Portrait of Alaska [antikvár]

ALASKAN LIGHT When I returned to Alaska after sixteen years Outside, the first thing that struck me was the quality of light. It made me remember something deep inside I thought I'd forgotten. How to describe that? It's harder to talk about the feeling of a certain kind of light on a mountainside than it is to feel the tears in your eyes when you see it. Alaskan Born in Fairbanks i first discovered it when I was six: the word Outside is different. When I said "Outside" Outside, no one knew what I meant. To Alaskans, Outside, spelled with a capital O, means any place outside of Alaska, usually "the Lower 48" or the contiguous United States. The expression captures the Alaskan frame of reference: Alaska-the Great Land, the Last Frontier-forms the center of the world the rest is Outside.Our attitude seems to spring, historically from the land itself: vast, unknown, stunningly beautiful and wild, exotic, challenging, remote. Even as we move into the international mainstream via the economy transportation, and communication, Alaska— to Alaskans-remains the hub. But neither the terminology nor the attitude accounted for my awareness about Outside at age six. Nor was it that it took six or more hours aboard an airplane to get from Anchorage to Seattle. Like most Alaskan children, I had grown up flying. Superimpose a map of Alaska onto one of the United States, and it stretches from Florida to California, from Texas to the Canadian border. Cut Alaska's 586,000 square miles in half, and Texas would become the third largest state. Between Ketchikan at the tip of Southeastern and Alaska's westernmost point, Attu Island, lie more than twenty-two hundred miles. (The international dateline bends far out around the Aleutian Chain to include all of Alaska in today) Long distances did not tell me Outside is different. But any roads at all make the Lower 48 totally unique for many kinds from Alaska's several hundred villages, unconnected by highway to anywhere else. As one woman who grew up in Sitka on Baranof Island put it, "Outside, you could drive for more than an hour in one direction, and not reach the end of the road. Plus you could drive to other cities." Alaska's capital, Juneau, can be reached only by plane and boat. Glaciers and mountains block road building to this mainland community. We saw deer by the side of the road in Washington State, so I did not realize that most places in America do not have wild animals roaming freely I was accustomed to spotting moose (sometimes in our back yard), bear, beaver, mountain sheep and goats, plus occasional wolves, caribou, and foxes. So what made it different out there? The light. Or rather, the lack of light. Here it was, the middle of summer Outside-and it became dark at night! With all the certainty of a six year old, I knew that Anyone Who Knew Anything About The World knew that summertime means daylight. It gets dark in the winter As I have grown up, I have come to understand many more things which made Alaska different from the rest of the world. Some will continue to set Alaska uniquely apart when the babiesof today begin comparing their world with Outside. And some will exist as memories for their parents, like many things I took for granted as recently as ten years ago. Of course, countless changes have been evolving, with their roots reaching back decades and centuries. Alaska became America's "First Frontiéi^' with the migration of people over the Bering Sea land bridge from Asia fifteen thousand to forty thousand years ago. But since 1970, Alaska has experienced more dramatic change overall than in any other period: changing life-styles, the Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act, the pipeline, the development of natural resources, and the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. It is easy to make judgments about new versus old, to want things to stay the same and not change. But as one Tlingit Indian man puts it, "Once you take on something new, you change____ Ifs what you do—what you keep as value from old times and how you put that into today that counts." With fewer than half a million people, Alaska is among the states with the fewest number of residents. If Manhattan Island's population density matched ours, seventeen people would live there. Yet, since the mid-1970s, the number of people in the 49th State has been growing atone of the country's fastest rates. It is a standing joke that every newcomer thinks no one else should be allowed to move to Alaska. We who live hereseefewerfami liar faces as we travel. More people mean more change: more needs and wants; more cars, roads, houses; more stores, theaters, art galleries; more ideas, opportunities, possibilities. With the vitality of a teenager, Alaska is changing, growing, getting to know itself, deciding who it is and where it fits in the wodd. The world Alaska comes from the Aleut Alashka, or Great Land. Many things beyond mere size distinguish Alaska among the states. It has ten rivers over three hundred miles long, three million lakes larger than twenty acres, more than half the world's glaciers, and nineteen mountains higher than fourteen thousand feet, including North America's tallest peak. Mount McKinley (Denali), 20,060 feet by the latest measurements. Alaska has places with more precipitation than anywhere in the forty-eight contiguous states—more than two hundred fifty inches fall each year at MacLeod Harbor, on Montague Island— and places with close to the least-only about five inches fall each year at Point Barrow. Geologically Alaska has a lot going on: more than half the state is seismically active, with earthquakes (more than 10 percent of the world's tremors occur here) and extensive volcanic eruptions.