Observation No. 14: The Birthright

I’ve had more conversations about fishing than I can count on two hands in the few weeks. I am not a fisherperson. I have never caught a fish although I do have a vague memory of going to a fish farm when I was about five and catching something but I could have made that up.

Fishing season in Alaska is like the Super Bowl in the rest of the world. It’s something that everyone does, everyone talks about and everyone has opinions on. There’s different types of fishing here that aren’t allowed anywhere else in the country and have totally peculiar names like snagging and fish wheels. You can set net, dip net or purse and beach seine or… I don’t know what else. It’s a lot. Most people fish for halibut and salmon, although it seems you can get herring, pollock, cod, crab and clams too.

Then there’s the terrifying possibility of “combat” fishing, where fishermen and women stand shoulder to shoulder on popular rivers at certain times of June, casting their rods and hoping for a catch. Now, from what I hear this is a bit of a trick because salmon heading upstream to spawn and die aren’t necessarily very hungry. You literally have to bonk them on their nose with the bait to get them to bite—or so someone told me at a party the other night. My cousin’s wife is a life-time lesson and a bit of an expert. She recently challenged my uncle and cousin as to whether they were going to stay at the preschool or get in with the “big boys” while fishing on the Russian last week. She caught the fish that we ate for dinner (my cousin notes that he cleaned it). Her secret to success? Eye protection and lots of rubber.

In Alaska, fishing is big business and a building block for the state’s economy. So far this season, the state’s fishermen have caught 30,379,000 salmon. On average, the value of Alaskan seafood sold at first wholesale easily tops $2 billion, according to the State Division of Commercial Fisheries. The division reports that the economic impact of the seafood industry is estimated at $4.6 billion five years ago—not counting personal and subsistence fishing.

But fishing in Alaska isn’t just about business—it almost seems to be a birthright. Indeed, the New Girl has pictures of her own parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles in Bristol Bay grinning in front of skiffs full of fish.

I don’t have a fishing license so I’m relegated to sitting on the sidelines for this summer. But a friend did let me practice casting his reel on a blank stretch of river, and I easily cast it out. I’ll be ready to claim my portion of Alaska’s catch next year.

Observation No 13: The country's favorite governor

It is intriguing how the actions of one state’s governor can totally captivate the attention of the American public, and even the world. One week, there’s South Carolina governor Mark Sanford jetting off to Argentina to hook up with a lover http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE56652M20090707.
The next week, my own governor up and quits.

She back to running this state this week, albeit from a variety of locations around the state. Like the ADN and , I follow Governor Palin on Twitter.

Here are a few of the Tweets from the last day or so:
AKGovSarahPalin: The 9th Circuit had to dissolve injunction; barrier to Kensington Mine project is gone- good jobs on the way; stand by 4 press announcement

AKGovSarahPalin: Today,try this: "Act in accordance to your conscience -risk- by pursuing larger vision in opposition to popular, powerful pressure"-unknown (about 14 hours ago from TwitterBerry)

AKGovSarahPalin: Grateful Todd left fishing grnds to join me this wkend; but now he's back slaying salmon & working the kids @ the site; anxious to join 'em! (07/05/2009 3:01:53 PM from TwitterBerry)

AKGovSarahPalin: Refreshing to be in Kotzebue to honor VPSOs; Native dancers, whaling captains, lots of beautiful kids loving the annual Trade Fair- perfect! (07/07/2009 5:01:28 PM from TwitterBerry)

Sigh.

Now, I’d like to tell you that Alaska is not as transfixed as the rest of the country when it comes to our governor. But that would be a lie. By strange coincidence, I pulled into Wasilla during the governor’s press conference on Friday, as she was delivering her “I’m quitting but not quitting speech.” It was immediately the talk of the town, with the grocery store clerks swapping the latest with people as they stocked up on hotdogs and chips for the holiday weekend. Another friend who was on a remote island for the holiday weekend reported seeing herds of people flocking to the island’s tip—the only place where cell phones get coverage—to get the latest news.

I think the state is just as flummoxed as to why she’s quitting as the rest of the country. The best analysis I read of this was a story from Time magazine that suggests reasons why she might have quit. The story features quotes from policy expert and former journalist Larry Persily, who I sat in on a meeting with a couple weeks ago. Persily is smart with the dry sense of humor only developed in a newsroom.

This Time article also discusses what made Palin appealing to so many when they elected her in 2006. Here’s a shock—it wasn’t because she was a gun-toting, hardline conservative. Contrary to popular belief (and the New Girl’s own expectations), Alaska has some blue voters, including in Anchorage, where Senator Mark Begich served as mayor before his successful bid against Sen. Ted Stevens. Many of the rural communities continue to elect Democrats to office.

An source close to Palin suggested to the Wall Street Journal that the mainstream media, including MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow (Here’s the story picked up by the Alaska Standard) has missed the point and Governor Palin was paralyzed by a barrage of Freedom of Information Act requests that prohibited her from governing effectively.

From the New Girl's perch, Alaska will benefit from seating a governor ready and able to work on state issues. We need more cooperation and bi-partisanship and not less. Whatever Governor Palin's story is, Alaska will no doubt wait with baited breath to see what happens next.

Observation 12: Fourth of July, AK style

It was Fourth of July Alaskan style for the New Girl in AK this weekend. I drove up to Petersville area to join my husband at a remote cabin where he’s been working for the last 10 days.

I’ll be honest. Up to now, I didn’t get what the big attraction was to the cabin lifestyle that is a matter of pride for so many Alaskans. This winter, people would earnestly describe the 11 years they spent living in a 10-by-20 foot cabin out of Fairbanks with no inside plumbing and sporadic electricity and all I could think was “Why?” What’s more the accoutrement of this lifestyle didn’t seem appealing either—namely ATVS, diesel, and guns.

Here’s the lesson learned kids—don’t knock it until you try it.

Our hosts, a life-time Alaskan and her husband, were expert guides on a backcountry Alaskan weekend, immediately setting me up with my own pair of the omnipresent rubber boots that every Alaskan woman needs to navigate the marshy tundra.

Everyone agrees they are remarkably dry this year. In Alaska, remarkably dry means you don’t need full waders—just boots will do.

It took a couple of hours in a convoy of ATVs to shuttle me and some construction materials into the cabin after one of the ATVs pulling a trailer was bogged in deep hole that was hidden by grass. After a good deal of conversation, a stop at a neighbor's, one beer for me and some mechanical intervention, the trailer was freed and we were on our way.

The “cabin” turned out to be several times larger than my Anchorage home and was once run as a bed and breakfast before our friends purchased it for private use. There were two smaller cabins on site, one of which was home for me, my husband, and roughly two dozen mosquitoes at any given moment. It looked out on a gigantic meadow that was filled with alders and wild cotton.

After we settled in, we spent a large part of the weekend “visiting” with nearby residents—just stopping other cabins by for a few minutes to share some gossip on the latest with Sarah Palin, borrow coolant for the four-wheeler and check out the newest touches that someone has put on their abode. [Alaska writer Nick Jans had a fun article about his own experiences ‘visiting’ in the Alaska Magazine’s May edition.] While out and about, one neighbor let me drive his ATV, while another stopped to point out the footprint of what he guessed was a 7-foot-tall bear. We didn’t see the bear but I was given a lesson on where the guns were kept in case we did. (See my previous post about guns versus bear spray—our hosts had both on hand.)

When we weren’t visiting other folks, we had our own company that we attempted to ply with all the food we’d hauled in—but of course, they wanted us to come back to their cabin to eat their supplies.

On day two, I shot a rifle for the first time in my life and hit the target on my sixth bullet—I didn’t have to reload! We celebrated the Fourth of July with plenty of food and neighbors but no fireworks. The sun isn’t setting until close to midnight and full darkness doesn’t come for hours after that. We agreed to save the fireworks for New Year’s when night comes early and it only takes a few minutes to reach the cabin on a fast snow machine.

Of course, as I was standing in my rubber boots, with a rifle in hand and an ATV standing by, I thought of Sarah Palin, our soon-to-be former governor. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen photos of Sarah with a similar look. What can I say? She might not know politics, but she definitely knows how to have fun AK-style.

Will I head back to Petersville area this winter if I get the chance? You betcha.

Observation 11: The Bucket List

A friend my husband and I have made since arriving in Alaska announced this recently that he and his wife are moving down south to Ohio after many years here.

I talked to him on the phone this week and he sounded a little wistful, with just a few days in town left. “There are so many things we haven’t done yet,” he said, adding that he’s coming back in August to get their home ready for sale and hopes he can eek out a few more Alaskana experiences before leaving the state for good.

I felt just this way when we were leaving Colorado. There were places that we just didn’t get to during our 10 years there, experiences that we didn’t have that are now much more difficult to achieve then a simple weekend trip. Floating the Yampa River comes to mind, rock climbing at the Colorado Monument, hiking more of the Colorado Trail, seeing more blues shows in Telluride.

This came into further focus tonight with the arrival of my aunt and uncle from the Seattle area. They’ve spent the last week in Alaska, cruising, fishing, rafting and staying in a big cabin in Cooper’s Landing. They were bursting with news and we ate their fresh red salmon for dinner.
Why is it that people come thousands of miles to experience what’s in your backyard but it seems impossible to get a couple days off to see the same when you actually live there? And if we do get those days, we’re more likely to fly off to someone else’s backyard and experience it. It’s one of those real-life mysteries like what’s in Spam.

Anyways, I’m starting to cook up my Alaskan bucket list so if and when I leave Alaska, I’ll have ticked off some of those things. Here comes the brave part: I’m putting it out there for all you readers to appreciate and hold me accountable. And I’m willing to hear some ideas too.

Here's the start of my list:
-Walk on the beach in Pilot Point, Alaska. This is the village where my mom was born.
-Earn my turns at Hatcher Pass.

-Take a flying lesson.
-Splash around in an ocean kayak at Kayakers Cove.
-Catch a King Salmon. Learn how to smoke fish.
-Hike out to Lowell Point near Seward.
-Climb a peak in the Chugach Mountains.
-Do a big river trip, anywhere.
-See the Porcupine Caribou Herd.

I'm anxious to hear what's on other people's lists. Post them here or Tweet me.

Observation No. 10: Town Square

If you want to find Anchorage of a Tuesday afternoon, look no further than the mid-town Wal-Mart. I read an interview with Billie Letts who wrote the book Where the Heart Is (which later became the movie) and she said that she chose Wal-Mart as the setting because she was looking for the modern day of equivalent of a town square in United States. In the book, the main character finds herself homeless and living at Wal-Mart until the birth of her daughter. Letts was looking for a place in America where people still meet and mingle and live their lives.

I remembered this today as I stopped by Wal-Mart after work to pick up face soap and grass fertilizer. The place was packed with tiny vignettes of color.

There were the three girls in the clothing department exclaiming over the cuteness of impossibly tiny, shorts the color of candy that were labeled $4.99. In the face cream aisle, a twenty-something women complained to her mother about her blackheads as her the older woman advised her to see a dermatologist. There was the boy who was working in the garden department who was surprised when I held the door open so he could angle a heavy cart through. There was the patience as 20 people waited for three tellers to slowly check us out, edging forward under the florescent lights. The man in front of me offered to let me move in front of him in soft, hesitant English. I told him to go ahead but he stepped beyond me anyways.

We all watched as a little girl with curly hair, wearing white leather sandals a size too small, begged her older brother for a sucker from a Ziploc bag that he carried and her teenaged siblings urged her to be quiet. We waited as an older couplecarefully counted out exact change for their purchases. We watched as a teller frantically tried to fix his register and then flicked his sign to flashing, alerting the manager.

Letts might have seen aspects of town square at Wal-Mart and I see some of that. But I also see the bus station--dreary, dodgy with some long lines. It’s a place where you come because you need to be there—a place with thousands of lives rushing through, on their way to somewhere else.

Observation 9: Coffee shop jungle

Is it just me, or as we get older do we become less self aware? For me, this has led to two tragic developments—I’m becoming a worse driver and an illogical dresser. Case in point, my ability to walk into the coffee shop where I’m sitting at this moment with the tags from my new jeans still blatantly attached, similar to the way boys wore tags on their hats when I was in high school. But I think they did that on purpose.

I’d like to tell you that this is the only time it’s happened. In fact, I’m constantly turning up places with hems unraveling, sweaters inside out, the stitching that you’re supposed to take out of skirt slits still in place. And I think, "It wasn’t always this way. I think I used to show up places looking relatively polished. I would lay outfits out; I would iron."

Here’s an even more disturbing trend—I can’t figure out if things match anymore. This is girldom at its most basic, something you learn along with tying your shoes—what colors, textures, styles, and shoes go with what. Some mornings I’m dashing through the kitchen to grab coffee when my husband gives me a funny look that says, “ummm, there’s something wrong there.”

Up until now, I’ve been one to ungenerously look at an older woman in line at the grocery store or at a town meeting, and wonder what she could have been thinking when she pulled on fuchsia stirrup pants and a disheveled polka dot sweater. Now, I realize that there was no thought process at all. All she was thinking was that the internet is down, she’s supposed to have weeded the front garden today, there’s nothing for dinner and she’ll just pop out for 20 minutes to post something to the web before she zips home. She arrives at her internet cafe and a nice guy with several studs in his face whispers out the side of his mouth rather purposefully, “Look at your left leg. The tag, the tag!”

It's not so much that I'm a fashion victim, rather the New Girl can see fashion leaving her behind, like a bus slowly pulling away from the stop. Really, people should just be thankful that we show up with clothes on and with four wheels on the ground. What more do they want?

New Girl Observation No. 8: Lions, Tigers and Bears?

Around noon today, my husband stood in the middle of our living room with the slightly doomed look he gets when he has to pack. Around him were scattered items a person needs for a week in the Alaskan wilderness—or what we think he needs because we don’t actually know anything about it. We both have this vague picture of a lot of marshland, populated by moose, the occasional grizzly and a lot of mosquitoes.

Rubber boots? Check.
Bug spray? Check.
Bear spray? Got it.

Before I moved to Alaska, I contacted a Facebook friend of a friend who is living here in Anchorage. Judging from his photos, he was a hiker so I shot him a quick email for some summer hiking ideas. He replied with a few suggestions on Alaskan hiking safety—chief amongst them a hand-gun to purchase for backcountry protection.

Now let me just say that I’m not totally against guns, if it’s truly a matter of personal protection. I don’t want to get my head torn off by a raging animal the size of a Volkswagen. And I’d really prefer it if my golden retriever doesn’t get eaten either.

So we consulted with a few friends here in Anchorage about bear safety—principally another Colorado couple that moved a few years ago and have now settled into Alaskan life. I judge this solely by the fact that they have a great house within walking distance to downtown bars and they know how to go clamming (dig fast, they really move!) Anyways, these friends said we could get by with the bear spray for now and we’d inevitably get the gun later.

So Cam and I tromped down to the Sportsmen’s Warehouse a couple weeks ago. There we are amidst fly-rods, riles, ammunition and giant coolers and we sheepishly ask a guy to lead us to the bear spray. The salesman looks at us like we have two heads-they don’t have any bear spray. He suggests we try Wal-mart. So we drive over and another man behind a counter sells us what turns out to be an industrial sized can of what you would spray at a mugger if you could get it out of your purse in time. Apparently, hikers run into this same situation in the woods because you can buy a separate holster for quick access, like some people tragically wear cell phones. You can also write into the company (which is in Anchorage) and they’ll send you an empty can to practice with before you're staring into the face of a charging sow. I’m trying to imagine your thought process as you unleash a giant can of pepper-spray and hope for the best. I need that practice can.

I’m also trying to imagine a circumstance where a bear might get really angry. I saw three grizzlies last week in Talkeetna, lolling on the train tracks and soaking up afternoon rays. They didn't seem interested in the 50 tourists spilling out of busses and vans to photograph them.

Maybe it’s just hunger pangs that get them going—I talked to a state wildlife manager last week that told me about a demonstration at bear sanctuary in Sitka where two rescued bear cubs tore into a tent to find a hidden hot dog in about a minute flat. I’ve been warned.

As an aside, it appears that science is on my husband's side. Here's an article that shows that bear spray is more effective as a deterrent than a firearm in almost all cases.