Elise Sereni Patkotak

There’s an old joke we used to tell on Anchorage when I lived in the bush. We’d say that Anchorage was as close as you could get to Alaska without actually being there. The more complaints I read in the paper about the moose and bears we share our world with here, the more I realize that maybe that wasn’t a joke.

I moved to Alaska from the most urbanized part of America – that great megalopolis that starts in Boston and ends in Washington D.C.  The only wildlife you see along that corridor are the deer eating on the

I traveled to Barrow last week for high school graduation.  My friend Greta was graduating and, after sitting through innumerable grade school Christmas pageants in which she was only visible as the ponytail in the back row, I wanted to be front and center for her final bow in the Barrow school system. It was a Barrow graduation which meant it went on for three hours in the high school gym with little kids running around, a constant flow of traffic in and out of the gym and a procession by the graduates to the rhythm of Eskimo drums while

Remember that picture of Nick Nolte taken a couple of years ago after what can only have been a six-month, non-stop bender?  Remember any number of pictures of Courtney Love or Robert Downey, Jr.?

Now think about Rush Limbaugh. Have you ever seen a picture of him where he looked anything but well put together and sober?  And yet he had a major drug problem.

These thoughts run through my mind because I recently had surgery that necessitated a few days of drugs for the pain following it. I don’t do well on prescription pain meds.  So I spent the

An inspector general’s report came out recently that claims that passenger screening at airports is no better today than it was 17 years ago. On reading the report, Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio said, “The inadequacies and loopholes in the system are phenomenal.’’

According to a news report on the web recently, “The inspector general’s report, as well as a study by the GAO, portrayed the TSA as an unresponsive, inflexible bureaucracy that is failing to provide an adequate level of security at airports.” Again, according to this news story, Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin “told lawmakers the TSA screeners and

Up on the North Slope, we never met a bond proposition we didn’t like.  In 30 years of voting there, during 25 of which there were always bond propositions on the ballot, every one of them passed with flying colors.  If some bond proposition only got 65% approval, that was viewed as close to failing.

As in Anchorage, property taxes are the mail fuel of local government there and the backbone for financing the payback of bond sales.  Unlike Anchorage, however, on the North Slope we had industry property at Prudhoe Bay that fed hundreds of millions of dollars to

There was a death in Barrow recently and my friend Big Jim sent me this description of the community preparing the gravesite:

“Well we dug the grave for Leland today.  We had plenty of cousins and his brother Sam to help us. It was a true arctic grave dig.  The auger was there compliments of the City of Barrow, and BUECI provided Jeff Larson to operate it as usual.

“There were about 10 guys standing there clearing the dirt with 25 mph winds taking the chill factor down to -40.  The snow was whipping along the ground and then streaming

One of my favorite cartoons shows a man shaking his finger at a dog sitting in front of him. The man is saying, “Bad dog. Bad dog.  Don’t do that or you won’t get any treats and I won’t take you for a walk today.” In the next panel, we see the same scene from the dog’s point of view. Here’s what the dog is hearing. “Dog, blah, blah, blah, treat, blah, blah, blah, walk, blah, blah, blah, today…”

That’s about what I hear when I speak with my accountant and the man who invests what little money I have

I remember that one of the things that made the Inupiat people of the North Slope the angriest was when environmentalists suggested that ANWR was a vast trackless expanse of land that man had never touched. They used this as the reason why industry should not be allowed there now no matter how small a footprint it leaves behind.

This angered the Inupiat because the simple truth is that they have been part of the Arctic for as long as their cultural memory can reach and Western science can confirm.  And during that time, they did not fly on winged

Here’s what happens when you take your kids out of Alaska while they’re growing up.  They have no concept of what real life is all about.  If you bring your kids to a place like San Diego, they grow up thinking that life is all sunshine and 72-degree weather with blue skies and calm seas.

So when they get married and their new husband is stationed in Hawaii, they don’t understand why they aren’t getting a lot of sympathy when they call to complain about being bored in Paradise because it’s raining.  They have obviously grown up with unrealistic expectations

Back in my misspent youth, I studied nursing in New York City.  Part of the curriculum involved going out to an adult mental institution called Manhattan State on an island in New York harbor.

There were three tall buildings on the island. The higher the level, the more extreme the affliction. Student nurses rarely, if ever, got about the third floor. About that same time, a young reporter named Geraldo Rivera did some investigative journalism that led to the exposure of an institution for kids called on Long Island.  The place was a horror house of kids with mental illnesses