Daily Life in Alaska

There are two Alaskas, and almost everyone lives in the smaller one. A little clot of towns along the single stretch of road and rail holds most of the people, and everything else, which is most of the map, is the Bush: roadless country reached by small plane, riverboat, and snowmachine, where a village of a few hundred can be a day’s travel from the nearest town and the nearest town is not much. Daily life in the Kingdom is really two daily lives, the one you can drive through and the one you can only fly to, and the gap between them is the first thing to understand about the place. Even the capital kept the point until recently. The seat of the government sits on a shelf of the panhandle between mountain and sea, and until a road was opened in 2018 you got there by boat or plane like everyone else; most of the panhandle still does.

The long dark and the midnight sun

The real calendar here is made of light, not months. The year swings between a winter when the sun barely clears the hills and a summer when it never quite sets, and the further north you go the wider the swing, until on the Arctic coast there are weeks with no sunrise at all and, later, weeks with no night. But the two hinges of the year are not the solstices. They are breakup and freeze-up, the spring week when the river ice rots and goes out, and the autumn week when it hardens enough to carry a snowmachine, because in the Bush the frozen river is the road, and its coming and going open and shut the country. People bet on the exact minute the ice will break, a wager as old as the towns, and much of daily life is arranged around a season that turns on water changing state rather than on any date.

The road and the Bush

Urban Alaska is Anchorage and the rail belt that runs off it, a stretch of ordinary Realm life with supermarkets and traffic and a hockey rink. Bush Alaska is everything else, and it runs on the small plane. The bush pilot is a lifeline more than a luxury, bringing the mail, the groceries, the doctor, and the coffin, and a village measures its week by when the plane can fly and its year by when it cannot. Between planes people move by snowmachine over the winter trails, by boat up the rivers in summer, and here and there still by dog team. Children fly to play basketball against the next village. The dead are sometimes weathered in for days. Distance is not a background fact of life in the Bush but the main one, the thing every plan bends around.

Off the land and off the oil

Most households live two economies at once. One is subsistence: a freezer filled each year by the season’s hunting and fishing, which is not a hobby here but a right, written into the 1884 settlement and guarded by the House of Nations, so that the taking of fish and game is protected law rather than pastime. The other is cash, from a job on the oil of the North Slope, the fishing fleet, the school, the government, the summer tourists, and from the dividend. Once a year the Green Fund pays every Alaskan the same cheque, from the oil hand to the newborn, and the whole country feels it land. Neither economy is quite enough alone. In the Bush a carton of milk or a drum of fuel costs whatever it costs to fly it in, less what the Kingdom’s subsidy on power, fuel and staple food takes off, which narrows the gap and does not close it, so the salmon in the freezer and the cheque in the autumn are not extras. They are the margin people live on.

The table

The Alaskan table is half what the land gives and half what the plane brings. Salmon is the year’s work and the year’s staple, put up smoked, dried, and frozen through a summer of hard fishing; the fall hunt brings moose and caribou; the coast gives halibut and cod, and on the north and west shores the sea mammals, seal and the bowhead whale, whose meat and muktuk are shared out across a village after a good hunt. Late summer is berries, and the whipped berry-and-fat dish the Yup’ik call akutaq. Over the top of all that sits the store food, flown in at a price that shocks outsiders, and along the old Russian coast a way of eating that still keeps tea, savoury pies, and the fasting days of the Orthodox calendar. A rich table and a dear one, and often both at the same meal.

Onion domes and the Church of America

Faith in Alaska is split the way the land is. Along the coast, the islands, and the southwest, the church is Orthodox, the faith the Russians left and the Native peoples made wholly their own two centuries ago, with onion domes over villages of a few hundred and the liturgy sung in Church Slavonic beside Yup’ik and Unangax̂. Its year runs on saints’ days, on the starring that carries Christmas from house to house, and on the blessing of the waters in the deep cold. Inland and among the settlers, the established Church of America holds the ground instead. Two Christmases therefore sit on the calendar, the Western in December and the Orthodox in January, and in mixed towns plenty of people simply keep both. Under either church, older Native practice has not vanished; on the coast it is often braided straight into the Orthodoxy that has held there longest.

The great race

Gridiron is the Realm’s game and Alaska watches it like everyone else, but the country’s own passion is the dog team. Each winter the great race, the Iditarod, runs close to a thousand miles across the interior in the dark, from the road country out to the western coast, and its mushers are the nearest thing the Kingdom has to national heroes, followed by radio and wire the way the rest of the Union follows a cup final. Below the race the sled dog has become half heritage and half sport, kept now for love and prize money more than for haulage. Through the long dark the village gymnasium is the other temple, with whole communities flying out to basketball tournaments, and the Native games keep the oldest athletics alive: the high kick, the blanket toss, and the flat contests of endurance and pain that come from a people who lived on both.

The Crown at a distance

For all the strangeness of the Kingdom’s crown, an Alaskan can live an entire life without the king ever touching it, save in two ways. His face hangs on the wall of the school and the courthouse, and once a year, in summer, he or since 2004 his regent comes for a week or two, and a few thousand people see him. The yearly cheque is not his: the Green Fund is a public fund the house does not control and may not add to. But the hospital at Anchorage and the university at Fairbanks were founded with the house’s money, and the cathedral at Sitka rebuilt with it after the fire of 1966, all of it paid through a foundation whose accounts are published, so the crown is felt mostly as the thing that paid for the roof rather than the thing that rules beneath it. A distant, wealthy, mostly absent presence, known by its endowments and its summer visit. Which is exactly how the Kingdom was built to feel it.

✎ Editor's Note · Rich country, poor country

Alaska is a wealthy kingdom where daily life is frequently hard and dear, a place with the richest crown in the world and a carton of milk that costs a fortune in the Bush. The wealth is real and so is the difficulty, and the two do not cancel out. What holds them together is not the motto, which looks north to the future, but the older habit it leaves out. People here endure the country, and are paid, in salmon and in a yearly cheque, for doing it.

Trivia

In-Universe There are two Alaskas and almost everyone lives in the smaller one: a clot of road-and-rail towns holds most of the people, and everything else is the Bush, reached only by plane, boat, or snowmachine. Even the capital kept the point: until 2018 you could not drive to Juneau.
In-Universe The Alaskan year turns not on the solstices but on breakup and freeze-up, the weeks when the river ice goes out and comes back, because in the Bush the frozen river is the road. People bet on the exact minute the ice will break, a public wager as old as the towns.
In-Universe Most households live two economies at once: subsistence hunting and fishing, protected as a right under the 1884 settlement and guarded by the House of Nations, and cash from the oil, the fleet, and the Green Fund's yearly cheque, which pays every Alaskan the same, from the oil hand to the newborn.
Real-World The Orthodox faith really did take root among Alaska Native peoples in the Russian-America century and remains genuinely theirs, which is why two Christmases sit on the calendar, the Western in December and the Orthodox in January, and many coastal families keep both. The Iditarod and the tradition of betting on the spring ice breakup are real Alaska too.