For the past 17 years, my family and I lived in Anchorage. Since moving to Chicago last fall, I’ve frequently been asked to describe the Last Frontier.
Alaska is a beautiful place that operates by its own rules. The unofficial state motto is, “We don’t care how they do it Outside.”
In other words, we’ll do whatever we want.
It’s a bubbling stew of contradictions. You hear of people heading north for a simpler life, yet when the state’s first Kmart opened a few years ago, you couldn’t find a place to park because of the crowd. A front-page story in the state’s biggest paper might be about world affairs, or about a bear wandering downtown. And for every tree-hugger, you’ll find someone whose thoughts run along the lines of, “Ah, wilderness–let’s pave it!”
How can I explain to someone the romance of the North, or of duct tape? The beauty of the mountains, and the stench of decaying salmon? The rugged individualism, and the fact that Alaskans just can’t wait for their annual Permanent Fund Dividend checks?
This is a place that until fairly recently sold firearms in the drugstore.
It’s a place where the only state lottery is based on when the river ice goes out each spring in Nenana, a small town whose biggest claim to fame is the fact that people bet on its ice. Well, that, and the fact that it has a bar called Skinny Dick’s Halfway Inn.
Alaska is where people buy more rock salt than grass seed. Where, in winter, spit bounces. Where a 75-pound cabbage won’t even make the top 10 at the state fair. Where people recognize individual moose, and even name them. (“Did you see that Stumpy was back?” my neighbor once asked me. The scary thing was, I really HAD noticed.)
In Alaska, you can leave work at 6 p.m., drive three hours to the Kenai Peninsula, fish for king salmon all night long, and return to the job the next morning without being considered, well, stupid. And if you drive as far as Homer and catch a big enough halibut, you get to SHOOT it before you wrassle it into the boat.
I’ve tried being all serious and solemn about Life in the Great North. When I am, people’s eyes glaze over like the water in your birdbath on an October morning. What they really want to know, and what some folks actually ask, goes like this: “Is Alaska really like it was on `Northern Exposure’?”
I give up.
So, I specialize in glib responses. There’s at least a grain of truth in every item.
YOU MIGHT BE AN ALASKAN IF …
You have eaten Crisco on pilot bread.* On purpose.
You know what pilot bread is.**
Bears outside your house get the sunflower seed before the birds do.
You have killed a moose either with a gun or a car.
You get your Vitamin C from Tang and your milk from a box.
You can accurately guess the temperature based on how quickly your nose-hairs freeze.
When you say you’re going “Outside,” you’re carrying a suitcase.***
You have never said “Be home by dark” to your kids in the summertime.
You’ve thrown back a 50-pound halibut because it was too small.
For Halloween, your daughter was a fairy princess with snow boots.
You have bought trading cards with pictures of dog mushers on them.
You have taken a date ice fishing.
You buy your wife’s lingerie from Frederick’s of Kotzebue.
Moose do more damage to your garden than rabbits.
Slugs do more damage to your garden than rabbits.
Voles and shrews do more damage to your garden than rabbits.
Rabbits have died of starvation in your garden.
Your high-school basketball team travels by ferry or small plane.
You plug in your car at night (Anchorage version).
You bring your car battery indoors at night (Fairbanks version).
You have thawed out a car with a weedburner.
You keep a fire extinguisher next to the weedburner.
At Fur Rendezvous, you ride the Scrambler at 15 below zero, and have fun doing it.
At the State Fair, you ride the Scrambler on a rainy, windy, 40-degree day, and have fun doing it.
You have never, ever been on a carnival ride in nice weather.
When the furnace goes out, your biggest worry is that your sourdough starter won’t survive.
You have played softball on snowshoes.
You have scheduled elective surgery around the softball season.
You have gone into labor during a softball game and not told anybody because you’d miss your next at-bat.
As a kindergartner, you knew how to jump-start a car.
You have used a snowblower on the roof.
You know that “honey buckets” don’t have anything to do with honey.****
At least one goldpan hangs on your wall. (Extra credit if the scene painted on it includes a cache or the aurora borealis.)
You know there are only three seasons: Last winter, this winter and next winter.
You have used duct tape to fix a plane, make a school-book cover, wrap a sprained ankle or diaper a baby.
Three choices for dinner: Moose, salmon or Spam.
*Folks out in the Bush sometimes substitute Crisco (with or without salt sprinkled on top) for butter.
**Pilot bread is a thick, flat cracker that tastes like a slice of thick, flat nothing, the culinary canvas for everything from peanut butter to dried fish and seal oil. Think of it as the pita bread of the north.
***”Outside” means any place that isn’t Alaska. The rest of the United States is also referred to as “the Lower 48” or, sometimes, “the States.”
****Honey buckets are pails that people use as indoor toilets. They either get emptied into an outhouse or dumped at an open-air “sewage lagoon.” Tell your kids about this the next time they complain about having to take out the trash.
