Another Haines election is upon us and as always, it’s generating some howlers. Like a recent letter to the newspaper where a summer resident faulted a Main Street business owner as too inexperienced to serve on the assembly. I’m sorry. I don’t care how many summers you spend in Haines, seasonality still disqualifies you from challenging the legitimacy of a…
Let’s all calm down a bit that Global Port Holdings is going to make us a management offer on our cruise ship dock. Let’s remember, first and foremost, that the Haines Borough did not go looking for some other party to manage its dock. GPH said, “We’d like to make you an offer.” And the borough said, “Fine. Knock yourself…
I have been eating Joe Poor apples lately. They are delicious. Poor, a squeaky retiree, blew through Haines about 15 years ago. He got in with the Chamber of Commerce and fashioned himself something of a rooster, crowing about this and that. He seemed to have a kind heart under a protective coating of bluster. Joe’s lasting contribution to our…
I asked the former mayor of Haines Junction how many Canadians were boycotting Haines. “How many did you see at the state fair?” he asked, in response. Canadians didn’t show up at the fair. So I stopped by the Visitor’s Center office and asked if anyone knew how much money we were losing per month in Canadian visitation because of…
Former Haines Borough Mayor Fred Shields approached me a few weeks ago when I was circulating a ballot petition to reduce the amount of the senior citizen property tax exemption. “You know that’s not proper for you to do that,” Shields said to me, intimating that a mayor should not involve himself in partisan politics. It’s an opinion persistent among…
My all-boys high school offered an after-school activity called “computer club.” The guys who joined were mostly pasty-faced, squishy fellows who wore pocket protectors to keep pens from staining their white button-downs. If you saw them approach a cute girl at a school dance, she would look sidewards and say, “Um, I have to get a drink of water.” These…
I gave my truck keys to my dad one time and told him to take my mom into Canada to see Chilkat Pass. They came back early. “I don’t know why you sent us up there. There’s nothing there,” dad reported. In a manner of speaking, he was right. For 100 miles on the only road out of here, there’s…
One year into the Trump administration, it’s obvious that the Chaos Theory of Government isn’t working and that the president either is an idiot when it comes to governance, Putin’s stooge, or both. For Putin, it doesn’t matter which. He and his henchmen oligarchs gain every inch of ground that America loses. “Look at the insanity of America. That’s what…
Working as a tour guide in summer, I’m occasionally asked what it’s like to live in Haines year-round. “It’s hard and it’s sweet,” I tell them, “and the hardest parts of it make the sweet parts even sweeter.” A couple minutes after getting out of bed Friday I was on all fours in a cold, windy rain, fishing around on…
If voters don’t approve a seasonal sales tax Tuesday, it will be no skin off my nose. I’m too old and I’ve seen too much to pin my personal happiness on the whims of the electorate. I would, however, like to see the initiative pass for all the reasons I’ve already shared, plus this one: To prove to ourselves that…