Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
— 1 —
Introduction
I'M OLDER THAN MOST
of the buildings in Anchorage.
Hell, I'm older than the state of Alaska.
I say things like this when I'm on tour Outside in my author persona and people sort of
giggle nervously, not believing me, really, and not really understanding what I mean, either.
But it's true.
I was born in Anchorage in 1952, in what was then the territory of Alaska. I was raised
in Cordova and Seldovia, more or less. More because we were more ashore than we were at
sea, and less because for five years we lived on the
Celtic
, a 75-five foot fish tender on
which my mother was deckhand.
Seldovia was where we were living when the 1964 Earthquake hit, right in the middle of
my twelfth birthday party. I had a great time, including being evacuated to the high school
gymnasium along with the rest of the town and standing outside, holding my mom's friend
Maka's hand as we listened to the tidal wave come in. What wasn't so great was when the
Army Corps of Engineers came in, declared that there was no saving a town that had sunk
five and a half feet, and did their dike-and-fill routine, which entailed literally ripping the
Seldovia boardwalk up by its pilings and leveling the surrounding hills to create a flat
gravel expanse that was as ordinary and ugly as the previous town had been unique and
beautiful.
The boardwalk was over two miles long and had served as our Main Street. It meant a lot
to the kids of Seldovia; we rode our bikes on it, we fished for flounders and yellow bellies
and bullheads from it, we played kick-the-can under it. Watching its destruction from the
sidelines was an early and object lesson in the transience of manmade things, at least in
Alaska.
