July 28, 2008

• A Quarter Century

  Twenty-five years ago, my family moved here to the Upper Susitna Valley.  My ex, Doug’s dad, Charley, was working at Anchorage International Airport, Doug was two years old, and we lived in a small trailer park in Rabbit Creek, south of Anchorage.  It was on a hillside, overlooking Potter Marsh and Cook Inlet.  We collected photos of spectacular sunsets.

  Then our Athabaskan landlord lost his lengthy legal battle with the municipality and was forced to yield to zoning ordinances limiting that area to single-family dwellings, and close the little trailer park.  We were given thirty days to move, and two or three of our neighbors managed to do so.  When the deadline passed, Charley and I were still looking for a place to take our little 8′x35′ thirty-year-old trailer.

  We started with classified real estate ads, and searched concentric circles ever farther away.  Our requirements were simple:  down payment and monthly installments within our budget, and enough clear space to park our trailer.  The first place that met the budget limits was on a cul de sac where we might temporarily park the trailer while we cut trees to clear a space, but the ground was marshy and the air so full of mosquitoes when we walked it, Charley said it wouldn’t do.  After a moment’s reflection, although I was getting desperate to escape our landlord’s wrath, I agreed.

  That place had been just outside Wasilla, only a few miles away from where Greyfox now has his cabin and roadside stand.  We didn’t find anything else within our financial range until we’d gone another forty-some miles up the valley.  It was a subdivision created from an old homestead at the time when the voters of Alaska had decided to move the state capital from inaccessible Juneau to Willow, where the Anchoraguans could drive or catch a train to oversee the legislature.  When the voters then learned how much the move would cost and voted to leave the capital down in the Panhandle, land values up here, which had briefly boomed, quickly went bust.

  Ten lots were available in this subdivision at the time.  Some of them were on a south-facing bluff and had long beautiful views of the muskeg along Sheep Creek.  They also had a great potential for land slippage and mudslides that could take our land to the bottom of that bluff.  Others were low and swampy.  One lot had been used as a gravel pit, with all its topsoil scraped off but for one wooded hummock about 50 feet in diameter.  The rocky ground with one sandy area had excellent drainage and enough level space for our trailer, so we bought it.

  The next hurdle was getting our trailer out here.  Marty Larrigan was a neighbor in the little trailer park who was renting his trailer, not just the space as we did.  He hadn’t found a place to move because he had been collecting junk and salvaged building supplies from his job as a house wrecker, and none of the owners of rental houses he looked at would allow him to junk up the yards.  He had a 5 ton truck, and agreed to tow our trailer out here for us in exchange for our letting him park his junk “temporarily” on our land.

  The move was an adventure.  The trailer needed work before it would be roadworthy, so we moved everything else first, including a wannigan we had built from salvaged lumber and sheathed with salvaged plywood, mostly old real estate signs found in ditches.  They had the advantage of being pre-painted and weatherproof and the added interest of various colors and colorful text.  The next-to-last trip was to tow our mechanically challenged bus, which we had outfitted as a kitchen from which we had been selling vegetarian meals at the Alaska State Fair for a couple of years.

  Doug and I went with that load.  We were to sleep in our old broken-down VW van and use the kitchen facilities in the bus until Marty and Charley got the trailer moved.  That weekend job took more than two weeks because an axle broke on the trailer.  It happened conveniently close to the state commercial vehicle weigh station on the Glenn Highway, giving them a paved place to park and work on the trailer.  When they finally pulled it onto our land, they brought with it a pair of violet green swallows who had flown alongside all the way, escorting their nest inside a knot hole in the soffit under the eaves of the insulated plywood roof Charley and I had added to the drafty old trailer.

  During the two weeks the trailer was at the weigh station, I saw Charley once, when he zipped out in his AMC Gremlin for a brief visit on Doug’s second birthday, July 27, 1983, to let me know what had happened.  With no phone, knowing no neighbors who could relay messages, Doug and I just kept each other company, and listened to KSKA public radio on a battery powered radio.  I spent my days preparing gardens and transplanting perennials I had brought from the old place.

  In the next seven years or so, Marty visited his junk pile two or three times to get some things he needed.  The car parts, tires, tools and building materials in that pile (about 100 feet long and ten feet wide) have been mined by us and our neighbors, and there’s still some useful stuff there among the trees that have grown up through it.

  That summer has been on my mind a lot the last few weeks, as that quarter-century anniversary passed.  The weather that year was hot and dry, nothing like now.  The gardens at the old place across the road have been overrun, mostly by poplar trees, but some of those hardy perennials I started from seeds more than thirty years ago in Rabbit Creek are still alive over there and a few have been transplanted across the highway to this place now.  Doug doesn’t remember Rabbit Creek.  More than half of his life was spent in that old gravel pit that started out being, as I thought on that first morning when I stepped out of the bus with a spading fork, looking for a place to start gardening, “the most inhospitable dry camp I ever made.”
  

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