ALCOHOL WAS A FACTOR: Weekly Newspapering in Rural Alaska

Public Meetings Are Open Season in Haines. Axes fly.

In my 35 years as a professional journalist, working for four different newspapers, I have covered some pretty dramatic events.

I’ve written about floods and fires and presidential elections; in both the U.S. and Pakistan. I’ve covered the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and the tsunami-inspired meltdown at a Japanese nuclear power plant. At times, I have feared for my life.

But I have never witnessed (or covered) an extraordinary, theatrical, savage and downright-crazy event like last’s night surprise firing of the borough manager in tiny Haines Alaska.

It was more than a firing. It was an ambush. It was shock and awe, and at times seemed to border on a witch-hunt. There were angry taunts from the audience and tears from the presiding town mayor, who characterized her fellow panel members as “ax throwers.”

In the end, there was blood on the walls. And the instrument of death was blunt: a chandelier, perhaps, an axe or a claw-hammer.

And my boss Tom Morphet — the editor of the Chilkat Valley News and member of the borough assembly — was there instigating the fray, wielding the weapon.

It’s clear to say this: Bill Seward, the 100,000-a-year professional manager who had never done this kind of job before he was hired just six months ago, never saw this coming; neither didn’t anyone else, including his wife, who sat just two seats away from me.

Nor did I.

I’d seen Seward around town. He seemed like a nice enough guy; but you never know with these things. I’m nothing else if not a wise ass, so when I walked into the meeting chambers and saw Seward sitting there, looking a bit uncomfortable, as though about to face a firing squad of shooters he assumed had no bullets, I just couldn’t help myself. “Look,” I said, “if there’s any trouble, I’m right here in the second row.”

He smiled weakly.

I came to this town more than a month ago because Tom needed someone to fill in for him as the town’s journalist chronicler. Tom has worked here in Haines for more than 30 years, often living on sustenance wages to put out a 1,500-circulation weekly newspaper known for its brass-knuckles scrappy stance to the world — which in Tom’s view, is Haines and Haines only.

Tom cares about Haines. He was tired of covering what he viewed as the nincompoops running the show. So in a surprise move this fall, he ran for a seat on the six-member town council, which here is called the borough assembly.

People called it a conflict of interest, including his lead reporter, who quit on the spot.

So Tom has brought in a series of outsiders like me to fill the 12-page weekly while he tries so sell the paper and continue on his newfound path of civic leader — and rabble-rouser.

And man, did he rabble last night. Man, did he rouse.

The meeting was the last in a week of public-showdowns in a town that loves showdowns. The previous night, the often-contentious agenda dragged on for so long, the assembly had to call it quits before midnight.

Town leaders declared a time-out, saying they would pick up the following night with a matter that on its face seemed run of the mill: the six-month review of a placid looking and sleepy-eyed Alaskan Native American who had been on the job just six months.

But nothing in Haines is ever run of the mill. This is a town with what many say is the highest per-capita number of college degree holders in the state. With that come chips that sit on shoulders like huge blocks of ice. Like immovable glaciers. They don’t take easily to outsiders here. They size one another up like predators, looking for weaknesses. And none of it plays out more brazenly than during the borough meetings.

Some say there isn’t enough to do here or that there’s something wrong with the water, but they just can’t understand why this town feeds on itself with a vengeance that rivals Lord of the Flies.

Or as Tom told me before I took the job, the warring tribes of Kandahar.

And at times, it seems, Tom is one of the tribal leaders.

Last year at this time, Mayor Jan Hill made front-page news here when she called Haines “a hateful place.”

She hit the frozen nail on the head.

I compare the place to this: Remember Blue Velvet, the David Lynch film about the characters who dwell in the dark margins of a small community? The movie starts with a man mowing his lawn (he suddenly has a heart attack). But the camera pans from the suburban scene down to the grass and the dirt below, as if to say the denizens you will find here are subterranean in their weirdness and duplicity.

That’s Haines. Pan down from the majestic mountains and you find an ongoing war of class and intelligence and culture and everything else under the weak winter sun.

Which brings us to last night’s meeting: Give the manager a slap on the wrist and tell him to get his act together. That’s how it’s done in other places; but not here.

Haines has gone through a revolving door of managers in recent years. Either they flee town or are run out on a hemlock rail.

Tom got the show started with sniper-like precision.

He read a lengthy three-page manifest about why Seward had to go. It was succinct and it was brutal. I told myself as I listened, “Gee, I hope he doesn’t write an evaluation of me before I slide out of town in another week.

The next three hours, which included 45 minutes of executive session, were Shakespearean to say the least — as board members, many of them visibly moved, one with her head on the table, grappled with the decision of deciding one man’s professional fate.

As one assemblywoman said, her eyes wet with concern, “Remember, this is a member of our community.”

In Haines, that was a death sentence.

For a while, it looked as though Seward was going to escape with a reprimand and another three months to get his act together.

But then Tom rallied. He passed a motion that Seward had to go.

It was beautiful in a way. Tom would be a formidable member of Congress. He is fearless and he does not give a damn what people think. And on this night he thought that he had to have Bill Seward’s head.

As Tom continued his litany of doom, the mood in the audience shifted. People began talking under their breaths, like a mob in search of its torches.

One woman turned to me and said with a nightmarish face, “And you work for that man!”

Another, hired by Seward, a bright, funny woman with a law degree, passed me a note.

“Is he this much of a micromanager at work?”

I had to admit that he was.

For months, Tom has been in a forced retreat from his beloved newsroom. He has taken an office down the hall as he lets others run the ship he has steered for decades.

But he can’t help himself. He returns with ideas and executive orders.
He is blunt.

“Glionna, get out a piece of paper. Take some notes.”

I have come to say, whenever he enters and appears heading for me: “Tom, how have I failed you this time?”

When he is dictating a story he wants done, he brooks no interruption. I listen, and sometimes begin by saying: “Permission to speak?”

But I get it. Tom is all about passion. He doesn’t want anyone else at the wheel of this classic car he has built from the ground up.

During a break, a resident approached me in the hallway outside the meeting room and asked how I liked Haines.

Then he launched into a five-minute soliloquy about how he had never before seen such a strange, hateful place and he had been in the military and had traveled around the world.

I listened, wondering how so much spite festered in such a majestic and beautiful place.

Back in the room, on the killing floor, before the final vote was taken, the mayor gave a tearful speech about how she was ashamed to be involved with such an attack.

But justice was done: Bill Seward was declared professionally dead at just before 10 p.m.

He seemed like a nice guy.

I followed him out into the hallway to get his reaction. He was a reindeer in the headlights.

“I never saw that coming,” he said.

Nobody did; except maybe Tom.

I had to rush back to the newsroom. It was our deadline night and I had called the layout guy to reserve space on the front page for what was in this town big breaking-news.

But I had to stay for public comment.

And man, am I glad I did.

One woman walked to the microphone and literally spit her venom at Tom. She said Tom was a vicious little-hearted man. She told him to take his hat off when the board said the Pledge of Allegiance.

Another man said he was going to begin organizing a campaign to recall Tom Morphet from the assembly the very next morning.

I hurried out, walking the two blocks back to the paper on a cold but gorgeous night.

Tom passed me in his old pickup with the cracked windshield and threw open the passenger door.

I hoped in. He seemed elated, high on some drug, adrenaline-buzzed, like a soldier just returned from battle.

In the newsroom, there was joy. Apparently, people didn’t much like Seward.

Or else they all just liked the energy of fresh blood.

I sat down at my desk to write a deadline story about a man I didn’t really know, working for a boss I both respected and somewhat feared.

“After only six months on the job,” I wrote, “Manager Bill Seward was terminated Wednesday night by the Haines borough assembly following an emotionally-wracked evening in which a tearful Mayor Jan Hill accused the panel of being ‘axe-throwers.’”

It wasn’t art, but I was off to the races.

In the end, it would be another 80-hour week chronicling emotional blood and guts in a vitriolic little Alaska town, a Fargo that had long ago lost its sense of humor.

But I had a job to do, taking part in the savage tribal warfare that is life in Haines Alaska.