Marilyn Borell: Starting Over

July of 1986 was a bad time to show up in Anchorage looking for work. The city was in the throes of a recession. There were 7,000 fewer jobs than the previous year. Another 7,000 would be lost by 1987.

Oil prices had taken a nose-dive from $15.81 a barrel in January to $2.99 in July, the month my husband and I arrived. People were leaving Anchorage in droves. Seventeen thousand moved out that year, another 10,000 the next. Many locked their doors and walked away from houses that suddenly were worth less than they owed on their mortgages.

Did Steve and I fail to notice all the vehicles headed south as we drove up the Alcan Highway? It’s not that we hadn’t done any homework. We’d been receiving The Anchorage Times in our O’Fallon, Illinois mailbox for months, eagerly perusing the classifieds for work opportunities. Steve had mailed scores of resumes to Anchorage businesses that had anything to do with mining, the field he’d been working in for the past dozen years in North Dakota, Colorado, Colombia, S.A., and Illinois. The few replies he received were some version of “thanks, but no thanks.” We figured maybe we could do better in person.

If The Times was covering what was happening in the oil industry, the chief mainstay of Alaska’s economy, we missed it. We put our household goods in storage in Springfield, Illinois, bought a flat trailer to carry our Subaru station wagon, packed clothes and personal files in the over-the-truck camper, and headed for Seattle, visiting friends and relatives along the way. We took our time driving up the Alcan, camping at lakeside campgrounds for the scenery and an easy shampoo and bath.

Once we arrived in Anchorage, we stayed with my college roommate Karen and her family who had moved to Alaska in 1978. We had visited them in 1982 so I could get a feel for the state. Steve had been stationed in Galena with the Air Force the year before we met and was already convinced that Alaska had no equal.

While I hung out with Karen and her two young foster daughters, Steve made a full-time job of job hunting. Every morning he showered, put on a coat and tie, and met with contacts in the mining industry. Unfortunately, not much was happening in mining in Alaska. The only large, operating mine was that of Usibelli Coal Company near Healy. Joe Usibelli, Sr.’s, sons held the jobs that would have been a good fit for Steve.

It was a great time, however, to be looking for housing and used furniture. The apartment vacancy rate of 14.5% in the second quarter of 1985 would climb to 26.1% by the second quarter of 1987. After living with the Ericksons for a month, we settled into a four-plex in Independence Park. I bought a sectional couch for $75 and a quality wood dining set for $150 at a moving sale down the street.

Food was another matter. Milk cost twice what we had been paying in Illinois. When we saw that a 16-ounce bag of Doritos was nearly $5, we purchased a hot air popper and made popcorn our snack of choice. I bought only the fruits and vegetables that were on sale each week, a habit that I mostly follow even now.

A six-pack of Coke was $3.29, and there were no deals because there was little competition. Fred Meyer’s didn’t carry groceries back then, and Anchorage had no K-Mart or Walmart. Ditto Target, Lowe’s, and Home Depot.

My job hunt was postponed several months by injuries I suffered in a car accident ten days after we arrived. Karen and I were driving east on Minnesota in her minivan, just west of where C Street ties into Minnesota with a roundabout today. There was no road running north from Minnesota at that spot, and the east- and west-bound lanes were separated by duck ponds. A short stretch of C Street had just been completed connecting Klatt Road to Minnesota from the south.

“They’re not going to stop!” I exclaimed, interrupting our conversation about contact lenses. I saw a flash of red and then everything went dark. A ¾ ton pickup truck t-boned my door, launching the minivan into the air. We landed in a ditch near one of the ponds, the windshield flush with the mud bank.

Karen’s foster daughters were screaming in their car seats in the back. Fortunately, they suffered only a few nicks from flying glass. Karen was bruised from the steering wheel and was having trouble breathing.

My right eye hurt so bad, I didn’t realize my right elbow was cut to the bone and broken. The driver behind us called 911 and handed me a scrap of paper with his name and phone number on it.

Karen was treated in the Providence Hospital emergency room and released. I was hospitalized for a week and required two surgeries on my elbow, one to clean out the debris, a second to sew it up once the doctor was confident no infection had set in. What followed was physical therapy twice a week for over three months. Fortunately, our apartment was on the bus line.

In late December, having regained full mobility in my arm, I got a temporary job in the Financial Aid Office at the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA), which was in the process of merging with Anchorage Community College (ACC).

Having still not found a job, Steve took out a small business license and ordered business cards, which he tucked into the Christmas letters we mailed out. In January, he began to get calls from former mining associates in the lower 48 offering to fly him down for one to four weeks of mining consulting. He worked that winter and spring in Nevada, New Mexico, and California.

The Financial Aid Director wanted to offer me a permanent position but couldn’t do so because of a hiring freeze in place while the university tried to relocate employees whose jobs had disappeared with the merger. Financial Aid kept extending my temporary contract. After six months, they were required by law to provide some limited benefits. I ended up working there 12-and-a-half months as temporary staff.

Before leaving Illinois, Steve and I had decided we would give the Alaska adventure a year, and if it didn’t work out, we’d leave. When neither of us had permanent jobs after the first year, we prayed about it and decided to give it another year.

In the spring of 1988, before the second year was up, Steve was offered a permanent job at the Valdez Creek gold mine. It was located north of the Denali Highway, halfway between Cantwell and Paxson. He had first gone to work there as a short-term consultant.

In negotiating his hiring contract, Steve got the company to agree to pay for moving our household goods to Anchorage. His permanent job also qualified us for a housing loan.

By then there were fewer lenders from which to choose. Multiple banks and savings and loan associations had failed due to the high rate of defaults on real estate loans. Alaska Mutual Bank and United Bank Alaska would have been among them had not the FDIC and the European-based Hallwood Group come to their rescue. We got our mortgage through National Bank of Alaska (now Wells Fargo), which was able to weather the financial storm because they had been more conservative in loaning money during good economic times.

By summer 1988, UAA’s hiring freeze was over. On the way to the state fair in August, I stopped at the Human Resources Office and turned in an application for one of two full-time jobs as Department Secretary in the English Department. I got an interview and then a job offer.

The Anchorage housing market had started to recover by then, but it was still an excellent time to buy. Through a realtor friend of Karen’s, we learned of a house on two wooded acres on the mid-hillside that was coming up for sale. It had not been listed or shown to anyone yet.

We moved into that house in December 1988. Three days before Christmas, our shipment of household goods arrived. Steve’s parents, who were up from Kansas for the holidays, helped us unpack box after box of dishes and run them through the dishwasher. Not having seen our belongings for over two years, it was like opening lots and lots of extra presents.

But there was a more significant present that arrived without wrapping and ribbon that year. It had taken two-and-a-half years of persistence, and the Lord’s grace, but we were finally home.