Inescapable Roots: An Essay on Place
A Western Star Dumptruck, Headed up the Glenn Highway
When my grandma Claire came to the Matanuska Valley in 1936, its population was somewhere around 700 residents. Born outside of Buffalo, NY in 1914, her adolescence and early adulthood was intrinsically shaped by the Great Depression – a framework from which she developed a lifelong love of education and honest work. Amidst adverse circumstances, she took classes in nursing eventually earning herself a job in a tuberculosis annex at a hospital in Detroit. From there, she was offered a position at the old Alaska Engineering Commission hospital in Anchorage (sometimes referred to as the Alaska Railroad hospital), but was immediately put on a train and transferred to the new Matanuska Colony to aid the fight against tuberculosis which had ravaged newcomers and indigenous populations alike.
Two years later she would marry my grandpa Herb, a farm boy from South Dakota who had studied banking before following his older brother to the then territorial capital of Alaska – Juneau. Somewhere along the way, he decided there was money to be made in the Matanuska Valley as a truck and trailer operator; one who could, in particular, help to haul heavy equipment and supplies to and from the Chickaloon and Sutton coal fields. In 1940, he established Kopperud Transportation Inc., which still operates today as the second oldest, continuously ran, trucking company in the state of Alaska (although the official name changed to Norse Alaska in 2013).
When my dad Karl was born in the Matanuska Valley in 1952,
its population was under 5,000. The youngest of four sons, he
attended primary school at what is now (and has been since the late 1960s) the
Matanuska Borough building, witnessing events as prominent as statehood in 1959
as a first grader and the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake as a sixth grader. After two
years of community college and working in a local trailer factory, he finally
escaped to Las Cruces, New Mexico where he would finish his bachelor’s degree
in Individualized Studies (lol at the 1970s…) at New Mexico State University.
He had studied theater and business management and was heavily considering
staying in New Mexico for the long-term. As fate would have it however, he was
needed back home to help run the family business as my grandpa Herb had
suffered a debilitating hard attack a few years prior.
The Family Business
In the late-1970s my dad returned to Alaska at the height of the pipeline boom, and met my mom Melanie through the local Lutheran church. My mom was a pastor’s daughter from Essex, Iowa who had just finished her degree in education. She was looking for a change and came up to Alaska at the suggestion of her brother Al who had been stationed in Anchorage during the Vietnam War and was then an accountant for the Alyeska Hotel. My parents married in 1980 – my father managing the family business while my mom taught 4th and 5th graders (first at Sherrod Elementary and later Butte Elementary, in Palmer), earning a specialized master’s degree in reading education from the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA). Her last year of teaching was 1984, when my oldest sister Kristin was born with congenital heart disease. Between Kristin’s unique situation, and the birth of my other sister Greta in 1987, my mom found she simply would not have the time to teach and decided to work within the family business in the role of secretary, wherein both my parents could have the flexibility to address family health concerns as they arose. She would later tell me she didn’t necessarily regret not returning to education – loving to teach, but feeling as though she was only instructed to discipline.
When I was born in 1992, the population of the Matanuska Valley was roughly 45,000. I grew up between blue-collar and white-collar worlds, with backhoes, dozers and roadgraders in the yard, while National Public Radio could be heard playing inside the house. I remember overcast summer days out in the garden with my mom picking and shelling peas and going to State of Alaska equipment auctions with my dad. The Valley I remember being born into was still largely agricultural, but on the verge of change. Wasilla had two street lights and a scattered population of 4,000 which had just bypassed Palmer at roughly 3,000.
After graduating from Palmer High School in 2010, I – like so many other Alaskan high school graduates – left as quick as I could. Tired of the dark, tired of the cold, tired of the people. My final college decision was between New Mexico State (Las Cruces, NM), University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN) and Appalachian State (Boone, NC). When visiting the year before with my parents, I fell in love with the Mesilla Valley in New Mexico and eventually chose Las Cruces just like my dad had 35 years before. Honestly, New Mexico felt similar to Alaska in many ways, apart from the obvious climatic differences – both states contain strong ties to their indigenous populations, both are dependent on natural resource extraction and tourism, and both states tend to be rural and impoverished outside of the largest 2 or 3 cities. To this day, I still have extremely fond memories of my first year of college spent in New Mexico, unfortunately I let restlessness get the best of me.
A Las Cruces Sunset
It was during my spring semester in Las Cruces that I began to convince myself that the grass would be greener elsewhere (funny enough, it didn’t rain the entire time I was there between January and May). Apparently I believed that greener grass to be in Cedar Falls, Iowa, where I wanted to study geography. My University of Northern Iowa decision was a disaster – perhaps the worst of my life – and I left after 3 days, before classes had even started. It just wasn’t going to work out. I hated the place, my roommate was a ‘partyboy’, it was 90 degrees and humid, and I had a panic attack. Even worse, I couldn’t just go back to Las Cruces like nothing had happened. I had to return home to Alaska because I didn’t know what else to do, or where else to go.
Back home, my only feasible option for that fall semester was to take a handful of courses at Mat-Su College while continuing to work for my dad doing road maintenance through the winter. This was a pivotal semester of my life. I remember being in Willow at -25F picking up a roadgrader to haul on a trailer back to Palmer with one of my dad’s employees. This was not where I was planning to be. This was not what I wanted to be doing. But I grew up that semester, more than I had at any other point in my life. I learned the value of education the hard way. Emotionally, I had to grapple with the fact that I was a failure for returning to Alaska, particularly for college. You see, all throughout my life in was indirectly expressed to me and my classmates that staying in Alaska was what happened when you weren’t smart enough to get out and stay out. None of my other friends had returned home for school after the first year, and why should they? As one high school teacher told me about his opinion on UAA, he said, “well… it’s there” with a shrug.
It wasn’t until after I was back home for a couple months that I began to notice how much I had missed Alaska. That spring I enrolled at UAA and slowly began to realize a few critical things about myself and about place. Firstly, UAA was a perfect fit for me identity-wise and I struck a goldmine with the history department. Based on all of the college coursework I encountered between four different institutions (I would attend the University of Minnesota on exchange through UAA as a junior), UAA offered by-far the most rigorous and bang-for-your-buck education; despite the sadists that run Parking Services and the bureaucratically impersonal nature of the administration. Additionally, one of the things I admire most about the student body, faculty and general staff is that we all suffer from an inferiority complex… and it doesn’t really bother us. There is a certain self-deprecation that pervades life at UAA, leaving its students well-humored, humble and hard-working. Most of us have jobs, many of us commute and we’re here to get work done, unlike the often superficial work-hard/play-hard attitudes and elitist snobbery that drive many of the country’s more well-known institutions (I’m looking at you, University of Minnesota).
Secondly, I began to realize that – for better or worse – Alaska is my home and I can’t ever change that. It’s funny, because every time I hear a jet in the sky I glance up to try and find it, and I think about the destination it’s flying to, longing for escape. Yet every time I do in fact leave Alaska, I’m always ready to come back after about two weeks. I distinctly remember picking up my sister Greta from the airport one time after she had been in California for a week or two in March/April. The roads were full of that dismal Alaskan break-up slush, overcast weather and wind, and I just thought about how much better it would be to be in sunny California. As we strolled down Spenard past the various ‘ladies of the night’, my sister sighed and reflectively said, “Every time I leave, I just realize how much more I love home.”
Springtime in the Butte
It’s now 2017, and the estimated population of the Matanuska Valley is over 104,000. The growth has been largely unregulated, unstructured, and uninspired. Community has been thrown out in exchange for highways, strip malls, and subdivision tract housing. And the Valley I grew up in has been taken hostage; by caricatured versions of yuppies riding fat-tire bikes and alt-righters open-carrying at their children's Little League games.
The most noticeable change I've witnessed is that a large amount of the newcomers seem quite fatalistic in their attitudes towards Alaska and community life. For example, many of these people have just been here for the boom-times, escaping the lower 48's economic stagnation of the Great Recession. But are these people here for the long haul? Will they hold out through the shaky economic years ahead for Alaska? Or are they simply here to exploit Alaska's offerings, conquer its landscape on their motorized 'toys', and then leave. Because I'm here for the long-haul, and it hurts to watch a place I grew up in and love continually get exploited for short-sighted gain.
[Now excuse me, while I step off of my high horse...]
I suppose the purpose of this essay is to emphasize that community and place matters, and if we want to do anything about it, it starts in the classroom. Without community we're vulnerable to a continued decline in interactions and trust with one another -- and, most importantly it lets us off the hook in our moral responsibility to one another. When I think about the well-being of my students, I remember that they are my neighbors, and the future torch-bears of the community in which I live. I want to help them realize their full potential, and I also don't want them to grow up and attempt to rob me at gun-point! I have an invested interest in their success, and the relationship is reciprocal; that's how community works.
I can't change home. Home is where the heart is, and for better-or-worse I'm stuck with Palmer, Alaska. But I love this place and I feel this weird sense of obligation to stay despite my objections to its growth (or yearning to move further up the highway away from 'people'), simply to be that one hold-out who refuses to cave in to the new status quo. I'm here to respect the past legacies of this land and I encourage my students to do the same -- to take pride in their community, to help each other out so that they can construct their own sense of 'home' and what it means to them. I figure I at least owe that to my grandma Claire.
My Grandma and I at Palmer's High School Graduation (2010)
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