Last Frontier

Every few years, I go to Alaska to visit my mother, who has lived on the Kenai Peninsula for the last twenty years with her spouse.

When I'm there, I like to visit the town of Seldovia, which can only be reached by boat or airplane. It sits on the ancestral land of the Sugpiaq and Dena'ina people.

It's little wonder Seldovia fascinates me: I write about families and cultures separated by the void of space, magical seas, and interdimensional portals. I love the idea of living in a place where, if somebody wanted to find me, they'd have to pay $42 each way to ride a ferry across choppy, cold water. In theory. In practice, I simply don't have the administrative skills to live without the ever-present conveniences of a city of millions. I'm certainly not going to plan what I'm eating the day after tomorrow, let alone next month.

The accessible parts of the Kenai Peninsula have changed in obvious ways since the turn of the twentieth-first century. Primarily in that there are more people and houses wherever you go. Not in Seldovia. The only difference I note is that one can now get wifi and espresso drinks in a few places.

The towns on the Sterling Highway, however, are starting to look less like "Alaska" (which I put in scare quotes because I'm talking only about the Alaska of my mind, which is superficial and largely uninterrogated by any intellectual process) and more like, well, anywhere else. Lots of rustic bourgeois houses jockeying for the best view of the mountains, built on land recently bulldozed by people who want to live in Alaska because they just love nature and the outdoors.

On my most recent trip, in August of 2021, there was a lot of talk of all the Californians fleeing their fire-ravaged state and buying cheap (to them) land on the Kenai. Why they would flee wildfires in California and go to another western state where millions of acres routinely burn, I don't know. I suspect the northbound migrants are more interested in Alaska's personal income tax rate, which is 0.0%.

There's a very clear pattern that I recognize from Chicago. White people like me, or my mom, or whoever, move into a place they love, make it inaccessible to the people of color who were already living there, and take umbrage when different kinds of white people follow suit and remake it in their particular image of whiteness, which we find tacky. Because it is tacky. But the ability to recognize that something is tacky is not to be mistaken for a virtue. Because it isn't virtuous. It's just deflection.

I don't like those new houses on the Kenai for a good reason. They make me think about the melting glaciers their owners so desperately want to build a picture window onto. They make me think about the genocide of nations who lived on that land for thousands of years. But my instinct is to critique them for their aesthetics, to see in them evidence of people who are not like me, don't think like me, don't vote like me, don't respect what I respect, don't believe in science, etc.

It's easy to see the damage such people (not me!!!, my ego insists) do in a place that is so easy to read as pristine. I felt the same way when I went to Hawai'i, where you see a stunning place and the people it belongs to overlaid with the horrifying detritus of the tourism industry. The problem with Alaska is that there is still too much evidence of what the place was before Europeans and their descendants got there. But in Manhattan? Houston? Chicago? Much easier for a person like me to forget I own a house on unceded land once inhabited by other nations: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi. Not to mention, that house is in a neighborhood that has dropped from over 80% Latinx to 50% Latinx in just two decades, not because of long dead pioneers, but rather because of me and my peers.

I don't know how to fix it. I can't fix it. I can try to mitigate my own damage and that's about all. Which is probably why I keep writing new frontiers. Frontiers that are oblique enough in their allegory that I can look at them without the urge to look away and cast the blame on somebody just a little worse than me.

Image: A rocky beach in Seldovia, AK. Photo by the author, 2021.