Tom Duck and Harry's Alaska Connection

Read my online book, Living Too Far North, commentary on life in rural Alaska and on the cartoons from Too Far North, the book we published during our 1986-87 school-year winter sojourn there.  It includes all 61 cartoons from the original book, now colored and updated, plus 19 previously unpublished ones.

In the best of times, life in Alaska, on or off the road, can be deceptively perilous.  One should not travel without adequate emergency provisions and supplies in any season.  The Copper River Valley, an area the size of West Virginia and bounded by mountains on all sides, can be particularly dangerous.  There are no cities, and public services are few and far between.  The threat posed by the novel coronavirus, pervasive world-wide, was no respecter of isolated communities.  In fact, the few two-lane roads that traverse the region, while serving as a vital lifeline, also provided easy entry for the disease borne by in-state and international travelers.  The people of the Copper Valley - its Native Ahtna and non-Native residents - have long relied on each other for support and sustenance.  That spirit was present in the pandemic, although like everywhere means of executing it had to be modified.  Leading the way was the Copper River Country Journal - www.countryjournal2020.com - a web-based source for news, information, and community cohesion.  The original bi-weekly printed Copper River Country Journal was started in 1986 for just that purpose, to support information and cooperation in the community.  It was discontinued in 1999, but its publishers, Linda and Jeremy Weld, now in their 70s, saw the need to provide those same services as Covid-19 began to ravage the valley, perhaps even more so, as there was no reliable, responsible local source of information.  (On the other hand, they also published my updated cartoons from Too Far North, which may have raised questions about their credibility.)

My Brush with Alaskan Humor or What's So Funny about Running into a Moose?

By David Mudrick, June 2007, revised June 2022

With selective memories of Gakona, AK  -  Until we lived there, I thought AK should have stood for Arkansas, but now I know it's the sound you make trying to inhale at minus 55 degrees F.

In May 2007 I received an email asking permission to use portions of my book, Too Far North, A Northern Cartoon Odyssey,  in an exhibit of Alaskan sequential art (aka cartoons).  We had  produced it over twenty years before in Gakona, Alaska, with publisher friends Linda and Jeremy Weld, in the dead of winter.  The exhibit was held in June 2007 in a small gallery between College and Ester, on  the Parks Highway, "the road" that runs between Fairbanks and Anchorage.  In the mid 1980s, this area would have been too small to call "podunk," especially in midwinter when there's not enough unfrozen liquid around to dunk anything, rich or po'.  Nevertheless, I couldn't  have been more honored, even if it were in the New York Museum of Modern Art.   (Well, that's probably not true, but I don't have to worry about finding  out.)

My wife and I, along with our then five kids, were wintering in Alaska to see the Northern Lights, with plans to return to Northern Virginia after the school year and spring breakup.  As winter  progressed, we needed to raise enough funds to stay fed and get home.  I had been drawing cartoons for our friends' new bi-weekly news magazine, Copper River Country Journal, which they published through their company, Northcountry Communications, Inc.  We decided to publish the book, which was a collection of those cartoons and others.  The cartoons were usually executed in ball-point pen on copier paper, by lantern light after the kids were asleep.

My greatest compliment at the time came from a Journal reader in Tok who wrote, "This is real Alaskan humor."  If so, then, what is real Alaskan  humor?  Certainly, it  runs the same gamut as any other humor genre, perhaps more often on the cruder side to meet the preconceptions of  tourists.  However, with the penetration of The Last Frontier by technology, just about anything can be had or viewed there, now, whereas when we were there, satellite broadcast was sometimes the only way to communicate.  The satellite dishes were pointed almost to the horizon, which was a visual and visceral indication of just how far into northern latitudes we had come.

My cartoons focused on the more quirky aspects of rural Alaskan life as we experienced it.  No, I never really saw a house made entirely of duct tape, but I suspect more than one exists.  No, swans do not return for the  summer in "S"s, but rather in the same "V"s as other migratory waterfowl.  No, my kids never fought over the Sears catalog as a source  of indoor recreation, but they did decorate the cabin with paper snowflakes and listened to the output of our home entertainment center, which consisted of an AM-FM clock radio that picked up two stations and a Fisher-Price cassette recorder.  (The story of the gentleman phoning Sears to order a case of toilet paper, and when being asked for the catalogue number replying, "Lady, if I had the catalogue, I wouldn't need the toilet paper!" is probably anecdotal, but not too far off the mark.)

Alaskan humor reflects the same vagaries of the human condition found elsewhere, though Alaskans may be reticent to admit it.  More than  elsewhere, Alaskan humor must also pay homage to the larger population of two-, four-, and six-footed, pawed, clawed, winged, or otherwise appendaged denizens of the state, not to mention the finned or flippered river and sea folk.  Unfortunately, like mosquitoes, puns can exist that far north.  Even more unfortunately, but unlike mosquitoes, puns do not die off in winter.  

Having a moose in it doesn't make it Alaskan  humor, although having a flying saucer cross the galaxy, only to run into a moose on "the road," just might.  This also was the only way I could work road kill moose into a humor context, since those encounters were often fatal for both the moose and the occupants of the vehicle.  To add insult to injury or death, you or your survivors wouldn't benefit from the windfall of moose meat.  There was a list of indigent families waiting to get a phone call that their moose was available, perhaps 200  miles away in Talkeetna.  We had more than our share of close encounters of the moose and caribou kind, and they were only a laughing matter after the fact, if at all.

Oh, yeah, the Northern Lights.  We did see them.  They can stay almost  motionless for hours and then suddenly start dancing at breathtaking  speed, so you have to decide in advance just how long you will stand there watching.  Otherwise, your brain might freeze and you might forget to go back inside.  We also saw them from the doorway of our north-facing latrine.  The door was no obstacle to viewing as it had blown off in the fall during a week of 100-mph Chinook winds.  Of course, when using the latrine in the winter, you have to let the seat drop hard first to remove the two inches of hoarfrost.

Springtime was another source of humor, when kids would measure the depth of ice-melt puddles by wading into them.  The water was always at  least a half inch above the tops of their "breakup boots."  By that time we were packing to return home, and the nights were now too light to see the Aurora, but the local fauna springing back to life all around our cabin sounded like a Tarzan movie.  On the drive back "outside," after  surviving the winter with little more automobile trouble than a broken valve lifter, we experienced a cracked windshield and a flat tire within two hours on the Yellowhead Highway, the first major paved road we hit in British Columbia:  Good ol' Alaskan, or maybe just northern, humor.

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