What’s wrong with Alaska?

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 11:48:00 +0000

It is difficult now -- it has always been difficult -- to visit Alaska and not depart with the feeling that you have witnessed something experimental and anomalous. The state seems less an extension of America proper than a distilled counterfactual, a pioneer's idea of what the country could have become. There is the magnificent landscape, of course, the rough survivalist feel, the intimacy with the natural world and the disorienting, ever present gender imbalance. Where women outnumber men in the rest of the country, the proportion is reversed in Alaska, the most male of all 50 states. There is the state's unique transience, too, the notion that with more than 60 percent of Alaska's population born elsewhere, the state's very existence depends on hundreds of thousands of decisions to pick up stakes and leave the Lower 48, and on an equal number of individual commitments to live not only differently but apart. And then, perhaps even more vividly, there is the politics.

Salon.com > Benjamin Wallace-Wells

What’s wrong with Alaska?