We’re here to help each other

I was startled to see a wedding announcement in the Frontiersman a few weeks ago for a girl I’ve known since she was a Brownie at Cottonwood Creek Elementary. Have I really lived here long enough to watch a generation grow up?

It was early February 1996, when I first spoke to Vicki Naegele by phone from Colorado. She did have a job open for assistant editor, but needed someone before the two weeks when I said my one-way ticket from Denver, Colo., to Anchorage would bring me.

At 4 a.m. the last day of February, a leap year, a friend’s mom whom I’d never met drove from Palmer to Anchorage to pick me up. I had no car. No job and no apartment. Mostly I had the promised generosity of these strangers whose daughter worked at the same newspaper in Colorado.

We were twentysomething then. I wanted to see something of the world besides the Midwest. And she was running away from the man she loved.

When I woke up in Alaska that morning, I called the Frontiersman. No, Naegele said, the position was filled. A few weeks later I came home from a walk to Palmer to find a phone message with her name and number. When could I come in for an interview?

I left the paper in 1998, working my way across Southcentral at a handful of newspapers and magazines.

Thursday night the wind picked up. Driving home from work around midnight, an oncoming vehicle flashed its lights at me on Spruce Street. The driver stopped and lowered his window. A tree in the road up ahead, he said. He’d nearly hit it. It was entirely blocking my lane.

I shudder to think what might have happened to me if that driver hadn’t stopped.

A quarter-mile down the road a big, dead tree jutted at a 45-degree angle across most of the road. I flashed my lights at the next driver. Danger. Danger. Pulled my car over just beyond the tree and went back to see what I could do to clear the road.

Too heavy for me, the oncoming driver stopped and began to push too, but we were outmatched.

I tried calling 911, but high winds disconnected the call. Meanwhile the other driver suggested dragging the tree to the side. And fortunately, I drive a tiny ’90s-something Saab – kept alive by the kindness of my mechanic – but, which sometimes requires a towrope.

Back inside my warm car, I called 911 again to report there was no need to dispatch an Alaska State Trooper to assist as we’d tied the tree to the Good Samaritan’s truck and dragged it out of the road.

My random midnight encounter with these two kind, young men reminded me why I love it here: We help each other. I’m proud to say this where I live and you are my neighbors.

Heather A. Resz is the managing editor of the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman.