, and I had the number right there in my pocket.

The next two hours passed slowly as I agonized over the decision I thought I had already made. I knew I would be far from my family and friends. I would have no access to the world of classical music -- no public radio broadcasts, private flute lessons, or master-classes. No live concerts. No opportunities to perform or to rehearse with other musicians. I knew, from teaching in public schools and later as a Suzuki flute instructor, that teaching could consume all my time and energy, leaving little or none for other creative work.

But I steered clear of the phone. I had always had too much pride to quit, even when quitting might have been smart. Besides, I was pretty sure I could handle this.

I was used to doing things alone, and I had some experience with other cultures. I had hitchhiked several thousand miles by myself in Europe, survived the Orient Express from Vienna to Istanbul second-class, and ridden the train from Moscow to the other end of Siberia in the early seventies with my father. My first teaching job had been in a Chicago inner-city high school, where one of my favorite students, a 22-year-old in tenth grade, had sharpened his pencils with a switch-blade and had offered to steal me a color TV. At one time or another, I had learned to speak and read German, Russian, Chinese, and a little Spanish. The language in Tununak couldn't be harder than Chinese, could it? Anyway, something was propelling me in this direction. Otherwise, how could things have evolved this far?

An hour before flight time I walked to Gate A3, where the Markair jet for Bethel would depart. The waiting area was empty except for one overweight black-haired man slouched peacefully in an orange plastic chair, asleep. I sat as far away as I could, so I wouldn't have to make conversation if he woke up.

Within 15 minutes, the waiting area filled with more black-haired people, plastic shopping bags under their arms, children in tow, elders leaning on canes. A tiny woman, slumped in an airport wheelchair, was rolled in by an airport attendant. The woman's wrinkled brown face looked out, like a peeled avocado seed, from a bright green parka trimmed with silver rickrack. A quilted hood, edged with a circle of black fur and a circle of white, bunched behind her head like a pillow.

People wandered into the area in ones, twos, and threes, looking as weary as I probably did. Almost immediately, though, they recognized someone they knew and were shaking hands, hugging each other, smiling, laughing, talking in a guttural language I had never heard. The level of energy in the dead room shot up like a geyser. Even the woman in the wheelchair smiled. I realized these people were all Eskimos and that they must be speaking Yup'ik. I couldn't understand a word they said, but I could guess what some of it meant. Suddenly I thought I had done the right thing.