Going north, to Alaska.

So, last week I went back to the scene of the crime.

This, boys and girls, is called click bait. I’ve committed no crime (that you know of … or can prove). I am talking about something so totally different, so completely irrelevant to actual life, as to be of no interest to anyone. I’m talking about an old TV show. But it was a hell of a show.

It’s called Northern Exposure, and it ran from 1990 to 1996. It was the ultimate fish-out-water show. It took a Jewish doctor from New York, and placed him in the tiny town of Cicily, Alaska. This was a place where, when he asked for a bagel with lox, he was met with, “A what?”

Joel Fleischman, a recent graduate of Columbia Medical School, owes the State of Alaska $137,000 for his education. So, it’s either pay up, or do your residency of four years in this tiny, dirt-floor, idiosyncratic, one-moose, bizarro town full of … let’s say quirky characters.

But before they are accepted by the viewers as quirky — before they became known and loved by us — they were just full-on weird. When Joel is met at the bus station by Ed, the friendly, but odd, young native kid, Ed takes him to the mayor, Maurice’s house. Only, he doesn’t take him all the way to the house, he takes him part of the way there, then he stops the truck in the middle of the road, in the middle of the woods actually, stops the truck and gets out and begins to walk away.

“Ed!” screams Joel to the retreating back of his recent driver. “Where are you going?”