Mary R. Katzke: Drunk on Daylight

I first arrived in Anchorage on a brilliantly sunny evening in April 1979. The sun was low in the sky as we circled to land, but I could see Sleeping Lady Mountain in all her glory. The air was dusty and saturated the sky with a palette of oranges, pinks, fuchsia, and indigo. I had grown up in the rolling green farmlands of southern Minnesota, and I was arriving in Alaska with just four cardboard boxes and a collie in the cargo. I had plans to stay for the summer and regroup after a disheartening run at law school. I felt a welling of unprecedented excitement. And it wasn’t long before I was intoxicated with this eternal sunshine.

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.