The summer of 1987 was a heady time in Haines journalism, or it seemed that way to me.
I was sole reporter for the Chilkat Valley News when Mike Sica and Barnaby Dow of KHNS covered area news like white on snow.
Dow, the Haines reporter, was building a journalism resume impressive enough to get him out of town before winter. Sica, arguably the best newsman in Lynn Canal history, stalked Skagway, often producing two or three stories daily.
On visits to Haines, Sica could unearth two or three leads on local stories in the time it took him to shuttle between the airport and Chilkat Center. Together Dow and Sica produced about 20 minutes of local news twice a day, with fresh stories every newscast.
More than once I was told, “Why would I buy the Haines paper? Everything in it has already been on the radio.”
My biggest scoop that summer was a ferry trip to Skagway by Elsie, the town’s only milk cow, for a date with Gene, a bull that resided in Dyea. The Alaska AP picked up the story, which went nationwide and elicited great guffaws from dairy farmers, I suppose.
In June, Dow and I were in a race for a story originating in the 4-H room of the horse barn at the Southeast Alaska State Fair. A research team from the prestigious Scripps Institute of Oceanography was holed up inside the room for days, but they weren’t talking to reporters.
Wait, they promised us. When we’re done here, we’ll explain it all to you.
After a week or 10 days, they let us inside to see a metal cylinder supported by a tripod, a device they told us was a “relative gravity meter.” Using a laser and a digital clock, it measured the time it took for a small weight inside the cylinder to fall from its top to its bottom. Over and over again.
The Haines measurements were important for an ambitious experiment in Greenland, where a bigger weight would be dropped through a 3,000-meter hole drilled in an icepack. What they were chasing, the Scripps folks told us, was evidence of unexplainable variations in the force of gravity.
“The data may tell the scientists if there are exceptions in the equation for measuring gravity, and if there is an unknown force that works against gravity,” I reported. Dow filed a similar story. It seemed a yawner.
About a week later, Dow phoned me. “We got snowed,” he said, citing a story he had just read about the real purpose of the 4-H room experiments. “Those guys were looking for the fifth force of the universe.”
Whoa. Damn. Right here in Haines, I thought. Then Dow and I put our heads together. What, we asked each other, are the other forces of the universe besides gravity? Earth, wind and fire? Atmospheric pressure? Friction?
Barnaby and I were in so deep over our heads we may as well have been at the bottom at that hole in the ice in Greenland.
It’s a truism that news reporters duck stories they don’t understand. That’s why local TV reporters cover slayings and house fires, not the city budget. It’s also why the New York Times hires only reporters who hold master’s degrees in the topics they cover.
So it was like meeting an old friend to pick up the May 13 edition of the news digest magazine The Week. Under a page 21 headline titled, “Searching for A Fifth Force,” The Week reported that scientists in Europe have restarted the Large Hadron Collider after three years of upgrades “in an effort to see whether there is a fifth fundamental force in nature.”
The physicists, the story said, need a more powerful particle accelerator “to establish the breakthrough they seek, which could explain the mysterious dark matter in the universe.”
I started feeling better about myself. I’m still only writing articles for the smallest newspaper in the emptiest state in the union, but a bunch of other guys a lot smarter than me haven’t finished a science project they started 35 years ago.
Of course, the truth gets more confused, as big ideas do in small towns. The news accounts that Dow and I wrote about the physicists in the horse barn got so tangled up in local lore that about 10 years ago, during a trivia contest at the Chilkat Center, the correct answer to a question about what local geophysical feature was exclusive to Haines was stated as “heavy gravity.”
Yes, the game’s host assured the gathered audience, gravity is heavier in Haines.
For the record, it’s not. Also for the record, the four known forces of the universe are gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force.
And I can’t explain any of those, either.