Blog Entry #9: Seasons in Alaska

This week's topic is seasons in Alaska.  I live in Fairbanks and it has always seemed to me that we only have two seasons: summer and winter.  The transition between the two is so brief, it reminds me of a Bugs Bunny cartoon where a huge pile of snow just wumps down on a blue summer day and it immediately becomes winter.  Then in the spring, we seem to go from seeing people trudging around in parkas to leaf buds on trees and frolicking in shorts within a week.  Maybe this is because our winters and our summers are both so unusual: the winters are so, so dark and so, so cold, while the surprisingly warm summer days stretch on forever, and this makes our short springs and autumns forgettable.  My own musings aside, the seasons is a subject incorporated into nearly all the pieces in our book, The Last New Land.  It's almost always relevant to the story.  I could probably choose 10 random writings and 9 of them would mention or at least imply the time of year since it's such a huge part of everyday life in Alaska.  For the purposes of this blog post, I chose three essays: two about the spring and one about the summer.  Winter is conspicuously absent, but everyone focuses on winter when they think of Alaska, so I decided to choose something different.

The first piece is an excerpt from Sidney Huntington's book Shadows on the Koyukuk and is called "The Flood."  Shadows on the Koyukuk is one of my favorite books, so I was quite pleased to find it in our book!  The book is about Sidney Huntington's life growing up in rural Alaska and this particular excerpt is set during the spring time around 1930.  Sidney lived in a cabin on the banks of the Yukon River with his father, younger brother, and another man, and break up (when the ice in the river begins to melt) that year caused a huge jam of ice chunks and a flood that destroyed their cabin and food cache, causing them to lose almost everything they owned and had worked so hard for.  Re-reading this piece made me think harder on my idea of Alaska only having two seasons.  Obviously, spring time and break up are a huge deal for people that live close to the land like Sidney Huntington, and a bad break up could be completely devastating to their livelihood and even their survival.  I live far away from any rivers and am pretty safe from roving chunks of ice and flooding, but that is not the case for many people, especially in the past when many set up their homes right by a river.


Photo of the damage break up can cause to homes along the Yukon River!  Taken from an article from Juneau Empire and photo from the Associated Press.

The next piece that made me think is an excerpt called "The Native Villages" from Art Davidson's book In the Wake of the Exxon Valdez.  The writing details the effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill of March 1989 on a small coastal village called Chenega Bay.  To say the oil spill was devastating for the village is an understatement.  The people in the village depended heavily on the sea not only as a source of food, but to set the rhythm of their everyday lives.  When oil coated everything, there was no food to harvest, and in the process of attempting to do research and clean up, outsiders trampled sites of historical importance to the people in the village.  The oil spill occurred right at the beginning of spring, and instead of rejoicing in the return of fishing season, the people lost one of the most important things to them.  Even the first caught fish of the season, which was usually a cause for celebration, was shipped off to a laboratory to be examined.  While I get excited about spring simply because I'm tired of the snow, want to plant my garden, and want to spend my days outside, many people throughout Alaska (both now and in centuries past) welcome the arrival of spring because it means life has started all over again and they can once more harvest the food that sustains them throughout the year.

The final piece I looked at is Jean Anderson's short story "Skin." This one is a good example of how seasons in Alaska cannot help but be mentioned in stories and other writings.  While this one was less season oriented than the previous two, it is still important.  The story was about an Alaska Native woman who came to Fairbanks to purchase some nice rabbit furs to make a bunting for her soon to be born grandchild and encountered a man she used to know long ago.  The reader learns during the story that the woman is from a small village that apparently was home to many drunk people, and she appears to harbor some fear of drunks.  As she left the store where she purchased the skins, she thought that the drunks "shimmered like mirages" in the heat of the summer day and mentioned that "dry heat rose slowly from the cement like old wind."  I think Anderson chose to set this story in the summer instead of the winter because imagining the heat and bright light makes the drunk people seem all the more realistic and you can practically smell stale liquor and sweat.  It's just not the same in winter!  And after all, Fairbanks can get into the 90s in the summer, so it's easy to imagine the scene that the woman encountered.