This is part 1 of Alaska Confidential, a book I wrote about my experiences of growing up in Fairbanks, Alaska.
So what's Alaska like? Any Alaskan-born person like myself has heard this too many times to count. I always reply that Alaska is far too vast and intricately diverse to sum up in a general sense.
Most places are, but it’s within the realm of possibility to explain what, say, New Hampshire is like to a reasonably accurate degree. I've been there a few times, and I can tell you what it's like for the most part. It's very white, quaint, and the people are friendly. That's not profound, but could feasibly give a foreigner a handle on it. I've been to Delaware. There's a beach, some rich people, and some poor folks. Alaska is 267 times larger than Delaware.
It’s roughly a fourth the size of the continental United States. If you superimposed it onto the map, the branches of its islands would stretch from Atlanta to San Francisco. This would make an attempt at summarizing the entire state an exercise in futility. If you're from Fargo do you know much about Florida?
The TV show Northern Exposure used to come on sometimes, a mundane exercise in entertainment. It didn't represent an accurate portrayal of life anywhere in Alaska, and one could surmise that the writers of the show had never even spent time in the cold.
The characters on the show weren't afraid of a moose which roamed the town, and would have eventually maimed several of them. They would wear hats on their ears but leave their hands exposed, which, if it were cold enough to necessitate a hat, would leave their fingers somewhere between icy and amputated, which is moot because they’d instinctively be shoved into pockets anyway - but the actors didn’t do that. And the lack of authenticity hardly ended there.
The characters in shows and movies like this consistently make mistakes which would lead to their demise. In The Revenant, a masterpiece of cinematography, the characters routinely jump into barely thawed water and then get out as if they stepped out of a lukewarm bath. That water would lead to immediate hypothermia, if the pelts they were wearing didn’t drag them to the bottom and kill them first.
These contrivances hardly went unnoticed when being viewed by Alaskans, but nobody took offense (outside of the offensive number of times a Filipino guy would portray a Native Alaskan.) In general, we were just confused as to how the writers could be so inept, yet we understood it was entertainment, seeking the most engaging possible outcome.
Yet, I don't believe the audience of these shows really considered it. Meanwhile I was well aware that everyone from California wasn't a blond surfer and everyone from Texas wasn't a cowboy with a beer belly, yet somehow everyone from Alaska was a missed stereotype. I had been aware of these things since the age of seven or so, when I first started watching media.
When I began travelling after I'd left Alaska, most people on the West Coast had met a Northerner, yet conversations with people who were ignorant to places outside of their neighborhoods were typical.
This was further exemplified when I visited the South and the East, where I began telling people I was from Seattle when asked that boring introductory question, because I was sick of talking about it. If you answer truthfully to the wrong person you can have an uncomfortable situation on your hands, and you know the script before this conversation even begins.
You'll be talking to some guy, let’s say he's an Italian from Baltimore. Maybe you met him at a party while visiting a friend in college.
"Where are you from?" he'll ask, expecting you to say someplace within the same five square miles he grew up, some tri-state area, where the people across the border say "hoagie" instead of "sub sandwich" and everyone is so wildly different.
"Alaska," you'll answer, and the guy will shoot a glance back as if you're fucking with him, an accusatory assessment. As if you walked up to him and proclaimed this, when he in fact broached the subject. Now he has a lot of follow-up questions to make sure your story checks out, even though you have no desire to impress him or even talk to him.
The interrogation usually follows the same pattern. Keep in mind, if an Alaskan inversely asked these questions to someone from the lower forty-eight, they would be considered dense because in a conceptual sense these questions lend themselves to an individual who is unable to grasp a slight deviation from his or her sense of normalcy. These can take place in any order.
"Uh huh, so, were you born there?" This is the guy accusing you of making up an angle. Maybe you lived in several different places and picked the most interesting one to present yourself as being from. Yet, if someone tells me they are from Missouri, I don't immediately ask them if they were born in Missouri. It doesn't matter, and I assume that they probably were.
Perplexed, this pizza shop dwelling neanderthal, still inherently suspicious of anyone who has ventured outside of their birthplace, will follow up with "So, you like, went to school up there?"
Yeah. Again, if I am from a place, it’s presumed that means I grew up there, which would entail attending school.
Inevitably, they move onto the tidbit that everyone seems to know, no matter how bereft of an education or understanding of basic science they may be . . .
"So, is it like, light all the time there?"
The answer to this question necessitates a lesson in astronomy and of the axis of the earth and how this affects how the sun shines on its top and bottom, which tends to lead them to pull on their lip pretty quickly.
"What part are you from?" they’ll now interrupt.
"Fairbanks."
They’ll shake this statement off and say,
"My aunt went there, I can't remember what part," trying to relate to you now. When this comes up they are, without fail, one hundred percent of the time, talking about someone they knew that went on a cruise ship. If you talk to people who grew up in these coastal destinations, they will tell you that the number one question that people ask when they step off of the cruise ship is "What's the elevation here?" It's the ocean, you miserable drunken fool.
"Ketchikan, Anchorage, Kenai?" I'll suggest, knowing these cruise ship routes from years of these mind-numbing conversations.
"Yeah, I think that's it” they'll say helplessly, actually having no idea.
"I grew up in Fairbanks, it's three hundred and fifty miles inland from the ocean. It's called the Interior," I'll say, hoping to leave them with a smidgeon of perspective, yet I know it won't stick.
I also know these dullards will be telling their roommate later that they met a guy from Alaska tonight, and he was kinda cool, or he was a huge dick. I know they'll never look up how the midnight sun works, and why it's darker at the equator than the poles.
I've heard it all. Did you have electricity? Did you live in an igloo? I don't dignify these people anymore. I can't tell you about Alaska. I can tell you about where I grew up, in Fairbanks, and I know nuance can be frustrating, as it's so easy to summarize people and things, to proclaim you've got it all figured out.
I don't have Fairbanks figured out, but I can try and explain it. I don't consider myself blessed or cursed, but maybe lucky that I didn't have the typical American experience. I don't know where I'd be right now if I grew up in Orange County. I presume I'd be more adjusted, and, much like that area, homogenized in many ways.
These stories are not sensational. They don’t involve slaying packs of stray wolves, (which are all stray, by the way.) I didn’t have any spiritual awakening when I lived in Fairbanks, and I don’t sit on the porch misty-eyed telling stories of an elderly Indian woman who changed my perspective on life - at least not every night.
This was a singular life, a unique experience. They happen all over the world, every day. You probably wouldn’t expect this is what Fairbanks, Alaska, was like for one particular person, and that’s why I wrote this book.
Spot on!