They just don't get it Outside

Being Frank

By Frank Ameduri

May 2 was the one-year anniversary of my return to Alaska. When I left my friends and family behind -- mostly in the Southwest portion of the Lower 48 -- it was with mixed emotions that they bid farewell. Some people were excited, because they knew I'd loved my time in Alaska during the '80s, and they were happy I'd found a way to get back here. Others were concerned. It seems far away to people who haven't been here, not just in miles but in all of the ways things can be far from life in the rest of the country.

Of course, there were the classic questions that always surface when you announce the move to Alaska.

"Does everybody live in those metal tube-like thingies?"

"You mean Quonset huts?"

"Yeah … I guess."

"Yes, they do. And there's no sunlight, no McDonald's and no cable television either."

"OmyGOD! No cable?"

My mom was probably the most concerned, but she didn't let on, too much. She just asked what moms are apt to. "Are you sure this is what you want to do?" that roughly translates to, "You know, if you move to the other side of the Earth, this may be the last time I ever see you." Of course, Mom knows my history of letter writing, too. If I live more than six blocks from you, you're likely never to see or hear from me.

Anyway, reviewing this first year back, I think I've re-acclimated myself to the state pretty well. There are always those things that are uniquely Alaskan, and if you can never make sense of them, you probably don't belong here.

One example of that is the mail situation. Mom sends me letters and the occasional care package. I tell her to go ahead and send the letters to my home address and the packages to my work address.

"Don't they deliver packages to your house?"

"Actually, they don't deliver anything to my house. My mailbox is two blocks away … on another street."

"You don't have mailboxes on your street?"

"Yeah, there's a bank of mailboxes at the end of my street but people who live on other streets use those mailboxes."

" … Oh."

Makes perfect sense to me.

Of course, when I told people there was no cable up here, I was joking. It turns out the joke's on me, though. There really isn't any cable on my street. I live about four blocks from the cable company's main office, but … well, I don't know. When I need an ESPN fix I travel five miles up the road to the Ressler Dome and catch a game there. They live farther from the cable company than I do, but … well, I don't know.

That drives people in the Lower 48 crazy. They're pretty sure cable TV access is a right that should be written into the Constitution. They're pretty sure The Sopranos should appear somewhere near the base of the food pyramid. They haven't looked out my living room window. If anybody looks out just about any living room window in the Valley, they'll realize you don't really need cable TV -- until the Stanley Cup playoffs begin, at least. Let's not get silly.

Another thing you'll notice if you've been away from Alaska for a while is the culture of public smoking. In the Lower 48, smoking is pretty much illegal unless you're in a hermetically-sealed chamber in your own home, and only then if you have a smoke-capturing system that can package the second-hand smoke into canisters that can be shuttled to a special landfill site on the moon. In some parts of California, even having the smell of smoke on your clothes is enough to get you deported to Oklahoma -- but only the smoking section of Oklahoma.

Walk into most restaurants up here, and you've got the "old fashioned" concept of smoking and non-smoking sections still at work. Of course, most of those restaurants are pretty small, and the sections are separated only by the power of suggestion. I sat in the non-smoking section of a local family restaurant the other night, and I couldn't see my waitress through the smoke until she was within three feet of my table. In the Lower 48 they'd call that a felony. Up here we call it ambiance. So what. The burger was great and nobody in the smoking section actually seemed to be holding a personal grudge against my lungs.

"So are you still happy about moving up there?" a friend recently asked, shouting over the honking horns and loud traffic outside his apartment.

"Yeah," I said. "I'm pretty darned happy."

Frank Ameduri is happy to be back in Alaska where freedom exists, even if cable television doesn't.