Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [68]
Over the years, the city council had made numerous rules about junk. What would happen if the whole town were cleaned up? No derelict boats out on the Spit. No junk cars in people’s yards. We could be as spotless a tourist destination as Disney World. But there were quiet incentives to the contrary. Space wasn’t much of a limiting factor, so there was always room for more junk, even though the landfill, barely two miles out of town, accepted almost anything for free. And outside city limits, people could do just about anything with their properties: gravel mine, airstrip, dog yards.
A junkyard here or there was no big deal. We could handle it. Things were worse in the Bush, far off the road system, where nearly everything was flown or barged in—televisions, generators, snowmachines, refrigerators, sofas—and nearly everything stayed. “Combi” jets heading to hub communities off the road system had half of their fuselages blocked off for cargo. Passengers sat in the aft section of the plane behind a bulkhead on the other side of which sat cases of soda, stereos, and power tools.
A new school arrived in pieces by the planeload to a remote village: lumber, metal roofing, nails, sacks of concrete. But Bush life depended on air transport for more than just bringing in stuff. “You see the whole cycle of life,” a pilot explained. “You haul a young guy to a village where there’s a girl waiting for him. Then you haul the wedding party. Then you haul the young mom with a new baby.” He added, “You fly Grandpa out to the hospital when he’s sick and then his body back to his village to be buried.”
Dealing with solid waste is a tricky problem in the Bush. Plumbing has come slowly to rural Alaska, which means that residents in many Native villages collected their waste in honey buckets lined with plastic bags. The plastic bags were then dumped into a lagoon dug out of the ground a short distance from the village. I had flown over communities where you could see the blue bags slopped into these shallow pits. Honey buckets presented a public health disaster, and millions of state and federal dollars were being pumped into the Bush to build water and sewer systems. But in many cases, not enough money was socked away for maintaining these systems, which are extraordinarily expensive to build and operate because of months of subzero temperatures, extensive waterlogged ground, and permafrost. One village, facing a decade-long project with a price tag of $43 million just to plumb its two hundred homes, turned to raising funds through pull-tab gambling.
Most villages dumped trash in open landfills. On weekends, people went there for spare parts. Making junk go away, out of sight in a flat, treeless landscape, was expensive or impossible. Why shouldn’t used cars be dumped along a river in hopes they’d shore up an eroding bank? Well-meaning people were arranging empty DC–10s to fly steadily accumulating junk out of the Bush to scrapyards and recyclers in Anchorage and as far away as Seattle. In one year, more than a million pounds of used cars. Alaska’s most remote places had become sinks not only for trash, an insult to the eyes, but worse, to the invisible jetsam of modern life: toxins leaking from landfills, radioactive materials on abandoned military sites, pollutants from other parts of the world that collected in the north as if it were a giant river eddy. We couldn’t see this trash, but knew it littered our lives.
But in town, most of us wanted the lifestyle here we’d known elsewhere. We wanted wine, food from far away, books, clothes we liked. Two companies delivered nearly all of the cargo that came into the state, which arrived by ship at the Anchorage port. A single ship of the four that arrived weekly could pour out two hundred cars. Vast quantities of construction materials were shipped up to erect structures to hold other stuff. Machines and materials came in ships to be trucked north to Arctic tundra oil fields. Tons of groceries arrived every week by ship