Tag Archives: urban AK

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Being an Urban Alaskan #7 – Moose.

You’ve found your way to post #7 of my series of articles on the Urban Alaskan, written for my non-Alaska friends, where I talk about how my day to day experience is exactly like yours, mostly, except for the moose and timezone. You can catch up here.

I bet you think that because I work for Department of Fish & Game that I know everything there is to know about Moose. Well, that’s absolutely not true. I know about databases, we have biologists for moose. The few incontrovertible facts I know about moose can be summed into the following bullet points:

  • Alaskan moose are big,
  • They taste delicious in curry,
  • They are not scared of you (Usually. If one sees you with a gun, it might actually run away. This happened to me once when I was small game hunting up near Sutton.)

However, just because that’s about all I know about moose, doesn’t mean I can’t bang on about what moose mean for the Urban Alaskan.

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Living in urban Alaska does mean wildlife encounters. If you live here long enough, you will absolutely have encountered moose and bear, even if the biggest hike you take is a quick loop around the dog-park lake. Before I get too far into this, I also want to point out that Alaska urban life also means loads of things we haven’t got to worry about (read: we have stuff to worry about, you have stuff to worry about), ticks aren’t generally an issue, snakes don’t live here, spiders are always small enough to be squashed and none are poisonous, neither fleas nor cockroaches are a major issue. There are no fire ants in Alaska, we don’t have anything like scorpions, and even the frogs tend to be these cute little things about the size of my thumb. Opossums, skunks, and Raccoons are the realm of fairy-tale creatures and the biggest wild cat we have is the lynx, which you’d be hard-pressed to see even when looking. Of course, there are exceptions to all of this, but this is how I see it as an urban dweller. My point, again, is that we have our wildlife and you have yours, right?

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Have you ever seen that early 90s TV show Northern Exposure? The opening credits have a moose wandering though town, and while I never really watched it myself, I’d call that scene more or less accurate. Moose do just sort of strut around like they own the place. They’re giant Pleistocene hold-outs consisting of 50% legs, 50% hamburger, and 50% “don’t give a shit,” that still seem to remember when people were pretty new on the North American scene.

I think I could sum up living around moose in a few statements:

“That bloody bastard just broke my apple tree in half!”

“There’s a moose in the driveway and I can’t leave for work.”

“Koster! A moose hit my car this morning. I was stopped at the light and it came charging out of the woods and ran right into my quarter panel.”

Most suburban dwellers around the country are familiar with deer furtively emerging from the woods to chew on the tender grass or fallen apples or some such. Those encounters typically involve hushed voices and “oh, look, it’s a deer.” Then, the deer will scamper off and do whatever it is deer do under the cover of the forest. Possibly smoke and drink. I don’t know, I’m not a deer.

With Moose, this simply doesn’t happen. If they were smoking and drinking, you’d better believe they’d do it right there in front of you. In fact, you could stand on your front porch banging pots and pans and shouting at the top of your lungs and the best you might get is a sour look from the moose and a sore throat from shouting.

If you’re very lucky, the moose will carry on licking the salt from your car or decimating your prize apple trees. If not, well, you’ll be tramped into an unpleasant jelly-like stain.

While a lot of noise is made about bears, because they’re big and strong and sometimes maul people, human-moose interactions are way more common and plenty dangerous. Plus a moose will absolutely maul the shit out of your car. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game reports that nearly 800 moose are killed in motor-vehicle accidents every year on urban Alaskan roadways. That may not seem like a tremendous amount from the perspective of a state this size, after all, deer are hit all the time in the lower 48, aren’t they? Not the same, friend, not the same at all. Hitting a moose is the same as hitting 7-8 deer all at the same time. While getting hit by a car is a death sentence for a moose, it is also an alarmingly frequent death sentence for the car.

I’m sure at this point, you might be asking yourself. Wow. A thousand pound animal gets hit by a car. Seems like an awful waste of perfectly good meat, that… No? Not thinking that? That’s because you’re not from here. The thing is that if you hit a moose with your car, by law, the moose meat doesn’t belong to you. It’s property of the state, and the state gives the meat to charities. Wow – great idea eh? Yes, it is and to add a cherry on top charities in this state also include family groups of 4 or more families. So, it comes around to this: If you want to eat roadkill, then you better round up some friends and call the Alaska State Troopers to get on the damn list.

And one last fun anecdote before I leave you without a conclusion to satisfactorily sum up how living here with moose is exactly like living anywhere else without them. I was on the list with some friends a few years back. So, one week, when my wife was out of town with our youngest son and I was at home with the older kids, I was woken up at 4am. I checked the caller-ID. Alaska State Troopers. You ever had a GOOD call from the state troopers at 4am? No, me either. Well, until that day. Turns out someone had hit a moose and it was our group’s turn. After a full day of butchering with friends at the kitchen table, we had a freezer full of moose.

The whole point of this post is to describe the realities of living with moose, which do suck and all urban Alaskans can commiserate with the story of being trapped inside the house by a moose who refuses to leave. However, if you’re cautious and respect the animals, they’ll generally leave you alone and it winds up being a fun little thing to watch them stomp through the yard onto better munching grounds. It’s really a lot like watching the deer down south, but with plenty of time to take a good picture.

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Being an Urban Alaskan #5 – Do you really get paid to live in AK?

money-1428594_1280You’ve found your way to post #5 of my series of articles on the Urban Alaskan, written for my non-Alaska friends, where I talk about how my day to day experience is exactly like yours, mostly, except for the moose and timezone. If you’d like to catch up, you can check here.

To answer the question in short, Yes. We get paid a Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) each year. We don’t pay any sort of state taxes, however cities and boroughs are a bit different, each having a patchwork of sales and property taxes. Before I go on about this at all, I want to be clear, one thing the PFD is NOT is universal basic income. Regardless of what Mark Zuckerburg said about it, or anyone else. The PFD is the tip of an odd regulatory iceberg that is somehow both socialist and fascist. In this state, even in our little urban corners, land owners only own the surface. Everything below ground is available for sale to the highest bidder. This means that it’s totally possible for a company to drill for oil under your house without any sort of personal compensation. The PFD is our consolation prize for having the minerals sold out from beneath us. On one hand it’s a totally equitable system where everyone shares the wealth, on the other, it’s a system where big companies run everything and dole out a little cash to make it seem above board.

The amount of the PFD varies quite a bit. When I first wrote this blog it was fairly high (maybe 1500?). As I write this now in 2021, we’re not likely to get one, but if we do, it won’t exceed about $600/person. In general, the value of the PFD has a lot more to do with the stock market than oil these days. The state has MANY billions of dollars invested in various places. Alaskan residents are given equal shares of ½ the five year average net earnings of the PFD or something like that. Right now these payments are in jeopardy due to a massive fiscal crisis. I expect that will persist.

What’s interesting about the PFD isn’t the fact that we get money. I think it’s the PFD sales. At this point you might ask, “PFD sales? What the hell is this?” Put this picture in your mind: A twenty foot tall stack of flat-screen TV boxes. Back when I was in college, before flat-screens were in wide use, we had a couple of really good PFD years. I recall walking into Fred Meyer and seeing TVs stacked to the ceiling. This didn’t actually even cause me to stop and think at the time. I mean, hell, everyone was flush with a couple thousand bucks a person seems like it’d be as good a time as any to buy a TV. I didn’t think about it until I moved to Maryland and there was no PFD or PFD sales.

Some years ago (maybe 15?), when oil was astronomical AND the stock market was clipping along, we had a two-thousand dollar PFD PLUS Sarah Palin gave everyone another $1,000 ‘energy bonus’, which rang up to a solid $3,000/person across the state. There is a reason she’s well liked here. Overnight, my bank account went from being a mud-puddle in a desert to a Scrooge McDuck swimming-pool. That’s the year I put the addition on the house.

I can’t speak for rural residents, but for an urban Alaskan, the PFD has become a pretty routine part of life that, more often than not, gets put to some practical use with a bit of splurge. Each year, we apply and receive our money. Typically, we use it for mundane things, like fixing the car or paying off some debt.

There it is – we get a PFD. No, it’s not anything like what folks experience in the lower-48, but also recall that food and things (like lumber or cement) cost a lot more here, as does fuel (in spite of owning vast oil reserves), and to be honest, paychecks aren’t dramatically better here than elsewhere, in some cases rather considerably less than industry standard. While it sounds cool, it’s just helping us to fill in the cracks and help us forget that an oil company might very well just drill our water out from under us at any moment.

Next Up: Do you use American Money? (Misconceptions)

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Being an urban Alaskan #4 – Yes, it’s bloody dangerous to live here, even in the city

IMG_2442[Updated August 2021] You’ve found your way to post #4 of my series of articles on the Urban Alaskan, written for my non-Alaska friends, where I talk about how my day to day experience is exactly like yours, mostly, except for the moose and timezone. If you want to catch up, you can see post #3 here.

August marks the anniversary of when my brother-in-law went missing, more than 20 years ago as I write this. It was a beautiful sunny day, and for Seward, AK, that’s a rare thing. Actually, the whole summer had been a nice. I think that was the same summer it hit 90 in downtown Seward and the pavement buckled, something not repeated until the summer of 2019. Stewart, my wife’s twin, decided to go to Bear Lake for a spin around on a jet-ski on his day off. I no longer recall if he was a deck-hand on a fishing boat or was doing guiding over in Bristol Bay at that point. Anyhow, somewhere in there things took a tragic turn. Nobody knows what actually happened. He had a couple of friends with him, but they were otherwise occupied or out of sight when the incident occurred. At this point it’s all rather irrelevant.

Alaskan Lakes are mostly very, exceptionally, cold. Typically, the temperature of an Alaskan lake isn’t a great deal higher than freezing. With water that cold, hypothermia happens so quickly you might only have a couple of minutes. Yes, you can survive for a surprising amount of time in some of these lakes, but as a rule, you’d better be wearing a life preserver. In the vast majority of circumstances, if you fall into the water, you’re not going to have the strength to swim to shore if you’re any distance in at all. There are exceptions to this, especially around Anchorage, but I can also tell you that swimming for me as a child meant wading into your knees and completely losing feeling for a few minutes. This also made my boy scout swimming test absolute hell because I was so terrified of the cold water, I couldn’t jump in for the swim, even though the water was cold but not deadly. At this point, folks from the lower-48 might conclude that I’m exaggerating and it doesn’t happen that fast, but it does. Falling into a lake without a life preserver, even for an excellent swimmer can be a death sentence. Add physical injury to that and your odds of survival are about as good as jumping from a very high place. Because of the icy water, everything sinks too. So, not only did he go missing, he stayed missing for days before they were able to find him at the bottom of that unforgiving lake.

I know these sorts of accidents happen everywhere. It’s the nature of being human – shit happens and sometimes we pay for it with our lives. However, nearly everyone who has lived up here for any significant amount of time knows someone who has died attempting to enjoy the outdoors (or at the very least has a 1-off). Sometimes it’s an accident that could’ve happened anywhere – jet ski accident or the like. Other times it’s a rare accident. For example, I knew a guy from high-school who died in an avalanche a few years after we graduated. Deadly bear maulings, even very close to Anchorage, aren’t unheard of. There’s also the classic story of the person who got stuck in the mud in Turnagain arm and drowned from fast moving tides. The real story comes from north of Anchorage involving a soldier and his friends. On top of that, there are plenty of stories with people going off on what we all trick ourselves into believing is an easy day-hike alone only to suffer an injury and subsequently die of exposure. In 2021 a woman went missing not far from Palmer after being charged by a bear. They searched two days and didn’t find her. In her case, she made her way to a main road and survived. However, this illustrates that even close to population, you can go missing badly enough that teams of searchers may never find you.

Now, I’ve said all of this but I don’t think the exotic ways people die up here is actually particularly unique. After all, nobody was ever eaten by a gator up here or taken up in a tornado. What is unique is the ultra-low population densities. So, when something does happen. It can take days or weeks before someone happens across you, even when they’re looking for you. What’s more, when this sort of thing happens, odds are that your extended family is very far away indeed, so pulling together in that family way is difficult to impossible. I think this is really what gives urban Alaskans the sense of remoteness that we probably don’t deserve. After all, if I can go have lunch at a Subway sandwich shop and in twenty minutes, ON FOOT, be so remote that even after years of searching nobody could find my mangled body at the bottom of that ravine, it can set up some pretty confusing dichotomies. On one hand, wilderness, on the other, city life. It’s weird and dangerous.

Next up: Do you really get paid to live in Alaska?