The Hindcast: Anchorage’s Past Week in Weather

By Jessica Cherry

The thoughtless Turnagain winds pull the moisture from my potted plants. When a stable marine layer stops the wind and washes the city in gentle rain, I’m grateful, but today a provisional sun burned those clouds away. Each day in the heat or the wind, my porch flowers shrivel and I water them until they stand back up. Why do I put them through this miserable cycle, I wonder. I’m not sure I’m very good at this. And yet, I want nothing more than to propagate my ignorance on a larger scale, to get a piece of land and spread out: the colonial dream and the back-to-the land escape. Never mind that real farmers are political pawns or that, in Alaska, aboriginal land rights are still being litigated. This could be an organic privilege homestead. You know the type: the handsome boutique chickens and rows of kale, Instagram. But the fecundity I really crave is a production, a growth, a creative expansion, hope, a survival strategy, a non-performative exercise. Even plants, though, don’t make something from nothing. They need sun, soil, water, minerals, microbes, and pollinators. From whom and how, is this capital acquired? Must what I need to grow be taken from another?

Jessica Cherry, PhD is a scientist, writer, and commercial airplane pilot living in Anchorage and Fairbanks.