June 28, 2002

• For anyone who has missed this essential fact about me in my profile
  and previous blogs:  I live in ALASKA, the Last Frontier, Land of
  the Midnight Sun, The Great Land, where the sourdoughs make huge
  fortunes panning gigantic gold nuggets out of pristine
  mountain streams.

  Well, that last bit was just to illustrate the misconceptions many
  of you Outside (Alaskanese for anywhere else) have about our
  state.  Gold mining here has long been mechanized.  Pans are
  mostly used by prospectors and tourists.  Mining operations have
  poisoned many of the richest placer streams, and dredges have turned
  others from crystalline burbling brooks to broad muddy creeks lined
  with big heaps of the gravel that was dredged out.

  The sourdough sobriquet now is most often applied to people
  otherwise known as “boomers”.  These are people who heard about
  the big bucks to be made on the pipeline and at Prudhoe Bay, and came
  here seeking the pot of gold.  True, those guys working at Prudhoe
  (where my friend Charlie said, in reference to the polar bear problem,
  “To step out of your trailer is to re-enter the food chain.”) get good
  pay and lots of perks, but there aren’t many jobs and the union wait
  list for them is long.  The pipeline construction was completed a
  couple of decades ago, but amazingly we still get some boomers coming
  up here looking for those jobs.  They are the new sourdoughs, sour
  on Alaska, with not enough dough to get back home.

  Dough is a big issue for a lot of visitors and new residents. 
  It costs more to live here than in any other U.S. state.  Most of
  that extra cost goes into the expense of shipping things up here from
  the Lower 48.  I once found a great deal on New Jersey greensand
  for my organic garden, only $5.00 for fifty pounds.  It would have
  cost me over $50 to have it shipped, and I’d have had to wait until a
  trucking company filled a van on the east coast with freight bound for
  Alaska, then trucked it to the west coast.  There, that van would
  be loaded onto a barge and would wait until the barge filled up and was
  towed up here for the goods to be distributed.   I remember
  one winter a tug lost three barges in a storm.  Stores from
  Anchorage to Fairbanks and beyond ran out of stuff like dog food and
  toilet paper, and a number of remote villages lost all their mail-order
  Christmas presents.  For many of us, mail-order is the easiest and
  cheapest way to shop.

  We who’ve been here a while just expect prices to be higher than
  what we see advertized in national media.  When McDonald’s® has a
  new Happy Meal® special, we know that another dollar will be tacked
  onto the price at Mickey D’s in town.  On my last trip to Wasilla,
  I noticed a new store: big sign, “Dollar Store”.  Below that, it
  said “15,000 items @ $1.25.”  Par for the course, but I can
  imagine some tourists’ reactions.  Burger King® here is apparently
  stuck using the same big plastic menu boards they use elsewhere. 
  In the section that is labeled “BK 99¢ Value Menu”, all the prices
  listed are $1.29.  It was the topic of conversation among those
  waiting in line the other day.  I just stood there, nothing to add
  to that conversation.  I know why it costs more, and for me the
  advantages of being here outweigh all that petty shit.

  Weather is another thing that breeds misconceptions. 
  Climate is what you expect; weather is what you get.  The
  situation with global warming has eliminated our climate, so all we
  have now is weather.  It still gets cold, although it’s not the
  year-round frozen wasteland that many people envision.  Even in
  the far Arctic the sea ice melts in summer.  Here in this
  sub-arctic valley, most years we can count on being snow-free through
  June, July and August, although a few frosts from mid-August on are
  common, and I’ve seen frost in July a few times.

  I’ve had conversations with summer visitors from places like
  Minnesota, who said they were familiar with cold.  I had somewhat
  the same misconception when I spent a winter above 13,000 feet in the
  Colorado Rockies to acclimate myself before coming here.  Yeah, it
  snows in those places, and the temps drop into the sub-zero Fahrenheit
  range for a few days each winter.  Here, when snow falls in
  October, we can count on it still being there under a lot of other snow
  come May or early June.  Last winter, we had two periods, each
  about ten days to two weeks long, when nighttime temps went down to -45
  F and never got above about -20 in the daytime.  I will never
  forget a photo I saw in a newspaper over ten years ago, when the annual
  military cold weather training maneuver “Operation Brimfrost”
  encountered a cold snap.  The reporter was interviewing a supply
  sergeant who had been talking about the way tires lose tread in big
  chunks, plastic parts act like pie crust and metal parts break as if
  they were plastic at -80 F.  The photo showed the sergeant
  standing on the surface of an open 5 gallon can of 30 weight motor oil.

  Cold, however, as any of my neighbors would tell you, is not
  the hard part of winter.  The duration of the cold is bad,
  yes.  Month after month of unrelieved whiteness will make people
  do weird things.  Drinking and domestic violence rates rise as
  winter wears on, but some responses are just whimsical, like
  scattering Kool-Aid® powder to brighten it up.  The year that
  there were two volcanoes spewing ash our way, the snow took on an
  interesting layered look with stripes of gray and brown between the
  white strata.  But the worst part of winter is the darkness. 
  I don’t have any idea what it must be like above the arctic
  circle.  In Barrow the sun goes down in November and comes back
  up, just barely, a little peek over the horizon, in January.  Here
  in sub-arctic suburbia, around the winter solstice, we get about four
  hours a day of sun, a weak cool light in deceptively warm colors due to
  its passage at that low angle through the atmosphere. 
  Sunrise to sunset, it just creeps a few degrees over the treetops and
  then it’s gone.  One of my happiest winter moments is the one that
  comes each February, when I can stand in the sun and actually feel its
  warmth on my face again.

  Not any of that, nor the mosquitoes in summer, nor living amid
  a lot of people even crazier than me, can dim my enjoyment of life in
  Alaska.  I know it’s not for everyone.  The woods around here
  are scattered with the abandoned cabins and boarded-up businesses
  of those who came here and either didn’t make a success of it
  economically or couldn’t endure or survive the physical and mental
  hardships.  But Alaska has been good to me.  It took me in
  with open arms, made me feel welcome and gave me a sense of belonging
  I’d never felt elsewhere.  I love the cool green brightness of
  summer, when I seldom see a neighbor except in passing as we are all
  busy on our own pursuits.  The winter social life provides the
  much-needed warmth everyone craves when the most pleasant place to be
  is around a fire with friends.  For half my life, I wandered and
  never expected to settle down.  Then I came here and forgot to
  leave.

  • 3:11 pm
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