At first I shared a house with two male friends. One was
building a new shopping center called Northway Mall. The other was managing a
small lighting company, Brown’s Electric. People I met along the way were
starting social service agencies or becoming the first coffee roaster in Alaska
or starting an athletic club that soon became the Alaska Club. My degree in
communications mattered here. I applied for a media job that offered twice any
amount I’d ever made before—and got it. I also took a weekend course in grant
writing at Alaska Pacific University and raised $60,000 for my first
documentary film.
My housemates and I hit the road nearly every weekend,
embracing new experiences and challenges. Our parents were far enough away that
we could take all kinds of chances without fear of consequences. Once, on the
way to Valdez, I looked up from peeing in the brush to see a pair of golden
blond grizzly heads watching me. Another time, a group of nine women rented a
helicopter and flew across Cook Inlet to go salmon fishing. When we landed, the
propellers made a crop circle in a stand of the biggest ferns I’d ever seen. I
brought back a garbage bag of those sword ferns that thrive to this day in
friends’ yards around town. We would fly to Seattle for a weekend of shopping
where there was no tax for Alaska residents. I bought a red sports car so shiny
I was scared to drive it home. We all decided we were never getting married.
Everyone was heady with opportunity and discovery.
Romantic tension in a household of one woman and two men
eventually pushed me to find my own place. That is when I found the “deal of
the century.” Nestled between two gravel roads now known as A and C Streets,
this little one-bedroom house was set on an alley between 12th and 13th
Avenues. It was basically a shack with an even more rustic tin shed behind it.
It cost $600 a month to run the oil heater in winter, and the plumbing froze
repeatedly that first year. But the rent was only $90 a month. That’s right.
The rent had been the same since 1962, and the landlady, whom I never met in my
13 years of living there, never raised it. The unspoken deal was to send the
check on time each month and never ask for anything.
As you can imagine, the low rent allowed me to improve the
place. The first thing I did was purchase a wood stove, and my engineer father,
who visited that summer, helped create a combustion air system that drew fresh
air from outside rather than through leaks in the walls; this instantly brought
my heating costs down to the price of a cord of wood for each winter month. The
wood heat was the coziest warmth in Alaska—steady, silent, and permeating to
every nook and corner of the little house.
I built a big deck and a greenhouse around my bedroom
window. I created a fruitful garden and raised the occasional lamb or goat to
keep the grass down. When I dug the ground to plant trees, I uncovered numerous
army rations in tin cans, which I fed to my dog. I made a comfortable,
unassuming studio out of the tin shed and carpeted and re-roofed and painted
the house. It was a perfect location from which to walk downtown or to hold
Friday happy hours on the sun-drenched, sheltered deck.
As the years rolled on, I was able to continue being a
documentary filmmaker because my overhead was so manageable. Life was
adventurous, fulfilling, and meaningful.
To the east of my house was a four-plex with a very special
little girl. Her blond hair and innocent blue eyes belied the life she’d
already endured by the age of three. She would hover silently at my fence while
I gardened, until one day I chased off some rock-throwing, name-calling bullies
and took her under my wing. Twenty-one years later, we made the film About Face
together about her life.
Suitors brought wine and new socks, fixed my pipes, put up
fencing, and built a carport while I made glorious salads from the garden. I
cooked on an ancient gas stove next to a 30-year-old Frigidaire. Tomato-scented
lovers crawled through that greenhouse into my bedroom window. Visiting
villagers, drunk and lost, wandered the alleyway. They staggered from one edge
to the other, but as long as they didn’t yell or pull knives on each other, I
just read my New Yorker and went to sleep.
In 1988, I received a scholarship to New York University’s
graduate film school and wanted to sublet my little house. Living with a woodstove
in an arctic climate is no small feat. Each of my fires lasted 30 days: then I
would let the fire go out, clear out the ashes for the garden, climb on the
roof with a chimney brush to clean the chimney, and start a new fire. When
severe cold hit, I opened the trapdoor to the crawlspace and left faucets
dripping through the night. This system worked but needed careful tending.
Finding the right person to sublet to was challenging. Trust
was a big factor in the equation. Would this person be able to manage the
heating and keep the pipes from freezing? I had several applicants and chose a
young woman who wanted to hibernate for the winter and write. I gave her
instructions and walked through every step, with strong words of caution on how
one should never burn cardboard in the wood stove. She was there less than a
month before she put a pizza carton in the stove, which was quickly sucked up
into the chimney and started a blaze. Prompt firemen saved the old tinderbox
this time, but I had to cover the cost of the damage, and she moved out in the
dead of winter.
Finding another renter then was almost impossible,
especially long distance, and the next one I found was even worse than the
first. She couldn’t come up with a deposit, but I was desperate. Against my
intuition, I let her move in. She paid the first month’s rent and then quit
paying. Apparently my little castle became a cook shack for making illicit
drugs and burned to the ground, tragically killing someone in the process. The
property, now a bulldozer special, was offered to me for $50,000; it would have
been a good investment because it was right downtown, but I could not afford
it, even at that price.
Now when I drive the paved streets past the property, I
steal glances at the big new house built on it and note that the trees have
been cut down. The tin shed studio and greenhouse are gone, and there is no
garden, not to mention a lamb or goat. A shelter for abused women now occupies
the vacant lot my dog used to rule. Somewhere along the way, life turned
ordinary.
But those were the days, days of tying cans on the tail of
life.
Mary
Katzke moved to Anchorage in 1979 after a disappointing run
at law school in the Seattle area. She came up to Alaska “to be a waitress and
figure out the next step.” One good thing led to another for the next
thirty-five years. Katzke has continued to thrive, with a life balanced with
family and travel and her work as an independent filmmaker, photographer, and
writer.
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