BETHEL, Alaska — You have no idea how big this state is.

You may think you know. You see it on a TV weather map sitting in a box alongside Hawaii, the other afterthought state, and it looks maybe the size of Colorado. Or maybe you learned in school that it's the largest state in the union, all that Texas braggadocio notwithstanding, and you figure that gives you some sense of how big a piece of real estate this is. But it doesn't.

Bill Roth/Anchorage Daily News/MCT (ENLARGE)

A youth rides his bike off a boardwalk in Bethel, Alaska.

Leonard Pitts Jr./MCT (ENLARGE)

Local people perform traditional dances in the outpost town of Bethel, Alaska.

ALASKA'S TOP FIVE Here are five of Alaska's top attractions: Denali National Park: Incredible wildlife viewing and scenery; on clear days you can see Mount McKinley. The Inside Passage: This picturesque cruise-and-ferry route links the popular towns of Ketchikan, Sitka, Juneau and Skagway. Flight-seeing: Whether you take a ski plane or helicopter, don't miss the chance to fly over this majestic world — and land on top if you can. Glaciers: See them from above — via a flight-seeing excursion, at eye level (some you can actually touch) or by ship or kayak. Catch them quickly; most are receding. Native culture: Most larger tourist-friendly towns offer heritage centers and museums dedicated to indigenous peoples. —Jane Wooldridge VISITING ALASKA Because Alaska is a vast and rugged land, many areas are linked only by air or sea; charter air companies are numerous. (Check safety records before you fly.) • By cruise ship: Ships large and small from 15 cruise lines ply Alaska waters. Most sail the Inside Passage, starting in either Seattle or Vancouver, B.C., and ending in Seward. The cruise season runs May through October. • By ferry: The Alaska Marine Highway System of ferries serves the Inside Passage, the Aleutians, Prince William Sound and other areas. www.dot.state.ak.us. • By air and ground: For connecting from the Lower 48, Alaska's primary airports are in Anchorage and Fairbanks. Once in Alaska, road access is limited; some towns are reached only by air and sea. The Milepost (http://milepost.com), a fat travel guide, is considered the bible for visitors driving through the state. The Alaska Railroad links some popular areas; www.akrr.com. TOURISM INFO: www.travelalaska.com; 907-929-2200. —Jane Wooldridge

Put it like this: If you could superimpose Alaska over the 48 continental states, the panhandle would be in Miami and the Aleutian Islands would end somewhere near San Diego. Put the southern tip of Kodiak Island over New Orleans and the city of Barrow would be about 50 miles short of the Canadian border.

This is a vast land with much to see. Unfortunately, I have seen none of it.

Well, that's not quite true. I did see the mountains that loom above the road between Anchorage and Seward, grand and stately edifices wreathed in snow and looking down impassively upon the doings of tourists and travel writers. But other than that, I have seen little. No Mount McKinley, which is said to rise so high you think the tour plane is going to fly into it; no moose wandering casually through the streets of Anchorage; not so much as a single measly glacier.

I have been sick for the last three days. So the sight I have seen the most of here on the Last Frontier is the hotel room where I huddled drinking tea by the gallon and sucking throat lozenges by the box. My biggest adventure to date: trying a reindeer-sausage omelet at the restaurant across the street in Anchorage's rather drab downtown.

Today, though, is a good day. In the first place, I am feeling better. In the second place, I have hopped on a plane and flown 400 miles west to this town on the frozen banks of the Kuskokwim River in the expectation that I will finally find Something To See. And I have.

I see mud and flood.

That is not a complaint, just a description. At this time of the year, mid-spring, the ice on the river is breaking up (you can win a pile in a local contest if you guess the correct day and time) and getting around requires navigating a quicksand of slush, mud and water. There are, I am told, only seven miles of paved road here; the rest is gravel and potholes — make that "pot craters." There is no road leading in or out; you can get here only by flying in, floating a barge up the Kuskokwim or, when the river freezes, mushing a dog sled team.

Bethel, according to the last census, is home to 5,471 people. Most of them are Yupik, an American Indian people indigenous to this part of the world. A group of them will gather in someone's house a few hours from now to share a potluck dinner with the visitor from the Lower 48. Meantime, an aide to the governor is playing tour guide and I am soaking up Bethel facts.

Such as the fact that about 90 taxicabs operate here — the highest number per capita of any city in the nation — because many people can't afford to own cars. Or the fact that the village is built on permafrost, which turns out to be less "perma" than the name implies, requiring all the buildings to be on stilts, and the few miles of paved road to be repaved or repaired every few years, because the constant melting and refreezing causes the ground to shift and pulls them apart. Or the fact that food here is less likely to be bought than caught; it's not uncommon to pass a home and see pike or ptarmigan (the "p" is silent) hanging outside to dry.

Indeed, ptarmigan — it's a bird — is on the menu at dinner, along with caribou, seal stew and kippered salmon. Dessert is salmon berry ice cream, which is very tart. Before I leave Alaska, I will also have occasion to dine on porcupine.

Given how alien these dishes are to a palette raised largely on cheeseburgers, I am apprehensive when I see my host, Susan Charles, cutting into a pan of something brown and gooey. "What is that?" I ask.

Charles, who is soft-spoken and sweet-natured, answers without a hint of sarcasm: "Chocolate cake."

Oh. Chocolate cake. Yes, I've heard of that. I think I'll have a piece.

We are sitting, a group of us, at her kitchen table. Children are ricocheting around the house and Father Chuck Peterson, who came to Alaska in 1970, is pondering a two-part question: What do you find in Bethel that you wouldn't find anywhere else, and what must you do without if you want to live here?

"You're going to find seal meat," he says. "You'll never find seal meat elsewhere. And salmon berries. And seal oil as a condiment. That's a very favorite condiment that people put on their soups. Salmon in abundance. People fish throughout the year."

And what do you give up? "Don't expect movie theaters," he quips. "Don't expect the opera. Traffic lights. No traffic congestion. Crowds of people."

What else? "Unlimited running water. We have some. But for many of the folks here, water is brought around in tank trucks and then the sewage is brought out in tank trucks. So running water is a luxury for some folks."

"The morning paper," adds Charles.

"Albertson's," says Peter Twitchell, who is Yupik and works at the local radio station. "That's our supermarket out there, in the river, back on the tundra. We've got berries, we've got caribou, moose, ptarmigan. I could never get that anywhere else. Not even in Frisco."

The ready availability of ptarmigan aside, even those who live here will tell you that living here is a challenge. The sense of isolation, of being cut off from the rest of the nation — even the rest of the state — is palpable. Nor is it coincidental that alcoholism is a pressing problem; the possession or sale of booze is illegal here, but bootlegging is a thriving enterprise. And there are, says Peterson, only two seasons: break-up ("... meaning the ice breaks up and then we have the season of going outside, fishing, hunting"); and freeze-up ("People stay home much more, they can't get around to do their hunting and fishing and gathering. That's when they do the dancing, the travel, the building things, repairing, sewing").

So yes, there are easier places to live. And yet, as Susan Charles sees it, this is the only place to live. Her home is on land to which her parents came in 1936. She is rooted to it by memories of them and by the need to preserve the culture into which she was born.

"Yupik culture is a thing of practice," she says. "Fishing, picking berries, cutting wood, packing water, taking care of your children and your parents and their parents, your grandparents. That's one big thing about Yupik families, the practice of caring for each other. All the children belong to you. This little boy that you see running around, he's not really my grandchild, but I'm his grandmother. We are not blood-related, but I am his grandmother."

The Yupik say their culture has been under assault from the moment outsiders got here — Moravian missionaries came to what is now Bethel in 1884. The missionaries sought to disabuse the Yupik of their notions of God. The traders who followed told them to throw off their language.

"I was born in 1950 and I didn't speak my language, my Yupik language, until I was 21," says Twitchell. His voice snags just the slightest bit as he adds, "And then when I spoke it, I felt like I was grounded for the first time."

But if church and school were the original culprits in the destruction of Yupik culture, says Susan Murphy, who is Yupik, "I think now the things that are destroying the culture are television, alcohol, drugs, materialism, people who want better for their children than they had and think that the way to do it is to have the children learn only Western ways. It's a combination and not necessarily only outside forces that are helping erode the culture. It's us, too."

Some of this, she concedes, is inevitable, maybe even desirable. "Culture is always in a state of change," she says. "You wouldn't want to run around with bows and arrows anymore. I certainly would not want to have to deal with a seal oil lamp."

Even so, she says, there is "sadness and a sense of loss" — particularly among the elders — in watching their culture leave.

We migrate to the living room a few minutes later, where a group of young people performs traditional dances for us to the heartbeat of a drum. One of the lead dancers is a young, blonde man who bears little resemblance to the dark-haired Yupik. It turns out he is just what he looks like, a white kid from Iowa. I can't resist asking what he's doing in this frozen, isolated place, performing dances in a culture not his own.

There is an elemental sweetness in the answer. You see, he met this Yupik girl and fell in love.

And it occurs to me that Susan Murphy spoke more truly than she knew. Culture is not a static thing, not some precious heirloom that sits behind glass on a shelf in a curio cabinet. Culture is always in a state of change. Culture is a dance.

It is after 10 that night when I lie down in a hotel room the size of a walk-in closet. The sun is still up.

When you get to Bethel, someone in Anchorage had told me, you're going to think you're in a village. Ask them to take you to a "real" village.

Which is how I find myself the next morning folded in my seat in a tiny charter plane watching the tundra fly by below. After a few minutes, it drops to earth on an airstrip outside Kwethluk.

I have been in African villages that were larger. Kwethluk is home to fewer than 900 people and about eight cars. We will be on the ground for just an hour, during which Max Olick, a bearish man who is one of seven police officers, shows us around. We visit the only store in town, where the difficulty of bringing in goods shows in the prices: a box of Quaker Instant Oatmeal costs $6.55, a game of Scrabble will set you back $30.19. We go to the jailhouse, where the "cell" is secured by a length of wood braced lengthwise between two other pieces of wood, one nailed across the door, the other across the floor. Then Olick allows me to take a spin on the police department's snowmobile — first one I've ever ridden — and we go racing across the river. The only sound is my laughter and the shush of the vehicle on the snow.

Twice in life now, I have had occasion to pause in the moment and marvel at how far I was from everything and everyone I have ever known. The first was in a village in Niger. The second is here. The difference, of course, is that I required no passport to get here. And that matters, I think.

From time to time, one hears people question whether America is not a land too big to be united by a single government. What, after all, does an American look like?

The answer of course, is that an American looks like someone from Japan or someone from France or someone from Niger or someone from Sweden or someone from India or someone from right here in this place next to the river where the Yupik people have lived and fished and hunted and raised their children and done all the things that make them Yupik, for centuries.

And if America's vastness of land and diversity strikes some of us as an unwieldy challenge, it feels to me in this moment in a faraway place, like a benediction, an assurance that somehow, for all our failings, we got something fundamentally right.

So that minutes later, as the plane lifts off for the return trip to Bethel, and the land unfolds beneath us in a harsh and elemental patchwork of black and white, I think again of how far I am from everything and everyone I have ever known. And it's just fine.

This is America, too.