Bootleggers playing hide-and-seek on the Alaskan tundra (IHT)

By Dan Barry
Monday, October 13, 2008
BETHEL, Alaska: On a misty day the color of lead, a few people linger outside a general store in the small and remote city of Bethel, struggling but failing to achieve an air of purposeful loitering. Try as they might to feign enjoyment of the damp cold, they are clearly looking to score.
Jess Carson, a plainclothes investigator for the Alaska State Troopers, watches their fidgeting performance through the windshield of his pickup truck, a cramped theater that smells of wet dog, courtesy of Kilo, his scent-sensitive German shepherd. Carson seems less than riveted by an act he has seen too many times before.
This show is not about heroin or cocaine; it's about booze. Many rural Alaskan communities consider alcohol to be the primary accelerant for crime, domestic strife and other social problems, and either ban it outright or, as in Bethel, tightly restrict its use.
And with illicit alcohol come bootleggers who lack any roguish Prohibition-era charm; just one case of their whiskey can upend a small native village.
An outsider might scan an Alaska State Troopers annual report, come across that photograph of Coors Light cases stacked beside bottles of R&R whiskey, and see ingredients for a holiday party. But many people here see it the way others would a few kilos of cocaine, piled in a pyramid for the camera — as seized contraband.
By the way, a fifth of R&R — which stands for Rich & Rare, a highbrow name for a bottom-shelf blend — sells for $10 or so in Anchorage. But that same bottle can sell for as much as $300 in a dry village in the tundra, making R&R the bootlegger's current alcohol of choice and the trooper's alcohol of interest.
"Ninety-five percent of all bootlegged alcohol in the Bethel area is R&R, and because of that we tend to focus on it," Carson says. But the brand is not for discriminating tastes, he adds. "Even the bootleggers don't like it."
Of course, bootleggers need go-betweens, some of whom will gladly work for the promise of a bottle. These runners and hustlers often congregate outside this corrugated warehouse of a store called the AC Value Center, where Listerine, Lysol and other items containing alcohol are kept behind the counter.
Carson sees something through his windshield: a woman in a yellow parka may have just slipped money to a runner now spiriting away. He steps out to question the woman. She says she has no idea what he's talking about, as those around her scatter like shards from a dropped bottle.
If need be, the woman will wait all day for that bootlegger's runner to return with her liquor. But there are so many other leaks to plug in the Alaskan bush, which some say has nowhere near the complement of officers needed to stem the illegal alcohol flow. The trooper returns to his dog-reeking truck and pulls away.
Carson, a boyish 32, has an innocent way that masks a street savvy culled from years as a narcotics investigator in Fairbanks, not far from his eastern Alaska hometown of Tok. Eighteen months ago he was transferred to Bethel, a western outpost of 6,000 that serves as a base for 56 native villages in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.
Where he once concentrated on cocaine and heroin, he now focuses on beer, wine and spirits, with no doubt in the value of his mission. "Most of the sexual assaults, suicides and homicides are alcohol-related here," Carson says. "Whenever you show up at a scene, you'll see the alcohol. It increases the importance of getting that off the street."
He works out of a small office near the regional airport with a few other troopers, including Investigator Jerry Evan, 38, a Yup'ik Eskimo from the village of Napaskiak. Carson says his colleague's fluency in Yup'ik, understanding of native culture and prowess as a hunter have been invaluable in a region where often the only way to get from here to there is by boat or plane.
Evan, who listens more than he speaks, says he well knows the devastation that alcohol can do to a village like his. Suicides. Drownings. People freezing to death.
"Alcohol has always been an issue," he says.
So much so that dozens of communities have voted over the years to restrict or ban the importation, sale and possession of alcohol. These include many native villages, where alcohol is a relatively new addition to the culture.
"This is not a bunch of lawyers from Anchorage and Juneau, flying in from southeast Alaska to impose our law," says James Fayette, a supervising assistant attorney general for Alaska. "We're flying in to impose their law."
Then Fayette says something startling: "You need to understand that a case of bootleg whiskey in a small Alaska village of 600 people can shut down that village for a week."
The comment may sound hyperbolic, but various studies have documented the insidious effect of alcohol in the bush. And when Fayette's words are repeated to four elders in the native village of Akiachak, a short flight from here, the men nod in sad agreement. Then one growls, "I hate bootleggers."
Life in rural Alaska can sometimes seem like one long chase scene from "The Dukes of Hazzard," Fayette says. Two months ago, state troopers in Aniak, about 90 miles to the northeast, reported chasing two drunken bootleggers 25 miles up the Kuskokwim River, sometimes at speeds topping 40 miles an hour. The suspects were finally caught — with five bottles of vodka.
Here in Bethel, you can possess alcohol, but not sell it. There are no bars or package stores, so many people, including several known bootleggers, have it sent by airmail from businesses in Anchorage with evocative names like Gold Rush and Brown Jug.
Though the amount someone can purchase in one month is limited — and closely monitored by troopers when it lands at the airport — people still smuggle. They tape bottles to their legs, or fill water bottles with vodka and apple juice bottles with whiskey, or use the name of some hanger-on down at the general store to exceed the monthly limit.
The bootleggers also know that troopers will actually listen to luggage, trying to detect the glug-glug sound of liquid in a bottle. So the smugglers will buy liquor that comes in plastic containers, "burp the bottle" by releasing the contained air without breaking the seal, then cover the cap with tape.
"It's identical to the drug trade," Carson says.
His pickup splashes its way out of the rutted parking lot of the AC Value Center and on through the misty gray of Bethel, a place so isolated that it has only a dozen miles of paved road. He checks out the loiterers outside another general store, then heads to the airport to record who is receiving what and how much.
At the Alaska Airlines depot, Carson logs in a case of vodka and two cases of beer. As he leaves, though, he passes a known bootlegger who is carrying away a case of R&R on his shoulder. Delivered legally, received legally, and within the limits of a Bethel resident's monthly allowance of purchased alcohol.
The trooper doubts the man will taste a drop of that scorching stuff.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/13/america/13land.php





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From Palin, lessons on the role of the frontier in the American psyche (IHT)

NEWS ANALYSIS
By Katherine Roberts
Sunday, September 14, 2008
As Americans get to know Sarah Palin, they're taking a crash course on life in the Last Frontier. There is her sport of moose hunting, for example.
Shooting the prey turns out to be the easy part. The hard part is figuring out where to do the deed, according to the Alaska Division of Wildlife Conservation: "When choosing an area to hunt and a means of transportation, remember that you will have about 400 to 700 pounds of meat and up to 65 pounds of antlers to transport from the kill-site to home. That's why many seasoned Alaskan moose hunters say, 'Never kill a moose more than a mile from a vehicle of some sort.' "
No wonder, then, that Palin has been photographed driving a tank-like ATV As for the field-dressing, it's no joke to brave the blowflies while carving up a half-ton animal.
A few weeks ago a national conversation about such arcana would have seemed unlikely. But that was before the emergence of a candidate who has divided the country in unexpected ways not simply because of her record and her views, but also because Governor Palin comes from a place in the West that embodies deep-seated ideas and myths and contradictions about the role of the frontier in the American psyche. In some sense, Palin has become a metaphor for Alaska itself, and as grand a landscape as Alaska is, the current discussion is less about a geographical location than about a state of mind, or states of mind.
"The West was another name for opportunity," Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in 1893, in his famous essay that declared an end to the frontier, which in his definition meant the end of free land. More than a century later, the dreams and myths about the West persist. So do fantasies and outright misperceptions. Some originated in the East, with its vision of the frontier as being at once a majestic playground and a site of commercial depredation, of strip mines and strip malls. ("The East," Turner wrote, "has always feared the result of an unregulated advance of the frontier, and has tried to check and guide it.")
Other simplifications flourish in the West, with its self-regarding belief in an untamed wilderness brought to heel by fiercely independent souls.
The truth has always been more ambiguous, not least because of the region's tangled relationship with the federal government, which had cleared the land of Indians and offered the handout of the Homestead Act in 1862, itself adopted after some 70 years of debate about the rightful disposition of public lands.
In the 20th century, accounts of the West often centered on this paradox. The inhabitants boasted of their autonomy, even as the government did the dirty work, took the risks and offered sweet deals to settlers, so they could expand the borders of the United States. Without this help, as many writers have noted, the waves of Western pioneers wouldn't have had the luxury of hating Washington bureaucrats.
This attitude, of wanting it both ways, was neatly summed up a half-century ago by the historian Bernard DeVoto as: "Get out and give us more money." The novelist Wallace Stegner was just as unsparing when he observed, in 1986: "Westerners who would like to return to the old days of free grab, people of the kind described as having made America great by their initiative and energy in committing mass trespass on the minerals, grass, timber and water of the Public Domain, complain that no Western state is master in its own house."
Competing ideas about the West have dominated our politics for many decades now. No candidate was so synonymous with the regional ideal as Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who spoke Navajo and posed, like Governor Palin, in rugged outdoor outfits, sometimes with a rifle. "We didn't know the federal government," he said of his forebears who came to Arizona in 1860. "Everything that was done, we did it ourselves."
But, as Rick Perlstein pointed out in "Before the Storm," his history of Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, the land Goldwater's grandfather traveled "to follow a gold strike," in fact "developed as a virtual ward of the federal government," and the money for the first Goldwater general store in 1872 "came largely from contracts for provisioning army camps and delivering mail." Barry Goldwater, who was born in 1909, grew up with "a nurse, chauffeur and a live-in maid," Perlstein added.
As a politician, Goldwater excelled at playing both sides of the game. He railed against federal intrusion in the West, but was first in line to demand the billions of dollars that came to his state from Washington in the form of water projects, to cite one gargantuan example.
Today, the West is not the federal economic colony it once was. Nor is it the uncrowded rural paradise of lore. In fact, it has long been the most urbanized part of the country. This transformation has enticed a new brand of fortune-seeker, from the telecommuting migrants in mountain enclaves to the influx of people into metropolitan "boomburgs" where they are employed in the same jobs as people in the rest of the country.
It has been fully 15 years since the last Sagebrush Rebellion, the movement of boisterous anti-government types who aimed to "take back" their land from Washington, by force if necessary. It doesn't hurt that all those energy companies now drilling on federal lands pay high wages and provide many jobs.
The region's politics, never as uniform as portrayed, is more diverse today than it has been in years. There are now Democratic governors in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona, not one of whom was elected by praising the federal government or calling for a Buffalo Commons. Barack Obama is mounting strong campaigns in several of these states where Democratic presidential candidates have often struggled mightily for 30 years.
It is, to some extent, the collapsing of the old distinctions, and with it the continuing convergence of East and West, that explains the sudden fascination with Alaska now that Palin has become a national figure. The state, for all its suburban big-box resemblance to the rest of the West, remains in some ways the last true frontier — at least in the sense that it remains distant and exotic to most Americans, with its mammoth size, its severe climate, its many unpopulated miles.
Its contradictions, however, are the same ones noted by DeVoto and Stegner, only starker and more extreme. While half the land in the Western states in the lower 48 is owned by the federal government, in Alaska, it's closer to 70 percent, and only 1 percent of the state is privately owned.
Alaska's dependence on and disdain for government date back to its territory days. John McPhee captured the paradox in his book "Coming Into the Country," published in 1976: "When one adds in the existing parks, government forests and wildlife refuges and a vast federal petroleum reserve in the north, not much remains, so it is one of the ironies of Alaska that in the midst of this tremendous wilderness people consider themselves fortunate to have (anywhere at all) a 50-by-100 -foot lot they can call their own."
The most cantankerous assessment, perhaps, came from the nature writer Edward Abbey. "Alaska is not, as the state license place asserts, 'the Last Frontier,' " Abbey wrote in the 1980s. "Alaska is the final big bite on the American table, where there is never enough to go around. ... Alaska, like the rest of our public domain, has been strapped down and laid open to the lust and greed of the international corporations. ... Anchorage, Fairbanks and outposts like Barter Island, with their glass-and-aluminum office buildings, their airlift prefab fiberboard hovels for the natives and the workers, their compounds of elaborate and destructive machinery, exhibit merely the latest development in the planetary expansion of space-age sleaze not a frontier, but a high-technology slum. For Americans, Alaska is the last pork chop."
Palin's critics have tried to tie her to all the supposed evils Abbey detailed and some new ones, too relationships that any governor of Alaska might expect to be questioned about. If Palin stood up to the oil companies, was it so she would raise taxes for the state treasury? What about her on-and-off stand on that symbol of federal pork, the Bridge to Nowhere? While she may attack earmarks, as she did in her interview with ABC News, what funds has she sent back to Washington, given that Alaskans get $231 per person in earmarks, compared with $22 per person in Obama's Illinois?
The governor's supporters have painted her detractors as out-of-touch elitists, blind to their own insularity and entitlements and self-regard. Behind this view lurks a feeling of injustice rooted in another difference between East and West, the feeling that access to a particular kind of prestige and power is still off-limits to much of the country, to graduates of the University of Idaho, like Palin, rather than to those who went to Columbia and Harvard, where Obama got his degrees.
This in turn points to a very different though related continental rift, one whose origins are not so much regional as socioeconomic, and rooted less in competing myths about place than about class.
Turner saw all that too in 1893. "Free lands and the consciousness of working out their social destiny did more than turn the Westerner to material interests and devote him to a restless existence," he wrote. "They promoted equality among the Western settlers, and reacted as a check on the aristocratic influences of the East." Economic equality followed, and "this involved political equality."
"Not without a struggle would the Western man abandon this ideal," he concluded, "and it goes far to explain the unrest in the remote West today."
And it may also explain the uneasiness so many Easterners now feel as they are confronted, once again, with their own assumptions about the American frontier.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/14/america/14roberts.php



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