I’m covering the start of a sled dog race this weekend. That’s perhaps the most Alaskan event there is. If anyone who had never been to Alaska was asked to say 10 words about the state, I guarantee one of them would be Iditarod. The other two would be Anchorage and Juneau. Then maybe cold, igloo and Eskimo? That’s if that person had on his thinking cap.
Before going to Montana, people told me I should get a cowboy hat to fit in. As stereotypical as that notion may seem, it would have worked – though I also would have looked quite foolish and probably a bit like this guy. When I covered the rodeo in Montana, I really felt as though I was taking advantage of my surroundings. Every bucking bronco reaffirmed that I had fallen into cowboy country. In London I had the opportunity to cover several football matches. That’s soccer, obviously. Nothing felt more British than watching a bit of “footie” as thousands of angry fans made passive-aggressive remarks when Liverpool went ahead one-nil against Arsenal at the Emirates.
These are three fairly location-specific experiences, which started to turn the wheels in my head.
Let’s say I was from the Midwest or the West Coast and landed a reporter job in Albany or anywhere in the Northeast for that matter. I’m racking my brain and really can’t think of anything that the reporter could cover to have the quintessential “Northeast” experience.
In part, I think that’s because when you are from a certain place, nothing about it stands out. It’s just part of who you are. To pull a few highlights from your hometown seems too introspective, too limiting. It’d be like picking between your mom and your dad or your brother and your sister.
It’s easy to assign associations with a foreign land. The quintessential experience is really just a stereotype based on limited information. It’s an easy jump from A to B.
Of course, now I’m trying to think of what I would “need” to cover if I took a job in the Midwest. Farming? Na, too vague. Again, my mind is blank.
Maybe that’s how it should be. I’ll just go and cover the sled dog race and chalk it up to experience. Or do I mean Alaskan experience?
Note: I don’t usually write about sports in this blog, but this season has been the best New York Jets season since my senior year of high school. That was the year I taped the San Diego playoff game so I could watch it in its entirety after the winter dance. My friend Pat and I were sitting in Dunkin Donuts after the Snow Ball when I looked through the window and saw the Jets game being shown in the neighboring bar. Realizing the game was still live, and likely in overtime, I rushed home to catch the end. Those are the kind of lasting moments New York Jets football – especially playoff football – has given me in my short life. In case you forgot or never knew, after beating the Chargers, the Jets lost the next week to Pittsburgh, blowing two chances to kick the game-winning field goal that would have flown them to the AFC title game.
I had three lovers’ spats with the New York Jets this season. They were the kind of arguments during which I vowed to break up. I told them I didn’t need them any longer. The first came following the Oct. 18 Buffalo game when Mark Sanchez finally cemented himself as a rookie instead of as the next Namath. The Buffalo loss followed a heartbreaker to Miami, which some of my readers might recall.
It was the Sunday of the Buffalo game that I accepted the job in Alaska.
“How you doing?” my current boss asked when I called him to tell him that I was on my way.
I told him I was doing well, just a little bummed because my favorite football team lost a tough game. He laughed.
“Sounds like you need a change of scenery, bud.”
Yeah! I thought. Change of scenery! Screw the Jets! I don’t need them!
But then the Jets pounded Oakland the next week. (I couldn’t resist at least checking the score.)
When we lost to Jacksonville in the final minutes the following week, I had it. I was in Alaska. The Jets were four time zones away. Who wants to wake up at 9 a.m. and listen to football, anyway? So the next week I went for a hike instead of listening to the Patriots game. This was our second fight. I took some time to clear my head, to remove myself from the tenuous relationship.
When I came home to find out the Jets lost to the Patriots, I was happy. Good. That’s what you deserve, I told my love. After the Patriots loss, BobWischusen, the Jets radio announcer, declared the season dead.
“Even if they win out, it’s hard to believe the Jets will win enough tiebreakers to make the playoffs,” he declared. Our fate was sealed.
Except it wasn’t. The Jets started winning. And winning. And winning.
There’s a phrase that circulates near the end of every NFL season:
“Control your own destiny.”
It means that a team’s fate is in its own hands. If it keeps winning, it will qualify for the playoffs, no one will knock it out. Lose, though, and it becomes a game of chance.
The Dec. 20 game against Atlanta, was seemingly the Jets’ chance to control fate. Up seven to three with seconds remaining, the Jets were one play away from victory.
Atlanta had the ball fourth down and goal from the six yard line. Stop them from scoring, and the Jets win. But the Falcons’ quarterback, Matt Ryan, dropped back and found his tight end Tony Gonzalez in the endzone to claw the victory out of the Jets' grasp.
“Obviously, we’re out of the playoffs,” Jets head coach Rex Ryan declared after the game. Mathematically, that was a misstatement. But the Jets and all their fans knew, especially with undefeated Indianapolis lined up as the next foe, the season was done – again. Beyond a miracle, the Jets season was a lost cause.
I went skiing during the Colts game just like I went hiking during the Patriots game. I didn’t want to sit around indoors and watch my lover rip my heart out. I wanted to be outside, enjoying Alaska. Forget the Jets.
When I got back into my car after skiing, I turned on my phone and saw a text that let me know the Jets had beaten the Colts. I laughed to myself. A good win, but what would it matter?
Until I got home and learned that in addition to the Jets winning, all the right teams had lost. The Ravens, the Jaguars, the Dolphins, the Broncos. That meant one thing:
The Jets were in control of their own destiny.
As most know, the Jets crushed the Bengals (37-0) in the final week of the season to make the playoffs. And, as the Jets and Giants are moving to a new stadium next year, the game was also assuredly the final one to ever take place at the Meadowlands.
The next week the Jets beat the Bengals, again, in the first round of the playoffs to set up this week’s game against San Diego. The winner goes to the AFC Championship.
Sure the Jets are a wildcard team. But so were the Giants the year David Tyree beat the Patriots. So were the Steelers when Big Ben won it all. And the Jets have the best running game in the league along with the best defense. That has coach Ryan claiming the Jets should be favored in all remaining matchups.
Yeah, the same coach Ryan who a few weeks ago said the season was busted.
The crazy thing about this weekend is that if the Jets somehow win and if the Ravens beat the once invincible Colts, the Jets will miraculously host the AFC title game. Just like the New York Jets, the Meadowlands might be granted a new life.
With the way the Jets are playing, they seem to be very much in control.
This was the longest year of my life. I started it in Medford, Mass., at a party at my good friend’s college house and ended it in Kenai, Ak. So it was therefore my longest year by four hours.
How did I spend the extra four hours? That depends on where you add them on. Were they simply the four hours between 12 a.m. and 4 a.m. Eastern Standard Time Jan. 1, 2010? If that’s the case then I really didn’t do anything special with the hours – just had another drink or two with some of my coworkers.
But I don’t consider this a year of wasted time, so I refuse to accept that thought.
When I was in Montana, I posted about climbing life’s mountain. I wrote of being at the base of a long ascent. Well, on Jan. 2, 2010 I found myself near the top a ski resort unlike any other I have ever been to. The top section of the mountain is a glacier where you can ski in any direction you choose. And those who dare to can climb a few extra hundred yards for a few extra turns in some fresh powder. I decided to make the climb.
It isn’t the snaking down through the powder that meant the most. I actually fell about halfway through because my skis got caught up in a rough patch of snow. Falling in powder so deep is more like flying in the “Toy Story” sense – falling with style.
No, it’s the climb I’ll remember and the deep burn in my chest that came from hiking in plastic ski boots with my skis and poles flung over my shoulder. When I got to the top, at least the top where everyone else had decided to stop, I slammed my skis into the snow and flopped down into a bank to admire the view. The mountain looks back into the Cook Inlet, whose backside is guarded by other snow-capped mountains. It’s like a dreamland. Really, I can’t explain it. It’s like the land on the snowflake that the Grinch and the Whos live on.
I sat there looking down, my heart still beating hard and my breath still returning to normal, and then I looked up. There was still more mountain above me and behind me. If I wanted to keep going, there was terrain to cross. It might have been without the ski resort’s permission, still, it was there. But instead of climbing on, I just sat there and tried to steal my breath back from the view, satisfied with what I saw below me.
At about 5 o’clock one day this week, our boss was getting set to leave. One of the other reporters had written a story about green gifts for the next day’s paper. On his way out, our boss decided to tell us a little story about a multicolored sweater his mother had once given him as a gift. He considered it to be the perfect example of a green gift, I guess because it was handmade. Anyway, that’s when it happened.
I had only ever talked to Larry, my boss, on the phone before coming here. Whenever I talk to someone on the phone, I always try to put a face and an image to their voice. Is that weird?
Larry has a fairly deep voice – not quite Men’s Warehouse deep – but it has that raspy quality. It’s a good radio voice. He also laughs a lot, which makes him sound very jolly. For some reason, when I pictured Larry, I pictured him as a slightly overweight guy who enjoys wearing bright sweaters. I don’t know why that image came to mind, but it did. It’s pretty far from the truth. He actually favors a lot of single-colored earth tones.
But when Larry told the story about the sweater, I, for some reason, blurted out my story about me having pictured him as a guy who wears crazy colored threads.
He looked at me quizzically and then let out one of his deep belly laughs. I thought it was a good moment. A kind of redefining moment like when I rapped at my old golf course boss:
When counting change
I don’t make a mistake.
Cause with my skills
This job’s a piece of cake.
All I can say is you
better watch out Jake
Cause your best place might be in maintenance
With a rake.
My coworkers had different ideas about the sweater story.
“How long have you been working here?” the sports editor asked. He thought I stepped over a line. The story bordered on an insult, in his opinion. I argued the point, saying whatever I conjured up wasn’t the truth. How could that be an insult? It’s not like Larry actually wears crazy sweaters and I was making fun of him.
The next morning, Larry gave me an extra glance when I walked into the office. It wasn’t menacing or friendly. It was just thoughtful.
Then we had a conversation about an upcoming story.
Also, this may be the best lead I've ever written, if only because the situation is so rich.
Our paper has been mixing it up lately and that’s got me thinking a lot about the purpose of journalism.
Here’s the abridgement of what happened: The mayor’s chief of staff made some business deals with the local government (sold them some parts to a wheel well) and forgot to fill out a form before doing so. Not filling out the form got him in trouble because it potentially could have been construed that he was trying to use his power to make a good deal for himself. Not filling out the form also violated some local rules and actually could have been (and I guess still could be) punished criminally.
I did not write these stories. The story was already being developed before my first day. But I have dealt with the community response, which has been mixed.
At a local government meeting that I covered recently, several of the chief of staff’s family and friends came to speak on his behalf. Many people recognized I was reporter and spoke very loudly in my direction about how terrible it is when “the people who write about these things are so sensationalistic.”
Sensationalistic. Maybe, though I disagree. But certainly not inaccurate. No one to my knowledge has accused the stories of being false. And if you read them, you’ll see they aren’t written in a sensationalistic manner. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they are 100 percent justified.
The chief of staff certainly made a mistake. He should have known to fill out the form (and if the big raise that he received recently from the mayor is to be justified, he should be doing everything in his power to seem 100 percent competent).
But all he did was a make a mistake. It’s pretty clear he did not intentionally ignore the form, hoping to steal money from the local government. He simply didn’t know about it. I guess that’s where I begin to question the necessity of the stories.
I’m all for attacking those in power, but I think it’s best done when there’s a true wrong to be righted. This series of reports may be the beginnings of a bigger wrong, but as it stands right now I can understand why the chief of staff’s family and friends are so upset.
I’m excited to work at a paper committed to this type of journalism. I just think we need to be careful, tactful. We don’t want to become the Spokesman Review who essentially ran a mayor out of town because he was gay.
And I don’t think we will become that. I trust our leadership.
But I was interviewing the local government’s finance director the other day and he said our paper had recently turned into the National Enquirer. He said he was hesitant to speak to us. He asked me why we were behaving this way. I didn’t really answer him, nor was it my place to answer him.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about the question. Why were we doing it? Why do we put out newspapers in general?
That’s not a question that can be answered concisely.
Later that night I thought about a conversation I had with a person who recently lost her home in a fire. I had written an article on the fire. She thanked me because many people, after reading the article, had offered her help.
That reassured me. Newspapers can help people. And helping can take many different forms. Sometimes it means getting a story of a tragic fire out there so people can donate money, clothing, time, whatever.
Other times helping means forcing the local government to watch its every move so that citizens have the most effective and efficient leaders.
And other times, maybe newspapers don’t help but only hurt. But I hope that’s rare. And I hope that’s never the intent.
When I was in London, I used to walk around thinking “I can’t believe I live here.” I used to do the same thing in Superior, but the thought carried an entirely different tone. Amazingly enough, I haven’t had that thought at all in Alaska.
When I was little, I imagined Alaska to be this vast stretch of snow fields, perfect for dog mushing. In second grade, or whenever it was that I first learned about the Iditarod, I heard of places like Juneau and Anchorage and would think “I can’t imagine anyone living there.”
What would I have thought if I had known then that I would one day live in Alaska, and not even in one of the bigger cities? If someone had told me that, I would have simply said, “I don’t believe you.”
The interesting thing about being here is that it doesn’t feel that far away. I was looking at the Kenai Peninsula on Google maps the other day and scrolled a little to the left and got a real sense of how close Russia actually is. And you all thought Sarah was crazy. When I think about it that way, I think, “Wow, how did I get so far away?” But then I scrolled a little farther left and got to Europe. That’s close enough to home. At least it feels that way after having spent a semester there.
It’s like when you are driving home and it only requires two turns. Even though you still have most of the journey to go after you make the first turn, you can’t help but think “I’m halfway there.” When scrolling over the Earth, I can get to England from Russia, and from England I know what it takes to get home. It’s only a six-hour flight. That’s not bad. That’s not far from home…
I keep smelling the air here and am reminded of something. It’s so cold here most of the time that your snot freezes when you inhale. That always makes me think of ski club in high school, which produced some of the best memories of my Albany childhood. It was a time of inside jokes, throwing 360s off of big tabletops and not traversing down Ace of Spades or Whitetail. As my friend Zach once put it, “Ski Club is like a party on the mountain.” We were totally free.
I can remember many times popping out of my skis right before dinner at the summit lodge of Jiminy. Through frozen snot I’d breathe the smell of onion rings and burgers and fries cooking from inside the warm hut. It might actually be a disgusting smell, but my memories of ski club and its unbridled independence make me smile whenever it comes back to me.
It comes back to me a lot here. That smell of unbridled independence.
Just to be clear, I was never seeking Alaska. This was always a place that I thought might be nice to visit, but I never ever dreamed of living here. On our road trip from Montana, my mom asked me why I decided to take the job here.
“Was this the only job you thought you could get?”
Thanks for the demonstration of confidence, mom.
But in reality, that’s close. Just as with the job in Montana, I see this paper as a stepping stone sort of job. It’s a 10,000 circulation daily paper with a strong editor and covers an area of about 25,000 to 75,000 people (depending on the time of year). It seemed like a nice step up from a 3,000 circulation weekly.
Jobs like the one I have at the Peninsula Clarion exist all over the country and the world. I know because I have spent the past year and a half applying to them. I’ve applied to places real close to Albany, I’ve applied to places in Kansas, I’ve even applied to places in rural England. The Clarion, on the Kenai Peninsula, is the one that bit.
Now that I’m here, I can’t believe how lucky I am not to have gotten some of the jobs I applied to. What would my life be like if I had been offered the job in Gloversville, NY? It’d be safe, but limiting.
Now that I am here, I see why some of my coworkers (several of whom are from the Northeast. One, Mike Nesper, actually graduated from COM in ’08) sought out Alaska. They applied to several papers in this state because they wanted to experience this frontier.
So I’m here continuing my adventure. And just hearing about all the adventures to be had in Alaska, I might be away from the lower 48 for a good amount of time.
Above are the links to stories I’ve had published. (Tsalteshi and City Council were Sunday Page 1 stories.) My editors mostly threw me softballs my first week, but week two begins with a story that involves me researching the process of how to impeach the mayor.
As my editor said of the pressure the Clarion has been putting on local government recently:
