Linda was sitting on a log at the water’s edge, smoking a cigarette and nipping at a flask bottle of hootch. If ever there’s been a more fitting image of the Haines Polar Bear Dip, I haven’t seen it. We’re a ragtag crew, not an elite athlete in the lot. Linda is neither young nor petite and she sank in…
It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day and I haven’t done a damned thing to promote racial unity or end discrimination. That’s mostly my own fault, of course, but some of the fault lies with society and how, by deifying our heroes, we so often diminish their message. First, it’s a safe bet that MLK would not have been okay with…
The temperature at my wife’s house on Lutak Road reads two below zero, it’s snowing hard and that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is a prediction of rain on what Haines meteorologist Jim Green says is a downtown snowpack of 46 inches and what happens next as a result. Sub-zero temperatures and heavy snowfall are two…
There’s an apocryphal story about Ben Franklin, arguably the most pragmatic leader in colonial America, and a disastrous shipwreck. The wreck claimed the lives of many of the passengers aboard and distraught mourners asked that a chapel be built on the site in remembrance. When the question was put to Franklin he said, “No, build a lighthouse.” We are surrounded…
The notary public embosser used by Sol Ripinsky was returned to the Sheldon Museum last month, but half of the die – the part that sqeezes a piece of paper into a raised insignia – is missing. The embosser came from a house, an old Army building on Union Street that Richard and Mary Manuel had spent decades filling shoulder…
Not unlike Sarah Palin, the fat, philandering, bankrupt businessman who masqueraded as president liked to bash the press. But “lamestream media” and “fake news” are hardly new. Fifty years ago, soon-to-be disgraced U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew lambasted reporters as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Not that press criticisms are the exclusive domain of the right. Progressives can be just as…
My very limited time with Jenae Larson makes me think she was gifted a rare acceptance of the world. I was at her mom Kim’s house, writing a story about invasive plants and wanted to photograph her with her damnable hawkweed. “Use Jenae as your model,” Kim told me. Jenae, like no other teen-ager, agreed without a word to be…
It has become embarrassingly obvious that the downtown boat harbor expansion is an unnecessary monstrosity, a huge and ugly pimple on the once pristine face of our stunning waterfront. That this project was driven by hubris and vanity – not by need or by prudence – is nowhere as evident as in the Haines Borough’s recent decision to seek $20…
The people who pushed the Haines Borough to save Mosquito Lake School are now looking very, very bright. With only five students enrolled, the Klukwan School is in jeopardy. Like what happened at Mosquito Lake, with fewer than 10 students, the village school is now facing the loss of state funding needed to keep it open. If that happens, the…
Many people in Haines will respond to news of $20 million to rebuild Lutak Dock as great news and a Christmas present from Uncle Sam. They’re wrong. It’s neither of those things. The taxpayer bailout of the dock amounts to a corporate subsidy to Alaska Marine Lines and others in the shipping and freight business. It’s also a huge slice…