Yikes! I'm in Alaska (part 2)

Years ago, when I was driving to Pittsburgh, a 7-hour trip, to give two talks at a synagogue, I listened to an audiobook that included a chapter about Henry Knox, for whom Fort Knox (Tennessee) is named. Between November, 1775 and January, 1776, Knox had dragged 60 tons of cannon from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston across 300 miles of snowy landscape in the dead of winter via ox-drawn sledges, horses and manpower. The route included two semi-frozen rivers, the Berkshire mountains, and numerous swamps. General Washington was able to use these heavy weapons to neutralize British warships and drive them from the Boston harbor. The sheer physical effort of Knox’s “noble train of artillery,” as it came to be called, was beyond my comprehension — me, zooming along in a nicely air-conditioned car with GPS and bottled water and an audio book. The greatest danger I faced was hemorrhoids from the long drive.

Here in Alaska, I’m being reminded every hour of the contrast between the cozily civilized life I live and the hardscrabble, enormously effortful lives of Alaska’s indigenous people and the non-indigenous pioneers who joined them during the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

Like this: At our first dinner on our Oceania cruise, I enjoyed a smorgasbord of lobster tails, white-tail sushi, pork loin, baked potato, freshly steamed vegetables, and white wine. (There were probably a couple of other items on my plate that I’ve forgotten.) Never mind my easy drive to Pittsburgh — this 50th-anniversary cruise of ours is sublimely pampering, so much so that I would be very uncomfortable with its utter classiness were it not a once-in-a-lifetime indulgence, and if not for the utmost friendliness of the international staff.

O, it’s hard on the conscience to be a red-diaper baby.

Twelve hours later, I found myself in the small Pratt Museum in Homer, Alaska (population 5,500) watching a film about a homesteader, Ruth Kilcher, who abandoned a career as an opera singer in Switzerland to come to the Homer region with her husband and their three little girls in the 1940s. They lived in a tiny cabin on 160 wilderness acres, twelve miles distant from Homer. Without electricity and without power tools, they cleared the land and logged trees with a team of horses, then built a house by hand, and ultimately raised eight children there. To get into town for supplies, they would drive a horse-drawn wagon the twelve miles at low tide, spend the night, and return at the next low tide.

Ruth’s workload was endless, and endlessly grueling, much of it happening without her husband’s presence, as he’d be away from home for days of hunting, fishing, bartering, socializing. Just doing the laundry — eight children! — involved her toting buckets and buckets of water and scrubbing at a washboard all day. In the film, her grown daughters all complain about how preoccupied their mom inevitably was (though she was singing all the time), yet they sympathize enormously with her for being consumed by so many burdens.

What was it all about? Her son sums up the Alaska mystique nicely in the film: “You know that you’re lonely because you’re alone — you’re not lonely in a big ol’ crowd.”

And here I thought I was the one who doesn’t like crowds!

In Homer (not named for Homer Simpson, unfortunately) I also learned that the Exxon Valdez oil spill, had it occurred on the east coast of the lower 48 states, would have stretched from New York to Charleston, SC; that the Aleutian Islands, to the west of here, number over 200, with some 57 volcanos, and stretch out for 1,200 miles; that the skeletal part of a whale’s fins looks exactly like a four-fingered hand; that Russia’s treatment of indigenous Alaskans in the 19th century resembled its treatment of Ukraine in the 21st; that if you see a moose (which we did, two of them, in the woods right behind the museum), back off and don’t stare into her eyes; and that a great many Alaskans go to Hawaii during the winter. We were told that there are even special airfares to accommodate them.

Finally, the museum has a gorgeous exhibit of large acrylic paintings by Marjorie Scholl, a Homer artist, featuring local people in birch forests. Her subjects are white, black, brown, indigenous, trans, young, old, delightfully diverse — which had me wondering how Alaska could have given 53 percent of its votes to Donald Trump in 2020. Maybe rugged individualists don’t go to museums?