Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [26]
Sometimes I wondered about my own fortitude. Could I last in a place where winter mornings required a long ritual of waking up, layering on warm clothes, heating, clearing snow, and de-icing? Where summer morning light shot you out of bed at 5 A.M.? Could I survive in a place where few other people seemed to doubt their own ability to survive?
I was surrounded by people who came from someplace else. And everyone had a story about how they’d come, why they’d stayed. A young woman who had run the local head shop in the 1980s selling tie-dyes and pot pipes had bought half an acre with a vast ocean view, then left for sixteen years to get career, husband, and kid taken care of before she returned and built a house on the concrete foundation she’d poured more than a decade earlier. It seemed she had come home. Her hair had gone gray, her slinky figure had filled out; she had morphed from party girl to teacher–mother–wife and hoped no one recognized her from before.
Another woman told me she’d arrived by ferry with fifty dollars in her pocket. Now she owned the bakery in town. I befriended Tammy, a woman in her forties with short brown hair streaked platinum in the front. She had left southern California for Alaska more than twenty years before, when she was twenty-two, beautiful, and in love. She had raised five babies in an aluminum trailer fifteen miles out of town while the father of her children went off for weeks at a time to fish. Tammy remembered the cold, dark mornings of winter when she coaxed her older kids out the trailer door to walk alone to the main road to meet the school bus. Being a mother like that was an act of faith. She sewed clothes, baked bread, and kept the trailer warm. When she couldn’t stand the isolation any longer, she left the fisherman and moved the kids to town.
In Alaska, where many people ended up scrabbling a life together that would be considered nontraditional anyplace else, the politics of libertarians and liberals sometimes overlapped. Shuffling into city council chambers to vote, ardent conservatives who wanted to be freed from government and hippies who wanted to move back to the land and be freed from modern life could find some common ground on the far side of the political curve. Alaska’s first elected officials after statehood had been Democrats; they saw statehood as a way of gaining home rule and independence from outside interests. But over the decades, the politics shifted. Most of the state’s elected officials could best be described as paradoxically Republican: They hailed from the political party that seeks to shrink government, but worked to build expensive infrastructure of dubious necessity and did their best to funnel federal funds into the state for outlandish capital projects, such as a $300 million bridge to a tiny island and a $700 million port expansion for no obvious purpose. Despite the state’s mythic character as fostering independence and rewarding the pioneering spirit, the Last Frontier relies more on federal assistance than any other state.
Even half a century after Alaska became the forty-ninth state, thereby gaining (residents thought) significant autonomy over what happened within its bounds, some people still view Alaska as a colony controlled by corporate investors and federal managers. More than half of the state’s land area is held by the federal government, and corporations from elsewhere feed off Alaska’s natural resources. Outside capital is pumped in to extract wealth from the state’s remote and weather-beaten landscapes: oil and gas from the shore and below the waters of the Arctic Ocean; zinc, lead, and silver from a vast hole in the ground in Northwest Alaska, where a single fifty-five-mile-long road leads to a port that is ice-free only in midsummer; gold from vast pits dug deep in