Greasy Bits
July 16, 2008
Filed in: Alaska, The Way We Live Now
You cannot travel to the 49th State, even the supposedly “pristine” parts where the machinery is not in eyesight, without feeling the sludgey sloosh of Big Oil beneath the workings of nearly everything that goes on.
I would never presume as a tourist to try and explicate the complicated and slippery relationship Alaksans seem to have with the petroleum industry. I’ve tried to make sense of these anecdotes and opinions, but can’t, other than to acknowledge that Alaskans are at least as good at the rest of the world in holding two or more contrary opinions in their minds at the same time.
Without further ado, random encounters of the greasy variety:
“It’s not the oil companies who are the enemy, it’s the people who use the oil.”
That’s from J, a late-30-something eco-tour guide father of five, by all indications an evangelical Christian (though he seemed careful to keep this last bit under wraps from his well-heeled, maybe even secular humanist clients from the Lower 48), a man whose family lives at least part of the year off the grid, with solar panels and a backup propane-fueled generator, who will cautiously talk about “the current administration” and its culpabilities vis a vis the environment if he feels his clients are inclined that way politically.
J explained, when I asked, a little bit about the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, the program where every October, every citizen, including the kiddies, who has been a legal resident for a least one year receives a check. From what I can tell, last year J in most likely got around $11,500 for his family of seven.
“I have no problem with them opening up ANWR. It would not be a problem if they started drilling up there.
Different day, different bay, different “J,” him also an operator of a wilderness lodge, this one much further out and more off the grid. He makes his money helping fishermen get to the fish and helping wildlife freaks like us drive around (gas!) in little ATV buggies looking for and then at bears.
When T and I admitted, under questioning, that we wrote things for a living (which is different from being a writer), he asked, “Do you know anything about grant writing?” He was interested in apply for grants to add to the wind turbine and solar panels he already has in place.
Same conversation, same breath, he said he’d worked on the North Slope for a year, was impressed with how the oil companies ran things, and didn’t think opening up the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve would have any negative impact on the land or the animals.
What he said was pretty interesting: apparently all the “vehicles” (and by the way he talked, it was pretty clear we were talking about some kind of massive trucks and other machinery things, not like an SUV-sized unit or anything) are all equipped with these big diapers so no drips or spills or other fluids will seep into the ground. Separately, he said there were as many “cops” as workers on the North Slope, but again he made it sound more like MPs or something than ordinary run-of-the-mill police officers. Apparently, it’s a rule, punishable by citation or whatever from one of these cops, that every driver has to walk all the way around his vehicle before getting in, because most accidents, they found, occur when drivers back up and hit something they didn’t realize was behind them.
[Huh: just went surfing for a picture of those diapers and found this instead, which doesn’t show any diapers but sure does seem to back up the point just below about what’s up on the North Slope. Blogger seems to be a pretty interesting and knowledgeable guy.]
“Prudhoe Bay is nightmare. It’s a pit. They count on people not going up there to see what’s going on.”
That was not an Alaskan but a Californian, R, with whom T and I had a beer in Homer’s super-funky dive bar, the Salty Dawg Saloon. He’s a 30-something school teacher, teaches Middle Schoolers somewhere south of Los Angeles in a town where the kids sound pretty hard up. He had taken the summer to ride, I think he said from Baja California, so from Mexico, all the way up to Prudhoe Bay, the tippy-tippy top of Alaska (and of our country), the place where they pump all that oil that flows through the pipeline that runs the length of the entire state down to Valdez, where…well, I’m hoping you know the Valdez part.
There’s a road, a service road, which I believe is still unpaved in most places, that runs beside the pipeline all the way up, and he was on that with his motorcycle most of the way.
He was unapologetic and visibly disgusted by what he saw of the oil-making machinery in Prudhoe Bay, that’s for sure. What if he had been talking to a couple of nice young Swellville free-market Republicans? We were pretty scruffy by that point, 2 or 3 days unwashed. I guess he assumed FMRs would never appear that beat in public. Even in a bar that dive-y (and I say that with deep affection. I adore dive bars, as long as middle-class me feels safe).
The gig in this place is you sign a dollar bill with a Sharpie and tack it to the ceiling. (I know, smart of them, what? Recession gets any deeper, they just take those bills off the wall and cash them, Sharpie signatures or no.) We gave R a dollar, because he didn’t seem like he was going to part with any of his for such a frivolous use, and all three of us signed one and tacked them up.
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Coming Out of the Country
July 06, 2008
Filed in: Alaska
Yes, the title is a play on John McPhee’s brilliant Coming into the Country, which I am about halfway through and will someday reagle/bore you with my thoughts on (I know that’s not quite 100 percent good grammar, but bear with me—I’m typing in the dark next to my snoring family). “In to the country” is a term Alaskans use, and McPhee liked enough to swipe for his title, for going deep into the bush, as if all the rest of Alaska is some kind of suburb and only the real wild stuff, the bush north and east of Fairbanks, is the real “country.”
They’re tough up here with their categorizations, baby. What we saw was pretty wild, pretty “country,” specially as compared to, say, Swellville or the rest of our suburban 70s upbringing.
We never went anywhere near McPhee’s kind of country, but up til the 4th of July (a cool coincidence), we had been going out and out and further out. Anchorage to Homer, then across the bay to Kachemak State park, then up to the face of the Gwruwink glacier...it’s country up there.
Then out the other way, north across Cook Inlet to the Lake Clark national park, which is, depending on which guide you trust, either the least-visited or the third-least- visited national park in the United States, the reason being you need either a small plane or a pretty sturdy boat to get there. There are no trails in that wilderness at all. The very few people over there, the ones who’ll show you the bears for a largo fee, stick to the coast. The bush is too dense to hike through for any distance. Also there are the volcanoes—we were closest to Mt. Iliamna --and of course the bears to contend with.
The point is, that was out there. Definitely as out there as I personally have ever been—looking at thousands of acres of wilderness that no human has ever set foot in, that’s pretty awe-inspiring, and humbling. ( I wonder how long it will hold; they’ve discovered gold of all things just down the peninsula from the Lake Clark park, and there are apparently plans afoot to build a nice, environmentally friendly mine.)
I wonder if T and I will ever be in a place that remote again in our lives—we have loved this, but we do have Italy and France and Spain and Hawaii on our life lists (and I of course have Kansas and ND too), and them college costs are coming closer every day.
I wonder if the boys will—will there be anything left by the time they get the means and wherewithal to travel on their own? Especially in Homer, we saw lots of 20-something kids from the Lower 48, girls with tats and boys with those little goat beards the guys all wear these days. Will either of my boys grow up to be one of those boys? (Just typing that and thinking of my wired-boy C makes me LOL, but you never know; he might make a digital conversion and give up his e-ways.)
Either way, from that moment standing on the volcanic sand as the tide was coming in, watching our Piper cub circle around to land and take us back to Homer, from that point forward we’ve been coming away from the country, coming back into civilization, adding baggage quite literally.
Like Adam and Eve, once we returned to Homer and a real hotel, our eyes were opened and we saw that we were dirty and disheveled and had been wearing the same hiking socks for three days in a row. Last night, I did laundry for the first time in a week (as opposed to my other life, when I literally do a load every single day).
Yesterday we made that big long beautiful drive up the coast and around Turnagain Arm back into Anchorage. I imagine that must always be a shock, even for native Alaskans, simply because Anchorage and its plain boring anywhere outskirts appear out of nowhere after a final turn in the road. Wilderness one mile; Office Depot the next.
Today is big carbon-footprint day for us— two flights that will take us to San Fran, then back across the continent tomorrow to Boston and, finally, back on into Swellville and our middle-middle-middle life (that’s middle-class, middle-aged, middle-brow, for those not in the know).
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Da Bears
July 05, 2008
Filed in: Alaska
OMG you guys we did it! We went on our bear safari and we survived—we survived the tiny, rattly little Piper Cub flying mere feet above the towering cliffs and angry gray ocean and huge threatening clouds of Cook Inlet, we survived the landing-on-the-sand business, and we survived seeing lots of bears, at first very far away, and then closer and closer and closer and then, right when we were getting ready to leave and our guard was down, VERY close. Which was both tremendously cool and a little bit scary.
This big guy (they use pig terms, don’t ask me why, it seems a little disrespectful, so the males are “boars” and the “females” are sows) who was too close to our little ATV buggy cart turned his head and sniffed the wind and looked straight at us for a minute too long, like he was wondering if he had time to kill and eat all before he went back to clamming on the tidal flats.
Our guide (our very nice but young and completely inexperienced guide, who’s not even from Alaska and hasn’t even been doing this bear thing for more than 8 weeks total) whispered in a low voice, “I think he smells that muffin box in your backpack.” Great. Killed by our own inability to eat breakfast before our 7:30 a.m. call at the teeny tiny airstrip.
But then the bear thought better of us and ambled off. Man, they have big behinds. Can I be petty and say that? Even the youngish girl bears, who “only” weigh 600-700 pounds, have a lot of junk in that there bear trunk. Every one of them looks like they pulled on a big hairy pair of bear pants before they climbed out of the bush to do their tourist thing. Given that each of us came to Alaska with exactly one pair of pants (what were we thinking? hello? Alaskans don’t even own shorts), we’re starting to look a little hairy-pantsed ourselves, so we could totally relate.
We saw two different sets of bear cubs, wildly cute, and here I’d love to show you a picture, but guess what? We forgot to charge the camera battery so we got exactly two pictures off before the thing died. So, trip of a lifetime, all in our heads. What can I say, at least we had our bear pants on.
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Back from the bush!
July 04, 2008
Filed in: Alaska
Okay, technically it’s not the bush we’re back from. The bush is interior Alaska, and we have been in (and are still in!) exterior Alaska, the coast, Kachemak Bay, but for the rest of the world in the lower 48, it counts as the bush, so I’m stealing it unfairly as my blog post title.
Too overwhelmed to tell it all—also a few scant hours of sleep/non-sleep away from our big bear/tiny plane adventure (gulp, yeah, we’re going forward with it, fears and economy be damned), but here are some bullet points for random digestion in the meantime:
* If there’s a state population center more generic than Anchorage, Alaska, with a spectacular mountainous getaway region closer than the Kenai peninsula, I’d like to hear about it. I’m being unfair, because we stayed in a disgusting airport motel south of the city and left from there, but everything I’ve read tells me we missed very little and perhaps nothing by skipping Anchorage. But either way, it’s almost impossible to describe how quickly the city and indeed all civilization falls away and you are driving through some of the most amazing terrain of your life. Snow-capped mountains, trecherous turns, staggering vistas, it’s all there, 30 mins or less from the city.
* Off the grid with the teen and tween: On the one hand, yeah, we were faking it, we had cabins with hard wooden planks rather than, say, a tent and the cabin had propane heat, so it barely counts. On the other hand, we were at the ends (or one end, anyway) of the world, Internet-free, electricity-free, people-free, noise-free, medical-help-free (see below) and C was only able to pull up one or two bars of service on his iPhone, and that was sitting on the railing of his cabin, hanging out by a hair’s breadth off the cliffs and into Kachemak Bay. Does that count as “off the grid”? I’m gonna give it to us, even if we were cheating a bit.
* Stuff we did that i was afraid/psyched to do: You guys, I hiked 2 miles into the Alaskan wilderness, put on the most unbelievable amount of gear (rain paints (!), polypro inner layer, North Face jacket, wool sox, hiking boots, rubber overboots, armpit-high waders, Patagonia rain jacket, rubber gloves, floatation device [has anyone else noticed they no longer call them “life preservers”?]) and flobbered into an inflatable kayak and paddled past these huge floating chunks of glacier to the face of an active glacier. It was what counts in Alaska as a boiling hot day and every now and then there’d be a huge sharp crack echoing through the otherwise complete silence, some chunk of ice calving off of some bigger piece. The newly calved pieces are so so blue, this strange almost threateningly beautiful kind of blue that doesn’t otherwise occur in nature. Mesmerizing. After awhile you have to look away, for fear you will abandon your suburban life for something altogether wilder. Anyhow, we survived: no one drowned, no one was eathen by bears.
* Wildlife we have seen thus far: Bald eagles (tons! they never lose their amazingness, every single one is a thrill, in fact I’m embarrassed to admit they make me feel like bursting into tears. Does this make me a patriot?), spruce grouse (and chicks!), arctic terns (actually trying to peck us to death as we inadvertently walked over their nesting grounds), sea otters, western jays, tufted puffins, horned puffins, harbor seals, pigeon guillemots (sp?), and these little western shrew thingies that are pretty much more common than mosquitoes but 2,000 times cuter. They look like every PetCo in America released all its hamsters into the wilderness at the same moment, only they’re even cuter than that.
* The bad news: SOMEbody, the same somebody who dragged everyone out of his wilderness cabin this morning for a way-too-early un-guide-assisted hike, busted up her knee big-time, causing us to hobble down the sheer cliff-face one painful misstep at a time in the rain (I would love to write “pouring rain” to make it even more dramatic, but in fact it was only a drizzle.) We weren’t in any actual danger of the life-threatening variety, but we felt that way a little bit for the two hours we were out there, ranger-free and wounded in the wilderness. Now we’re in some cruddy roadside motel in Homer AK and the feeling of remoteness and danger are both receding, even in the stabbing pain in our middle-aged kneecap is not.
More later. Must arise in 6 hours to mount the tiny plane to view the vicious bears at close range. What’s scarier, that or taking a newly reconnected teenager away once again from his wi-fi?
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Heading out …
June 30, 2008
Filed in: Alaska
Hokay! We made it as far as Anchorage (as C said, fine, can we turn around and go home now?) Answer: no.
Now we’re heading the 255-something miles down to Homer, then across Kachemak Bay to our wilderness lodge. Emphasis on wilderness. That means right now we’re sitting in our pitly hotel room next to the airport (emphasis on pit) charging every electronic device we own. Imagine venturing far enough off the grid that your cabin has no outlets to charge your MacBook. Horrors.
Also, kinda rethinking/getting cold feet about the whole bear-viewing trip. Check out these two headlines in this morning’s Anchorage Daily News:
and
Pilot trying to land dies in crash