A Land of Characters – A Blog Hop Article

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Hi, welcome to the blog.

This week’s topic:  What is special, unique and fun about where you live?

Okay, I live in Alaska. I probably don’t have to say much more than that. Pretty much everyone who does not live in Alaska thinks there is something exciting about the very idea. Imagine, however, if you grew up here and it was just home?

We’re the largest state with the fewest highways and almost the smallest population. 80% of our communities are not accessible by highway. We have the largest number of private pilots among the states. We have the largest percentage of gun owners. It is a felony offense to attempt to pet a polar bear in Alaska. We lead the nation in per capita ice cream consumption. The Territory of Alaska banned racial discrimination 10 years before Congress got around to it.

Interior Alaska, which is the part of Alaska I call home, is a place of extremes. Most winters it reaches minus 45 – 50 degrees for a couple of days with an average of 50 inches of snow. Some winters are warmer with 12 – 14 feet of snow. Others are colder with just a couple of inches of snow. It’s hard to predict which sort of winter it might be. Summers are hot and dry. This summer has had plenty of 80-95 degree days and the forest fires that come with it. You see, Fairbanks (my town) is surrounded by millions of acres of taiga — a stunted forest of black spruce and black spruce are just oil lanterns awaiting a spark to burst into flame. They need fire to create more black spruce, in fact. Hot summers mean lightning storms and that’s the spark black spruce is waiting for. Then again, last summer, it rained 80 days out the 90 days of summer. The sun shone so little that our gardens (yes, we garden) didn’t produce anything but yellow leaves. Again, you just never can predict other than that it will snow sometime in October and that snow will probably still be here six months later.

The extremes of weather isn’t what attracts most people to Alaska and it certainly isn’t why we stay. What is unique and different about Alaska is our culture. Non-Alaska Natives come from … well, everywhere. We rank in the top five states for diversity of races, but also 71% of adult residents moved to Alaska from another state, while only 28% of adults born in Alaska still live here when they’re 30.

That diversity has led to a unique culture in Alaska because we bring our culture with us from wherever we come from. In most cases, migrants adapt their culture to the culture they join because they are outnumbered. In Alaska the is always in flux as residents don’t just come from nearby states, but from all states and many foreign countries. During the construction of the TransAlaska Pipeline, our home-grown always-slightly-in flux culture was nearly overwhelmed by Texans and Oklahomans who were very proud of where they were from and not shy to assert their superiority. The Alaskan culture asserted itself by boldly confronting this tsunami of immigration and from that confrontation, we defined Alaska culture for future generations. The overriding characteristic of long-time Alaskans is a live-and-let-live attitude that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but it’s okay to say when people are full of baloney … which tends to be frowned on by Southerners … except for those who found the honesty refreshing and decided to stay and thereby become Alaskans. Generally, Alaskans say what we mean and mean what we say and we don’t care if others don’t like it, but we are perfectly willing for those who don’t like what we have to say to state their own opinion. We’ll feel free to not like it and argue against it … or to mull it over for a while and change our minds … maybe, if you make a good argument.

Because you don’t have to be born here (or even grow up here) to call yourself an Alaskan, we don’t have a state accent. Sarah Palin’s accent is her parents’ Idahoan accent. I have kept people guessing on my accent for hours because my parents were from different regions. My neighbor sounds like a Texan, but she’s been an Alaskan for longer than I’ve been alive. A friend of mine is an Alaskan, though he clearly grew up speaking Korean before he learned English.

We are a very outdoorsy kind of state and our state sport is dog mushing. Yes, that’s a sport and not just for the dogs. An Iditarod or Quest musher runs a good bit of those 1000-mile races. It’s one of the few professional racing sports where women win about in proportion to the percentage of their participation. The meme here is “Alaska — Where Men are Men and Women Win the Iditarod.” Men are men, by the way, but we have a strong streak of hardy practicality that sees women changing their own tires and chopping their own wood as perfectly normal.

Currently, we’re in food harvest mode as my husband Brad just returned from Chitina on the Copper River with 45 sockeye salmon. Chitina means standing on the shores of a powerful glacial river holding a landing net on a 12-16′ pole in the current and hopping 10-15 pound fish will swim into it. Sometimes this takes hours, sometimes it takes days … and sometimes you don’t get much. Most years I would have gone with him and caught some of them, but I had to work for money this week. . Sometimes he takes the kids (who are now 22 and 16, so can pull their own weight … are at least a salmon’s weight). This year, he went alone. There is no fresher salmon in the world than Copper River reds. After driving 350 miles, he caught 45 fish in about 10 years, put them on ice and drove another 350 miles to come home. We filet these beauties, wrap them in freezer paper and store them in the freezer. We’ll eat salmon at least once a week until spring. We keep the heads because there’s some delicious cheek meat in them and we even retain the spines (what’s left after filet) because the “waste” meat makes salmon burgers.

Blueberry season will start in a couple of weeks. Alaskan blueberries are very tart compared to Lower 48 blueberries, but if blueberries are a superfood, Alaskan blueberries are a megafood with three times the antioxidants of standard blueberries. We freeze ours on aluminum trays and then store them in jars to eat all winter, mixed with honey on toast (creating a very healthy jam) or sprinkled on our cereal and in baked goods. We also pick cranberries closer to fall and freeze-dry them to make craisans.

About 12% of the homes in our community use woodstoves as their primary heat source. We’re no different. We have a diesel furnace as backup, but we use wood most of the time. It’s affordable and a great exercise program, as well as a more even heat. And you can cook on top of the woodstove if the power goes out. When we finish processing the fish, Brad and Kyle will be returning to my brother’s place where the electric utility cut down a small forest of birch trees along the right of way last year. Some years fire wood is more work, but this year, we get to harvest wood while catching up with my brother.

Of course all this outdoor activity in the summer is made possible by the midnight sun — which in Fairbanks is really the 22-hour sun. Although the sun does dip below the horizon, it never really gets dark from April through August. It’s not unusual to see people out at 11 pm, playing Ultimate Frisbee in the park, walking their dogs or sitting on the deck reading by the lingering sunlight. Boats run up and down the Chena River at all hours and there’s an irrepressible hot-air ballooning community. We even have a city-wide festival that goes until midnight and a baseball game played without the benefit of artificial lights, both on the summer solstice. Our family hikes at all hours and get to see some lovely vistas because Brad’s nickname is “Ridgewalker”.  There is something special about “sun dip” at 4,000 feet.

There are many more unique aspects to Alaska than I could possibly fit into one blog post. Some of my regular readers are familiar with some of those unique aspects from prior posts. You can check out the category “Alaska” for more articles.

Now that you’ve heard about the thoroughly wild place I live, you might want to hear about my colleagues’ cool hometowns. Just follow the link below and it will connect you to other blogs where this topic is being discussed.

Author Alexis Donkin tells the true account of one woman’s suffering which she transformed into opportunities for empowerment. Check it out.

****Follow the link to join the blog hop.

http://www.amazon.com/Thrive-How-I-Became-Superhero/dp/1512211486/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr&qid

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