An unfortunate Christmas Day car wreck got me thinking about how often we cheat potential disaster by a hair’s breadth—and how rarely we may be aware of those last minute avoidances. We don’t always realize that we’ve been lucky until the speeding truck of reality whizzes by in front of us, tickling our noses with the wind of its passage, calling our attention to the fact that we’ve gotten away with the audacity of life again… this time.

I’ve written about some of my more memorable close calls: Fleeing from an enraged mother moose, close bear encounters, nearly freezing into a Lisa-sicle on a mountain peak during a sunny June day, when down below people sweated in shorts and T-shirts while chugging cold beer from the back of a truck. Drama and conflict—even if the conflict is between human flesh and freezing wind—usually make for an interesting story.

There’s another sort of drama one frequently encounters in the Alaska outdoors: the great cymbal-crash of a dark, starry night sky, snowflakes bigger than your fingertips, crackling, ethereal northern lights, the moose or bear that’s close enough to see but not so close that your knees start knocking. And yet, chaining these two types of drama together, peppered with the spectacular beauty found in any Alaska landscape, are millions of ordinary moments. That is, if anything in Alaska can be called ordinary. There’s always the hidden potential for disaster—a weak point in river ice, loose rock ready to tumble at the slightest provocation, a weak layer in the snow pack or a moose you haven’t seen yet, but she’s seen you and has her ears back—lurking just out of sight, safely hidden by that thing we call “unknown.”

Maybe that’s why even the “ordinary” Alaska moments can pull us in so thoroughly. This is a riddle that I’ve been working on since an “ordinary” full moon hike. There’s almost nothing to say about the hike; it was a simple stroll through the woods with a few friends, turning back when the cold started to affect us overmuch. And yet, there’s everything to say about it: the way the “Wolf Moon” hung over us, stark and bright, painting long tree shadows across the trail. The way the snow glittered under the night light and the extreme quiet (our crunching bootsteps hardly counted as breaking it). The way the mountains above us stood like tall, rocky sentinels—somehow, by night, they looked almost snow-free in places that, by day, still have a healthy white covering.

Ordinary.

This was a night with no drama realized—just easy chatter and the comfortable camaraderie of other people, spinning a comfortable human bubble inside the great, all-consuming wilderness that sits on our doorstep. And, yet, the very comfort we realize from such company is a tip of the hat to what we know lurks outside the human bubble: the scary unknown. Animals much better suited to the wild than we. A howling wind that kicks up with no notice. Clouds that pull the drapes of moonlight closed without a whisper of sound, then drop fresh snow to cover your tracks.

Just another winter night in Alaska.

The line of parked cars at the trailhead was almost as long as you might expect on a typical summer day, but there was no sign of the other people. We’d all scattered like buckshot into the quiet of the woods, and unless the other parties had all fallen into deep meditation, the snow, trees and moonlight were enough to swallow any sound of their passage. We might as well have been alone, but the knowledge that we weren’t—quite—was still a comfort.

Ho-hum.

When we finally turned and made our way back, there had been no extreme adventure. No fleeing from enraged or startled wildlife, no extreme discomfort aside from a few lightly chilled extremities. And yet, our hearts were full. We’d gotten what we came for. Some might call it filler, but to me, the ordinary moments that stick points of high drama together—with the drama and danger forever lurking unrealized, and sometimes unseen, in the background—are what get me from one exciting moment to the next. And while, yes, bear and moose and survived-by-the-skin-of-my-teeth stories make for good telling, I have to admit that I’d be pretty darn happy with “ordinary” every day. Because when you get right down to it, there’s really nothing ordinary about this place at all.