Alaska has always had an aura of mythology, and it’s easy to see why. Just plop a mountain like Denali into a state and you will have climbers dying on it. Have Jack London come into the North, almost die of scurvy, then retreat to sunny California to write hairy-chested and Darwinist tales of the wild land. And, like all frontiers, Alaska has been the refuge of escapees, dreamers, prospectors, adventurers, boomers and busters, a few outlaws and definitely some rogues. Drop all these types into a harsh climate with people willing to endure the harshness, and you can imagine the outcome. In some cases, you can’t.
To mythologize a person or a place, we must be keep them at a distance, far enough away to keep us from imagining them completely but close to give us a silhouette and maybe a shadow, too. In the middle, we must have the writers and television people dramatizing and doing their work, adding that touch of unrealism. Whatever we do, we must not get too close to the working life of such a thing or the mythic status will turn out a little thin.
Alaska has all the necessary ingredients. It has occupied both the rim of consciousness and the rim of the world. It has had, and continues to have, its writers and youtubers and television people. There are some good ones and there are some exploitive ones, who have taken our ignorance of the place and inserted an Alaska that neither exists nor wants to exist. It is like heaven: So far away and we know so little of it that we believe almost anything about it, including downright speculation. If you ever spend a year in Alaska, you will be asked these questions ad nauseum: How dark is it? How cold is it? Some people think it is dark six months out of the year. Others think Alaska is close to Oregon. With that kind of ignorance, we could tell them that Alaskans keep unicorns for pets and come away smelling of lavender.
Myths are no trouble if we do not expect them to be true, such as the Greek Myths, which we read with a combination of amusement and philosophy. But, unfortunately, the Real Alaskan can be verified and therefore has the potential to be turned in on itself in comedy. As the frontier days of Alaska dwindle and recede, there is the predictable set of upstarts who cling to a few heroic, mythical stereotypes as a way to distinguish themselves from the rest of the mere mortals. For America broadly speaking, this mythology was built around the American Indian; for the American West it was the cowboy. For the Alaskans, it is the Real Alaskan. Google it and you will see what I mean. The Real Alaskan takes selfies with bears, swats his mosquitoes with magnum revolvers, and spits in weather so cold his saliva crackles.
The stereotypical Native American was, in frontier days, an illiterate knave and a nuisance in the way of Manifest Destiny, but is now a noble savage who lived in rhythm with the land in sound ecological principle. With the comfort of time and hindsight, we have reexamined our relationship with him, updated him to our current politically correct standards, and found him to be an exemplary human now that he is no longer waving his scalping knife from the hedges or stealing our fire-water. We just bend the poor guy into whatever happens to be fashionable.
We have done the same thing with cowboys. In the days when cowboys drove cattle to Abilene, the freelancing cowboy likely had woman trouble, drank too much, and was too shiftless to hold down a job. He probably smelled, too. But take a look a look at those fops twaddling about in knee-high, lime green boots, pink shirts, and plastic cowboy hats who have never set boot to stirrup and you can see how the distance of time has distorted the life of the working cowboy into a plastic stencil.
What have we done to the Real Alaskan?
Driving east out of town there’s a sign advertising “Real Alaska Cabins.” Nobody that I know was worried about cabins real or fake until that sign asserted that here were real cabins and now, like the child who insists he didn’t steal the candy before you suspect it is stolen, we have grounds for suspicion. We at least suspect some fakery somewhere in the territory. Our suspicions arise from the word real, which is rarely up to any good and whenever we see it propping up another word, we know the word it modifies has lost some of its authority and needs some gussying up.
The distinction between “real” and “unreal” Alaskans has more or less been here for a long time, however, said perhaps a bit more accurately with terms such as chechakos and sourdoughs. It took much skill to live in a place so remote and so removed from commercial conveniences that newbies needed help. In Tom Kizzia’s nonfiction book Cold Mountain Path, one of the locals of Mcarthy, Alaska tells a newcomer to, “Tell me what you need and I’ll tell you how to get along without it.” This is simply a reflection of life in much of Alaska in the early days. Today, however, it is more laughable, with the Real Alaskan being more in tune with a vague set of principles descending from mere economic necessity of a bygone era.
In this modern world, in the presence of Blockbusters and TGI Friday’s and strip malls, the distinction has the feel of a joke. I have been intrigued with the idea of finding the “Real Alaska.” Could I find it in the average citizen, in the sum of culture? Could I find it in the villages, with their blend of modernism and tradition, where they travel by river to basketball championships, where village trading posts sell iPhone chargers, where the seal hunter lives in a shack in the shadow of a multi-million dollar school complete with a gymnasium? Or is it found in the Trans-Alaska pipeline, that vital artery of Alaska, and the people who make it work? Are the Alaskan homesteaders the ones who embody they Alaskan spirit? Is the Real Alaskan a minority or a majority? Are they the indigenous peoples?
Industrial America has come to the Last Frontier, bringing the predictable results such as homogenization and dependency on manufactured products (and thus servility to the system, which seems antithetical to Alaskan ideals). Modernization has also brought pop culture, a remnant of woke culture, and what Edward Abbey would call “industrial tourism.” Alaska suffers from an obesity crisis just like the rest of the world. There are lazy people and industrious people, video gamers and gardeners, sinners and saints, democrats and republicans, and the blending of complex lives that defy categorization. They complain about the heat in the summer and the cold in the winter.
When they see something odd, say an airplane taxiing down a county road or a mattress strapped to a the roof of a car, they shake their heads and say, “Only in Alaska.” Which is precisely what anyone would say about the same scene in Nowhere, Nebraska or Anyplace, Alabama. It is an ordinary thing to think that we are extraordinary. Alaskans are born to the human condition more than they are born to Alaska residency, and they carry the world on their shoulders, just like all of us, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free.
My friend Josh Engbretson, who lives in Idaho, and I were discussing if Westerners are superior to Easterners. We were discussing this via email. There certainly are cultural differences, but are they better humans, more self-reliant, virtuous or otherwise? He retorted with classic wit:
“Westerners do see themselves as superior, even as far as the east is from the west. Easterners are soft, pale, unimaginative, and unadventurous. The Westerners who see this most clearly have lived out West less than three months, generally speaking.
“Imagine a man who’s always struggled to conform to the social expectations of being clue-ful, open to others’ ideas; valuing relationships, family and cultural roots. Have him marry a kind woman. Watch him hit a wall at church and in an impulsive moment throw his wife and life into a semi-trailer, head west in pursuit of some childish, undeveloped Daniel Boone/Louis Lamour fantasy, and park his wife in a camper in a sage brush desert while he heads for the mountains with his new spurs and nickel-plated revolver. That’s him, the superior Westerner.”
All this is on my mind because I, too, am a newcomer to Alaska and do not really live here; I am nothing but a tourist who has overstayed his welcome. Worse, I play at writing. Not only do I risk doing the people and the state an injustice, but also it is my type that are the movers and shakers behind the Real Alaskan Myth, the newcomers who are still capable of romance and are in love with an Alaska that they got from books.
Granted, Alaska is ripe with ribald tales. And it is a special place. It has remote villages that are accessible only by airplane and boat that almost nowhere else in the world has. Where else can you find a place twice the size of Texas with less than a million people and less than 1 percent of it in private land? It has eight mountain ranges, plains, tundra, more coastline than the contiguous United States, and all of it yours to wander in if you can only get there. The thought is intoxicating. That it is a fantastic place and worthy of some Barry Lopez-style attention is undeniable and I would be a fool to object.
That it is such a remote, delicate, and brutal place demands that we talk about it correctly and carefully. Take the tundra north of the Arctic circle. It is a place to pass through, not a place to live. There is relatively nothing to provide shelter, and one’s impression is that it is a place for tough animals and tough people. But at the same time, a human footprint in the lichens and moss may stay for a year, maybe forever. A set of tire tracks will stay forever. A set of tire tracks will hold water, the water will collect heat, the heat will melt the permafrost, and there will appear two bottomless pits in which a human can disappear never to be seen again. Just like that, the delicate ecosystem that has survived centuries is tipped into chaos.
Just like the tundra can be damaged by a set of tire tracks, I think about our ability to exploit the mythical aura of Alaska to sell our media and kitsch. Slap the word Alaska onto a mug, T-shirt, or book cover and it is a seller. We can dramatize the darkness and the cold and set ourselves up to cheapen the place; one of the last and most precious wildernesses in the world.
There are more artisan coffee joints in Alaska than there are bars and maybe churches, and most of the locals have developed the kind of epicurean tastes only consistent exposure to the finest can produce. Some days I drink such a coffee myself, some latte or breve. Is this how the Real Alaskans do it?
I’m in Alaska, and I’m doing it. We only need to figure out whether or not I am real.