September 22, 2005

• Indigence and Ingenuity in the Susitna Valley

  Yesterday’s blog and the comments it received brought to mind some of
  the ingenious survival strategies I have encountered since I have been
  here in subarctic suburbia.

  Alaska is beautiful.  In the rainforests of Southeast you’ve got a
  green fringe along the coastline, backed up by steep and rocky
  slopes.  There are no roads between towns down there.  You go
  by boat or by white-knuckle airlines.  Up north on the tundra
  there is the stark beauty of long vistas, with the occasional drama of
  a huge herd of caribou.  Still no roads between the
  villages.  You fly, or mush a team of huskies, or hump it on a
  four-wheel ATV or a snowmobile.

   Here along the Railbelt there is one highway parallel to the
  railroad 484 miles from Seward to Fairbanks, no alternate routes, but
  lots of short backroads off to the side into backcountry.  West of
  the highway here, the next paved road is somewhere in Siberia. 
  This is the quintessential nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want
  to live here, and I’ll tell the world that horrible lie, because one of
  the great things about living here is the relative absence of
  crowds.  Of course, this environment isn’t for everyone.  It
  just happens to be just right for me.

  I have written about what led me to come to Alaska and how I got here. 
  I’ve listened to a lot of other people’s stories that are equally
  wild.  For example, there was the woman who used to be the
  receptionist at the local health clinic.  She told me that when
  she divorced (in Tennessee or Arkansas or some equally hilly country
  down there), she decided to bring her four kids and come to Alaska
  because she’d heard of many job opportunities and a favorable ratio of
  men to women in the population.  They looked at a map, and liked
  the sound of “Trapper Creek” so they made that their destination.

  Trapper Creek is a wide spot in the road north of Talkeetna and south
  of Cantwell — a gas station, campground, motel, general store, pizza
  pub, lodge/bar, elementary school, library, and a few other roadside
  businesses that struggle to make it from one tourist season to the
  next.  No work there, and the family arrived in October, around
  the same time as the first snow.  They found someone kind who let
  them park their pickup/camper on his land for the winter and they
  squeaked through.  In the spring, she found the clinic job and in
  a few years found a husband.  She loves it here and enjoys telling
  her story as much as I enjoy mine.

  Other stories don’t end so happily.  Women do come here looking
  for the abundant, virile, outdoorsy Alaskan men, never having seen
  those t-shirts we Alaskan women wear, that say “Alaska Men:  the
  odds are good but the goods are odd.”  Couples come here and soon
  find out that he loves it and she hates it or she loves it and he can’t
  stand it.  Just in this little neighborhood since I’ve been here,
  I’ve seen a dozen or more cheechako* marriages break up, and I don’t
  get out and about very much.  Hell, sometimes even when they both
  hate it, the strains of the trip up here and the disillusionment at
  what they find is too much for the marriage and they leave going in
  different directions.

  Misinformation has brought many clueless cheechakos up here. 
  After the State Supreme Court’s Raven Decision in the 1970s
  decriminalized private possession of marijuana there was an influx of
  stoners and hopeful entrepreneurs, especially after that exquisite
  local strain, Matanuska Thunderfuck, became famous, and even after the
  state legislature recriminalized pot.  One man left a lucrative
  situation in Alabama diving for mussel shells (for sale to Asian pearl
  cultivators as “seeds” for their pearls), and a profitable sideline of
  waste-ground marijuana growing, to come here and grow pot under the
  midnight sun.

  Sure, we have 20+ hours of sunlight during summer time, but our
  frost-free growing seasons some years are as short as 46 days. 
  July is the only month that is reliably frost free, and I’ve seen light
  frosts in the middle of July a couple of times.  Besides that, the
  natural soil here is too acid for hemp.  This guy had planned to
  do it the way he did it in Alabama and Florida, scattering seed out in
  the wilderness and coming back later for the harvest.  In this
  cold acid soil, the seed rots before it sprouts.  He adapted,
  started sprouting the seed indoors and hauling bags of Pro-Mix growing
  medium out into the woods.  It was a dismal harvest after the
  native bugs got to his plants.  After a bear tore up his camp one
  time, he decided to move his growing operation indoors under lights.

  He parked a 15′ x 55′ trailer here, lived in the front room and turned
  the back 2/3 of the trailer into growing rooms.  His crops
  succeeded and he made some money, but he couldn’t handle the
  winters.  He left the place in the hands of house-sitters and
  wintered in Florida, Hawaii, or Mexico.   One of those
  winters, his house-sitters abandoned the place for the lights and
  warmth of town during an especially bad cold snap accompanied by power
  outages.  His crop was lost, his water system froze and burst, and
  he came back to a big smelly mess.

  A stubborn guy, he kept coming back from those southern winters for
  five years.  That last year, Greyfox, Doug and I moved in here as
  his house-sitters after Sarah
  and her lover Jono (who had just gotten here a few weeks before, about
  the time this neighbor was ready to leave, and took the house-sitting
  gig), split up and made their separate ways South, leaving the place to
  us.  The frustrated and disillusioned entrepreneur came back in
  the Spring and took his dog south with him, then came back in the fall
  to clean out his safe deposit box and give me the title to this
  trailer.  We haven’t heard from him since.

  Then there’s the cabin on the bluff, and on the other bluff, and below
  the bluff and down the road and then down the bluff again.

  When Charley, Doug and I moved to the Su Valley in 1983, there was half
  a cabin visible on the bluff facing the highway.  We could see the
  back of it through the trees from our lot (which is just on the other
  side of the highway from this place I’m living in now).  We
  learned that someone had started building it and before it was finished
  the place was condemned because he was building it astraddle of the
  easement line along the highway, partly on public land.  Those
  public access easements are a pain in the ass.  The space is
  included in our lot’s measurement, but we’re not allowed to build on
  it.  The builder of the cabin had just abandoned it after it was
  condemned.

  In 1985, a recently divorced man from Anchorage bought a lot in the
  subdivision, moved a travel trailer onto it and started building a
  cabin.  As his cabin grew each day, at night the half-cabin on the
  bluff was disappearing.  He had been a restaurant manager in the
  city.  Out here, he was just another Valley Rat trying to
  survive.  He borrowed money and he stole not only building
  materials but tools and machinery.

  Eventually, the neighborhood got too hot for him and he left,
  abandoning cabin, camp trailer, a dog and a cat.  His ex-wife came
  for the cat.  I took the dog in after another neighbor threatened
  to shoot him for getting into his trash.  Dirty Ernie used his
  bulldozer to push the trailer and cabin off the bluff to clear that lot
  for the new buyer who wanted to build something spiffier than that
  used-lumber shack.

  In 1990, while I was on my honeymoon with Greyfox, an oddly-assorted
  family moved into the neighborhood, drawn here by the prospect of good
  jobs on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.  Never mind that construction
  on the pipeline had been complete for a decade and a half.  This
  is what I meant by misinformation.  They were from Arkansas: 
  a woman and her son and daughter, and this man they had hooked up with
  somehow.  He was a solvent huffer and was crazy even when he
  wasn’t intoxicated on toluol or gasoline fumes.

  They squatted on a cleared lot in the subdivision, where someone else
  had parked a trailer for a year or two before becoming disillusioned
  and clearing out.  They built a rickety cabin right on the rim of
  the bluff, out of some logs they cut from other vacant properties
  around here and some of the lumber they salvaged from the bottom of the
  bluff.  After one winter in there, with an open fire in a cut-down
  oil barrel and a hole in the roof to let the smoke out, the little girl
  talked to her teacher at school about the man’s sexual abuse, and the
  woman and her kids left.

  The cabin started slipping off the bluff, and the man moved out. 
  The last I saw him he came by here to pay me some money he owed
  me.  He had just gotten out of prison for some time he did after a
  long high-speed highway chase in a car he’d stolen from his new
  girlfriend, with the girlfriend’s daughter whom he was supposed to be
  baby-sitting, during which he had almost run down a construction crew
  flagger.  His name hasn’t been in the police blotter column in the
  local papers for a while, so he’s either back in jail or gone south, I
  suppose.

  *Cheechako:  newcomer, greenhorn, tenderfoot.

  ---

  After three days of peaceful
  canine/feline relations in this household, Hilary made an unprovoked
  attack on Koji this afternoon.  He was just lying on the bed, and
  she crept up to the side, jumped on him, whacked him a few times, and
  settled back into a crouch beside the bed.  After a “don’t mess
  with me” growl and snarl, he moved to the center of the bed, out of
  easy reach.  I know it’s the kittens.  They’re driving her
  nuts, and me, too.  Yesterday all three of Hilary’s little gray
  kittens were chasing Auntie Orange Nemo around, up, and down between
  the wall and the hanging Navajo rug.

  I discovered a new Xangan, worthy of being read.  He is at elegblog. 
  Okay, I can’t take credit for discovering him, really.  One person
  had left a comment there before me:  the explorer MarcoPolo.
  

  • 6:13 pm
  • 8 Comments