Big Apple Returnee Faces Zingers in Questions About Life in Alaska

Strange things happen when I tell people I just moved to Manhattan from Alaska.

Conversations stop; mouths fall open; eyes dilate in astonishment, and then soften with pity.

Alaska? It’s so far away, it’s so cold, so dark.

“Do they have an area code,” asked the New York telephone worker when I set up service here.

“You must be happy to be back in the United States,” said a clothing store salesperson. “Did someone drag you up there?”

Answers: The area code is 907. And no, I went to Alaska on my own and stayed for two years--and loved every minute of it!

Of course, like the fictional Joel Fleischman on TV’s “Northern Exposure,” who’s forced to work in Alaska to repay medical school loans, I occasionally pined for more movies and better food.

But this Midwesterner--I grew up in Chicago--loved Alaska for some of the same reasons many people love New York City: for the extremity of it.

For starters, Alaska, too, is a melting pot of the adventuresome, the get-rich-quickers, the truth-seekers, the economic refugees, the loners, the fugitives, the curious, the weird. And yes, those who are dragged along.

Sixteen percent of the Last Frontier’s population is Eskimo, Aleut or Indian. The rest is a transient crowd, usually arriving for a few years or a few decades for a job or exploration.

It has the second youngest population of any state, after Utah--with an average age of 29.8, compared to 33.1 nationally--and people are active, determined to fight the wintertime blues with frenzied extracurricular activities.

Alaskans smirk at “Northern Exposure”--filmed in Washington state--saying its glamorous bush pilot, Zen DJ and redneck ex-astronaut are TV contrivances. Actually, such offbeat characters are on the mark.

For real: Take the glamorous California girl turned Barrow taxi-driver, who speeds along the 18 miles of rutted road there with manicured hands and designer sunglasses; the 86-year-old Iditarod sled-dog racer; the governor, Walter J. Hickel, who won a last-minute bid backed by a third party that advocates secession from the United States, or the panhandler-turned-city council candidate in Fairbanks who lost.

There’s the group of Anchorage women who knit sweaters out of their dogs’ hair; the Anchorage rabbi--long the state’s only one--who bid his congregation good night on Rosh Hashanah with the hope that nobody should hit a moose on the way home; and the Nome newspaper editor with a dog named Walter Cronkite and a building sunk so deep in permafrost that the chairs slide across the tilted floor.

(“It’s leaning the wrong way though,” Nome Nugget Editor Nancy McGuire says about her tiny yellow building, which slants to the right.)

The Last Frontier also has more than its share of folks running from their troubles. In one recent Anchorage election, two candidates were found to have fabricated virtually their entire resumes, reinventing themselves in Alaska.

As to the myth of hordes of eligible single men: Despite what national television talk shows say, there are just 1.1 men to 1 woman statewide and the difference is largely on grungy Bering Sea fishing boats, North Slope oil fields and the like.

As Alaska women say:

“The odds are good but the goods are odd.”

As for me, I suppose I went for adventure, and got an Alaska-sized dose--that is, more than twice the size of Texas or 10 times the size of Illinois.

In the Anchorage bureau of The Associated Press, for which I worked, dogs were frequent visitors, jeans were de rigueur and a mountain bike was tucked in the closet--for use in case of the big earthquake, of course. One wall had a huge hole in it where one of my predecessors had hung the head of a ram he had shot.

The office was wallpapered with maps of Alaska, which is more like a conglomeration of different countries than a state.

Where else could I play with polar bear cubs 80 miles out on the Arctic ice pack, try driving a dog team through the woods near Denali National Park, and drop in on Eskimo villages in a rickety bush plane during the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race? I learned to leap off a ski trail for a charging moose and swim in outdoor hot springs when the air temperature was minus 30 degrees and the steam turns your hair white.

I saw the oil that seeped from the sand in Prince William Sound a year after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and watched a cold, drizzly Fourth of July parade in the Aleutian Islands with a group of Russian sailors whose ship had just pulled in.

Not unlike New York, Alaska is a place so different and demanding that people’s daily lives and discussions revolve around how they cope with it.

In Alaska’s case, there’s an intimacy in being just half a million people out in all that wilderness. It creates pioneer-style friendliness and a virtual obsession with the place.

Alaskans talk about Alaska; everything else is dismissed as “Outside.” If someone mentions the “Bush vote,” they’re talking about rural Alaska, not the President.

Alaska’s problems just aren’t the same as the rest of the country’s. It has serious ethnic and environmental problems, but urban race riots, crowded landfills or water shortages simply aren’t among them.

Front pages are more likely to describe the perilous state of Alaska’s native cultures, problems such as alcoholism and depression, or the latest wrangles over subsistence--the seemingly intractable dispute over who has first rights to hunting and fishing.

In Juneau, Alaska legislators yell and harangue and hold all-night sessions trying to come up with a budget, just like legislators in other states, but their financial constraints are a bit different. Flush with oil revenues, Alaska doesn’t tax residents. It pays each one more than $900 a year just for living there.

Finally, Alaska is, not unlike New York, a place so huge and rich that it can’t ever be explored completely.

In the 49th state, the potential lies in the vast, inaccessible reaches of land; the challenges of weather, the scattered pockets of human ingenuity and cultural wealth in native villages and homesteads.

Alaska is, of course, overwhelming in natural beauty: clean air, uncrowded trails, northern lights, thousands of waterfowl in the spring, mountains so remote they have yet to be named, whales within sight of downtown Anchorage and moose at the window. It’s heaven for dog people.

But nature in Alaska is frightening, too--and not just when bears wander into houses, or eagles take the family cat.

Living in Alaska means going through frequent earthquakes and occasional volcanic eruptions.

Above all, it means enduring winter.

Winter is months of waking, dressing and getting to work in the dark and braving the cold at lunchtime just to catch a glimpse of the sun--if it’s high enough to peep over the tops of buildings.

People in Anchorage often get through the dark season by thinking how terrible it must be in Fairbanks, 300 miles north, or worse yet in Barrow, the nation’s farthest north town, all the way up on the Arctic Ocean. In those places, locals have developed a sourdough ethic in which anyone who zips their coat when the temperature’s higher than zero is an automatic weenie.

In the spring, after three months of darkness, Barrow turns out for softball in 20-degree weather. Fans sit in cars and honk for the big plays.

It’s the cold, the dark and the distance that eventually drive so many people away.

Few older people stay past retirement; the state pays older Alaskans a yearly dividend as an incentive to remain. Wedding announcements in the newspapers tell a similar story: Many young Alaskans go to college Outside--often California--and don’t come back.

The farewell party is an institution in Alaska.

But there’s also an opposite trend: Move to Alaska, and few places ever seem as exciting again. Many who leave look back at it as a lost paradise, returning often and, frequently, moving back again.

One publication--Alaska Magazine--caters almost exclusively to people who love Alaska from afar. Ninety percent of its subscribers live Outside--some people who have never been there, others expatriates.

Because when it comes down to it, the hardest thing about living in Alaska is being so far away from everyone else.

For me, it was a price I couldn’t pay long. With regret, I said goodby to Mt. McKinley, which on clear days I would see on the way to work; to tacky, badly zoned but comfortable downtown Anchorage; and to the people who, despite saying goodby to so many Alaska friends, still put themselves out for newcomers.

Sign me up for a subscription to Alaska Magazine.