They won’t even remember when their parents couldn’t get married in every state.

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It helps, too, if you like history. History, like beachcombing, is essentially a way to exercise the imagination. Adak has exotic natural beauty, sure, but the place is also a unique study in the life cycle of human debris. It’s junk, really, but if you’re the right sort of person, it fills your mind with stories.

To get to Adak, you fly 1,200 miles west of Anchorage to the far end of the Aleutian Islands. Alaska Airlines currently offers jet service to the island on Thursdays and Sundays. It takes about three hours to get to Adak, depending on the wind. The plane is often mostly empty.

You descend out of the clouds and there it it is: snow-capped peaks rising out of the sea like the island home of a villain in a James Bond movie, the Pacific on one side and the Bering Sea on the other. Once you land, you’re in another time zone, one hour earlier than mainland Alaska.

Read more here (and see photos by Nathaniel Wilder.) To see my iPhone photos from the trip go here.

The post For 61º North: Adak’s Curious Bones appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

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I’m hosting a two-day storytelling retreat this summer in Homer on beautiful Yukon Island, July 24 -26. This retreat is an intimate, no-homework, no-pressure opportunity to generate material and improve storytelling and listening skills in a positive environment. The workshop, especially suited for people who write for their jobs, will center on personal storytelling while relying on techniques that have broad applications in writing and reporting work. You will leave with tools that help you write more fluidly, listen more effectively and tap into your innate ability to organize and tell interesting stories that connect with readers.

There are 10 workshop slots available.  The cost for two days writing on the island is $425, which includes lodging and food. Transportation by water taxi is an additional $65. I can offer up to five discounted slots for working, early-career journalists. Alaska Press Club members get $25 off.

Please email me by May 15 if you’re interested in participating: juliaeomalley@gmail.com. You must pay in full to reserve your slot (or make other arrangements). Paypal preferred. First come, first served. I promise you’ll have a great time.

The post Write with me in beautiful Homer, AK! appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

I was also surprised yesterday with the news that this story about Sara’s farmer cousin Emily and the Homer food scene was nominated for a James Beard Award, which is like the Oscars of food writing. There’s a big dinner in New York City in a month when the winners are announced. I don’t know how I’m going to get there, but I plan to try!

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On occasion my wife Sara and I fall into old-fashioned roles when it comes to parenting. We’re both moms, but sometimes I feel like a total dad. I’m sure this happens to her, too.

Her mom trait is worrying. She once Googled “crawling helmet,” she tracks childhood illness outbreaks like she works for the CDC, and she always knows the weather forecast. I just don’t worry like she does. It’s not in my wiring.

“It’ll be just fine,” I say, calm as Mr. Brady in the den. And, usually, it is.

One night a couple of weeks ago when we were having that stretch of warm weather, my friends Abraham and Lam came to town for a journalism training and I decided to take them for a drive.
This was a Thursday. As it happened Sara was taking care of Leo, who is three, and I had baby Neri, who is six months. He fell asleep about the moment I plugged him into his seat in the minivan. Before I left, Sara told me not to go anywhere steep. Freezing rain in the forecast, she said.

“It’ll be just fine,” I said.

I picked up Lam and Abraham and we decided we wanted to see a view. While I was thinking about where to take them, I looked up and saw the Arctic Valley star glowing on Mt. Gordon Lyon. Great idea!

The roads were dry as we drove out the Glenn Highway toward Arctic Valley. It had rained but the temperature was mild and I figured the cloud cover was high because I could see the star.

As we started up Arctic Valley Road, Abraham, who has a baby Neri’s age, asked me about driving a minivan. His tone was neutral but we both knew what he was getting at: a minivan is the telltale sign that you’ve lost the battle to stay cool after becoming a parent.

I told him that it was a hand-me-down from Sara’s parents, and totally practical for hauling children and gear around. I’d only been driving it for five months, I said. It took a little getting used to because though it had snow tires, it’s the first car I’ve had that isn’t four-wheel drive.

Up we went into the mountainous dark. The trees were spooky in the headlights, branches white with frost. At the first pullout, the city lay before us like a twinkling blanket. The baby was sleeping and I decided to keep driving to the next, higher, viewing opportunity.

I might have driven another 15 minutes, and I might have lost track of the fact we’d turned away from the view, heading up toward the ski area. A few raindrops splashed onto the windshield. A quick little squall. Minutes long. But suddenly the road ahead looked different. Shiny. It took me a minute or two to process.

Ice.

I felt the car struggling to climb and slowed to a stop. Time to turn around, I said. We were on a steep incline. The road was carved into the mountain, a tree-filled ravine on one side of the road and an upward slope on the other.

I started to maneuver the van in reverse, but the rear wheels couldn’t get a purchase on the roadway. Soon we were perpendicular to the road. I gave the car a tiny amount of gas, trying to regain control and back up. The wheels turned, but the car began to slide, sideways, downhill.

So. Totally. Not. Just. Fine.

I ground the brake into the floor, but we were still sliding. Over the shape of the baby’s car seat, I saw the city through the van’s long side window. The sensation of sliding felt like vertigo.

“I don’t like this,” I whispered. Lam and Abraham said nothing.

My thoughts coalesced into a brutal reality check: I was on the ice in a front-wheel drive minivan in the dark, sliding sideways down a mountain, and I couldn’t make it stop. Oh: and there was a baby with me. (Insert lightning bolt of terror) How had I been such a total idiot?

We were still sliding. Were we picking up speed?

One of the possible outcomes of our sideways movement was that the minivan might roll. Or go off a cliff?  I wanted to be anywhere else. Watching an infomercial. At the dentist. Making yet another peanut butter sandwich for a school lunch. Just not here in this car sliding to my death with my tiny, innocent son.

The car stopped.

I took a breath.

“Are you a good driver?” I asked Abraham.

“Not on this,” he said.

I put the minivan in reverse and managed to work it toward the side of the road until the rear wheels made contact with soft snow. We were angled uphill pointed the wrong way, but secure. I pulled out my cell phone and called my car insurance company’s roadside assist number. I told them we needed a tow truck. I also texted Sara. She called my cousin’s husband, John, who has a Ford F-150.

And then we waited. The baby didn’t stir. Pretty soon, some headlights came up the road. A big old diesel truck with 20-somethings inside. They stopped and got out, slipping and giggling over to our car. Did we need a pull-out? (Can I take an aside to say that this offer of help is so one of those things I love about Alaska.) No, thanks. They said they’d wait with us until John or the tow truck showed up. At least 30 minutes passed.

Then my phone rang. It was the insurance company. They’d called every tow company in the city, they said. No one was willing to come. Most of the trucks don’t have four-wheel drive, they said. (!) The companies were worried about getting stuck, they said. (!!) Call the police, they said. (!!!)

About then we saw another set of headlights coming up the road. But then they disappeared, sliding backwards, downhill, out of view. Up they came again. Down they slid. My phone buzzed. It was John. We had to walk down to him, he said, the truck couldn’t make it up. That meant abandoning the minivan on the side of the mountain. I didn’t care. I just wanted to get my baby down.

We left the van unlocked, gathered our stuff and tromped down the snow on the side of the road, the 20-somethings illuminating the way with their headlights. Abraham carried the car seat. When we got to the truck, he slid the seat across the icy road to John who put Neri in the car. Neri was still asleep, pacifier moving up and down.

“You took a baby up here?” John asked.

I didn’t answer. We headed down.

I felt horrible all the way. This is exactly how regular people end up getting rescued by helicopters when they get lost off well-traveled trails, or how people end up dying in canoe accidents on popular lakes in view of recreational cabins. They just forget for a moment that this is Alaska. My grandparents are buried here, and I’d forgotten.

The next day, visions of my minivan in flames on the roadside, I called JBER to see if they might sand the road so a person could drive down. Nope.

But, they said, they’d wait a couple days before they towed me.

“You went and drove a baby up the side of a mountain in a minivan?” said the guy on the phone.

Out of ideas, I called my dad.

“Let’s go investigate,” he said.

We headed up the mountain at sunrise in a Subaru with old-fashioned studded snow tires. Dad spent the ride telling me about how he used to go up Arctic Valley Road to go skiing all the time as a kid in bad weather. Cars just had chains back then, he said. Sometimes they had to back up the hills.

Pretty soon we started coming across abandoned cars. Then there was a guy standing with his sedan, looking terrified. And a tow truck, its driver putting on chains. We pushed higher, (I didn’t realize I’d gone so high.) passing a couple of big pick-ups on the side of the road, waiting for tows. We spotted the minivan, sideways, on a steep, slick incline.

Dad parked the Subaru above it and slipped down the hill, pretending to speed skate, looking back at me to see if I was laughing. It was one of those moments when Dad seemed ageless, even though he is 66. I am 36 but I felt like a child. I was alone in the passenger seat in the parked Subaru. All of a sudden, it started to slide. I saw Dad’s expression change. I jumped in the drivers’ seat and smashed the brake. The car skittered to a stop. Adrenaline flooded my raw nerves. Man, I’d had enough of that road.

Dad got in the minivan and started it. He inched forward on the ice. So far, so good. Then he started sliding downhill. Sideways. I screamed, watching him pick up speed. (Thoughts: I am totally going to be responsible for killing my dad.) He gained control, turned forward and kept going until I couldn’t see him any more.

I sat in the Subaru, breathing, too petrified to take my foot off the brake. My phone rang. It was Dad. Little slide there getting the van going, he said. Everything was fine once he took off the emergency brake.

“Come on down now,” he told me. I could hear the smile in his voice.

I let my foot off the brake.

We inched down the mountain that way. Him first, me behind, passing all the stranded motorists and the tow truck. My pulse returned to normal. The mid-morning light was golden. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been so terrified and so at a loss for what to do.

I stared at Dad’s taillights. He’d used the calm, “it will be just fine” dad voice on me. But there was more to it than that. Someday my kids will need me to take the wheel just like he did. I would have to be ready. Paralyzing fear like I felt on that mountain is a luxury a parent eventually has to give up. Because your kids need you to be stronger than they are.

It’s probably good to be reminded that I’m not as squared away as I think I am even if I have two kids, a mortgage and a minivan. Parenting is a lifelong project. There was Dad up ahead, still doing it.

The post For the Anchorage Press: Getting Sideways appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

It was late April or early May, near 8 p.m. It had been a sunny day and I’d spent the entirety of it inside a newsroom, helping put out the next day’s paper. I love newspapers. And I loved the News. But work, which had once been my happy place, had gotten out of hand.

The paper had just been purchased by Alaska Dispatch. The name was going to change, and the newsroom had just filled with new people. I had been a columnist for five years and had just started working as an editor. The hours were grueling, the workflow chaotic. Time always got away from me. I couldn’t reliably make it to daycare to pick up my son anymore. I couldn’t make dinner for my family. I fell asleep reading bedtime stories and woke bleary.

I worked until two days before our second son was born in June. And I soon realized that when I returned to my job, my entire paycheck would go to childcare. The shape of newspaper work didn’t fit my life anymore.  I couldn’t enjoy my family or Alaska.  I wanted to go outside on sunny days. I wanted to pick up my son from school. I wanted to make dinner. I loved the newsroom, but I loved my family more.

The decision to leave was one of the hardest I’ve ever made. It felt like a horrible breakup. I have a reporter’s mutant mind. I can’t be in the world without observing it. The idea of giving up writing and reporting made me miserable. When I gave my notice, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do.

An old friend suggested I pitch some stories to editors I’d met through the Alaska Press Club. They were interested. Before I knew it, I was flying over the Brooks Range in a de Havilland Beaver, on a story assignment about polar bears and climate change for Al Jazeera America. I was writing and reporting again, but on my own terms. A year before, I would never have imagined it.

I wrote a few stories for a national audience, and I enjoyed it. But what I missed still was the relationship I’d built with readers while writing columns. I missed their ideas and their insights. I missed looking for stories that they would like, about things you only get if you live here.

So I built this site to let me write and report about Anchorage in a way that fits the shape of my life. You’ll find my freelance stories, long and short posts about Anchorage, posts about children, home and, most important, what’s for dinner.

PS: Every hour I get to work on this site right now comes thanks to a family member who has agreed to hold the baby. (Thanks Grammy, Papa Nino, Nonna, Doc, Marsi, Uncle Tommy and Gran!) And the site looks good thanks to the work of my dear friend Scott Levin. Thank you! And, many thanks to my wife, Sara, who is my chief editor, and the many friends who have been readers and idea people. Thanks for all the coffees and convos. Here we go!

PPS: Here are my people, who matter most of all.

The post Hi guys, I missed you. appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

It’s been maybe five years that she and I have been passing each other. Usually it’s somewhere in Spenard or downtown. Her carriage is usually filled with plastic bags, or a shopping basket lifted from a grocery store, or a cardboard sign. For a year or so she passed my house on Arctic Boulevard every day at almost exactly the same time. I theorized she was riding the bus to pass the time and getting off at a nearby stop. I got used to her. I noticed when she didn’t come by.

She has a sixth sense. She can always tell when I’m looking at her. She always stares back until I turn my head away. It used to rattle me as I drove by her, but I’ve started to think that she notices me too. It’s the closest she can come to saying hello.

Some days she looks unkempt. Others, her hair is neatly combed. Sometimes, when the sun is out, she wears a pair of Ray-Ban style sunglasses. Once, deep in the coldest part of winter, I saw her stopped on the side of the road near my house, shouting at passing cars. I wasn’t sure what to do. So I called police.

“She’s mentally ill, I think. Maybe homeless,” I told the dispatcher. “I’ve seen her walking by here for years. She pushes a baby carriage. But today something is off.”

She wasn’t herself, I said. But as I heard my words, I realized I didn’t know anything about her. They sent a couple officers. I watched them drive down and talk to her. She got in one of their cars. As the car passed by my house, I looked for her face in the back window, but she didn’t turn her head.

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