Registration continues this Saturday, April 7, for little league baseball in Haines. Sign your child up. Little league builds character, and the worse player you are, the more character you build. When it comes to little league, it’s all good, and I don’t say that lightly. “It’s all good” is an expression I can’t stand. In the annals of little…
The Chilkat Indian Village of Klukwan rankled some people in Haines in November when it joined a lawsuit against the federal Bureau of Land Management, saying the agency should consider effects of a mine’s development now, not later. Constantine Metal Resources, the Canadian firm that’s exploring an ore deposit near the Canada border, has said it’s still a distance from…
We need to rally to save the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program, or some version of it, here in the Chilkat Valley. The Bigs are just the most recent victim of state budget cuts and the Alaska Legislature’s inability to maintain what makes Alaska great, but let’s save that for another day. Due to funding cuts, the Anchorage-based organization is laying…
While composing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson did a radical thing. In defining what rights men possessed by virtue of birth, he added “pursuit of happiness” along with “life” and “liberty.” Previous to the Declaration, Englishmen believed they were naturally entitled to “life, liberty and property.” Jefferson’s editing represented a tectonic shift in the world’s view of a person’s…
Alaskans emerge from winter on their hands and knees. The dark, cold, wind, rain and snow beat down on us until, by spring, we squeeze out from under them and can start to walk upright again. In varying degrees, winter freaks us out. Under its weight, we say and do crazy things we would never say or do in July.…
“How many people do you want at this event? We could bring lots of friends. We have ski races in the Yukon, but nothing like this.” These words, spoken to a local volunteer by a Canadian competitor in Saturday’s Kat to Koot Alpine Adventure Race, should be music to the ears of Haines tourism officials. For decades they’ve bandied…
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” from “A Few Page of Notes” by H.L. Mencken, 1915 “Schools are still like prisons, because we don’t learn how to live Everybody wants to take, nobody wants give…” from “Presidential Rag” by Arlo Guthrie, 1974 Get…
The media watchers are saying that Pyeongchang will be the least-viewed Olympics ever. That’s discouraging, but understandable. With all that’s on TV in our thousand-channel universe, it’s a wonder people still watch at all. Compared to something like a kid riding a bicycle off the roof of a house, even downhill skiing can seem pretty tame. For that I feel…
I think I’ve exceeded my tolerance level for mass shootings. How about you? There’s only so long that a person can witness madness without trying to stop it before acceptance of the madness become its own form of insanity. Imagine living in a city where each day you saw a person hit by an oncoming bus. After two or three…
For those of us who only occasionally get out of small-town Alaska, a trip to the Lower 48 is like an infant’s first experience of ice cream. We have no resistance. Sunshine. Restaurants. Live music. Bookstores. Universities. Strangers. What a fascinating world. I’ve long held that the only worthy companions for a trip south are friends from Haines. Only they…