Frontier Spirit Fuels Hardy Souls in Icy Alaskan Outpost

Last July 2, according to the Bethel police, a man walked into the Alaska Co. store, stuck a dozen cassette tapes--including Jethro Tull’s “Thick as a Brick”--into his pack and left without paying. He was spotted by employees, arrested and charged with shoplifting.

The incident caused quite a stir in this town on the Kuskokwin River because the suspect was Bethel’s 32-year-old district attorney, Bryan Schuler, and almost everyone started speculating why a man earning $80,000 a year would swipe $66 worth of cassettes. What made the case even stranger, police said, was that Schuler returned to the store with his hot tapes just after he had left, as though he wanted to get caught.

“He was a personable enough fellow, but he didn’t socialize a lot,” said Police Chief Kevin Clayton. “With him it was work, work, work. He didn’t have much of an outside life and that makes it difficult to survive in Bethel. Something just clicked.”

“I’ve seen people do ghastly things to get banished from here, like shooting moose out of season,” offered Rosie Porter, publisher of the weekly Tundra Drums. “It’s obvious the guy was burned out. It was just his way of saying, ‘Get me outta here.’ A shrink might give you other reasons, but that’s my analysis.”

Left for Anchorage

Whatever the truth, a new district attorney was soon on his way, Schuler was on a plane for Anchorage, about 450 miles away, and Bethel--a town most Alaskans love to dismiss as a Third-World oddity on the distant shores of civilization--was left to reflect on the fact that its remoteness and trying living conditions had claimed another victim.

Bethel, Alaska’s eighth-largest population center, has 4,200 residents. It sits on a wind-swept, frozen desert, an unslightly collection of buildings strewn helter-skelter along muddy streets, and is in many ways today what all of Alaska was yesterday, a frontier both in spirit and appearance. It is a place where the Arctic climate--the mean summer temperature is 53 degrees and the first snows come in early September--builds character and toughness, and the weak and faint-hearted quickly succumb to numbing isolation and long months of never-ending winter darkness, when the temperature can hang at minus 30 degrees for days on end.

“People come up to the frontier from ordinary societies, and they’re not knowledgeable enough about themselves to adapt,” said Bill Biven, general manager of the Bethel Native Corp., a native-owned group whose investments range from real estate to a car wash. “I know flexibility is an overused term today, but you need psychological and intellectual maturity to survive here. You can’t take a person who’s spent 30 years in an urban environment and expect him to make it in Bethel.”

Biven accepted his position in Bethel only after negotiating an extra $10,000 in his contract so he could buy “toys”--a snowmobile and an airplane. “You’ve got to know your limits, and you’ve got to get out from time to time,” he said. Almost everyone here agrees: If you can’t escape Bethel occasionally, this town 450 miles west of Anchorage becomes a winter prison.

Air Miles

When residents speak of some place being an hour away, they mean by private plane, not car. Supplies are flown in or shipped by barge from Seattle. When the mail arrives each day on the late-morning flight from Anchorage, it seems as though the whole town converges on the post office at once, and it is there and in the grocery stores that gossip is exchanged and most of the town’s socializing is done. Life is kept on such an informal basis that when a passenger disembarked from a taxi the other day, he ignored the meter and told the driver: “Just take that off what you owe me.”

With its buildings perched on pilings driven into the permanently frozen earth and with “honey buckets” outnumbering flush toilets, Bethel looks more like a place that just happened than it does a town that grew out of any plan. Yet this 19th-Century Russian fishing outpost is the biggest and most important center in western Alaska, a region the size of Oregon with 20,000 inhabitants, most of them Eskimos. It is the commercial and transportation hub for 56 native villages tucked away on the treeless tundra and the regional headquarters for the Alaska State Troopers, who keep the peace in planes, not patrol cars.

Bethel runs on black coffee and reindeer sausage, and Rosie Porter, 49, who was raised in a New Jersey cold-water flat, was sharing a few thoughts over a cup of steaming coffee the other day about life on the frontier. She was in the kitchen of the spiffy, six-room bed-and-breakfast inn she oversees above her newspaper office. She lit a cigarette and remembered how she had once kicked the habit after flying all the way to Paris to take a new medical cure. “But I started again,” she said. “Smoking’s my friend. It never deserts me.

“This town’s got an old, old reputation of being a terrible place,” she said, refilling her cup. “Well, that reputation comes mostly from snot-nosed people who are new to the state or from those hotsy-totsy people in Anchorage, who are getting so pretentious they think Anchorage is Seattle. As far as I’m concerned, Bethel is a secret, a great place to raise kids, to live.

“It’s also a dynamite place for news. There’s never a week you’re sitting around with a finger up your nose, saying, ‘Oh my God. What am I going to put in the paper this week?’ The issues we get are real hot. The little guy versus the big guy. This town’s taken on the entire nation of Japan for Christsakes on the issue of fishing rights when they were out there scooping up our salmon.

Bach and Birds

“And we’ve got birds galore--ducks, geese, everything--and it’s a prime area for bird-watching, although I’ve observed bird-watchers and most of them are real cheap. But I’ll tell you, I put on Bach and I watch a swallow sitting on the wire outside, and what I know is that the meanness of spirit you find in urban people isn’t here. People come up here and spend any length of time and the country bends them and they adapt some of the ways of the Eskimo, just as the Eskimo has had to adapt some of our gussak (white) ways.”

Yup’ik Eskimo make up 68% of Bethel’s population. Of the whites attracted here, an inordinately high number have attended college and many were born abroad--Greece, Vietnam, Iran, Great Britain, Yugoslavia, Korea. “The place isn’t anywhere near as bad as it looks,” said Frank Mustafa, a cab driver who escaped from communist Albania in 1972. The town’s little library reflects the high literacy and the lack of diversion with 50,000 checked-out books a year, although almost all of its business comes in the winter when there is little else to do but read, watch television and drink.

Bethel’s city council--half white, half native--has banned the sale of alcohol, as have many other councils in bush Alaska, because of the Eskimos’ intolerance for liquor. Police Chief Clayton, 31, estimates that 90% of Bethel’s crime, which includes about one murder a month, is related to drinking, and Porter has tacked up a sign in her inn that says: “Only social drinking please. No controlled substances in the building please.” But because the possession of alcohol is not illegal, whiskey, vodka and gin arrive by the caseload and bootlegging is rampant.

“The people doing most of the yelling about the evils of bootlegging are the same people who are buying bottles from those guys on Saturday night, so there’s no real pressure to get rid of the bootleggers,” Clayton said. “Personally, in terms of looking at what our problems are, I’d rather put a bootlegger in jail than a drug dealer.”

In the summertime, when heavy drinking and serious crime diminish, the sun stays up nearly around the clock and it is not unusual to see children riding their bicycles and playing baseball at 2 in the morning. The town, though, looks particularly ugly in summer without its blanket of snow camouflaging the junked cars and broken machinery piled like discarded ornaments outside many homes. The stuff never gets carted away, the locals say, because in the Arctic, where spare parts are difficult to get, junk is tantamount to an insurance policy when emergency repairs are needed.

Ice Roads

The city maintains 15 miles of gravel roads and 48 miles of ice roads on the Kuskokwin River in the winter. The town has no sidewalks, curbs, gutters or real main street. Sewage is collected every other week from homeowners’ septic tanks and dumped into the fresh waters of the lagoon.

Amenities that city people expect such as a proper sewer system would be too costly to build here in the permanently frozen ground, residents say. So Bethel’s frontiersmen and women accept what they have and complain little, thankful that the oil boom of the ‘70s at least brought the town a new hospital, youth detention center and airport control tower.

Few would welcome the unrelenting growth of Anchorage and Fairbanks, for what keeps them here is simply the challenge of standing up to a harsh and spartan world and knowing they have not yielded or been conquered. A standoff is all they ask for, with neither side a winner or a loser.

“There’s a lot of satisfaction in being able to survive and be successful in an environment like this,” said Dave Foster, manager of Swanson’s general store. “It makes you feel pretty good, because whatever you end up with, you’ve earned.”