Adventure of a lifetime

When Frank Bruni wrote his last column for The New York Times the other day he apologized to Ted Cruz for disrespecting him during Cruz’s presidential campaign.

Bruni is quitting journalism to join the faculty of Duke University and was referring to the time he unloaded on Cruz in a 2015 column about candidates running in the 2016 presidential election. I won’t go into the details since they are somewhat sordid but seeing Bruni’s column made me wonder if I ever committed an offense worthy of such an apology.

I have been writing columns in Alaska since 1967 and have surely written a few things — hopefully just a few — that I should apologize for. My memory isn’t all that good about such matters so I’ll leave it to you readers to nominate your favorite jerkwater columns.

I can’t promise I’ll print any of them, but it might do me good to be reminded of my transgressions. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since that August day when my wife and I pulled into Anchorage. So you have a lot to work with.

One of my favorite recollections over the years was the day I got a phone call from Joe McGinniss, an old friend from the newspaper I worked for back there in New England. Joe had since gone on to a newspaper job in Washington, D.C., and then had a successful career going in writing books. One of his most successful was The Selling of the President 1968, which was about the Richard Nixon campaign of that year.

Joe subsequently came up here and wrote his book Going to Extremes, which became one of his bestsellers. One of the things Joe covered in that book was the decision my wife and I made in coming to Alaska and our long, long drive from Massachusetts to Montana and then our trip up the unpaved Alaska Highway.

Though our trip was nothing special compared to other such journeys to Alaska, it is worth noting that everybody who moves to Alaska makes the journey of a lifetime in the process. And that includes those who get here in a matter of hours by flying up.

Moving to Alaska from anywhere is such a journey and coming here from one of the other states is a transition I can identify with. And somehow doing so while you are still young seems to be for everybody the adventure of a lifetime. It’s that kind of place.

Those who came here in the years before my wife and I did were accepting a great challenge, as were a great many of those who came after us. Uprooting yourself and your loved ones is often such a challenge no matter where you go. But somehow Alaska seems to rank very high in such a list.

When Joe McGinniss called me to say he was coming to Alaska, he seemed surprised that I was so enthusiastic about the notion of his pending journey. To those who have never been here, having your call answered is a lot like sending a message to Mars and getting a response, at least it was in those days.

Joe’s book was very successful and he had many more such adventures — and successful books, both fiction and non-fiction — before passing away in 2014 at age 71. He was very encouraging to me and I have written a half-dozen books, most of them published by Epicenter Press, but none have had the success of Joe’s books.

He was a friend of my lifetime and his time in Alaska remains one of my great memories.

Tom Brennan is an Anchorage columnist and author of six books. He was a reporter/columnist for The Anchorage Times and an editor and columnist at The Voice of The Times.