Publisher's Synopsis
When considering the manuscript of "The Blue Envelope" my publishers wrote me asking that I offer some sort of proof that the experiences of Marian and Lucile might really have happened to two girls so situated. My answer ran somewhat as follows: Alaska, at least the northern part of it, is so far removed from the rest of this old earth that it is almost as distinct from it as is the moon. It's a good stiff nine-day trip to it by water and you sight land only once in all that nine days. For nine months of winter you are quite shut off from the rest of the world. Your mail comes once a month, letters only, over an eighteen-hundred-mile dog trail; two months and a half for letters to come; the same for the reply to go back. Do you wonder, then, that the Alaskan, when going down to Seattle, does not speak of it as going to Seattle or going down to the States but as "going outside"? Going outside seems to just exactly express it. When you have spent a year in Alaska you feel as if you had truly been inside something for twelve months. People who live "inside" of Alaska do not live exactly as they might were they in New England. Conventions for the most part disappear. Life is a struggle for existence and a bit of pleasure now and again. If conventions and customs get in the way of these, away with them. And no one in his right senses can blame these people for living that way.
