| April 21, 2006 Red Alert by Soren Wuerth Lot
for sale, inlet view
A thin creek corridor is all the nature that remains in the South Anchorage suburb where I grew up. My parent’s house used to sit on the periphery of the city. Its windows faced a lonely hill, a small lake where ducks bobbed and moose stood, and an unbroken margin of forest. Twenty years later, the wilderness outside the windows is enclosed by subdivisions. The tiny lake is a temporary holding pond for street drainage and the rusty trickle from a litter-strewn creek. Boots burnt orange, I waded through the drainage one year, pulling out plastic bags, candy wrappers and old tires. As a teenager, I ran across a bridge over the creek, and out to a dirt road that cut beneath a hill rising above hundreds of acres of muskeg and forest. I remember scrambling up the hill once, threading a path through gray spruce trees, and finding a view of the coast. Now the hill, shaved of its trees, is a cluster of enormous homes. From my parents’ house the subdivision looks like the headwall for a medieval castle. “Let’s go for a walk,” my mom suggested last week. My wife and I are still trying to decide whether we want to move back to Anchorage. We would housesit for my parents, driving to new jobs in the city each weekday morning, following paved tributaries into rivers of traffic. Mom wanted to show me her wilderness refuge and so I followed her and the dog out beyond the lake. We cut into the woods at the lake’s opposite end, following an ice-coated drainage. New houses loomed over snags of dead or dying black spruce and a few leafless birch trees. I imagined people watching us with suspicion as we stepped across the divide. From the draw, the estates have a creepy, Wuthering Heights aura about them; boxes foreign to the land, wherein distracted people absorbed in frivolous occupations look at the slice of nature below with disdain or impatience or with indifference. I wondered if I could live here again. “Look, look,” my mom said. “There are the tidal flats ahead. I have to always watch for moose so the dog doesn’t see them first.” There were moose droppings everywhere. The hollow is their last sanctuary. The coast opened before us and, at last, we saw uninterrupted wilderness across Cook Inlet, from the shimmering Kenai Range ahead to the Chugach Mountains to our left and the Alaska Range on our right. We hiked up a bluff. Survey tape was everywhere, wrapping spindly beetle-pocked spruce trees like tags at a discount store. I removed some tape, and then gave up. We walked another 50 yards to the edge of a subdivision where a long fence divides several properties. “This wasn’t here a year ago,” mom says. “What they’ve done is cut off the view of the inlet for every new home being built.” The 8-foot fence extends 100 yards, ending abruptly at the edge of the bluff. The land behind the fence is flat and barren, with a multimillion-dollar home commanding a corner. Any moose, searching for food in the landscaped cul-de-sacs, would now have this impasse to prevent its passage to the creek refuge. “Can you imagine the greed, the selfishness of this person?” my mom asks. “Sometimes I wish I had dynamite.” I thought gasoline would make the job easier. We returned through the draw, stepping carefully across the ice. Just before the lake, we startled two pintails in a warm pool. I watched the ducks flap intently away. They rose, circled, and then slipped off, toward the ocean and the unaltered landscape beyond. Soren Wuerth is perhaps Alaska's best known community activist, and is the winner of the Alaska Press Club's 2006 'Best Columnist' award. He resides in an undisclosed location in rural Alaska and can be reached at soren@insurgent49.com. |
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Reserved. in-sur-gent (in sur'jent), n. 1. a member of a group which revolts against the policies of its leadership. |
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