Because it’s so often steered by egos and ideologies, politics is rife with absurdities. The most notable during my term as mayor was the Battle of Jones Point Cemetery.
Takshanuk Watershed Council, a group that cleans our streams and beaches, improves fish and wildlife habitat, educates our children, and provides scenic land for public use was seeking less than one tenth of an acre of the far corner of the cemetery property – across the street from the actual headstones – for access to a public compost facility it was building on its own property.
Garbage is a problem in our community due to bears, drainages, high water tables and other issues and the council was hoping to help the town address it.
The decision to grant this sliver of overgrown and unused property to a service group for a community use would be a no-brainer anywhere in the world so the town manager supported it. All hell broke loose and a crowd of angry, gray-haired conservatives filled the assembly chambers with charges that our largely unfilled 20-acre cemetery was under threat and, perhaps more ominously, that our manager “had turned left,” as in gone commie.
The rhetoric reached stratospheric levels when opponents and supporters testified to how the dead people in the cemetery felt about it, Haines being one of the few places in the world that takes testimony from corpses.
The Battle of Jones Point Cemetery was emblematic, a perfect but not singular example that our town will fight over anything, for any reason, and the war will consume us.
Haines politics are contentious enough that the first thing U.S. Senate candidate Mary Peltola said to me during a recent campaign stop was she had been afraid to campaign here because our town is so divided.
This place is renowned for being as bloody as it is beautiful.
Why is that so?
I’ve wracked my brain on this question for years and the explanation I’ve come to is multi-fold.
Some of it comes down to an overlooked demographic: Most of Haines is an immigrant population. Census figures say 66 percent of residents were born outside of Alaska. Even by Alaska standards, that figure is high. What is it about immigrants?
While they’re a majority in Haines, immigrants are a minority everywhere else in USA. In the United States, 80 percent of people live within 100 miles of where they grew up. Only 10 percent of Americans move more than 500 miles away. People are homebodies by nature.
People who move to Alaska, often enough, are the oddballs in their families, the one child who was not satisfied, perhaps couldn’t be satisfied, and pitched it all and moved to Alaska.
(An important question is: If they were energized to move by their dissatisfaction, did moving to Haines satisfy them, or are they just generally dissatisfied people, always acting on their dissatisfaction?)
Then there’s the phenomenon known as “immigrant zeal,” defined by AI as “a sociological and psychological concept referring to the high-energy, optimistic and unflagging determination often seen in immigrants and their children as they pursue success, education and upward mobility in a new country.”
Immigrants are zealous, so perhaps they tend to be zealots. If that’s too strong a word, we can probably accurately describe many new arrivals in Haines as self-certain individuals, people with a belief in their beliefs that goes to the core of their being.
At least two other factors should be considered.
One is that our town has a history, a political culture, of disagreeing and fighting.
In his book, “American Nations,” Colin Woodard argues that there are 11 regional cultures in America that date to before our nation’s founding, and that they are very much still intact. More importantly for this discussion, Woodard asserts that cultures of places generally stay the same, and that immigrants don’t change those cultures, they adjust themselves to them.
That proves out in Haines. People that move here tend to seek out like-minded individuals, then find a way to fit into the culture, ways of living and thinking that already are embedded in this place. Newcomers become moose hunters or Legionnaires or Lynn Canal Conservation members. They find places where they fit in and adopt the biases of people already here.
Finally, there’s the effect of excessive familiarity and what famed journalist Ernie Pyle – himself the product of a small town upbringing – described as “small-town hatreds.” Pyle put it this way:
“Small-town hatreds…verging on civil war, have happened everywhere in this country: over a man shooting a neighbor’s dog; over one kid’s slapping another; over a dead relative’s will; over which farmer was first in line at the grain elevator; over hiring a new preacher. It’s small and disgusting, but it’s America. And I reckon we might as well get used to the idea that people are going to be mean and ornery at certain times of the moon.”
In towns as small as Haines, where no transgressions are ever forgotten or forgiven, hatreds fester.
I was once using a local laundromat when I discovered I had time left on the dryer. I turned to a 20-something patron I didn’t recognize and offered him use of the extra time. He gave me a cold look and said, “Everyone in my family hates your guts.”
I was unsure of the man’s family and he refused to speak to me further or to accept the offer of the dryer time. Certainly as the town’s news reporter for 30 years, I made some enemies, but the point is that hatreds come easy, maybe even easier in remote small towns with long winters.
So we fight.
It’s an honorable sentiment to say we don’t like all the infighting, but considering who and where we are, perhaps we shouldn’t expect anything different.