Lynne Curry: One Look at the Mountains and One Bloody Knee

I hadn’t imagined leaving Wisconsin. My fiancé hadn’t imagined moving to Alaska. But when he said, “Let’s move,” my fiancé opened the door.

I stepped through.

Two years earlier, my flight home to Chicago from Korea had refueled in Fairbanks. It was 5:00 in the morning, but the sun already shone over Alaska. Though dozing when I looked out the window, the sight of mountains, forests, and 5 a.m. sunlight jolted me awake. I caught Alaska fever, promising myself I’d find a way to live in Alaska’s round-the-clock summer beauty.

Like other dreams, my Alaska dream faded until my fiancé’s “let’s move” nudged it awake. “If we’re going that far, how about all the way—to Alaska.”

Five minutes of negotiation, and we were moving to Anchorage.

Two weeks later, June 1972, we hit the road in an over-stuffed VW van, a plastic collapsible bucket fitted with a duct-taped metal faucet strapped on the van’s roof as a shower. We’d already become duct-tape Alaskans, and we hadn’t yet crossed the border.

Anchorage’s 5th Avenue, lined with car dealerships on both sides of the road, presented a cruel shock. What happened to the stunning wilderness we’d just driven through? A glance in the rearview mirror showed mountains so perfect they looked like a photo on the front of a jigsaw puzzle box. But these mountains blazed real in the dazzling Alaskan sunlight.

Anchorage or Fairbanks? A quick scan of our finances showed us we had $8.03 left from the trip. We bought two chocolate malts at Peggy’s to celebrate. Thick, rich, and chocolate-y good, they welcomed us to Anchorage, and we put down our leftover change as a tip. Luckily, we could continue sleeping in our VW van, and we still had peanuts in our travel stash for breakfast.

We found a wooded pullout high on Hillside Road and bedded down in our camper for the night.

Early the next morning, we hit the streets looking for a job. The new Cauldron restaurant and Dianne Tydings (current owner of Dianne’s Restaurant) hired us for a week. My fiancé built stools for diners to sit on, and I cleaned the kitchen for the health inspectors—at least until I used the sterile flour bin as a trash bucket. Thank goodness Dianne has a warm and generous heart; she fed us lunch and dinner for the full week despite my cleaning faux pas.

The next week I found a job at the University of Alaska. My fiancé worked odd jobs. Six weeks later, jostled out of our camper hide-a-way one too many times by curious hikers and irritated police officers, we found a rental we could afford at 829 East 9th Street—the heart of Fairview. A Chicago girl, I felt completely at home in Fairview. I wrote letters home bragging “It’s alive here, there’s someone on the streets at every hour of the day and night.” The people on the street made me feel safe; somehow I missed that they were selling drugs.

My fiancé took the van each day to look for work. I walked every morning from our downtown rental to my university job on 36th Street between Lake Otis Parkway and Providence Hospital. The walk to work in the sunshine charged me with energy on the way there and invigorated me on the way home. I wondered what would happen in winter, but snow seemed far away in Anchorage’s 19 hours of summer daylight.

Our Fairview rental seemed perfect, small and compact, with blue siding and an aging shingled roof that leaked with every rain. I learned to cook spaghetti in our coffee percolator and the one pot we’d found in the cupboards when we’d first rented our little house. Street people discovered we willingly shared one-pot dinners, and they brought fresh fish, currants, dandelion greens, and beer to share with us. Some nights, we had between eight and twenty folks sitting in our front yard, with some hiding weed when the police wandered by. As soon as our neighbors found out we knew how to make dandelion wine, they brought us buckets of dandelions, and we christened our wine Fairview Sunshine.

We fit in. Those on our street knew we had nothing worth stealing, just an extra set of clothing, a percolator, a cooking pot, two cups, and a VW bus they watched my fiancé repair nightly with duct tape and baling wire. We also had enough paper plates and plastic forks, washed nightly, so we could offer food to guests.

When our VW ran and we had gas money, we felt rich because we could prospect for currants, mushrooms, salmon berries, and blueberries in the late summer on Flattop Mountain and the Hillside.

As I was walking home one day a jeep veered onto the sidewalk at 9th and Gambell, almost hitting me. I jumped sideways and landed in a bramble of bushes.

“Are you okay?”

My one good pair of jeans torn, the knee ripped out, blood soaking through. My elbows scraped, wrists sore, I saw a thin, bearded man staring down in concern.

“You always drive on the sidewalk?”

“I’m sorry. I’m exhausted.”

He had a kind, worn face that led me to say, “It’s okay.” I didn’t say it but thought, ‘This man looks in worse shape than me.’

He shook his head as if dizzy.

“Do you need a chance to sit down?” I asked.

“Probably.”

“I’m Lynne. We make good percolator spaghetti.”

“I’m Jim, and that sounds wonderful.”

He’d almost run me over, but he was tired. Anchorage in the 1970s, especially Fairview, inspired openness and spontaneous generosity.

Jim came to dinner. He was a Jesuit priest working in Nome, where he’d started a community-based counseling center that focused on healing suicide, alcohol, and drug abuse among Inupiat teens. At that time, Nome’s suicide rate was 40 times the national average.

Jim recuperated with us for two days. On the second night he said, “You’d be perfect for running the counseling center.” He arranged a flight for me to Nome to meet the counseling center’s board of directors, and the rest is history. I ran the Nome center for two years, worked for the state for three years training managers and counselors at similar centers in Alaska, and ultimately started my own training company. But I would never forget 829 East 9th Street.

 

 

 

Lynne Curry has lived in Anchorage since 1972, except for a three-year stint in Nome. She has written a "Dear Abby of the workplace" column for the Anchorage Daily News since 1983. Since 1978, she has run a management consulting, employee/management training, human resources on-call firm, called The Growth Company Inc. Curry gave birth to three kids at Providence Hospital and is an active hiker and University Lake dog park mom. She has published three books, including two of the best of the Anchorage Daily News columns, titled Solutions and Won by One.