This is Anchorage now.
This is Anchorage back then.
Over the years Anchorage and everywhere else in Alaska has changed dramatically. But one common theme seems to stick out and that is the affect of alcohol on people. The three authors I chose to highlight were Tom Sexton, Dana Stabenow and Nick Jans. In these authors writings alcohol has either negatively affected the individuals in the story, or it plays a role.
In Tom Sexton’s poem “Anchorage,” he writes:
“While I pour my cup of morning tea, a dark bird tears at something in the gutter beneath a streetlight hissing in the sleet. Hotels send out signals from their ridge. Once again, I see that homeless woman, her bruised face holding water like a font, the police lifted from a plastic tent hidden in the woods below our subdivision. Their searchlights sweeing through the underbrush found the hut of those who fled the sirens. Not far from here, her ancestors would gather to net the quicksilver smelt, candle fish, that old women burned in soapstone lamps on winter nights, their voices coiled in endless shoals of light.”
From this.
Alcohol has taken lives from the traditional way of living of hunting, gathering, subsistence to homelessness, domestic violence, sexual assault, and heartbreak. I have seen to much of this in my community and in my family. I have lost family members over the bottle. I have lost a mother to the bottle. It has not had any positive affects in my life as well as many others. Our traditional way of life is being thrown away like a gum wrapper. Just as easy as that. One is willing to throw away their whole lives to feed their addiction. They would rather spend $60 on a bottle of R &R to soothe their souls rather than buying a birthday present for their child. In any way, shape or form one will go to the extremes to acheive the high from alcohol whether it be rubbing alcohol, hairspray, listerine, or whatever. I am talking burn the insides of yourself to feel a few brief moments of “freedom.” Sickening.
To this.
Dana Stabenow’s, “A Cold-Blooded Business,” gives insights on how alcohol can trap an individual in an unknown community like Anchorage. The visions they have to make it big slowly disappear once they take their first sip. Its all over from there. Because the bottle eats up all your cash you are trapped with nowhere to run, when all you want to do is go home. Home is always and will always be where the heart is.
Nick Jans’s, ” Beat the Qaaviks,” is a positive story that is more modern because basketball is such a huge part of many small communities. Basketball gives motivation and keeps some if not most on the straight and narrow. They strive to be better. They work harder. Although the path they are choosing is not traditional, and does not please our parents or grandparents it makes kids happy. It teaches them to communicate with their teammates. Gives them motivation work harder.
If its not one thing, its another thing. If its not negative, its positive. There are things in life that will take us away to another place whether it is good or bad. It may give us a natural high, or chemical high. Regardless along the way we will hurt many hearts, and break many souls. Through determination and love we must continue to treat one another as human beings. We were all brought into this world to do one thing and that is to love and treat each respectfully.
Ice Fishing on the Kuskokwim
Photo Credits: Nikki Corbett
Literature Discoveries by Nikki 
