A blog by Bill Hess

Running Dog Publications

P.O. Box 872383 Wasilla, Alaska 99687

 

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Wasilla

Wasilla is the place where I have lived for the past 29 years - sort of. The house in which my wife and I raised our family sits here, but I have made my rather odd career as a different sort of photojournalist by continually wandering off to other places to photograph people and gather information, which I have then put together in various publications that have served the Alaska Native Eskimo, Indian and Aleut communities.

Although I did not have a great of free time to devote to this rather strange community, named after a Tanaina Athabascan Indian chief who knew Wasilla in the way that I so impossibly long to, I have still documented it regularly over the past quarter-century plus. In the early days, my Wasilla photographs focused mostly upon my children and the events they participated in - baseball, football, figure skating, hockey, frog catching, fire cracker detonation, Fourth of July parade - that sort of thing. 

In 2002, I purchased my first digital camera and then, whenever I was home, I began to photograph Wasilla upon a daily basis, but not in a conventional way. These were grab shots - whatever caught my eye as I took my many long walks or drove through the town, shooting through the car window at people and scenes that appeared and disappeared before I could even focus and compose in the traditional photographic way.

Thus, the Wasilla portion of this blog will be devoted both to the images that I take as I wander about and those that I have taken in the past. Despite the odd, random, nature of the images, I believe they communicate something powerful about this town that I have never seen expressed anywhere else. 

Wasilla is a sprawling community that has been slapped down hodge-podge upon what was so recently wilderness of the most exquisite beauty. In its design, it is deliberately anti-zoned, anti-planned. In the building of Wasilla, the desire to make a buck has trumped aesthetics and all other considerations. This town, built in the midst of exquisite beauty, has largely become an unsightly, unattractive, mess of urban sprawl. Largely because of this, it often seems to me that Wasilla is a community with no sense of community, a town devoid of town soul.

Yet - Wasilla is my home and if I am lucky it will be until I grow old and die. Despite its horrific failings, it is still made of the stuff of any small city: people; moms and dads, grammas and grampas, teens, children, churches, bars, professionals, laborers, soldiers, missionaries, artists, athletes, geniuses, do-gooders, hoodlums, the wealthy, the homeless, the rational and logical, the slightly insane and the wholly insane - and, yes, as is now obvious to the whole world, politicians, too.

So perhaps, if one were to search hard enough, it might just be possible to find a sense of community here, and a town soul. So, using my skills as a photojournalist and a writer, I hope to do just that. If this place has a sense of community, I will find it. If there is a town soul to Wasilla, I will document it. I won't compete with the newspapers. Hell no! But as time and income allow, it will be fun to wander into the places where the folks described above gather, and then put what I find on this blog.

 

by 300...

Anywhere within a 300 mile radius of Wasilla. This encompasses perhaps the most wild, dramatic, gorgeous, beautiful section of land and sea to be found in any comparable space anywhere on Earth. I can never explore it all, but I will do the best that I can, and will here share what I find and experience with you.  

and then some...

Anywhere else in the world that I happen to get to, such as Point Lay, Alaska; Missoula, Montana; Serenki, Chukotka, Russia; or Bangalore, India. Perhaps even Lagos, Nigeria. I have both a desire and scheme to get me there. It is a long shot. We shall see if I succeed.

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« Getting there - two flights from Copenhagen to Nuuk | Main | Here I am in Copenhagen, in a stupor »
Sunday
Jun272010

Two people met enroute - one likes to hunt, fish and install elevators...

This is Jeff, originally from North Dakota but now Anchorage, who works Otis Elevators. He flew the first leg of my trip to Greenland with me, from Anchorage to Minneapolis/St. Paul. A lady from Texas who thinks so highly of Sarah Palin that during her visit to Alaska she took a trip special to Wasilla so that she could photograph her house, asked him how long he had lived in Alaska. Sixteen years, he answered. “Do you like Alaska?” she asked. “Well, I’ve been here 16 years, so I guess I do.” He likes to get out in the country to hunt and fish, but (and I do not understand this at all) sometimes the mountains and the trees cause him to feel claustrophobic and he has to go back to North Dakota for a couple of weeks and soak up all that flat country. He works for Otis Elevators and hopes to soon go to Barrow to install the elevators in the new hospital being built there. He has never been to Barrow before, but is excited for the chance.

Update - August 26, 2010: I have received a comment from a grandmother that has convinced me that I must delete the second part of this post and all comments related to it. I am in a big gathering, doing this update with my thumbs on my iPhone. I will better explain later.

Update 2 - August 26, 2010:  To better explain, this post originally included images and stories of two people that I met enroute from Anchorage - Minneapolis - Amsterdam -Copenhagen, where I overnighted before continuing on to Nuuk, Greenland. That is something that I enjoy doing - getting images and little stories of people that I meet along the way as I travel here and there.

I have removed the second, which included two images and a story about the fellow that sat next to me between Minneapolis and Amsterdam. He was quiet for most of the trip, but in the final hour he told me a very compelling story that began in a torture horse operated by agents of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, then moved on to Minneapolis where he told me had fallen in love, married, that he and his wife had two children but that she had been killed in the infamous bridge collapse.

The story was so compelling that I asked if he would mind if I put it on my blog. He said that would be fine.

In retrospect, I should have got on Google to see what kind of news reports I might find regarding his story, but I reached Copenhagen in a state of extreme exhaustion - for I had been exhausted before I left Wasilla and had not got even one minutes sleep on a trip that took over 24 hours total. I put up a short post before I went to bed. After I got up the next morning, I wanted to get the story up before I moved on, so I took the man on the plane at his word and wrote it.

Later, a commenter who had seen the story in the news said that the man and his FORMER wife had been divorced at the time of her death. A couple of other questions and challenges to the facts as he had presented them to me and I had written were raised.

Then today, I received a comment from a woman who identified herself as the grandmother of the two boys. She stated that the boys were not the children of the man who had sat next to me on the flight and made some serious allegations as to how he had treated those boys during the very short time that he had been married to her mother.

Given those allegations, I decided it best that I just pull his story, pictures, and all comment related to it. To the grandmother and all those that the story may have brought pain to, I apologize.

Grandmother of the boys, may you and all who have been impacted by this terrible tragedy find peace.

 

 

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