Why are politics in Haines so divisive? Why so mean? Why do so many disagreements in this town become holy wars between crusaders and infidels, where all tactics are justifiable and only total, crushing defeat of the other side is victory?
Why so many recalls? Why so many complaints? Why are so many of us so upset? We live in a place other people dream of spending just a few weeks of vacation. Most of us have enough food, decent shelter and almost unimaginable personal freedom.
Plus we are surrounded by mind-bending scenery and wildlife.
So what makes us so dissatisfied?
That question has banged around for a long time.
My friend writer Heather Lende, in her 2020 book about Haines politics (“Of Bears and Ballots”) suggested that maybe the heat of national politics was bringing us to a boil. But people were weeping at Haines assembly meetings at least back to 1987, long before our nation’s current divide. I know because I reported on those meetings.
I bought a used pickup from a Texas carpenter living in Juneau in 1995 and he said to me of Haines: “It sure is a pretty place but it’s no place to live. Where do people there fight all the time?”
Is there something in the water here? Or maybe something missing in the water? Perhaps besides preventing tooth decay, fluoride has natural mellowing agents and we should dump barrels of it into Lilly Lake.
“Heavy gravity” was a theory for a while, an idea that an exceptional amount of downward force made us all crazy. But it turned out that was public misunderstanding of a national science project on the fifth force of the universe that visited Haines in the 1980s.
I’d about given up on explaining why it is that we are the way we are to one another when teenager Maddox Rogers landed on it the other day: It’s the curse of the mummy.
And not just any mummy, the greatest mummy of them all: King Tut.
Maddox works down at the gift shop at the Sheldon Museum standing guard over the town’s treasures, including one very odd artifact: A vial of tiny green beads from the tomb of King Tutenkamen.
What are Tut’s beads doing in the Sheldon Museum?
The story goes back more than 100 years to an era when a dozen white guys ruled the world and museums were for gawking at cool, old stuff from far away.
Howard Carter, the Brit who discovered King Tut’s tomb, had come to the acquaintance of Steve Sheldon, a storekeeper in Haines who collected things and dreamed of opening a museum.
Besides a throne, death masks, sandals made of gold, board games, iron daggers and chariots, Carter found beads in Tut’s tomb, lots of beads. So Carter did what any respectable tomb raider might: He scooped up the beads by the handful and sent them off to his buddies all over the globe, including Steve Sheldon of Haines.
And here they’ve sat for about a century, the plundered booty of King Tut, held captive because a Main Street storekeeper who collected curios also jonesed for relics from antiquity.
There are about 1,000 books and movies about the curse of the mummy. You needn’t read or see any of them to understand this: It’s just bad juju to steal from graves and it’s probably worse to keep pilfered funerary items on display as treasure.
So let’s wrap up that little vial of glass beads and send it back to the Egyptians. It was stolen from them a long time ago and it has no importance to Haines or the Chilkat Valley.
I’m not saying that returning Tut’s beads will lift the curses that vex our town but what do we have to lose? At the very least, we could make some friends in Egypt.