When I was a child, my father would sing to me to sleep with “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” an ode to hobos and a life lived freely as a wandering bum. On the Big Rock Candy Mountain, lemonade bubbled up from springs, cigarettes grew on trees and they hung the jerk who invented work. It was an odd lullaby.…
I knew about four people in Alaska when I was invited to an “orphan’s Thanksgiving” in Anchorage in 1984. I had overstayed my plans to head south at summer’s end and was living in an apartment behind a strip mall on dreary East Tudor Road. November had been the coldest and darkest of my experiences with cold and dark. I…
Sen. Murkowski: Congratulations on your recent re-election. I’m sorry that the nature of politics compelled you to go on television during the campaign saying that you loved Alaska to the bottom of your heart. Your long career in office leaves no doubt that you are most dedicated to our state, exponentially more so than your recent challenger. I am writing…
A few weeks when I became so obsessed in my efforts to catch a coho I started trolling Main Street looking for anyone who could help me get my canoe in the water, I got to thinking about Jack Hemingway. The son of Ernest, the famous writer, Jack was an angler so possessed that he packed his fly rod when…
Mary Peltola stands a chance of being re-elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. If she does, Democrats might be onto a formula for winning and holding statewide office, but only if the Alaska Republican Party clown car stays full of shills, carpet-baggers and stooges. Peltola would be no match for a Jay Hammond or even a Wally Hickel or…
Chances are, your local librarian is a subversive, and if you’re religious, you should thank God for that. Or perhaps not. God is not a free-thinker, at least he wasn’t in the Old Testament. Old God took an eye for an eye. He smote the Philistines. And he wasn’t tolerant of you thinking there might be other gods every bit…
The summer of 1987 was a heady time in Haines journalism, or it seemed that way to me. I was sole reporter for the Chilkat Valley News when Mike Sica and Barnaby Dow of KHNS covered area news like white on snow. Dow, the Haines reporter, was building a journalism resume impressive enough to get him out of town before…
My high school English teacher wrote recently, discouraged by the state of the nation, as are so many of us. Pizza Joe, our town’s street-corner philosopher, says it’s because we believed the lies we were taught as children. George Washington could not tell a lie. It took until midway through the Trump administration and much hand-wringing by the establishment press…
Judging from the state of the world, it’s fair to say that most people should not have children. Most people make lousy parents. Their children, small or grown, are a wreck. They are selfish and self-serving. They are busy killing themselves, each other and our planet, taking many of Earth’s other creatures with them without batting an eyelash. Children are…
When the machine-gun was invented, people said it meant the end of war because such an efficient killing machine would be inhumane to use, even on soldiers. When the airplane was invented, people said it meant an end to war because aerial bombing would kill too many innocent civilians. When the atom bomb was invented, people said it meant the…