by Mary Odden
A couple from Missouri stopped and stepped gingerly around the mess, tried the door, the woman announcing in my direction that she thought Alaskans should be ashamed of themselves.
I felt hurt and self-righteous, having given two entire hours (and counting) of my whole year to picking up other people’s garbage, and I held up a clear plastic container plainly marked “Tourist-Oriented Fake Salmon Pate’” to prove that at least some of the garbage wasn’t from around here.
But the Missouri guy just pointed past the feces to the decaying bags of other miscellaneous yuck around the doors. And he was right—tourists don’t haul 200# of the stuff that collects in the bottom of burn barrels all the way to Alaska to dump it at Mendeltna. Or the bag of cement that doesn’t have the bag anymore so is a pillow-sized grey boulder.
Well that was disappointing. I was really hoping for slobs-from-elsewhere.
But if travelers and locals and people who fall for the “decoy” toilets are all going to fail the character test anyway—then maybe the state which famously gives mega bucks to the Alaska Travel Industry Association each year to promote tourism should invest some of those dollars on the admittedly expensive and thankless bureaucratic job of keeping State Parks and highway wayside toilets open and clean—if not year-round then please a little bit both earlier and later.
That would go a long way to making us look good—even if we aren’t.
BRAND ’EM, RAWHIDE!
Don’t try to understand ‘em, just rope ‘em, throw ‘em, brand ‘em.
I’m not sure why the subject of changing ourselves to capture more tourists raises my hackles, but I’ll try to explain it.
I’ve been a tourist, and a stupid one at that. In northeast Ireland, I listened in quiet awe to men working in the Killybegs harbor as they spoke their native Gaelic. I soaked in everything about the ways they talked, they moved, they dressed. I went back to the B&B house where we were staying and broke the news of my cultural experience, only to find I’d been admiring a Dutch dredging crew for half the morning. Gaelic hadn’t been spoken in Killybegs for about 100 years. But then our hosts described the difficulties of the real harbor and the real fishermen and the dredging project that had been launched to try and fix it. Those were things we wouldn’t have learned if I hadn’t been both dumb and talkative.
Alaska means a lot to me. I never know enough about the land or the people, but I’ve been here long enough that when I hear what seems to me to be grievous misunderstandings about Alaskans or our enterprises, my first reaction is hurt and sometimes anger. Standing around the McGrath Iditarod checkpoint at 20 below zero a few years ago, I got into a discussion with a reporter from California. Nearly the first thing he asked me was why Alaskans hated their animals so much that they wanted to kill all of them.
If you’ve ever been in that situation, you know that the entire weight of being SPOKESMAN falls on you, and also the impossibility of ever getting through a thick curtain of Hollywood and assumptions held dearly, somewhere down in the brain stem next to involuntary breathing.
For another example, I was trying to dig into the story of a proposed commercial wild blueberry harvest this week. I found a quote by a would-be commercial wild blueberry entrepreneur saying she’d been told Alaskans didn’t take berry picking very seriously anyway, probably because we were all out trying to kill all the animals. The implication was that something as important as blueberry picking should properly be commercialized.
These things make me allergic to the enterprise of polishing up our image of ourselves for tourists as a storefront for taking their money. There’s a lot here to understand, and appreciate, but the superficial views are very prominent. Big government and big business flatten us with the stereotypes they use to promote us, a breath-taking mix of truth and polyurethane.
Here’s my hope for visitors to the Copper Basin: The buses and motor homes should stop at a modern construction site run by Ahtna right after they learn something about Native culture, forcing them to view complexity. They should stop in and talk to Fish and Game about game and predator management so they won’t roll over for the next Disney movie they watch. They should go blueberry picking with my friend Joey and try to horn in on her patch. They should buy a blue tarp. They should talk to local high school and college educators about remote students and distance education. They should talk to elder Markel Pete about anything at all. They should talk to other old people who have lived here for a long time. Old Alaskans, I have found, don’t always agree with or necessarily even like each other. But since humans don’t learn anything until their assumptions get shaken, let’s show our visitors incongruity.
If the food is good and the bathrooms are clean and the art and conversations are genuine, I bet the mountains and critters will take care of the rest of the image problem for us.
The recent tourism class at PWSCC was wonderfully informative on Alaska. I think everyone should take a course like that, but not so we can sell ourselves. Contradiction Are Us: We are Viet Nam vets and fiddle makers and business people and scholars, construction workers and concert pianists.
Surprises abound. Hunters tend to respect animal lives. Pioneers were also cowboys and fighter pilots. Nature and isolation do not always make people noble. Canned milk isn’t bad in a latte.
We should pay kind attention to tourists and exercise endless patience with the huge metal marshmallows they herd along our highways. We should give good value in services (and adventures!) for their money. But we should not be afraid to tell them that the little grandma bucking up wood over there with the chainsaw is actually from the Philippines. Maybe they’ll want the rest of the story—it’s a good one.
COLLECTIVE HAPPINESS
On a recent radio program, I heard author Eric Weiner read excerpts from his book: The Geography of Bliss—One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World. Weiner, a news correspondent sick of suicide bombings and mass murders, decided to travel the world in another direction—to find the happiest places on the globe.
Curiously, he discovered that the happiest places weren’t beaches with palm trees but cold places where people vote a lot, value stability and routine, and depend on each other so that they won’t freeze.
Two of the places he mentioned, Iceland and Switzerland, each have their own kind of stability. The last time Iceland was invaded it was by Irish monks in ox hide boats—and all they wanted was enough potatoes to get them to Greenland ahead of Leif Erickson. In Iceland, governed by the equivalent of a huge town meeting, democracy is a full contact sport.
In Switzerland they have dependable trains and watches and they deal with bullies by taking away their bank accounts. They like every house to put out the same color of garbage bags. In Switzerland, Weiner says, they hold elections seven times a year.
Seven times a year?
Now I am going to diverge from Weiner’s book, which I have not read, though I will always intend to.
It seems to me that the Alaska of right now, using a formula subverted from Weiner’s conclusions, has all the ingredients for collective happiness without any Hawaiian vacations whatsoever: We are cold, we need each other, and this is a hugely important year in Alaska politics (polis from the Greek = people), not to mention an election year.
I’ve always liked elections pretty well, but candidates are truly awful. Candidates should be wrapped in duct tape on the day they file their intent to run for office and only unwrapped after the voting has finished. In the meantime, they would be represented to the folks who might vote for them only by what they’ve written or said or done BEFORE the campaign started, which was the last time they were their true selves and/or made any sense.
Another thing that would add measurably to my Alaskan political happiness is for people who disagree with each other to stop lying. And to stop buying the shrill, unverified “facts” on talk radio shows and the internet. Ill will and fear spread exponentially on the internet—faster than bird flu. Be media literate—rem
ember what your mama used to tell you and “consider the source.”
Politicians and pundits who try to whip me up to believe the dark side is trying to take away my birthday (and these guys are of every political persuasion) just make me wonder what they have to hide. And the pity of it is that they obscure the work of extremely hardworking and earnest public servants, always easy scapegoats, who need our good will and participation to make the whole system function.
My toes are cold, my coffee is hot, the dog loves me, and I get to read and think and vote. Could it get any better?
A MIDDEST PROPOSAL
Sometimes the most obvious good idea hangs in front of us like a wad of cash in front of Alaska legislators talking to Bill Allen, but we just can’t see it. Since I can’t get all my good ideas from “The Voice of the Times” anymore, I figured I’d have to look extra hard at the “Letters” section of the Anchorage Daily News.
This is where we find out what Alaskans think about important issues like where does milk come from and should moral people accept the theory of gravity or not.
On May 10, I saw this one:
“Move the Capital to Glennallen. A quick look at an Alaska road map shows that Glennallen is a central hub. And a great place to move our capital to.”
We will forgive this letter writer for ending his sentence with a preposition, because that’s not a real rule anyway.
And we will just ignore his implied sarcasm, because THIS IS A GREAT IDEA. Move the capital to Glennallen and quickly.
If they come, we can build it.
For now, businessman Park Kriner can put our legislators up in the Caribou Hotel and they can try on the Copper Valley for size. Lobbyists can set up wall tents and surround their doomed targets like the Sioux surrounded Custer.
Consider for a moment that our legislators will be utterly exposed in this environment, not only to lobbyists, but to Interior Republicans and other biting insects. They will be exposed to the actual farmers Larry DeVilbiss never wanted them to see. Ordinary people will be able to bring in money and buy their legislative representatives back from oil company service company Veco lobbyists, their current owners.
Expect some long term benefits as well: the 20 swamp acres west of town with the three-foot-tall black spruce trees is finally going to sell. The gas line will have a spigot here. Rick Pyle will put in a 24-hour sushi bar at his grocery store.
The crumbling shoulders and heaving pavement of our highways may get fixed, as they suddenly become “crucial arteries leading to the seat of government.”
Someone may clean up the nastiness leading to those other kinds of seats at Long Lake and Mendeltna highway rest areas—because if the legislature meets in Glennallen, we will have to take care of the not-tourists who travel on the highways all winter, too.
Senator Al Kookesh and Representative Woodie Salmon will find out where Kenny Lake is and will perhaps talk with their constituents who live there.
On the minus side, some legislators from Anchorage may die of altitude sickness when they realize how far north the state goes.
In other misfortunes, we are likely to lose our communities’ subsistence status as the office buildings and subdivisions rise, sucking attention and population away from Juneau and Anchorage and the Mat-Su valley. And all those people will overburden the half-completed Glennallen Sewer Project.
If that happens, I’m moving to Willow.
CIVIL DISCOURSE
SARAH-NADA
Sarah Palin abducted by aliens. You read it here first.
By now, every friend and relative in the lower 48 has asked you what you think of Sarah Palin, right? That’s how it is at this house. And, as if it mattered, I’m willing to express my opinion on this question.
I thought it was a sad day when national politics beamed up Sarah Palin. I looked outside to see if it was April 1st, but it was just a rainy day in August 2008, in a good old Copper Basin summer—as usual, southeast without the seafood.
If you got that joke, you are from around here. Most people are not from around here, which is why I live here.
Beautiful Sarah, the Governor I did not vote for, won most of my irrelevant allegiance in the last couple of years because she cut through partisan noise on both sides to get things accomplished. She wasn’t a talk show Republican back then, when she was our Governor. She worked with a coalition of Republicans who didn’t act like Yosemite Sam, and with Democrats who could let other people finish a sentence.
A social conservative, she nevertheless de-politicized the same sex partner benefits issue for state workers and deferred to the law. A friend of resource development and the opening of ANWR, she nevertheless held firm against the major oil companies when they wanted monopoly concessions in gas pipe construction and state taxes.
She faithfully pursued the goals of in-state gas availability and practical sense in that matter, alternately making Wally Hickel happy, then very unhappy, then happy again. She made legislators scream when she cut the favor-packed state supplemental budget and invited their considerable political scorn by saving her ink on their lip-service-only enemy, the state operating budget.
Alaska issues that are hot tamales at the national level—the Gravina bridge, ANWR, Polar Bears, export of Alaska natural gas—Sarah the Gov to some degree managed to deconstruct at the state level. She invited the help of experts and stakeholders, and to the extent possible for issues with such huge national cachet, quietly found nuanced approaches that reflected reality, though they did not fit and still do not fit in a Fox News sound byte. She surrounded herself with smart people.
I even had high hopes for her entanglement in the mess we came to call Troopergate, because I figured a non-partisan investigation and the cooperation of the Governor and her family might get past the “he said” and “she said” of a nasty divorce and a bone-headed public safety employees’ union. I surmised that particular Alaska storm in a teapot would invite healthy scrutiny of one of Alaska’s thorny root problems—the budgetary difficulty Alaska Public Safety has in recruiting, training, and holding on to virtuous and public-spirited individuals.
Sadly now, that problem has been obscured.
Before Sarah Palin went off to join the circus, she seemed to have innovative ways of bringing people together to solve political log jams.
Only Andrew Halcro, the governor candidate I did vote for, and Lyda Green, sweet friend of Ben Stevens, have consistently despised Palin. Green’s reasons are the most entertaining—she thinks Palin cast asparagus on all Republicans by lauding the convictions of the crooks in the on-going Veco bribery trials. How supporting the crooks would have helped the Republicans is a very weird thing to ponder.
It is to Palin’s credit that she was able, sometimes after listening to people, to sometimes change her mind about an issue or a course of action.
That implied she had a brain.
Well, say goodbye to all that. In Washington D.C., crossing the aisle is something that you do when a lobbyist takes you fishing in Florida. And you must never, ever, change your mind about anything or you will be branded with a hot iron on your behind faster than you can say “library book.”
Welcome to no-brain Sarah the caricature, the ultra-conservative poster child. My collection of photoshopped political images—Obama with the turban, Bush with the happy face smile—now includes Sarah on a western saddle riding a moose. Welcome to the world of people who will believe anything as long as it takes an immediate angry stand and stirs up muck.
Welcome to Alaska the caricature, we oil-rich igloo dwellers who hate our animals and waste federal taxpayer dollars on bridges we don’t need.
Far from America’s darlings before we became home of the moose-wrangling Veep candidate, we are in the cross-hairs even more now, for politics which are not likely to wander into the weeds of actuality.
Specific case in point: Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) has just gone after us, and Sarah, for the Nikiski LNG plant exports to Japan. Never mind that the reason
for awarding that small license was to keep the gas flowing in Cook Inlet so that the pilot lights wouldn’t go out in Anchorage. We are now, on the surface—and the surface is the only place that counts in national politics—those unpatriotic Alaskans trying to sell their gas to foreigners.
Sarah’s a symbol now, a sound byte, dragging us along too because we sent her, and I’m wincing every day. I’m wincing worse than I did long ago when I watched “Northern Exposure,” in retrospect a television show that exploited us only gently.
What do I think? I think it is too bad she’s morphed, because there’s still a lot of work to do around here—if we can just get those TV and movie cameras out of the way.
OPINIONS AND POLITICS, OH MY
I’m allergic to commercial station talk shows and the “sky is falling” tone of TV news. I despise “off the cuff” opinions—including my own.
The Internet, bless its little heart, along with its great gifts, is home to rumor and untruth uglier than bubonic plague, all exponentially spreadable via the “forward” button.
And if you ever want to see what an IQ below zero looks like, check out the comments posted after any online Anchorage Daily News article.
A common result of being exposed to this flood of opinion is either to take a side and cover yourself with Teflon so that no opposing information can get through to confuse you, or else hang a permanent “gone fishing” on your political self and withdraw.
There are a lot of metaphors for the political process, all of them uncomplimentary. Mating skunks and what not. None of them describes the reluctant self-education, crow-eating, and improbable optimism which actually proceeds accomplishing anything.
So why spend time on this stuff and risk having to disgorge your own Extra Tuff?
