No, I am not making this up, as the old newspaper, humor columnist Dave Barry was fond of saying back in the day when newspapers were an important part of American daily life and humor was more appreciated than it is in the clickbait world of eletronic media today where rage seems the emotion of greatest interest.
Especially irrational rage.
One cannot help to ask what part of Alaska’s “traditional lifestyle” was dependent on gas and oil? Are there whale- and seal-oil-powered jetboats and ATVs buried somewhere in the melting permafrost just waiting for archeologists to uncover them? Or prehistoric windmills that provided the electricity for the freezers in which to store the annual salmon harvest?
Of course not, but obviously someone is supposed to get outraged at the “affordability” struggle survival has become for an Alaska family living on more than $150,000 per year.
Couldn’t Weil find an Alaska Native forced to live in Anchorage on $50,000 per year, because jobs are so rare in most of rural Alaska, who then had to pay for $5 per gallon gas and fight traffic to get to the Kenai River this year to dipnet salmon for his, or her, annual salmon harvest?
Only to then find out that the Alaska Department of Fish and Game had been trying its best to maximize the commercial harvest of those fish out in Cook Inlet, and thus – on many days – there weren’t a lot of salmon getting back into the river because food security for less-well-off Alaskans isn’t an agency priority.
Or couldn’t there at least have been a Post editor left of over the old days who appreciated what journalism was when journalists had some factual understanding of the subject matter they were covering willing to ask, “So how much a year does someone have to make to comfortably live a ‘traditional lifestyle’ in Alaska?
OK, so there aren’t many of the sort of editors left in a country where journalism has become more and more about what reporters want to believe and less and less about facts.
On the truly factual front, it wouldn’t have taken much research on Weil’s part to discover that the truly traditional, subsistence lifestyle in Alaska invovled people packing up for the summer and moving to fish camp to spend weeks fishing, cleaning fish and hanging those fish out to dry, which was the storage method of the day.
Few want to spend weeks in a remote fish camp these days, and drying fish has been disappearing in favor of freezing them because most people consider a well-cared for, fresh-frozen filet, hot off the grill better than a cheawy, lukewarm hunk of dried salmon. But then Weil, a product of Harvard University who, according to the Post, has covered tax policy, religion, D.C.’s local government and more, couldn’t be expected to know any of this.
And reporters these days don’t bother to look up much of anything, so you can bet Weil didn’t do any digging into what actually was a “traditional lifestyle” in Alaska before lumping someone with an income of $150,000 into that category.
Still, you might have thought she’d at least have looked at current U.S. Census figures, which put the Alaska “median household income” at $95,665 per year, andat least found a family struggling “to uphold a traditional lifestyle” while earning less than $100,000 per year.
Even that provides a somewhat distorted picture of things, but it would have been better. The $155,000 figure appears purely absurd given Deptartment of Labor economist Neil Fried’s observations as to the “disparity between areas…often split along rural and urban lines. While there are exceptions, income in Alaska’s rural areas typically falls below state and national averages because of fewer economic opportunities, lower education levels, and higher unemployment.”
Googles “Data Commons” claims the average rural Alaska income in 2021 was $33,300, just about the then rural poverty rate of $31,700. Google claims to have extrapolated that data from U.S. Census figures, but the numbers seems low given that the Neilsberg Research Group reports a current median of $95,694 for the North Slope Borough, which has been blessed with oil wealth; a median of $95,625 for the Bristol Bay Borough, which has beenenjoyed record sockeye salmon runs in recent years thanks to global warming; and a median of $84,018 for the Northwest Arctic Borough where jobs at the Red Dog mine help fuel the economy.
Those areas would drag up the rural average, but it’s probably still only two thirds ot three-quarters of the statewide average would put it somewhere between $63,000 and $70,000 per year, which is a long way from $155,000.
Economic classes
A story about a middle-class, rural Alaskan (and income is how we define these classes) struggling to live a traditional lifestyle would have offered a more accurate portrayal of the situation in rural Alaska.
But instead, Weil chose to profile a wealthy family living in the Western Alaska community of Aleknagik, where the median household income is reported to be $75,417 per year. It seems obvious Weil didn’t know the obvious distinction between your average rural Alaskan residents, who can’t afford and an airplane planes, and the the few, well-to-do folks in any village who can afford one.
How could she?
She grew up in a comfortable suburb of Philadelphia and was, by all indications, raised by well-intentioned parents who wanted their kids to make the world a better place. The wealthy-by-rural-Alaskan standards she profiled likley seemed normal to her, and good intentions aren’t a necessarily bad thing.
I can empthasize with Weil in that regard. I didn’t grow up in a comfortable suburb, but I was the child of post-WWII parents who instilled in by brother and me similar ideas as to civic responsibility.
As a child, I was regularly sent off to “church camp” every summer not because my family was religious – my late father, to be honest, had a pretty dim view of religions in general – but because the camps to which I was dispatched were preparing young people join the Freedom Riders on buses in the American south where the Civil Rights Movement was exploding in the 1960s.
The words to the gospel song “We Shall Overcome” echo in my head to this day. And my uprbringing clearly influenced my decision to get into a career where people worked long hours for limited pay with no thoughts of accumulating wealth.
I was lucky, though, to start in the business when journalism was a knowledge-based business where young journalists were expected to develop some knowledge of what they hell they were witing about.
Like most young journalists of that time, I also got played a time or two by special interest groups wanting to paint a simplistic picture of the world that fit with their view of what would make the world a better place.
Sometimes, bordering on often, these views conflicted with the views of what others thought would make the the world a better place. And I learned that so-called ‘objectivity’ lives in a place between a lot of opinions and is often surrounded by some facts.
I also learned how ones “good intentions” can be preyed upon to get a journalist to paint a distorted view of almost anything.It was a problem back in the day when newspapers preached the gospel of objectivity. It is a much bigger problem in these days of online news organizations invested in advocacy.
Weil’s advocacy is clear in this story. She’s part of the New York Times’ war on all things Trump, and the latest front in that war against the sitting president focuses on the costs of the war with Iran.
I’m no Trump fan. Donald Trump daily provides, in my opinion, an absolutely horrid example for how Americans should behave. He makes former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the failed vice-presidential candidate and one time national polebrity who portrayed herself as both a “mama grizzly” and “pitbull with lipstick,” look like a lovable golden retriever wandering the neighborhood looking to do nothing but make more friends.
That said, it’s not hard to make a legitimate case for Trump’s decision to attack Iran. It’s not in the interest of this country, or any other, to have religious fanatics – Muslim, Christian or other – armed with nuclear weapons.
Just imagine what the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas – led by a man with an end-of-the-world vision that led him to tell children “that ‘everyone’s going to die’ and ‘we’re going to blow you up'” – might have done if they’d had such a weapon with which to “defend” themselves against non-believers by bringing on the Apocalypse.
Somehow, however, the substance of the war with Iran is not the subject of mainstream media debate in the country at this time. The subject of the war in Iran has been twisted into an “affordability,” issue as if Americans have now become so selfish that’s all they care about.
There are solid reasons to be legimiately opposed to the war in Iran. True pacificists are opposed to war in general, and the idea that we should all make love rather than war is not a bad thing in which to believe. But for non pacificists, deciding what is a legitimate war and what is not gets a lot more complicated.
One would hope Americans would base these opinions on more than just what the war might do to the price of fuel for their cars and trucks, but then again, if you read much of the social media debate between drivers and so-called vulnerable road users – ie. pedestrians and cyclists – it’s pretty clear there are a large number of folks out there who love their cars and trucks, and being able to drive them fast, more than they care about life itself.
The affordability issue likely appeals to them, and thus we get this craziness from the Times. And crazy is about the only word to describe the Weil story.
Truly struggling
I can’t imagine what someone living just to the north of Aleknagik in the Kusilvak Census Area might think if they read Weils story. This area surrounding the mouth of the Yukon River is sadly missing the environmental riches of the Bristol Bay region in which Aleknagik is situated.
The Bay lacks a strong, year-round economy, but it has a robust seasonal economy thanks to those sockeye salmon that fuel the most valuable salmon fishery left in the 49th state. Kuslivak basically has no economy.
The latter do help boost the median household income to $51,471 per year, but that’s less than half of the $105,356 the Census reports for Alaska’s largest city. Almost no one has a plane to assist them in hunting and fishing for food.
The website AirCraftOne, which tracks plane ownership, reports there are three privately owned aircraft and three corporate-owned aircraft registered in the nearly 20,000 square mile Kuslivak areas. For comparison sake, the state of Rhode Island is about 80 percent the size of Kuslivak, and there are 62 times as many aircraft registered there.
Suffice to say, Kuslivak is one of the most poverty-striken areas in the country, which helps explains the area’s average age of 23.6, with more than 44 percent of the population under the age of 20.
By and large, kids born in Kuslivak grow up and leave because life there is hard even if it is not as hard as life was almost everywhere was in rural Alaska even 65 years ago. The social support network is a lot better now than it was prior to the 1964 launch of the late President Lydon B. Johnson’s “Great Society,” which lead to the the Food Stamp Act” and other federal programs to help those in poverty.
Thanks to government-funded Medicaid, two-thirds of the people in the Kuslivak area now have health insurance, Data USA reports, but life there remains brutal by the standard of Americans.
Kuslivak residents, by and large, worry more about “survival” than they do about “affordability.” Almost every family there would feel blessed to be bringing in $155,000 per year with which to buy fuel for the family ATV or snowmachine.
Owning an airplane, or even having access to a charter for a fly-out hunt, is something most people in Kuslivak can only dream about. The same for a jet boat. Some don’t even own an ATV, which has in modern times because the automobile of rural Alaska.
The Alaska Department of Community and Regional Affairs reports the average price of a gallon of unleaded gas in Hopper Bay, the largest community in Kuslivak, was priced at $8.44 per gallon on Sunday, according to Mary Peltola, a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Alaska. That would put it $3.61 above the $4.83 per gallon, statewide average reported by the American Automobile Association.
And that $4.83 average has Alaskans crying in their beer about the state’s “affordability,” but it’s strangely not that far out of line with what gas prices were when I arrived in the state in 1973. The statewide average then, which was largely the Anchorage-Fairbanks price, was reported to 57 cents per gallon.
The inflation calculator of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says 57 cents is 1973 would be the equivalent of $4.34 today. So gas is about 50 cents per gallon more expensive now than it was back then, not to mention that a lot more Alaskans have money to pay for it.
One in every 10 Alaskans was out of a job and looking for work in ’73, though it seemed like the unemployment rate in Fairbanks was even worse than that. Today, the statewide, seasonally adjusted unemployment rate is less than half that at 4.6 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
I could barely afford to buy gas upon arrival in Fairbanks, and I was what would now be called homeless. I spent the summer living off and on at the Chena River State Recreation Site with my ”home” a Opel Cadet Stationwaggon that got driven only when I could find an odd job that put some cash in my pocket.
Alaska was in those days such a hard place to find work that I eventually enrolled in the University of Alaska Fairbanks because that opened the door to a student loan, which happened to be a good deal in those days, that allowed me to survive.
Gas in rural Alaska then was going for two or three times what it cost in Fairbanks, and high-speed, gas-guzzling jetboats, ATVs and snowmachines were rare. The standard riverboat was a 19-foot, Grumman freighter canoe with a gas-sipping 10- or 15-horsepower outboard, much as John McPhee described in the Alaska classic “Coming Into the Country.”
McPhee, in that 1977 book, quoted Yukon resident Steve Ulvi observing that he burned “10 or fifteen gallons of kerosene a year for light, some white gas for my Coleman stove, some fuel for my kicker. But if everybody else did no more than that we would not have an energy problem.”
Jet-boat owning Alaskans now burn more fuel that that in a day. Alaskans living in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley and commuting to work in Anchorage every day burn more than that in a week.
And now they whine about the prices more than anyone who arrived her in the ’70s could remember anyone whining about anything, no matter how tough times got. The only thing they whined about then was being a “sourdough,” as in sour on Alaska but lacking the dough to buy an airplane ticket south.
Still, many did manage to get out, as they’ve been bleeding south in recent years as well.
“A decade and more can bring deep seniority in Alaska,” McPhess worte. “People arrive steadily. And people go. They go from Anchorage and Fairbanks – let alone the more exacting wild. Some, of course, are interested only in a year or two’s work, then to return with saved high wages to the Lower Forty-eight. Others, though, mean to adapt to Alaska, hoping to find a sense of frontier, a fresh and different kind of life.”
That was then, and now a lot of them coming wanting to pull the Lower 48 north behind them in the form McDonalds, Walmart, Olive Garden, Fred Meyer, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and on and on. They want the easy lives of urban America, and now, it would appear, even those living the “traditional lifestyle” on $155,000 a year want the easy lives of urban America.
Categories: Commentary, News, Outdoors
