Best for: People about to visit or who have just visited rural Alaska; people who like short slice-of-life stories. In a nutshell: Obituary writer and Haines resident shares stories of life in a rural Alaskan town. Line that sticks with me: “Following an old Haines rule, we dressed for the weather, not the vehicle.” p 19 Why I chose it: Two weeks ago I was on a cruise in Southeast Alaska, and took an excursion through Haines. It was a gorgeous part of the country, […]
Lots of people die in Alaska
That’s basically what I learned from Heather Lende’s If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name: News from Small-Town Alaska. Granted, the author writes the obits for her local newspaper, so many of her stories lead back to that, but still. Plane crashes seem insanely common, along with people drowning on fishing boats and falling off mountains and all the other dangers associated with living in the middle of nowhere. Plus there’s the fact that the nearest hospital to Lende’s small town of Haines, Alaska, is about 4 […]