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…
Credit the Haines Sheldon Museum for coming to its own rescue. Then fill out the flier that went into your post office box last week and buy a museum membership. The reason you never needed a membership previously was that the Haines Borough and museum were flush. Now both are struggling and your help is necessary to keep the doors…
It wasn’t a big surprise to read that in addition to not knowing how to swim or to drive a car, Adolf Hitler couldn’t dance. Donald Trump can’t dance either. He moves like a man who never had to court a woman. Dancing isn’t particularly difficult, but it’s impossible for control freaks, as it requires a person to momentarily let…
“We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return – prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms.” Henry David Thoreau “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” Friedrich Nietzsche “Destinations are downers.” Author Ken Ilgunas, after walking 1,900 miles across the Great Plains…
A friend of mine was at Haines Home Building, ordering an oil heater for a home she was building when the late lumberyard owner Bruce Gilbert interrupted her and asked, “An oil heater? What about the Challenge of the North?” Bruce’s implication, as kindly as it surely was intended, was that real Alaskans burn wood. My friend, an office worker…
One day a recreation trail will extend from Carr’s Cove to the Haines Airport. A person can say that with confidence because the route already exists and people are using it in droves – walkers, joggers, bicyclists, skiers, snowshoers and anglers. All that’s left are the formalities, which are considerable but not insurmountable: Getting the Valley of the Eagles Golf…
Tlingit legend tells of a landslide at Chilkoot Lake so large that the resulting shock wave washed parts of the historic village there into Lutak Inlet. In the late 1880s, a chunk of mountainside adjacent to the Chilkoot River “eye” collapsed, destroying an estimated 30 village structures and claiming several lives. A few years after George Shotridge started building of…
Congratulations. You’re in power. Now you must sit down with your fellow assembly members and come to some agreement about what you’d like to get done. This will be your most single most important achievement and it’s not as difficult as it sounds. But it must be done at least annually, perhaps even quarterly, or your leadership will be blown…
Infectious diseases have ravaged human populations regularly since forever. Bubonic plague. Spanish flu. Yellow fever. Tuberculosis. Polio. Measles. Mumps. Rubella. Ebola. West Nile. Most of us walk around with a permanent tattoo on our shoulders left by vaccinations to ward off childhood diseases that in an earlier age would have maimed or killed us. In Alaska, white man’s diseases like…