I\u2019ve recently been travelling in the Midwest, and it reminded me of the seven basic questions people always ask when I say I\u2019m from Alaska.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ll start with one of my favorites, The Uninformed. \u201cSo do you live in igloos? Do you know Eskimos? Does it snow all the time?\u201d<\/p>\n
Ugh. No. And please don\u2019t call all Alaska Natives \u201cEskimos,\u201d as that usage is a \u2014 wait, never mind. Yes. Yes we do, and we ride polar bears to school and we all wear furry parkas all the time. The downsides are cleaning polar bear stables, trying to transfer dollars into beaver pelts for currency, and the 45 days of pure darkness (on account of the vampires). The upside is that our Coca-Cola is never warm.<\/p>\n
The Somewhat Informed. \u201cSo it\u2019s just like Ice Road Truckers and Deadliest Catch, right?\u201d<\/p>\n
No! No it is not. I mean, for truckers and commercial fishermen, it might be a little like those shows, but as we all know, reality TV is just a distant second cousin of reality. I\u2019ve never watched the shows, but I often wish what people knew about Alaska wasn\u2019t just drama and danger. But if they made a show about trying to keep ravens out of your trash, no one would watch it.<\/p>\n
The Tourist. \u201cOh I\u2019ve been there on a cruise.\u201d<\/p>\n
As much as part of me wants to raise my nose at this kind of travel, it\u2019s honestly the closest a lot of people are going to get to the fresh, tree-combed air and large horizons of uninhabited mountainsides of Alaska, so I get it. A lot of times people will follow this up, saying they wish they could have spent more time at each port, which sometimes I take as an opportunity to invite them to take our marine highway system if they ever want to return.<\/p>\n
The Traveler. \u201cI want to travel to Alaska someday!\u201d<\/p>\n
Yes you do! And I hope you make it up here. But where do you mean? Remember, Alaska is a state that, put on a map of the contiguous U.S., stretches from Minnesota to Georgia to Nevada. It\u2019s good to have a plan! Are you into temperate rainforests? Bitterly sheer, icy mountain ranges? Vast expanses of taiga? Pleasant forests of cottonwood? You\u2019ll have a much better trip if you do the research first about which part you want to see. You might be surprised!<\/p>\n
The McCandless. \u201cI want to go out alone in the Alaskan wilderness by myself and live off the land.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now, I do have respect for this, in the sense that it\u2019s a tradition. There has been a looming zeitgeist of a Thoreau-ish drive for independence in colonial America since before John Hancock put down his John Hancock. It\u2019s often framed in terms of proving oneself, of decrying a capitalist mentality, or maybe just being \u201cmacho.\u201d But many fail to grasp that so much of their perceived outdoorsmanship is not always transferable to this \u201cwilderness,\u201d and they often end up requiring rescue resources. Sometimes they don\u2019t make it out at all.<\/p>\n
The Distant Relative. \u201cMy brother\u2019s niece\u2019s mother lives in Alaska!\u201d<\/p>\n
Do they live in Juneau? What\u2019s their first and last name? Can I see a picture of their face so I know if I saw them at Fred Meyer? Wait \u2014 don\u2019t go! It\u2019s not as creepy as it sounds! Do they have a Honda CRV?<\/p>\n
The Climate Curious. I\u2019ve gotten two main comments about climate change. The first one is \u201cI bet Alaskans think global warming is ridiculous!\u201d and the other is \u201cYou\u2019re from Alaska? What is climate change like?\u201d I think that what a lot of people don\u2019t realize is that climate change isn\u2019t something you can always feel in terms of temperature and snowfall, since those fluctuate pretty rapidly over cycles that are several years long, and that it\u2019s not just the problem of polar bears in Barrow, but that it\u2019s truly a global concern that affects many aspects of life all over the globe.<\/p>\n
And lastly, a bonus. I call this one The 2008. I think we\u2019re all happy we don\u2019t have to answer this one anymore: \u201cWhat do you think of Sarah Palin?\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2022 Guy About Town appears the first and third Sunday of every month and includes seasonal musings on what changes and what doesn\u2019t in a small town. Guy can be reached at unzicker.music@gmail.com.<\/b><\/p>\n
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I\u2019ve recently been travelling in the Midwest, and it reminded me of the seven basic questions people always ask when I say I\u2019m from Alaska. We\u2019ll start with one of my favorites, The Uninformed. \u201cSo do you live in igloos? Do you know Eskimos? Does it snow all the time?\u201d Ugh. No. And please don\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":7,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-10889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10889\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10889"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=10889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}