Alaska's mix of people a very special thing

Our local library’s reading group discussion on the “The Great Alone” — a novel set in Alaska — took me back to the 14 years (1984-98) our family lived there. I wouldn’t do it again, but I’m glad I did it once.

One of the things the rural Alaskan experience gave me is an acceptance for all kinds of people and situations. There was Granny. An old Alaskan sourdough for sure. She taught our kids how to make homemade noodles. A tiny lady who liked her bottle of booze. She wasn’t giving that up at her age. So when she called one night and needed me to make a trip to the liquor store, I did. It was no time to go sanctimonious. I’d lost count by then of the number of times Terry had made runs on my behalf to the grocery store for chocolate bars.

There was our daughter’s native Alaskan classmate and friend. His mother’s boyfriend had the bad sense to attack her. He shot the guy. He was still in junior high. I subbed one day for a class he was in. And told him he did right, protecting his mother.

My good friend for the longest time did her dishes in the bathtub because she had no sink in her makeshift kitchen. Some of our children’s friends had no running water in their homes. After our youngest overnighted in one of these places, our family did the head lice dance.

When the high school counselor called and said a student — who was storing his backpack in the man’s office, and moving around among fellow classmates — needed permanent lodging in order to stay in school, we were full up. We found a spot for him downstairs on a cot beside the woodstove. Not much privacy. But far better than the setting he’d run from.

Nothing sounds more down home Alaskan than the story Terry’s cousin’s wife — an elementary school principal for a time — tells from those days. A student needed some help with hygiene. The mother was called in to discuss the matter. Her take on the whole thing, “Well, she had clean clothes out on the porch. All she had to do was bring something in and thaw it out!”

Alaska’s such a mix of people. We also had friends who owned float planes and lived in designer houses and vacationed in Hawaii. What I loved about life there — everyone’s in it together.

It’s a faraway, off-to-itself sort of place. But that’s the very thing that brings people close.