Lawrence D. Weiss: The Road to Anchorage

There was only one road, but I was lost. My truck radio had stopped working. I hadn’t seen another vehicle for hours, and I was driving toward an immense brown mushroom cloud unfurling like a shroud over horizon and sky. My predominant thought: ‘What the hell am I doing here?’

A couple of months earlier, spring of 1982, I was winding up a post­doctoral program at the Harvard School of Public Health. I was on track to be hired by the prestigious National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, when President Reagan unexpectedly cut the Institute funding in half. My new job evaporated.

I told the Harvard employment office that I would be interested in any position in my field of job safety and health. Some ten days later a guy named Steve called and said that he ran a small non­profit in Anchorage—the Alaska Health Project—and he was looking for someone to teach job safety and health to employers and workers across the state. He was in town recruiting for the position, so we met the next day to talk about the job. The work itself sounded perfect in terms of my interests, and he thought I was a good candidate for the position. He would get back to me in a couple of weeks.

I started to have second thoughts. The Alaska Health Project was not the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health—no high salary, no federal benefits, and no prestigious appointment. And Anchorage—a hick town truly on the edge of nowhere.

A few days after these disquieting doubts bubbled up, Steve called from Anchorage and told me I was hired. Suppressing my angst, I agreed to take the position for the simple reason that my options at the time were severely limited. He said, “The job starts in two months. See you then.” Click.

At the time I knew nothing about Alaska except that Anchorage was a few hours’ drive north of Seattle, give or take. Captain Cook knew more about Alaska in 1779 than I did. My anxieties peaked when I bought a special road map that listed all the gas stations on the Alaska Highway (Alcan) because there weren’t many, they were far apart, and they closed early. And while you’re packing, advised the narrative on the map, “Bring a couple spare tires, a replacement gas pump, and a spare rotor cap, and attach a screen across the front of your pickup to protect the headlights and windshield from gravel thrown up by speeding semis.”

Mid­-May I drove out of Boston heading for Anchorage. I stopped for a few days in Albuquerque to visit family, then drove north to meet up with the Alcan. And that’s how I got to the desolate track of wilderness road, driving straight toward the mushroom cloud that climbed past the horizon way up into the blue sky and obliterated it. I was a school kid in the duck-­and-­cover 1950s. The cloud looked just like an atomic bomb had been dropped somewhere up the road ahead of me. Maybe Anchorage was already a pile of radioactive dust in a war that just started.

About that time I noticed a little VW mini­bus with Canadian plates coming down the road toward me. I wasn’t going to let him get away. I swerved in front of him, blocking the road. He had to stop. I jumped out of my truck, gesticulating wildly at the gigantic cloud and bellowed, “What the hell is that? What’s going on?”

In retrospect, I think this guy had probably run into his share of desolation­-crazed Americans driving up the Alcan. He was calm and reassuring. He said that there was a big forest fire up ahead, maybe Canada’s biggest this year, but that if it threatened drivers on the Alcan, the Mounties would barricade the road until it was safe to pass.

Oh. Forest fire. Not nuclear holocaust. I thanked him profusely for the information and felt foolish and silly. While I was standing there pondering my overactive imagination, he gently reminded me that my truck was blocking the Alcan, and would I be so kind as to move it so he could continue his journey.

I kept driving. Eventually, the column of dense smoke became an entire horizon of billowing smoke, but there were no Mounties in sight, so I figured I was still OK. After hours of stuporous driving, tires droning over gravel, I suddenly realized I was in the middle of just ­burned forest. Licks of flame erupted from burning limbs, and pyres of smoke climbed from charred brush. Glowing ash rained down everywhere. Still no Mounties, so I pressed forward nervously. Meanwhile, my fuel was dangerously low. There was supposed to be a lodge with gas near here. Maybe the gas tanks had already exploded in massive fireballs, sealing my fate before my first day in Anchorage.

After some time I rounded a bend in the road and was startled to be in clear air. I had emerged out the other side of the hellish landscape. There was the lodge, maybe a half-mile away from the line of trees exploding in flame behind me. The road was choked by a couple hundred men and women milling about and dozens of vehicles parked helter-skelter on and off the road. I asked a guy what was going on. He told me that this was the main base for fighting the fire. He took a scornful look at my U.S. license plate and told me that here in Canada anyone can be forcibly recruited to fight fires.

No! I was not going to be dragooned to fight a forest fire in Canada. My destiny was in Anchorage. I drove to the lodge to try to get gas. In those days most lodges stopped pumping gas by mid­afternoon and this was several hours beyond that, but I was desperate. I was prepared to plead with, even bribe the lodge operator. The lodge was packed with dozens of hungry firefighters shoveling food into their spent bodies. The old guy at the cash register could barely keep up with the line of grizzled, exhausted fire fighters waiting to pay their bill.

I pushed to the front of the line and started cajoling the cashier about how desperate I was for gas. Much to my surprise he said he would help me as soon as he could find someone to run the register. After a while we were out at the pumps. While he was filling my tank, I was looking just over his shoulder at trees exploding in flame a half mile away. I asked him if he was afraid for his lodge. He chuckled and said, “No, not at all.” He and his wife had been there about 40 years, and it was time to retire, he said. He smiled and added that the place was heavily insured, and it had been a real good last few days in the restaurant.

I drove hard that night to get away from the flames and Canadian firefighter recruiters. I thought more and more about a new life in Anchorage, but it was hard to believe there was a city at the end of this dangerous, desolate road. Two or three days later I came up on the outskirts of Anchorage. I drove right through downtown, all the way down the steep hill by Elderberry Park, and stopped when I could go no further. I looked out over Cook Inlet, Sleeping Lady, and the Chigmit Mountains that anchor the Aleutian Chain to the rest of the state. There was a town at the end of the road after all.

On my first day at the job, I discovered that our office building was a squalid two-story wooden structure with four 2­room office suites. It was on the edge of a huge parking lot we shared with the Rescue Mission. I had a small office with a window overlooking the Mission and the parking lot between us. One day, after I had been working there a couple of weeks, I came to work early to get some writing done. After a short while my concentration was assaulted by the sound of a hard-­driving chain saw that seemed to be just outside my window. I cautiously approached the window and peered out.

Two guys from the Mission had spread a large plastic tarp in the parking lot between the Mission and our building. The guy with the chainsaw and his friend were butchering a huge moose sprawled out across the tarp. It was very messy. I couldn’t watch. On the other hand, I was really beginning to like Anchorage. It was full of good stories to tell my Harvard colleagues who landed boring Washington, D.C., jobs.



Lawrence D. Weiss Ph.D. is happily retired in Anchorage. He has decades of experience in program evaluation, health policy analysis, research, writing, and publishing. He founded and served as the Executive Director of the Alaska Center for Public Policy (ACPP) 2004-2012. Prior to that Weiss taught at the University of Alaska Anchorage for sixteen years, and retired as Professor Emeritus. In the 1980s, before taking a position at the University, he served for six years as the Executive Director of the Alaska Health Project. He is the author of three books on various aspects of public health policy, and a fourth book about the historical political economy of the Navajo people. In addition, he has published numerous narratives and articles on a range of topics.