House was in session, the page’s job was usually fairly boring. At times, though, when important pieces of legislation were being debated or voted on, we had a front-row seat to history.
We also had a front-row seat to how adults behaved when isolated in a hard-to-get-to town, away from their spouses and families, where bars are about the only entertainment around.
All of us pages became close friends. One, Libby Roderick, would bring in her acoustic guitar and sing and play during downtimes. (Her gorgeous voice would later build her a career in music.)
I made friends with the staffers who worked for the various legislators, people from all over the state. Despite having what I like to think is an upbeat personality, I must have possessed a less-than-sunny disposition at times. One staff member bought me a Sesame Street board book about Oscar the Grouch. On the cover, my name was handwritten over “Oscar.” Maybe it was all the coffee. But still, during lengthy debates, it was all I could do not to nod off.
While much of what was voted on did not interest me, several key pieces of legislation did. One was the session where the state created the Alaska Permanent Fund, groundbreaking legislation that basically created a state savings account. Into this account would go a set amount of the money flowing into state coffers from Alaska’s share of the oil flowing through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Alaska was one of the only states to conserve actively some of its wealth for future generations. Otherwise, no doubt, every penny coming in would have been spent.
The other Alaska State House of Representative pages and me at the chief clerk’s desk in the House Chambers. With the seven of us sits the Assistant Sargent at Arms Kathleen “Teeny” Metcalfe. From left to right: Paddy McGuire, Spike Dale, Chris Hart, JD Moore, me, Libby Roderick, Teeny, and Lisa Petro. (Photo taken by Kathleen Metcalfe.)
The Alaska Permanent Fund would eventually pay out a dividend to every person who had lived in Alaska for at least one year. The program was created in part to ensure Alaska would protect the fund from those interested in raiding the account for short-term gain.
MY OFF-HOURS WERE spent hanging out with a group of young people living in North Douglas at the end of Douglas Island. Then and now, North Douglas is largely wooded and remote. In the 1970s, young people lived in the houses that were either tucked into the deep woods or that lined the shore along Gastineau Channel across from Juneau.
The dense forests of North Douglas, much like all of Southeast Alaska, are filled with towering, almost Sequoia-like evergreen trees, including Sitka spruce, mountain hemlock, and red cedar. The forest of North Douglas now seems to me like something from a fairy tale. The dense undergrowth is a myriad of different shades of green, from the mossy carpet covering the ground and tree trunks to the huge ferns and skunk cabbage, a large, odorous plant with leaves the size of elephant ears.
Back-to-nature types lived in every kind of housing available: standard wood-frame homes, old shacks, cabins, wall tents, and such. Someone even hollowed out a giant, overturned spruce and turned it into a place to live—or at least camp.
I know because I had to camp there once. I was picked up at the airport by a friend who offered his place to stay for the night. He failed to mention it was a makeshift home like something out of Winne-the-Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood.
However, bunking in my sleeping bag in a damp tree wasn’t magical or even remotely endearing. It was ridiculous, and if it hadn’t been so late or so far out of town, I would have left. But I did what I could to get through the night and hold up my end of living the “back to nature” movement. That included spurning my friend’s sexual advances—but not without hearing a lecture on the concepts of free love and sharing.
I may have heard similar rhetoric before, but when I was in high school, we were normal teens. Normal, fall-in-love, or crush, or whatever teenagers. Sure, there was the occasional sauna (I wore clothes) or drunken party hook-ups (not for me), and later the go-home-together-after-the-bar kind of thing. But I didn’t really have a boyfriend until I was eighteen. I honestly don’t think I was that attractive to men at that age, or perhaps they were afraid to approach me, given my tough demeanor. I hadn’t had a mom or sisters to coach me on dressing, and I didn’t wear makeup for a long time.
One of my most significant relationships in Juneau was with a sweet, intelligent man my age. He had arrived in Juneau along with a handful of friends from the upper-middle class and wealthy suburbs of Chicago. Some had started working as loggers, wearing their steel-toed logging boots around town. They all had shaggy, long or long-ish hair, and were a back-to-nature girl’s dream guys. Some were from wealthy, established families, the kind of wealth where their last names graced major museums. Others had dads who raced Indy cars for a hobby. One guy described a dining table in his home bigger than the entire house we were standing in.
These young men had something to rebel against. They did so by logging, or learning carpentry or fine woodworking, or becoming commercial fishermen in the small boats that plied Southeast waters.
One of the group was a smart, kind young man who grew up north of Chicago along Lake Michigan. At first, he pursued me. No luck. Then I realized he was a good catch, so I pursued him. For a year, we dated and lived together. That was what young people did back then if things seemed to be going well. You lived together, sometimes almost right away.
His name was Jim, and he was working as a fine carpenter doing kitchen remodels and handcrafting cabinetry. He had long, dark, curly hair, and in a way, we resembled each other. With Jim, I was as secure and stable as I had ever been.
He helped me buy my first car—a forest-green VW Bug. Here’s the thing: I bought it before I had my driver’s license. I didn’t learn to drive until I was nineteen. But when the car was available, and I snatched it up. I did have a learner’s permit, and after taking the driver’s test twice, I got my license.
One should not learn to drive later in life, if nineteen can be called late. I was afraid to drive. To make matters worse, not everything about the car worked, including the driver’s side windshield wiper. In a temperate rainforest. In a place where it rained just about every day, or so it seemed. I did not have a working windshield wiper. On. The. Driver’s. Side.
Maybe I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was.
But the previous owner had hooked up a nifty string the driver could pull to make the wiper work. And for some reason—a lack of funds or just plain stupidity—that was how I operated that car.
There were other issues, one of which was discovered late one night. I was driving with a drunk friend in the backseat. Suddenly, he began yelling, “I can see the road!”
Turns out the floor had a hole that had been covered up by a piece of plywood under the floor mat. My friend had accidentally dislodged the wood, and his foot almost hit the road whizzing by underneath. I felt as if my cute VW Bug had become one of the cars from The Flintstones, where the cars were literally run on foot through holes in the floor.
As if back-to-nature living wasn’t appealing enough, after beginning to date Jim, I bought my first home. It was a popular type of Juneau home at the time called a “float house.”
My then-boyfriend Jim and me on the float house I bought to live in while going to college at the University of Alaska Southeast, in the late 1970s. We had towed the house by skiff on a high tide to a small creek bed to where it’s shown here.
Like a boat house found in marinas around the globe, a float house was also a structure built on a floating dock. A handful began cropping up around North Douglas, all handcrafted by young men and parked along the upper reaches of streams and small creeks, left to rest tied along the tidal flats. I was told at the time that neither state nor federal authorities had any jurisdiction over the tidelands. I doubt anyone gave much thought to the ecosystem of waterfowl and fish that a haphazardly parked float house might disrupt or even destroy. Eventually, a law change made such encroachments