Know Your Home
I
In Ella Higginson's Alaska: The Great Country1 there is this charming moment, as the steamer approaches Grenville Channel on the trip out from Seattle, where the author asks her fellow passengers about Alaska. One of them, a laborer, offers her this bright little gem in response:
"Maybe you see a white mountain, or a green valley, or a big river, or a blue strait, or a waterfall—and like a flash your heart opens, and shuts in an ache for Alaska that stays."
I think about that often now that I live here again. I left the state when I was nine years old in the passenger seat of a crumbling U-Haul, down the Al-Can highway to the San Francisco bay. I spent the following decades in various stages of mismatch. There's a saying I heard a few years ago that captures it well: "Alaska: it doesn't change you so much as it makes you unfit to live anywhere else." As best as I can tell that's correct. Stay here long enough and you get a bit of the wild in you — too much for other states. And it does haunt you. The aurora gets in you like a ghost and it lingers.
I don't know if that's just an Alaska thing or if everybody carries a bit of home with them when they go, but in either case Alaska is one hell of a home to carry. So eventually I found myself back in my hometown of Anchorage, against all professional sense.
And now I'm writing about it. This has been a long-dreamed-of project for me.
II
I'd like to explain a little bit about why I'm back here, and why I'm writing. A lot of it is just the impulse to find a place, to give to it, to lay down roots. Professionally, though, coming here makes little sense. I'm a numbers guy, a data guy, and in my field when you get a degree and some experience under your belt you're supposed to root around and find a spot somewhere in the tech world that will take you, or maybe academia, and you move there.
Instead of doing that, I just moved straight here.
There was a moment back in 2019 that prompted my decision. It's a bit weird — my family had roped me into buying tickets for the Nenana Ice Classic.2 The Ice Classic is good old gambling, Alaska style — every winter the residents of Nenana, south of Fairbanks, drag a massive metal tripod out onto the frozen Tanana River. Then they let it sit there and, come spring, the whole state bets on when it's going to fall through the ice.
The folks running the Ice Classic have recorded the precise fall time every year since the classic started in 1917, close to 110 years. They publish it every year in a brochure. You can see the fall dates for each year nicely laid out in their calendar. At the prompting of my family I wound up taking that brochure and turning it into a dataset, graphing the fall dates. The result is below:
I find this chart enchanting. Don't worry; I'm a numbers guy and I know that's a "me" thing — I'm not expecting you to be enthralled by a graph. But let me explain what I see in it.
It's pretty clear from the graph that something changed in 1970. The tripod began to fall through the ice earlier, and earlier, and earlier, at least when you look at the average trend. The brochure, it turns out, is a pretty classic example of a "found dataset" showing that the arctic has been warming. The folks who run the Nenana Ice Classic had no agenda in collecting their data besides figuring out who won the betting pool, and yet they accidentally documented a sudden shift in the climate of the north.
The Nenana Ice Classic records aren't the only example of a found dataset capturing global warming. The most famous is the record of the Kyoto Cherry Blossom festival, in Japan. The festival is timed so that it always happens when the cherry blossom flowers are in bloom. People have recorded the festival date every year since 812 AD,3 which gives us a near perfect measure of when the blossoms in Kyoto bloomed each year.
It is an enormous timeline; I've graphed it here along with a trend line, and I've placed a dotted line at the year 1970 — the same year the Nenana trend shifted downward. It looks like the blossom time began shifting in the early 1900s, but you can see how the trend increased after 1970.
Even more charming — in 1912 Japan gifted cherry blossom trees to Washington D.C. as a sign of friendship between the two nations.4 Clearly that didn't go quite as hoped, but the U.S.A. has reciprocated by holding its own festival each year, and scientists have recorded the bloom dates every year since 1920. Once again, I marked the year 1970 with a dashed line. You can see how it captures the same trend.
III
There is no scientific or moral lesson here. I'm not trying to make a point about global warming. My point is different. These numbers have been around for a long time, documenting a surprising trend that connects Alaska to far-flung locations like Kyoto, Japan, and Washington D.C. The details are there, and always have been. You just have to look at the brochure.
The world is full of hidden details like that, which only pop up when you look at the brochure. It's not just numbers and patterns, either. There are stories, connections, and surprises; they're all there if you're willing to look at the brochure.
Another example: In Alaska we have an island, a river, a lake, a protected wilderness, and a street (in Anchorage) that all share the name Baranof. Look a bit deeper into that and you find a wild story hiding behind that name: A vaguely Putinesque Russian merchant, strapped for cash, sails to a land almost completely unknown to the west and sets himself up as the micro-dictator of a company town to extract furs for his employer. Within days of his arrival his headquarters is destroyed by a tidal wave and he has to oversee the building of its replacement. He feuds with Russian monks. He founds a doomed experimental city. And then, after decades of service, he's fired. His replacement suggests that he returns to Siberia and so, with trepidation, he boards a ship to return to the home he left behind — and he dies from illness on the way there.
My point, I suppose, is this: know your home. There are stories there, wild stories, and knowing them connects you more securely to the place and the people around you. This slow process of learning history, and numbers, and institutions, and people, is the thing that transforms you from a disconnected dweller into a member of a community. The modern world works against this kind of citizenship. For most people, life happens on the internet, or at least the life they pay attention to. There's still an entire world right outside the door, waiting.
A few years back I decided that I wanted to know my home. So I thought about the many places I had lived and, on review, I was surprised to realize that Alaska is the place I truly wanted to know. When I was young I saw the white mountains, the green valleys, the big rivers, the blue straits, the waterfalls, and like a flash my heart opened, and shut in an ache for Alaska. For home. It stayed.
This blog, then, is my record. An earnest attempt to know my home, and to share it with you. — JH
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