Just Browsing Outside

As a child I wandered into the University of Alaska at Anchorage’s library stacks and just started reading. If books on physics and math just happened to be across the stack from 19th century French poetry so much the better, it was an easier reach. When finished with one selection I chose the next one randomly, sometimes with my eyes closed just for fun.

This method works well when the amount of data is limited and the desire for information is high. Sometimes random information is a highly acceptable result. Soon I had consumed all the art stacks -- I found I was rereading them going back the opposite direction. I wished for a way to mark the books or sections of books I had randomly read. Memorizing thousands of Picasso’s images at the end of the row was the end of my road, and I went ‘Outside’ in search of cross cultural connections.

For Alaskans the term “Outside” generally refers to the United States, or “lower 48 states”. Prior to roads being built travel to Alaska was via boat and commonly originating from Seattle through the 'Inside Passage' in what is now Canada. Therefore the reverse route, through any means, is termed ‘Outside’, as in, “I’m going Outside on vacation.” or "She had her baby Outside so it could be President of the United States when it grows up" (really - this was a tradition such as evidenced by Alaska Senator Bob Bartlett's family, and my own). The term ‘Outside’, like a nickname or a tag, also implies a great deal about the Alaskan mindset, that the U.S. is really not home, and it is very distant. With a small population people were viewed as valuable.

Lots of people don't know where the term comes from, but my family helped populate the state arriving in 1896 a couple of years before the gold rush, so we contributed to popularizing slang terms 'cause we love 'em. On the other hand, my mom, so fond of telling the truth about everything confessed that my grandmother had not planted the large old birch tree at the very corner of Anchorage on 3th and L street, near where the statue to Capt Cook is now, as she had often repeated throughout my childhood and to anyone who would listen.

This leads me to believe there is another tradition, leg pulling. So all the other theories about where that expression "Outside" came from could be just as valid as that tree planting story. So much for the playfulness of Alaskans -- folksy, resistant to authority, maybe not exactly anti-intellectual but something like that.

My mom tells me she is writing a series of short stories titled "I Didn't Die" about all the times she escaped death in rural Alaska just going about her business in planning. She fell off a cliff and was caught by a net placed there for the express purpose of catching people at AlyeskaSki Resort just outside Anchorage, got stuck in a plane without fuel drifting silently past Denali (Mt. McKinley) but landed safely, once having accepted a plane ride with her inexperienced boss acting as a pilot got lost in the far north and navigating with a map and a flashlight from the air found the only airport for hundreds of miles by spotting a tiny distant light, ate hallucinogenic mushrooms by accident, and poisonous shell food and so forth. And you know what, you know the tag line - she didn't die.

I still see myself as just browsing Outside, and still, someday I might go home.