To understand Alaska politics, it helps to know the politics of capital projects. Big projects – the Susitna Dam, the Juneau Road, Ketchikan’s “Bridge to Nowhere” – consume more than their share of government business in this state. That’s also true on our local level. Consider the numbers of meetings spent talking about boat harbor expansion, rebuilding the firehall, and…
A friend asked the other day whether American soldiers were still dying in Afghanistan. Shamefully, I didn’t know. The responsibility of citizens in a democracy is to keep up on issues and participate in decision-making and there’s no government function more important than deciding to kill people, our people or ones from elsewhere. So why didn’t I know? Because I…
If I hadn’t met Dick Carlson in person, he would have had to come to me from the pages of a novel. He was close to 70 when I knew him, with a shock of unruly silver hair, eyes like sapphires and a rocking gait from a lifetime working on uneven terrain. Leather boots, a flannel shirt, jeans and suspenders…
“Their greatest value no doubt lies in the universal interest of the public in seeing and photographing them in their natural habitat, and since they can be observed along most any good salmon stream when the fish are running, they provide a wonderful tourist attraction. For the sportsmen seeking a trophy, however, other areas in Alaska offer larger and more…
For his birthday party Tuesday, Pizza Joe invited friends to the skate park to play pickleball. About a dozen people showed up. The games went on for six hours. A week previous to his birthday, Joe was out at the fairgrounds with a fire hose in single-digit temperatures, putting down layers of ice at the makeshift rink there. Parnell has…
At a party a few years back I got into a disagreement with a rich man about the meaning of the American Dream. The man, who had earned his fortune honestly, said he’d achieved the American Dream by becoming wealthy. I told him that he needn’t have gotten rich, as the dream isn’t so much about riches as it was…
I was talking to my Republican friend on Friday’s ferry to Haines. Out the window, seagulls were clamoring above Lynn Canal. A week of north winds had churned up to the surface the big-eyed lampfish and maybe some other bottom-dwellers. The gulls were getting them while the getting was good. My friend was sitting at a cafeteria table alone, looking…
Joe Biden is promising to unify the country and certainly that needs doing. All Joe has to do is rebuild the middle class. Unity problem solved. No kidding. I know this because I grew up in a unified, lower-middle class neighborhood in the 1960s, and this is how it worked: All the guys on our street had jobs. They were…
The headline in the Anchorage newspaper read, “In Haines, Divisions Recede as Community Members Rally to Help after Landslides and Flooding.” The story remained on the paper’s website for weeks, proving it was a popular one, generating clicks. It’s a feel-good story, the kind people like to read about folks setting aside differences to help each other during a catastrophe.…
A long time ago aboard a state ferry that may no longer be around someone mounted a display of black-and-white photos of Sitka in winter. They were outdoor night scenes of wet houses and piles of slush, bicycles under an eave, lit by streetlights and illuminated windows. The photos were as somber as they were starkly beautiful, conjuring up this…