ALCOHOL WAS A FACTOR: WEEKLY NEWSPAPERING IN RURAL ALASKA

EPISODE 6: SAVING ME FROM MYSELF

In Haines, the weekly newspaper’s life blood is hyper local news.

The editor lives for a good City Hall story.

And so I dug in on my first week of work. This week, I wrote a story about a meth bust of a local grandmother who got popped with a small baggie of meth, a pipe to smoke it through and some alcohol — not to mention her six-year-old grandson.

Drugs are a significant problem in Haines, although most of the town fathers and mothers don’t like to admit it. But the new police chief, a former U.S. Parks officer in Washington, D.C., keeps warning them.

Heath Scott says that there are lots of ways that drugs can get into Haines — from boars along the unguarded coastline, on ferries that stop here regularly, on small planes that fly in frequently and by car from the Yukon in Canada.

In such a small town, especially one as isolated as Haines, there isn’t a hell of a lot to do for young people. If you’re not a hunter or skier or outdoorsman, you’re likely to get bored pretty quickly here. The solution for many people is a toke and a smoke, or a line to get them through another long winter night.

I’ve done reporting on drug use in my career, and I can tell a tweaker when I see one. There are the nervous shifty glances, the sniffling, the gaunt faces, often bad teeth and joblessness.

Haines was full of these people.

I hit the meeting routine hard that first week. I did a story about fisherman bitching about the town not spending enough money to make their new harbor a thing to brag about. The town was spending some $34 million on a harbor revamp, even though only 10 percent of residents here owned boats. But don’t argue with the fishermen; nobody argues with the fishermen here. They were here before anyone else; they’ll tell you that straight up, to you face.

They do God’s work, harvesting the sea. Other than the annual summer invasion of tourists delivered by cruise ship, the fishermen make this town’s economy tick.

The fishermen want a new harbor, at a price that’s three times the annual budget, well then, god damn it, they’re getting a harbor.

I went to another meeting about an ongoing controversy involving how helicopters dropping off extreme skiers on local mountains and glaciers threaten bears and goats. The local tourism companies want to expand the area where they can fly their helicopters; the environmentalists say the noise affects not just residents, but animals as well. The debate has waged for years, without end.

But first, I labored on the story Morphet ordered up — an annual tourism roundup of ferry and cruise ship arrivals. Important stuff to locals, I guess.

Then there was the piece about residents building their own parking spaces along a rural road. The state was against any makeshift parking, but after a year-long debate, about a dozen residents of an area known as Mud Bay, rented a bulldozer and carved out spaces along a rural road so they could park their cars and then boat it across a shallow harbor to their homes.

On a few weekend days, they gathered and split up the work of shoveling and raking. In my story, I likened their shared labors to an Amish barn-raising.

Morphet looked at the story and cut the line.

I asked him why. He said he was only trying to save me from myself; that people would not doubt be snickering about the outsider who came into their town and refer community of crusty fisherman and dedicated tree-huggers as Amish.

I asked him what was wrong with the image. We debated.

He put it back in.

Nobody snickered, as far as I know.

TOMORROW: The True Haines Originals