My recent Alaska reading list: Drop City by T.C. Boyle. Coming Back Alive by Spike Walker. The former, a novel, is highly recommended if you want to understand just how demented a person would have to be to want to live in interior Alaska (hot and buggy in the summer; unbelievably cold in the winter). T.C. Boyle, familiar to New Yorker magazine readers for his short stories, writes about a commune of hippies who get pushed out of California in 1970 and move up to a little wilderness cabin near Fairbanks. Coming Back Alive is about people who risk their lives every day trying to pull fish in from the Alaska coastal waters and/or pulling fishermen into Coast Guard helicopters, centering on a 1998 rescue of the crew from F/V La Conte.. This is a must-read for helicopter pilots and it will certainly make you stop whining about the difficulty of doing slope landings in an R22 with a gusty tailwind.
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Your comment about Helicopters and ocean rescue brought to mind a video I saw at work of a Canadian coastguard helicopter using a winchdown procedure to land on the fantail of a corvette. Sea state was wow! The pilot drops a cable that is attached to a winch on the corvette. The winch is a constant tension type that pulls the heli down. The pilot positions over the winch and drops lower and lower until he thinks he has the motions of the corvette figured out then when all is right he cuts the collective and wham he is down on the pad. Very exciting looking. I think I don’t want to be a passenger on those copters.
I saw the ‘Drop City’ novel at the library last year. I knew some of the original Drop City people, so I started reading it. It’s a hurtful load of crap, using barely disguised names. I found this URL that does a more elaborate dissection.
Review of ‘Drop City’
especially starting about halfway down the page.
A search for
“Drop City” Trinidad
will tell you more about the actual Drop City than you want to know (it was located in Trinidad Colorado).
My local bookstore proprietor saw that I was buying books on Alaska and told me to read Drop City. I read it, and said “wow, he just pegged every character we had around when I was living the hippy lifestyle back east”. So, Hexatron, yes, it’s a thinly veiled documentary about a few specific folks (I now live in Marin, so a lot of those folks hang out in local coffee shops…), but as archetypes for hippy culture they work pretty well.
And I forget the specific name of the place, but said bookstore proprietor told tales of han ging out at the Sonoma commune after which he thought the book was modeled.
My favorite Alaska book in my recent “prep for a vacation up there” frenzy is “Following the Alaskan Dream: My Salmon Trolling Adventures in the Last Frontier” by Marilyn Jordan George. It’s the “run into the person at the local history museum who has all of the cool stories and life experiences” book for southeastern Alaska. If you’re someone who goes places to get into interesting discussions with people who’ve lived lives you haven’t, this is a good one.