as a temperate rainforest, with as many as 220 days of rain per year and over 50 inches of rainfall. Most residents wear rubber boots all the time, favoring the brown, steel-toed boots popular with fishermen and those who work outdoors.
It rains so much in Juneau that I was taken aback the first time I saw a fur coat there. The young woman wearing a vintage mink had—of course—just arrived in town that day. Rain gear is de rigueur in Southeast Alaska. I was elated when Gore-Tex was invented.
When I think of my time in Juneau, the weather comes first to mind because I was so often in it. Initially, I had no car, and there was no mass transit where I needed to go, so I ended up walking—a lot.
When I arrived, the city had a lively arts and theater scene, a few good restaurants, and lots of bars to cater to the town’s population of blue-collar workers, fishermen, and government bureaucrats.
From a distance, the downtown, with its handful of multistoried concrete and glass office buildings, seems to have the skyline of a large city. Most residents, though, live about ten miles “out the road,” accessible via the town’s only highway. The Mendenhall Valley is named for the Mendenhall Glacier, a popular attraction and hiking area for locals and tourists alike. Suburban neighborhoods are located along a wide swath of flat terrain created as the glacier retreated to its current location.
The rest of the road services the airport, a shopping mall, and a number of beachfront neighborhoods before coming to an abrupt end about forty miles north of Downtown Juneau.
You’d be surprised how far forty miles can feel when you’ve got nowhere else to drive.
If my late teens were all about playing in nature, then moving to Juneau put those ideals to the test. For much of the four years I lived off and on there, I did so without running water, electricity, or indoor plumbing.
But my move to Juneau happened to place me in the center of a whirlwind of political and social change that would impact the entire state of Alaska for decades to come.
THE FIRST ORDER of business when I arrived was to find a place to live.
When the Alaska Legislature starts in January, hundreds of people swoop into Juneau, including elected officials and their staffs. Along with this influx come dozens of recent college graduates, lobbyists, and former political volunteers hoping to get jobs.
The annual flood of new people strains Juneau’s chronic housing shortage, causing government workers to bunk in apartments and houses like frat brothers. They might seek housing anywhere from cabins to cheap hotels to fishing boats docked in the downtown boat harbor.
In the 1970s, jobseekers longed for the short- or long-term posts with a state employment system known as “the gravy train.” This came from the state’s then-generous benefits and high pay, attributed to the difficulty in attracting employees when most chose the high-paying jobs linked with construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.
When I first arrived, I stayed with friends in an apartment in the town of Douglas, on Douglas Island across Gastineau Channel from Juneau. Then I learned of a small cabin in the woods I could have if I fixed it up.
The cabin was a small A-frame originally built to be a sauna. It was about the size of your average walk-in closet, with a loft just big enough to sleep in. It came with no windows, no heat source, no running water.
So I did what people who live like the Amish (but are not Amish) do: I organized a work party. About a dozen friends and I descended on my new abode and had ourselves the modern-day equivalent of an old-fashioned barn raising.
Luckily, some of those who showed up were carpenters.
We stapled heavy sheets of clear plastic over the window openings, installed a tin wood-burning stove, built a ladder to the loft, and made the place livable. Sort of.
It was cute. The only downside was I had to live there alone and had to travel a narrow, slippery-when-wet boardwalk through dense scrub brush and evergreens from the road to the front door.
At night, it was pitch dark.
Without streetlights or nearby houses, I had to guide myself using a flashlight. Every time I went home, I feared running into a moose or, worse, a bear. Or any number of other creatures and ghosts and everything my nineteen-year-old mind could conjure. I often ended up bunking on other people’s couches.
Once the Legislature went into session in early January, I participated in what was then the tradition of lining up along the second-floor hallway connecting the chambers of the State House at one end and the State Senate at the other. Longtime legislative members and staff recall the spectacle of people lining the halls and passing out their resumes. I’ve always loved a party, so I did what I always do in such settings: I walked and talked and met a lot of people and made a lot of friends.
I had no idea what I was up against, but I quickly figured out I needed to look more professional in order to compete with all those people on the second floor. I went out and bought a new pair of dress shoes. This was a big deal, as I didn’t have much money. I spent some of my last funds on those darn shoes, which I proudly showed off to all my new friends. They were all outraged when I got the news: all the legislative pages had been already hired. I was not one of them.
Then I learned that those hired to be pages had never even appeared in the halls. They were the relatives of political party volunteers, party regulars, and the like, all college age, all great kids, all deserving, no doubt, and all decided upon weeks or months before.
I hadn’t had a chance.
Fortunately, I had friends. Many of those I met in the hall that first week of the legislative session got jobs with various representatives and committees. At some point that week, I also made friends with the representatives from Fairbanks. It was that group that sent a sternly worded letter to the House Rules chairman demanding I get hired. He also got an earful from others I had befriended.
I was standing in the hall when the slightly embattled-looking chairman came out of his office and, with a slight grin, handed me a document declaring I was hired.
Normally, there were six House pages. I became the seventh.
THE POSITION OF page was created in part so that young people can learn about how the legislative process works. We didn’t do a lot back then. We were strategically placed in tall chairs around the House chambers. From our various vantage points, our job was to snatch notes waved by representatives and deliver them to other representatives, staff members, or people sitting in the visitor’s gallery in the back of the room.
When the House was in session, the page’s job was usually fairly boring. At times, though, when important pieces of legislation were being debated or voted on, we had a front-row seat to history.
We also had a front-row seat to how adults behaved when isolated in a hard-to-get-to town, away from their spouses and families, where bars are about the only entertainment around.
All of us pages became close friends. One, Libby Roderick, would bring in her acoustic guitar and sing and play during downtimes. (Her gorgeous voice would later build her a career in music.)
I made friends with the staffers who worked for the various legislators, people from all over the state. Despite having what I like to think is an upbeat personality, I must have possessed a less-than-sunny disposition at times. One staff member bought me a Sesame Street board book about Oscar the Grouch. On the cover, my name was handwritten over “Oscar.”
