Alaska stole my son, but gave me a great place to visit – Daily News

Alaska stole my youngest son this year. He snatched it from my house as we just spent 10 months searching for self in bonding during the coronavirus lockdown.

Unfortunately, he’s been here for 13 years, in the past three months wondering when all this soul searching and bonding for his parents in mercy will end, and he can move on with his life. Who wants to hang out with their parents?

He works as a guide for the glacier in Juneau, and if his trip advisor reviews are any indication, he does a great job and loves it. I’m afraid Los Angeles is in the rearview mirror. He is looking forward to making Alaska his home وطن

America’s last frontier can do that to people. Get them to start looking around and reassessing their lives, and wonder if that grass on the other side of the fence is really greener, and not just because of the heavy rain. I went to have a look last week.

Took a float plane with a bear guide to the remote beaches and meadows of Katmai National Park and Preserve, and did something totally crazy – something that will make you spend two weeks in a psych ward in Los Angeles

I walked in a meadow surrounded by 15 coastal brown bears, bigger than grizzlies. They were chewing on beach grass, and waiting for the main course – salmon, not me, to start running.

There were no fences or elevated viewing platforms. We were sharing the same land, and walked 10 yards from each other. No need to rush, just take your time, don’t show any fear. Crazy, right? Not in Alaska.

I wandered the streets of Kodiak, where McDonald’s starting wages are $13.50 an hour, and they still struggled to fill jobs because thirteen dollars was barely a decent wage to live in a town that relied on almost everything shipped.

Kodiak lost most of its fishing and canning business in a 9.2-magnitude earthquake that lasted nearly five minutes in 1964. By contrast, the 6.7-magnitude Northridge earthquake lasted 10-20 seconds, and was not followed by a 50-foot tsunami. It has wiped out all but one of the Kodiak buildings dating back to World War II. Today, the fishing and canning business is the city’s main supplier of jobs, along with the largest Coast Guard air station in the western states.

Alice Welling, Miss Anchorage 1987, who now offers tours of the city’s history. I was born there. (courtesy Alice Welling)

Alutiq native Wanda Katnikov was 11 years old and climbing a tree with a school friend when the earthquake struck. A stranger rescued the two girls and carried them to higher ground where a 50-foot wall of salt water came up in Kodiak, sinking the waterfront by 3 feet.

Her father was a fisherman working on his boat in the port, and her mother worked in the local hospital. She didn’t know for days if they were alive or dead.

We roam the riverbank ready to jump and fish for salmon, said Wanda, who works as a chef at the Kodiak Brown Bear Center in the heart of Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge, where dozens of bears are.

I got lost for a few hours walking through the dense fir forest of Fort Abercrombie, a National Historic Landmark, where the ruins of a World War II coastal defense facility still stand on steep cliffs.

Back in Alaska’s largest city–Anchorage of more than 350,000, about Glendale and Burbank combined–I reached out to Miss Anchorage 1987, who went from beauty queen, to comedian at dinner, to local radio, and now touring wagon driver The most famous tourist in the city.

“I tell people if you don’t like your relatives moving to Alaska,” she said. “They will never visit you.”

She’s driving down 4th Street downtown where at the end of February when it’s less than 10, thousands of people come out of their warm homes in costumes for the annual Fur Rondy carnival.

There are outdoor races, reindeer running, bull run. A thousand people start running in fourth place, they are chased by 24 reindeer, which is 10 below.

“Think of the state you live in, and its largest city,” Alice said. “Can you bring your fishing rod down behind the warehouse where the trains are still running, pick up your salmon, pick it up, put it in a bag and take it home?

“We are the number one consumers of ice cream, and we speak a hundred different languages ​​in our schools. We have 730,000 people in Alaska and over 100,000 moose,” said Miss Anchorage 1987.

“It’s the only place you can call for work and say I’m going to be late, there’s a moose between me and my car, and they say OK.”

Alaska, you stole my son, but she gave me a great place to visit. Then again, maybe the kid didn’t like his relatives.

Dennis McCarthy’s column is published on Sunday. He can be reached at [email protected].

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