February 9, 2011 - Airport in Minneapolis and the temperature is twenty degrees cooler than Anchorage. I wonder about this mythic anomaly of Alaska - the ice box, the folly. Where you can walk across ice in the summer in sandals, or ski down mountains in shorts. We build myths and live them. Had a friend once who adopted the garb of the supposed Alaskan. He grew up in the Anchorage area - born in South America. But when he went East for college he bought a Stetson and an accent, and played the tough Alaskan. His parents had been hippies - escaped to Alaska from the East. Father a College Professor, Mother a postal worker. But my friend? He was John Wayne in "North to Alaska" and the folks in Connecticut ate it up.
I came to visit him once during the Bush/Reagan Presidential Primary and he convinced me to come to the Connecticut College Republicans convention as part of his College's delegation. Not only was I a tried and true Democrat, but I had the long hair of a person who was rarely comfortable with more than one fork or a name plate by my dinner setting. I covered the Democratic Convention in New York City later that year as a reporter for the Alaska Public Radio Network (strictly voluntary, but I did interview Betty Friedan), but in March I travelled to the Connecticut College Republican Convention as part of his College's Republican delegation - under the assumed name of Hallowood Kaxlaxian (when asked I claimed it was British and Greek). At one point the battle between the Yale Reagan and Bush delegations turned into a credential challenge, each side fighting to see which would be seated and secure the delegates for the State Convention. I was selected to Chair as a "neutral" and practiced every trick I knew to get the Yale Bushies in - only to lose in the end. A strange experience, to be sure, but revealing also. We so easily move to deception....
And so it is. We spend a lifetime crafting stories of who we are, who we want to be - sometimes knowingly making the details up. But we risk losing ourselves in them. A Stetson and a myth, isn't necessarily the truth...