Worries

Despite the easy access to wilderness and the occasional moose parading the highway, lives in Fairbanks and Anchorage appear to move along about the way they do in Elgin, IL.  People hurry home from the office, pick up their kids from soccer practice, wait impatiently at traffic lights, and scramble for parking spots at the Wal-Mart.  In Anchorage, homeless men and women congregate in parks and at bus stops, and imagining the short summers and long, cold winters of their lives ignites my empathy.  But city life is really not Alaska as the rest of the state experiences it. Outside of the two “big cities,” the problems of the lower 48 telescope through the long lens of 1000+ miles.  In most towns, there are no Wal-Marts, no office buildings, and rarely a traffic light.  Serious medical care requires an airlift; drinking water is flown into towns like Chicken and Eagle.  When running out of diapers means a four hour drive and when beating winter’s cold depends on the cords of wood you can chop and stack and the meat you can collect in your freezer,  the quotidian worries about hair color, lawn care, and the pounds you can bench-press don’t just fade; they probably never existed at all.  I’m not romanticizing or belittling either existence.  Whether we live in sunny California, small town Iowa, or the urban sprawl of America’s big cities, we have our share of joys and challenges.  But staying in semi-remote Alaska, even as a tourist in a beautifully accommodated motorhome, has given me perspective. 

As we drove through small villages in Alaska and the Yukon, I looked askance, through my lower-48 suburban eyes, at the piles of junk that surrounded each home and business – stacks of wooden pallets, pieces of old cars, huge 55 gallon drums – and I wondered how they could live with all that junk around their homes.  But those obstacle course yards also reminded me of my maternal grandparents.  Gramma’s house and yard were immaculate, the floors were warmed by rugs she made by braiding rags, the beds covered in warm quilts made from discarded clothes.  She made basinets for our dolls from discarded margarine tubs.  Grampa’s garage workshop was tidy and well organized, but also full of used pieces of metal, scraps of rope, and other miscellany with which he could repair anything.  My mom’s parents were not wealthy, but they lived a comfortable and happy life by making every possible use of the materials they had at hand.  The people of Alaska and the Yukon, like my Depression-surviving grandparents, save everything – old cars, scraps of metal, anything wooden – because when the car breaks down, when the wood runs out, when a table, stove, or shelf breaks,  they may not have the option of running to Wal-Mart or ordering from Amazon.  They may need to make do with materials close at hand.   

One native woman we talked to, Allison, shared the hunting traditions of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in.  She related her own story of catching her first elk and the traditional expectation that young hunters dress their first kills independently.  The native conventions for dressing and processing the animal have been handed down generation to generation, and the samples she showed us of tools made from bone, ropes made from sinew, and clothes made from hide were new – Testament to the “waste not” mentality of life in the far north. 

Don’t get me wrong.  We didn’t see a single soul wandering the streets dressed in old buffalo hides.  Other than customer service workers dressed in character, everyone we saw wore mass-produced clothing, likely purchased at the local Wal-Mart, even if it was 200 miles away.  But we did see less makeup, less gelled and colored hair, and far less bondage-inspired footwear.  We saw some lovely gardens, but almost no manicured grass.  And cars?  Scratched paint, dented doors, and chipped windshields make a statement all their own – a vehicle without such character screams "chechako.*"

I left Elgin worried about the Illinois state budget and about my garden.  I worried about leaving my work and about preparing for the next semester.  Even though my sons are adults, I worried about being out of contact for so long.  Inside, I was still numb with grief, and apprehensive about how my dad, sister, and I would manage traveling in a space so infused with my mom’s presence.  Leaving the Yukon, Alaska a far dot in our review mirrors, we retrace some of the roads we took going in.  Entering Prince George, where we had impatiently waited for RV repairs in May, I looked over at Dad, noting, “We’re different.” 

“I know,” he said. 

*Chechako = new-comer, greenhorn