One Month in Anch!

Who moves to Alaska in the winter? November isn't exactly the heart of winter, but it's close enough. The lack of a sunrise before 9:30 a.m., the strange, heavy snow followed by a fast melt, the way the air takes your breath away when you first step out a door, this far north is exactly what you'd expect it to be this time of year. 

In the month since we ran to catch our plane at PDX, we've done a lot and a lot of nothing. Downtime after a huge move is good, and we've taken the cold snowy nights to watch movies, eat around the coffee table, learn how to tiptoe around the apartment, enjoy chilly walks down the Park Blocks after dinner and walk downtown to have coffee or watch the lighting of the Christmas Tree.

Call us cautious, we've made new friends, but good relationships often grow slowly, developing deep roots, so we're not in a hurry. We've learned to like each other in cramped quarters. We eat dinner in shifts, because our dining room table is a green fold up for two. 

We share a bathroom, which is decidedly tough with a nearly teenage boy who likes to shower every day, a younger brother who'd rather not shower at all, and a little sister who seems to have to go pee every 10 minutes or at least every time I am in the bathroom. 

Because many people rent these fully furnished apartments by the week, we've had a lot of neighbors we never get to know. The good news is that after a month, Cheryl finally found out that there is a laundry room in the building, and she got the lock code. No more long nights hanging out in the green fluorescent light of the laundromat up on Fireweed. 

We've seen many moose since we saw the big mama moose eating leftover pumpkins on our first weekend in town. Cheryl saw a huge bull moose in front of the library in midtown last week, and we saw another big cow and her baby on the way to visit Portage Glacier with a visitor. 

We've been ice skating with the kids on the oval at Cuddy Park as the sunset just after 4 p.m., casting an orange-creamsicle light over the midtown oil buildings. And we've spent an afternoon sledding and cross-country skiing at Kincaid Park, with a stop for hot chocolate on our way home. 

Saw the Nutcracker ballet and enjoyed evenings out and about at clubs and pubs.

Life is not perfect, but it is good. The adventure of Alaska is in the daily experience of living here. You don't have to launch an expedition to go and find it. In a place so beautiful, danger is an overabundant commodity in Alaska.

On a long-enough timeline, Alaska will kill you. I can attest to this just in the news reported every day on our station and in the local newspaper. Living here is surviving here. Even in the crowded metropolis of Anchorage, death isn't very far away, be it bullet, cold, car or plane crash. 

The dark won't kill you, but I can see why so many give up and go back south where the dark hours play more fairly with the light. There is a certain anxiety until the solstice comes around and the simple knowledge that the days are growing longer brings those first hopeful thoughts of spring around again. 

My claustrophobia gets the best of me occasionally. I wake up feeling a bit stifled, but I know that is a product of the fact I haven't driven much farther than the 45 miles it takes to get to Girdwood. I haven't been to the valley yet. I haven't been to Homer. Until I get a sense for the bigness of the place and the few roads that take you anywhere in this state, I'll wake up feeling a bit stifled, or I'll look out my window at work at the Chugach Mountains and wonder what is behind them and behind that. 

One month and so much to look back on already. The adventure has good start. 

Losing my religion and other compromises

We've converted. I'm not sure what we've converted to. All I know is my wife signed a religious waiver regarding child immunizations in order to get our son Cole into school. I should probably do some research into whatever it is we now believe about health care and our children. Don't want to be a hypocrite after all.

As adventures go, the horizon is never visible for long. Unknown mountain ranges or fog banks inhibit your view, and you may find yourself in a box canyon or an impassable drainage.

But you reroute, you explore, you climb the high ridges and get your bearings again.

Modern-age adventure isn't much different. In trying to lead my family through the hoops of relocating to a new city in what might as well be a new country, I've discovered that there are an inordinate amount of box canyons and impassable drainages.

We're living in an executive apartment in downtown Anchorage, which has its perks, including proximity to some of the great Anchorage night life. And I'm not talking about wolves and bear.

There are couches and chairs and a little plastic table in the kitchen. We have knives and forks and glasses, and our refrigerator is starting to look like we're more than just on vacation here. There is a television, and I signed up for high-speed Internet for a month so we could stay connected.

We keep the heat at 55 degrees, but our neighbors seem to like the nuclear setting and keep theirs set to hotter than hell. We walk around in shorts and t-shirts while inside and sleep with only a sheet over us.

Cooking meals for five in small pans is incredibly frustrating and funny at the same time. Trying to make a salad is a four-part process, which requires cleaning the kitchen and washing dishes in between each stage. We eat in stages.

There is no dish washer, per say, so the boys are getting a little lesson in the old art of hand washing.

The biggest challenge is keeping Carson, who really likes to bounce a lot, from tumbling around the apartment sounding like his nickname, Hurricane Carson. He seems to forget that we live above someone. In exchange, I let him bounce on the beds to get some of that energy out.

We got 7 inches of snow yesterday, which is almost enough to lose Carson in, so he's been home bound and unable to attend school because of our lack of a permanent address.

Many schools in Anchorage, especially the good ones, are on a lottery system, and many are closed for the year. But they are taking applications for next year.

We are not the homeschool types either. In fact, we hate homework almost as much as the kids do. So far we've been lucky to have good friends and neighbors to handle math and other subjects that I'm not very good at.

Sunday afternoon offered more fat snow flakes and slick roads as we drove around Anchorage looking for a place to live. In one neighborhood we happened upon the largest moose we've ever seen. It was munching leftover pumpkins in yards as a calf explored front porches in the Turnagain neighborhood.

And last night we ran out of clean clothes and visited a laundromat for only the second time in our 17 years together. We deposited what seemed like the remainder of our bank account in the form of quarters into 4 commercial washing machines and people watched for the next couple of hours.

The laundromat was full of Samoans and Tongans with little kids running around and lots of food and conversation in the background. It's a sight I haven't seen in a long time, and it made me feel good to be in a different cultural setting.

We finished drying and folding our laundry at 11 p.m., just as the owner was sweeping out the shop and getting ready to lock the doors.

Today we pushed the issue of getting the kids into school, and Cheryl signed a religious waiver to get our son Cole enrolled at Central Science. She'll spend the rest of the day trying to get Carson enrolled at Inlet View. I'm left wondering why there is no consistency between states and school systems. One state wants birth certificates, another state wants proof of immunization. I want an easier way to navigate the bureaucracy behind my headache.

As sometimes happens in an adventure, my wife is left with the brunt of a lot of the navigation, while I'm learning my new city through the eyes of the local broadcast station. I'm already well into the challenges of work and enjoying my job very much, while trying to support Cheryl by phone, E-mail and text message.

Yesterday she found the perfect house. Too perfect. It's a nice suburban single-family home in south Anchorage with new cherry wood floors, granite counter tops and a yard the size of a small eastern state.

The rental price was ridiculously low, which caused me to think twice. Still, I E-mailed the contact on Craigslist with the hopes that there was some explanation of why the price was so low.

Indeed there was. Turns out Mr. Harold B Richardson has moved to Spain with his lovely wife. They must rent their home here in a hurry and though they know the price is low, they would love to have a good family in there.

All we have to do is send them our bank info and they'll send us the keys.

The telltale sign in all of this was the return phone number with an area code from Lagos, Nigeria, which my friend Michelle graciously pointed out.

The disappointment Cheryl felt clouded much of Sunday for us.

But today is a new day with a few more listings on Craigslist. I'll be wearing a KTUU Channel 2 NBC vest in hopes that someone out there wants to rent to a news guy with a nice little family.

This post may sound depressing, but it's really not. We're adjusting to all the new challenges, and the kids are starting to get their bearings. Cheryl and I will start to find ours soon enough. Then it's onward and upward.

Tim

Thirty seven days in the unemployment line

It looks as though I'm going to have to change the name of this blog. I was originally inspired by the government extension of unemployment aid allowing laid off Americans to collect for up to 99 weeks.

My position at the Missoulian newspaper was cut on Monday, September 30. I applied for unemployment immediately, and to date I've received nothing but slips of paper saying my unemployment aid status is pending.

Last night I accepted a job at the new director of digital content at KTUU, the NBC affiliate in Anchorage, Alaska. Somehow Ninetynineweeks just doesn't seem that appropriate any more. However, I don't want to leave any interested readers hanging, so I'll continue to chronicle the adventure as it progresses.

My wife and I spent a lot of time in Hawaii in the early part of our marriage. Having to move away after we had our first child, we vowed to find a way back some day. Since then, we returned to Oregon, spent time traveling and working in Eastern Europe and ended up in Missoula, Montana, which is not exactly a population center. And now Alaska, with an even lower population than Montana, is our our next destination. Things don't always make sense, but I find that big picture stuff is often a little fuzzy and distal. Probably for a good reason.

I have always loved the ocean, but I have come to love the mountains. Anchorage seems to have both in abundance, which is something very satisfying to me.

Several months ago I was chatting with a friend in Alaska about our various moves since we met several years ago when I was researching a story for a University of Oregon publication. We would eventually end up working together at the Statesman Journal in Salem, Oregon, and we founded the craft beer blog - "Will blog for beer."


On this evening, I was asking about life in Alaska, a place she moved after her husband graduated from law school in Oregon. To my surprise, one of the best print writers I'd ever worked with was now working at a broadcast station.


She took a few minutes to explain that the company was expanding beyond the traditional 5 and 6 p.m. broadcast news to a more web-centric model to provide news digitally in the way Alaskans are increasingly digesting their news.


She told me they were going to begin a search for a digital content director and asked if I was interested in having her forward my resume on to the station president.


I floated the idea past my wife the next day, and I got the reaction I thought I would get. She sort of frowned and cocked her head sideways with that look that says, "You're crazy, and I hope I didn't hear you right."


I let it go and didn't think much more about it until that fateful Monday.


After sort of processing the idea of being laid off and immediately formatting several plans, including grad school, self employment, international job possibilities and cobbling a bunch of local job offers together, I came back to the Alaska job and decided to E-mail my friend to find out if that search was on.


It was, and while figuring out how to navigate the unemployment aid system, I was corresponding with my future boss in Anchorage.


Finally we were invited to travel to Anchorage to meet with the team there and to check things out around town. I've usually done this part of the job interview process myself, but this time Cheryl came with me, as I knew she'd be the hardest sell.

Sunset from downtown Anchorage

Turns out we both loved Anchorage. The sun was just setting as we flew into the city over the tortured ice-bound world of southwest Alaska. I could see a monolithic shadow to the north, something so immense I had to scrunch down in my seat to see the entire mass. This was Denali. The snowless Chugach range framed in the twinkling lights of Anchorage as we landed.


Ocean and mountains. It's like a complete world for me, though neither of us have any illusions about how difficult winters can be up there. We're pretty big fans of the light.


A move to Anchorage is not taken lightly. Not by the prospective employer and not by those seeking a job in that state. So the drawn-out process has been a bit torturous as our funds have shrunk to uncomfortable levels.


To accept the offer last night was rewarding for many reasons, not just the physical need to know that our future is set. It's rewarding to know I'll be able to continue in the job that my journalism career has morphed into. Going from a traditional print reporter to mobile journalist and videographer to online reporter and finally a digital manager is something I didn't expect when I walked across the graduation platform at the University of Oregon, but it's twice the career I planned for and therefore twice as rewarding.


It's nice to know I won't have to wait around for unemployment checks that never come. And searching for jobs is a torturous activity in this day in age. I will not miss it.


Now begins the daunting task of getting ourselves to Alaska. You can drive, but it takes up to five or six days. Shipping items is expensive, as is flying. This blog will likely continue to explore the whimsical nature of family antics, the challenges of moving to America's last frontier and the interesting details of settling in a place that might as well be a million miles away from family for the ease of getting their and back.





Tim