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An Alaskan Adventure in Small-Town Politics
by Heather Lende
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When I was on the planning commission, I had opposed the multi-million-dollar harbor expansion project because I had doubts about the design, but I was the lone dissenter so the engineer's plan was approved by the commission and then by the previous assembly. Now that same plan was going out for bids and the new assembly would have to make the final decision. (Committees and commissions are advisory to the assembly, which has the last word since they alone have the authority to appropriate the funds.) While campaigning I backed off some. I was still against it, but partly I was trying to heed the advice of my neighbor, and partly I had decided a borough-wide advisory vote—a referendum—would be fairest. Then we'd know for sure what people wanted. If the planning commission and the old assembly and the Ports and Harbor Committee were right, and I and the other detractors were wrong, the voters would approve it and we'd move on, con dent that a majority had ruled.
On this point Margaret disagreed with me. She was for moving ahead with construction without delay. She'd worked on the harbor design for the last year and thought my fears, and others', about the final price tag, the maintenance costs of the steel break-water, and the necessity of the huge parking lot, were unfounded.
AT HE ALASKA Miners Association's candidate forum at seven o'clock on a Friday morning in the Pioneer Bar, I answered the first question about any personal connection to mines or mining we may have by divulging that my great-grandfather had been a Klondike prospector, and that my grandfather was a mining engineer who graduated from the Colorado School of Mines and worked in the coal, oil, and gas country of Western Pennsylvania. There's a photo by my desk of a great-grandmother on my mother's side seated sidesaddle on a burro at the Mexican silver mine where she taught school. Borough and burro. Was it a sign?
I told the audience that I loved songs about mining like "Sixteen Tons" (but didn't mention John Prine's "Paradise," about a Kentucky town that Mr. Peabody's coal train hauled away) and literature inspired by mining, from stories like "THe Luck of Roaring Camp" to the writings of Jack London and Robert Service, whose classics, or at least lines from them, Alaskans are familiar with. One of my favorite novels is Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose. The book is about love and a marriage and is set in Western mining towns. The title is a metaphor, but in reading the book, I learned that practically speaking, "angle of repose" is the term for the steepest slope at which a hill of loose material, say mine tailings or gravel, is stable. When the phrase was mentioned in a planning commission review of a gravel pit, I knew what it was, thanks to that novel. I was so eager to please, that I may have even told the miners that they could borrow my copy of the book, if they wanted to read it. Some of them work in mining camps near Juneau; others are part of the Constantine Metal Resources crew exploring that potential mine in Haines.
"You probably shouldn't mention literature next time," my campaign manager, Teresa, said as we debriefed over a glass of prosecco in my kitchen.
"That's the least of our worries," I said, and told her what hap-pened when the moderator asked if I supported a so-called Tier 3 clean water designation, the highest protection possible for the Chilkat River, which is right below the Constantine mine site. When the moderator said, "Yes or no, one word," Diana said no, Leonard said no, Ryan said no, Judy said she wasn't sure but when pressed said no reluctantly.
"Heather?"
"Yes."
"You said yes?" Teresa asked. "To the miners?"
"Yes."
"Well. Good for you," she said.
Never mind that another old and dear friend, road-building contractor Roger Schnabel, my daughter JJ's godfather, put his head in hands and said, "Oh, no, Heather, and I was going to vote for you."
Excerpted from Of Bears and Ballots by Heather Lende. Copyright © 2020 by Heather Lende. Excerpted by permission of Algonquin Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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