Sunday, January 5, 1986
So begins the dance, having just rejected an opening offer to "come into the country" and write about politics in Alaska. Friday, the managing editor of The
Anchorage Times, a Texan, called and said, “We really need you. We think you can do the
job. We want to send you to Juneau.” Without even a personal interview, they are proposing that a minor news executive in a golf- and celebrity-centered winter resort for the world's wealthiest people, move to the capital of the Last Frontier, America's own oil-rich Third World sheikdom, and cover the Alaska Legislature for Robert Atwood's Anchorage Times.
I went to the city library yesterday, where I usually spend lunch hours reading Russian short stories in vain hopes of becoming Turgenev, and checked out books that portray
Juneau as a rain-soaked Southeast Alaska city of government workers and cocaine abusers. In "Going to Extremes," by Joe McGinnis, you feel the rain and whiskey cutting through you. John McPhee's "Coming into the Country" describes a despised capital that many people in Alaska want to lift out of Southeast Alaska and bring closer to the state's population centers.
Today's January temperature in Palm Springs is 75 degrees. It is sunny and perfect, weather of the superrich. I sit in my back yard on a Sunday morning, drinking black coffee and gazing up to snow-covered San Jacinto Mountains of Riverside County. We would leave this for Juneau, a soaked Alaskan city clinging to the slopes of Mt. Roberts 1,000 miles north of Seattle, end of the line for 1960s counterculture drifting north from San Francisco, a capital city with no roads in or out? I talk myself out of it. It comes back. It's an irrational drive to go for the wild side. I daydream, with a restless energy that pulled me West seven years ago, about living again as my wife Laura and I did in Kodiak in 1980, amid incessant moisture and the most beautiful country in the world.
We are moving back to Alaska! I worked the pay phones this morning at Denny's, hemming and hawing to the managing editor of The Times about a family being able to live in Alaska on his offer of $570 a week. He asked what kind of money I would need to feel better. Having rehearsed this part of the conversation I tossed out $625 or $630 a week. thinking he would counter with $605 and I might well let this pass. The Texan hemmed and hawed, aiming for the right air of cattle and hat, and then played the cattle card: “OK, we’ll give
you $630 a week.” I about died right there in Denny’s. There was nothing to say, but yes.
Such a strange
way to begin this journey north, listening in horror while driving my pickup truck, to
radio accounts of the Challenger space shuttle explosion this morning. I cried two or three times on the road, thinking of teacher Christa McCauliffe’s family watching her blown out of the sky, thinking of her classes seeing such an unspeakable thing on live television.
I listened to the drama for three hours to Sacramento, driving north out of sunny Fresno into a long, foggy and dreary stretch of Highway 99. Sacramento led to Interstate 5 and a new dulling three-hour drive, past the Highway 20 Clear Lake turnoff Laura and I used when we lived in the hills there, and small rice belt towns like Grimes and Corning and Willows. I drove in a light rain, the pickup filled with our family belongings, falling behind the truckers constantly passing me.
At Motel 6 in Redding, I read stories in Alaska Magazine ("Life on the Last Frontier") about wild moose, getting back to nature and how to make smoked salmon. It marked a first, hard and jarring knowledge that at the end of this road is wintry, soggy Juneau. My instincts tell me I will drive off the ferry in the darkness of a strange town and feel as weird and scared as I was in 1976, when 25 Peace Corps Volunteeers stepped off the Lungi Airport ferry and rode a bus in spooked silence through impoverished night scenes lit by flickering kerosene lamps in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Friday, January 29, 1986
Again, the rain fell today day, like a paradise. I visited Northwest state capitols this morning in Salem and this afternoon in Olympia. The Oregon Capitol is a pleasant, oddly shaped building filled with frontier mosaics and topped by a gold-plated
lumberman looking north. It’s
conservative, like Oregon.
Washington’s Capitol cast a wonderful, stately spell on me late this afternoon. It evokes gravitas and importance, looking very much
like Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Inside, it felt like Europe, aged with character. I
sat in the House and Senate galleries, sitting and watching, listening to the dignified silence and imagining days ahead in chambers like these. At the state library I found The Anchorage Times, which to my great delight
looked bright, fresh and interesting. Just as The Times didn't fly me up for a personal interview, taking me on faith, I had never seen The Times, taking it on faith.
Friday, January 31, 1986
The artistic, flip and literary side of my poor brain is in full-scale fright as I sit here at the docks in line with semi-trailers and huge pickup trucks. In an hour I'll drive the pickup up the ramp into the Alaskan state ferry Matanuska. I told Laura on the pay phone I am already surrounded by big scruffy Alaskans with dogs. Seattle was tough and relentless all day, rattling me with big-city anxiety, fearful of being lost in traffic and ripped off by indifferent strangers. The Matanuska rocks gently on the waterfront. I steel myself for uncertainty and adventure, calling this a career move.
I did not write on the ferry. What followed was two days of something like perfect bliss, standing on the top deck of the Matanuska, in rain, watching the world's most beautiful scenery in the Inside Passager. I honestly remember nothing else, not the food, not any conversations with other passengers, nor where I slept. Only the the wonderful, rich scenery of fog, mist and mountains rising from the gray waters of the Pacific.
On the early morning of arrival, I drove my loaded Toyota pickup truck off the Matanuska and apprehensively, into the capital where I knew no one and understood little of the legislative process or the colorful actors I would encounter immediately in the old territorial Capitol building on Main Street. In the lobby of the Baranof Hotel, I learned that my people at The Anchorage Times had forgotten to make a reservation, an appropriate introduction to the newspaper that had so long dominated Alaska and was now losing its grip. At the Baranof that first night, the fire alarm went off at 2:30 a.m., spilling guests outside into a rainy cold street until the all-clear. My adventure in Alaska politics had begun.
PALM SPRINGS, California
So begins the dance, having just rejected an opening offer to "come into the country" and write about politics in Alaska. Friday, the managing editor of The
Anchorage Times, a Texan, called and said, “We really need you. We think you can do the
job. We want to send you to Juneau.” Without even a personal interview, they are proposing that a minor news executive in a golf- and celebrity-centered winter resort for the world's wealthiest people, move to the capital of the Last Frontier, America's own oil-rich Third World sheikdom, and cover the Alaska Legislature for Robert Atwood's Anchorage Times.
Today's January temperature in Palm Springs is 75 degrees. It is sunny and perfect, weather of the superrich. I sit in my back yard on a Sunday morning, drinking black coffee and gazing up to snow-covered San Jacinto Mountains of Riverside County. We would leave this for Juneau, a soaked Alaskan city clinging to the slopes of Mt. Roberts 1,000 miles north of Seattle, end of the line for 1960s counterculture drifting north from San Francisco, a capital city with no roads in or out? I talk myself out of it. It comes back. It's an irrational drive to go for the wild side. I daydream, with a restless energy that pulled me West seven years ago, about living again as my wife Laura and I did in Kodiak in 1980, amid incessant moisture and the most beautiful country in the world.
Monday, January 6, 1986
PALM SPRINGS
Monday, January 20, 1986
PALM SPRINGS
For 16 days I
have thought of little but Alaska, becoming already like 500,000 Alaskans who think of their Great Land and Last Frontier as the center of the universe and everywhere else as "Outside." I imagine Alaska - so magnificent, ominous and immense - when I wake, while driving to work and before I fall asleep. I am ready to become one of the best daily newspaper writers in Alaska and just hope that I don't turn into
a drunk. "What's the worst that could happen?" asked Laura, who had the idea that carried us to Alaska the first time. (We were sitting in the
bar at Palm Springs International Airport, watching planes, drinking wine, hearing ourselves talking about going). Indeed. The thing that's always true of moving in America is that life is seldom more promising and filled with possibility than the moment you back out of the driveway.
Thursday, January 28, 1986
REDDING, California
I listened to the drama for three hours to Sacramento, driving north out of sunny Fresno into a long, foggy and dreary stretch of Highway 99. Sacramento led to Interstate 5 and a new dulling three-hour drive, past the Highway 20 Clear Lake turnoff Laura and I used when we lived in the hills there, and small rice belt towns like Grimes and Corning and Willows. I drove in a light rain, the pickup filled with our family belongings, falling behind the truckers constantly passing me.
At Motel 6 in Redding, I read stories in Alaska Magazine ("Life on the Last Frontier") about wild moose, getting back to nature and how to make smoked salmon. It marked a first, hard and jarring knowledge that at the end of this road is wintry, soggy Juneau. My instincts tell me I will drive off the ferry in the darkness of a strange town and feel as weird and scared as I was in 1976, when 25 Peace Corps Volunteeers stepped off the Lungi Airport ferry and rode a bus in spooked silence through impoverished night scenes lit by flickering kerosene lamps in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Friday, January 29, 1986
SALEM, Oregon
Today's news was again filled with analysis and speculation about the space shuttle going up in flames. It was a hard 12-hour day at the wheel, driving up and down hills, riding the curves through tractor-trailer spray. I drove on and on in the rain, the miles to Seattle slowly, steadily decreasing. The scenery is green, magnificent. I am happy to be back in cool "Ecotopia." All along I-5 the bright green fields, grazing horses and Hereford steers, the endless miles of aging barns and stables from my grandfathers’ time. It felt American, familiar and comfortable.
Today's news was again filled with analysis and speculation about the space shuttle going up in flames. It was a hard 12-hour day at the wheel, driving up and down hills, riding the curves through tractor-trailer spray. I drove on and on in the rain, the miles to Seattle slowly, steadily decreasing. The scenery is green, magnificent. I am happy to be back in cool "Ecotopia." All along I-5 the bright green fields, grazing horses and Hereford steers, the endless miles of aging barns and stables from my grandfathers’ time. It felt American, familiar and comfortable.
Thursday,
January 30, 1986
OLYMPIA, Washington
Washington’s Capitol cast a wonderful, stately spell on me late this afternoon. It evokes gravitas and importance, looking very much
like Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Inside, it felt like Europe, aged with character. I
sat in the House and Senate galleries, sitting and watching, listening to the dignified silence and imagining days ahead in chambers like these. At the state library I found The Anchorage Times, which to my great delight
looked bright, fresh and interesting. Just as The Times didn't fly me up for a personal interview, taking me on faith, I had never seen The Times, taking it on faith. Friday, January 31, 1986
SEATTLE, Washington
I did not write on the ferry. What followed was two days of something like perfect bliss, standing on the top deck of the Matanuska, in rain, watching the world's most beautiful scenery in the Inside Passager. I honestly remember nothing else, not the food, not any conversations with other passengers, nor where I slept. Only the the wonderful, rich scenery of fog, mist and mountains rising from the gray waters of the Pacific.
On the early morning of arrival, I drove my loaded Toyota pickup truck off the Matanuska and apprehensively, into the capital where I knew no one and understood little of the legislative process or the colorful actors I would encounter immediately in the old territorial Capitol building on Main Street. In the lobby of the Baranof Hotel, I learned that my people at The Anchorage Times had forgotten to make a reservation, an appropriate introduction to the newspaper that had so long dominated Alaska and was now losing its grip. At the Baranof that first night, the fire alarm went off at 2:30 a.m., spilling guests outside into a rainy cold street until the all-clear. My adventure in Alaska politics had begun.
Comments
Post a Comment