It’s not an early spring. Few are. So few are that a person can almost name the years they happened.
There were a few in the early 1990s so warm and dry that our forester put up signs warning of wildfire danger. You can mark these years by what you were doing at the time, things like Easter egg-hunting in a T-shirt. A tropical April once inspired me to jump into Rutzebeck Lake on Tax Day. Big mistake.
The newspaper produces the town’s annual Visitor’s Guide in April and on a few occasions spending weekends finishing that production was hellish, as out the window the sun was shining, warm as September. People were out riding bikes and puttering in their yards.
Pizza Joe, who has spoken more truths about this town than anyone, famously said, “It’s not the environmentalists who destroyed the local economy, it’s winter.”
More than ever before, people who live here leave in winter. That’s excusable. Our town doesn’t do a good job at winter. We could have a lot more fun around here in the dark months but that would require some public spending and someone would squawk about it at a meeting and the politicians would all nod their heads gravely.
Perhaps we are still a Presbyterian town at heart. The culture of a place changes slowly. Many here are still invested in fire and brimstone and the idea that raucous fun leads straight to sin, then to hell, and thus should be avoided.
So we stagger out of each winter either righteous or fallen, but wounded either way.
Bob Bartlett may have been Alaska’s biggest booster, but he had no illusions about winters spent here. Bartlett served as Alaska’s sole territorial representative in Congress before statehood. After leading the battle to join the Last Frontier to the Union, he went on to serve the state as a U.S. Senator.
But in his mid-20s, Bartlett was in a pickle. He was a nobody with no money, the son of a poor miner, wooing Vide Gaustad, a spirited, red-haired beauty who grew up alongside him in the gold camps around Fairbanks.
While Bartlett was kicking around as a newspaper reporter in Fairbanks, Vide earned a teaching degree from UCLA and found work in Washington state, where her beaus included a tall, handsome football star at the University of Washington.
Bartlett, who vaguely aspired to great things for himself and for the Last Frontier, wanted Vide’s hand in marriage but she resisted. Vide had lived in sunny California and she had seen what the world offered and she understood that was a hell of a lot more than Alaska.
Bartlett understood her reluctance.
He wrote at the time:
“Here it is May 9 and the ice has just gone out, and only a few nights ago it was freezing… and by October the old grind has started again.” Bartlett described Alaska winters as “desperately long” and causing “too much suffering.”
“Everyone is wishing his life away – continually wishing spring would come, with the realization that once it has come, it is practically time for winter again.” Alaska winter, Bartlett wrote, was “bound to sour people.”
“Except for a few old-timers who know no better, everyone is looking prayerfully forward to the day when they can go Outside to stay,” or at least for a short visit, Bartlett wrote, according to a 1979 biography of the man.
Bartlett was arguably Alaska’s biggest booster. He pleaded and proclaimed the territory’s greatness for years, until the U.S. Congress believed it enough to make this place a state, just like California.
When a person of Bartlett’s achievement and stature writes that winters here are painful, a person might put stock in that idea.