Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [25]
PEOPLE MOVED TO Alaska to find themselves, but also to get lost. After five years or a decade in the state—where no one bothered you about how you lived, where you could get by working long summer days and then hole up or go south all winter, where freedom from restrictive zoning laws meant you could do what you wanted with your property—how could anyone go back? A young guy I knew who had grown up in Homer but left to get a degree at a prestigious college on the East Coast told me one afternoon, “I just couldn’t find a place for myself back there, so I came home.” High school graduates who did leave—for college, adventure, or work—often found each other Outside, fell in love, and came back. The state is a mixture of back-to-the-landers and misfits; of people who are escaping a life elsewhere as much as they are embracing the particular one they can find here; of well-scrubbed and short-coiffed military personnel dropped in from someplace warmer, or veterans who came here decades before looking for a certain kind of peace; of suburbanites; and of Native people straddling the modern and the old. I was like many other new arrivals: a recent college graduate in search of some indefinable hybrid of adventure, wilderness, and what I imagined would be a simpler life. I think we all wanted to know what we would look like in front of a backdrop of wilderness, who we would become once the fancy clothes and high ambitions were stripped away. For many of us, Alaska seemed the only place to figure this out.
This state has long been considered a last resort. During the Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps scattered the otherwise unemployed across even the most remote stretches of Alaska to carry out federally funded projects; they restored totem poles, raised musk ox corrals, leveled remote forests, and dug latrines. Also as part of the New Deal, in 1935 some two hundred down-and-out farm families were shipped from the northern Midwest to Southcentral Alaska and deposited on a vast stretch of spruce-littered land that was intermittently boggy and dry. This was the Matanuska Colony, and the job of the colonists was to farm, improve the land, and convince others that it could be done. They arrived in early summer, lived in wall tents that had been thrown up by itinerant workers also brought in from someplace else, and got acquainted with their new world: with the tides of mosquitoes, with the Chugach Mountains shadowing them in the mornings, and with the dampness that clung to the land even though there wasn’t much rain. Little more than a decade later, two-thirds of the settlers had left.
From early on, everyone had designs on the far-off territory. During World War II, a New York congressman proposed the relocation of unemployed urbanites and Jewish refugees from Europe to Alaska. A group of Rocky Mountain businessmen formed a corporation to invest in the plan, but Alaskans were vehemently opposed. They needed more people on the frontier, they claimed, but those with “fortitude.” And they had had enough of outside interests plotting their future for them. While shipping off the destitute and hundreds, if not thousands, of refugees to the North seemed an attractive plan to entrepreneurs and urban politicians who might otherwise have to deal with them, neither scheme was carried out.
Many believed that this “fortitude” was made, not born, in the territory. One hundred years ago, government men considered Alaska to be proving grounds: The fickle sea, the sharp cold, and the uncertainty of