Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [27]
Although many Alaskans boast of their fierce self-reliance, Alaska is in many ways a welfare state. There is no income tax here; the state did away with it during the boom following the 1968 discovery of the nation’s largest oil deposit in Alaska’s Arctic. The state pays each resident merely for living here. This annual check, called the Permanent Fund Dividend, the PFD, was instituted in 1976 and is a payment of earnings on oil and mineral revenues invested by the state.
Oil wealth has had the surprising effect of making Alaska more dependent on outside investors, not less. Oil and gas activities provide nearly all of the state’s income; oil pays our teachers, paves our roads, and puts troopers in their shiny white SUVs on our highways. No one knows what will happen when the wells run dry. And because state income ebbs and flows with the price of oil, what happens in the Middle East can determine whether a hockey rink gets built, a library buys new books, or a cop shop gets a revamp. But no politician would dare tamper with the PFD, let alone reinstate an income tax. And hunger for the PFD checks, which arrive in post office boxes each October, ensures that every Alaskan has an interest in development of resources in the ground around us. During the weeks before the checks are sent, ads blare for big-ticket items: new cars, high-octane snowmachines, tickets to Hawaii. “Put your PFD down and pay no interest until January!” The first year I was eligible to receive the PFD, the payment was the second highest it had ever been: $1,850.28. Like many Alaskans, I used the money to buy a plane ticket to see my family back East. As much as I wanted to make my home here, the windfall helped me and many people around me practically live in two places at once.
HAVING GROWN UP just outside the Capital Beltway, I had to adjust to the way most people here weren’t racing to get ahead. They were not concerned about their professional growth, about adding stripes to their resumes, or about finding challenging job opportunities. Here, people weren’t defined by their jobs. The paper girl had a degree from Stanford and was bilingual. One of the local cab drivers was a lawyer. Doctoral degrees meant nothing when your car slipped off the road, when it was moose season, or when the northern lights struck us all dumb with awe.
Many people had come to the state for adventure, silence, and wide vistas. But the landscape could be as debilitating as it was liberating. As soon as I started teaching, I heard about FAS, fetal alcohol syndrome, which is caused in babies when their pregnant mothers drink. The syndrome results in an odd assemblage of characteristics, including mental retardation, short noses, small chins, and thin upper lips. I learned that Alaska had the highest FAS rate in the world. Babies born to alcoholic mothers in Bush villages had been adopted by families in town, where they grew up, went to local schools, and tried to live normal lives. But the statistics were dismal. Alcohol killed proportionally more people in Alaska than in any other state. And here, we had high drunk-driving rates, too. The radio played public service announcements that warned against huffing gasoline, paint thinner, glue, and other toxins that teens could find in nearby workshops and garages. In Alaska, suicide rates were twice the national average, highest among young Native men in rural areas, and most common in the spring. Was it enduring the long, dark winters? The unceasing wind that could find any chink? The constant blare of the summer sun? The fragile—often failed—economies? That was a level of desperation I couldn’t imagine; these hardships were still novel to me.
Some people thought the melancholy was a result of a lack of things to do. In the spring, we dug out from winter. In the summer we stocked food. In the fall, we got ready for winter. And then we just waited it out. The only thing there was more of in town than bars was churches,