A friend of mine described his residency: “I live in Alaska year-round except for Novembruary.”
For those four months, my friend went to Mexico or Thailand or Florida or anywhere warmer, brighter and drier than here in deep winter, which would describe most of the rest of the world.
I give my friend credit for owning up to his annual escape. Many of the rest of us are sheepish about the time we flee the long dark.
An Alaskanism popular when I arrived here in 1984 ventured that, “Sure the weather’s bad up here, but it keeps the riff-raff out.” Were that only so. That old saw contradicts another about sourdoughs: That the name describes old-timers sour for not having dough enough to move south.
Boulevardier Joe Parnell quipped that it wasn’t the greenies that killed the Haines economy, it was winter. People laughed and not only because Joe is too big to punch.
Permanent fund dividend checks were intended to keep the Alaska Legislature from stealing all of our money and to help Alaskans make it through winter. They work on both counts but their proceeds tend to land under palm fronds.
Maybe rightfully so. Some say the Permanent Fund distribution would be better issued as non-refundable, non-transferable plane tickets to Hawaii. It’s a two-fer: Keeping the sourdoughs from becoming too sour and providing an opportunity for the riff-raff to stake their tents permanently in Pahoa.
It’s a thought. It also might keep Alaskans from becoming so ghastly pale. Not even those Fairbanks college kids in swimsuits who line up for photos beside that electronic thermometer reading 40 below look particularly healthy.
When an Alaskan hits their “prime of their life” is anyone’s guess but many would peg it as just after their third margarita.
Still it’s hard not to think that in the future, cool people will live in Alaska only during Novembruary. It will become the emblem of the hip, with long accounts in Outside magazine about finishing all of Tolstoy’s masterpieces in the gap between winter’s final sunset and spring’s first sunrise huddled in a shack in Utqiagvik.
And maybe that’s how it should be. Novembruary is Alaska at its most Alaskan: Terrible and painful and a badge of honor to survive. It’s Alaska on its own terms, which is to say impossible.
Beating the elements. Doing the impossible. Those tropes are so woven into Alaska mythology they’re hardly recognizable unless you’re missing a frostbit finger or toe to remind you.
The bitter truth is that we don’t prevail over Novembruary as much as we sink deep down into it like a bean-bag chair, into a torpor where our pulse slows and we talk less and we can get lost looking out the window at a tree branch or a power line.
Novembruary becomes us and we become it and that’s not all bad if you can find the Zen of that sweet spot.
The problem comes in March with the first day of dazzling sunshine or a night eerily devoid of roaring winds and whipping slush. By the time we finally make our awkward peace with Novembruary, it’s over.
Then some friend knocks on your door after his months-long sojourn to a tropic isle and it’s like an Earthling making conversation with a Martian, an exchange of greetings from the same solar system, light years apart.