Alaska Archives - Julia O'Malley

For NYT: For a climate and food reporter in Alaska, a new unease in the air

Julia O'Malley — Tue, 21 Aug 2018 22:10:21 +0000

I was asked to write about the experience of reporting my story about the poor red salmon season.

Here’s how the column begins:

My grandparents came to Anchorage after the war. My parents grew up here and so did I. I never trick-or-treated without a snowsuit on. Now my kids, dressed as superheroes, run door to door on dry pavement. Rain keeps showing up in the wintertime. Snow, real snow, has begun to feel precious. My youngest son was 3 before we had enough at once to make a decent snow angel.

Since I started writing about climate and wild food in Alaska four years ago, I must have collected 100 anecdotes about things that might be related to climate change. Small things. Practical inconveniences, mostly, and strange observations.

There’s the whale meat stored in ice cellars, old-school refrigeration units cut into the Arctic permafrost generations ago, that tastes off now because the temperature has edged up.

Find the whole column here.

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Come to our Ottolenghi cookbook dinner at South!

Julia O'Malley — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 16:42:40 +0000

My brilliant friend Tamar Ben-Yosef and I are making dinner this month using recipes from our well loved cookbooks by the Israeli-British chef Yotam Ottolenghi in the lovely, intimate back room at South. (Readers of my blog might remember this awesome shakshuka recipe from Tamar and her husband Noam, who are both from Israel.)

We’re still refining the menu, but’s here a peek at our draft:

(Large challah for the table)

First course, starters, served family-style:

Pureed beets with yogurt & za’atar

Eggplant croquettes

Olives & pickle spread

Labane

Spicy carrots

Veggie course:

Green salad: arugula, fennel, tomatoes and dill, olive oil & lemon

Beluga lentil salad with leek fritter and yogurt sauce

Fried cauliflower drizzled with pomegranate molasses

Main Course:

Chraime with Alaska salmon

Kofta B’Sinya

Baked rice

Dessert:

TO BE DECIDED once Amazon delivers his newest dessert cookbook, “Sweet.”

Dinner is October 24 at 6:30 p.m. The cost for four large courses with paired wines is $75. Seating is limited. Reserve your tickets here.

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For NYT: A postcard from Kenai’s dipnet beach, America’s most democratic fishery

Julia O'Malley — Tue, 08 Aug 2017 07:03:17 +0000

I am pretty excited (and was VERY, like going to pass out, nervous) to get the opportunity to contribute a story to The New York Times Dining section this week about the diverse, unique, crowded Kenai River dipnet experience, working with the talented Joshua Corbett.

Here’s how it starts:

KENAI, Alaska — Wenceslous Fru, a physician assistant from Anchorage, stood on the sandy shore of the Kenai River and imagined the dinner he would put together once he felt the jostle of a salmon in his long-handled dip net.

He would make it the way they do back home in Cameroon, splitting it down the belly and opening it like a book, rubbing it with ginger, garlic and spices, and then slipping it under the broiler.

Fishing nearby, Raviwan Dougherty, an Anchorage restaurant worker from Thailand, envisioned steaming hers and bathing it in fish sauce, lime juice and chiles.

Lyubov Miroshnick, who works in a dental office in Wasilla, planned to smoke her catch after a soak in her Ukrainian grandparents’ brine recipe.

“Mainly, we fish for the winter,” said Ms. Miroshnick, who had a dozen family members with her. “That’s how most people survive here. It’s the cheaper way.”

There is no more popular fishery in Alaska than the Kenai (KEEN-eye), a three-hour drive southwest of Anchorage, where millions of sockeye salmon ripple through the silty turquoise water each summer to spawn.

And there is most likely no more democratic fishing spot in America — a place where any Alaska resident, from an oil company executive to a carwash attendant, can fill a freezer with premium salmon for only the cost of gas and gear.

Read the rest here.

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From trafficked to trafficker: youth homelessness and sexual exploitation in Alaska (For The Guardian)

Julia O'Malley — Mon, 22 May 2017 18:11:21 +0000

(This story is part of a larger project by The Guardian that looks at homelessness in the western United States. Ash Adams made the photos. )

Heidi Ross was a senior in high school when she hitchhiked from the Anchorage suburb of Eagle River into the city, leaving a dark childhood behind.

“I didn’t have anywhere to go,” she said of that day, around 20 years ago. “I had the clothes on my back.”

After she arrived, without a way to pay rent, she soon found herself trading sex for a place to stay. Next she traded sex for drugs. Using sex to get things she needed made her feel powerful, she said. At 21, she went to work for a pimp who promised to take care of her.

“It felt strange at first, because I was so used to taking care of myself,” she said. “It felt good. It felt like a piece was missing and it had finally come back.”

Ross said sex work became her “lifestyle”. Eventually, however, she would be the one exploiting young men and women as adrift as she was on that ride into Anchorage.

Sexual exploitation has been an undercurrent of the state’s male-dominated frontier culture since Russian explorers first came to the region, and men flocked to the state during the Gold Rush. Law enforcement, prosecutors and victim advocates have long suspected the state has a high rate of sex trafficking, but the problem has been largely unstudied. Recently, though, a small study of trafficking among homeless youth offered some data to support these suspicions.

Read the rest here.

ANCHORAGE, ALAKSA – MAY 6, 2017: “I’ve never had a tattoo done professionally,” Heidi Ross says. They were all done on the streets or in prison, she explains. This one, which reads “For the Love of It” with two money symbols, was done partially on the street and partially in prison. It references both the love of money but also the love of life as a sex worker. Ross got the first part of the tattoo when she was 24 and running her own escort service, and then the dollar signs while in prison. Ross was trafficked at a young age and then eventually ran her own trafficking business, but after almost 2 decades and 36 arrests, she says she’s done, changing her name, and going to school, ready to start a new life with her 7-year-old son./ASH ADAMS

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For The Guardian: Homeless in America

Julia O'Malley — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 21:30:34 +0000

I am helping The Guardian with a large project on homelessness in the west funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Below is the beginning of one of the first stories in the project. (Photographer Ash Adams and I contributed from Alaska.) I’m looking for more story ideas, especially ones that involve innovation and solutions, about homelessness in Alaska.

How America counts its homeless – and why so many are overlooked

They dressed in several layers of clothing or donned old hats. They carried blankets and cardboard boxes. It was approaching midnight in New York one night in March 2005, and recruits who had been paid $100 each to pretend to be homeless were fanning out across the city.

There were 58 sites dotted throughout the metropolis. Pseudo-homeless people arrived at subway stations in Manhattan, back alleys in Staten Island and Queens, the front steps of a church in the Bronx.

Then they waited to see if anyone noticed them.

The actors were taking part in a peculiar experiment led by Kim Hopper, a researcher then at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research. The purpose: to analyze the effectiveness of the city’s count of homeless people.

Hopper and his colleagues found that actors at almost one in three of the sites reported being missed by counters. And these were people who wanted to be counted. They did not include the swaths of genuinely homeless ensconced in corners of the city. “Invisibility serves the purpose of security and uninterrupted sleep,” the researchers noted.

Just over a decade later, questions remain about the reliability of America’s biennial street count of homeless people, an extraordinary undertaking in which thousands of volunteers head out into the darkness in cities, forests and deserts around the country.

It still takes place mostly at night, relying on volunteers who are often equipped with nothing more sophisticated than clipboards, pencils and flashlights.

But supporters of the count, which is run by local communities in return for federal dollars and may be the largest tally of homeless people in the world, argue that it is a crucial mechanism to keep track of people who often exist outside of government bureaucracy.

Even if the figures are open to question, they provide a window into the landscape of America’s homelessness problem – and a sense of how it is changing over time.

“The bottom line is that it’s imperfect, but I don’t know that we could do a better job,” said Dennis Culhane, a University of Pennsylvania researcher and a principal investigator on the homelessness reports that are presented to Congress annually.

The most recent report found that on one night there were 549,928 homeless people in America.

Read the rest of the story, including scenes from Alaska’s most recent homeless count, here.

ANCHORAGE, ALASKA – JANUARY 25, 2017: A group consisting of senior airmen volunteering from the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson millitary facility and group leader Monica Stoesser, a local social services provider, participate in the homeless count in Anchorage. Approximately 160 volunteers, most from the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson millitary facility, gathered at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in the wee hours of the morning to participate in the count. Volunteers were placed into groups with assigned parts of the city and a group leader./ASH ADAMS

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For the Washington Post: Alaska, Veterans, Esteban Santiago

Julia O'Malley — Fri, 20 Jan 2017 01:36:33 +0000

I had the privilege of helping the Washington Post on two stories (read them here and here) last week about Esteban Santiago, the Anchorage man who shot five people at the Ft. Lauderdale airport.

Then, over the weekend, I had a story of my own published in the Post that helped to provide context about Alaska law, mental health care and veteran’s culture here. To report that story, photographer Ash Adams and I spent several days talking to vets and visiting a VFW and an American Legion Hall, which was truly a pleasure.

The Washington Post story begins:

ANCHORAGE — Monday night was lasagna night inside the strip-mall storefront of VFW Post 9981. Clemson was still behind Alabama on the big screens as regulars trickled in. At the bar, Joe Federmann considered how Esteban Santiago fell through the social safety net Alaska has for veterans.

A young combat vet, Santiago lived for several years in this town of 300,000 before he boarded the plane that took him to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where the FBI says he shot five strangers at the baggage claim. Santiago showed signs of serious mental illness and a propensity for violence the year before the trip, investigators say. Federmann wondered whether he had signed up to get mental health care from the Department of Veterans Affairs. There is good help available for vets, he said, but they have to take it.

“The thing about it is, a lot of veterans don’t feel they want to seek that help because they think they don’t need it,” Federmann said.

It has been more than 40 years since Federmann, 71, saw a man killed by a rocket in Vietnam, but the memory is still searing, he said. When he came back from the war, he and his family moved to Alaska. He found peace in the vast wild landscapes, the fishing and a community of veterans who understood him, he said. He also had good care at VA. When he dies, he would like his ashes spread over an Alaska mountain range, he said.

There are more vets per capita in Alaska than any other state. One out of every three people is either military or a dependent, according to Verdie Bowen, director of veterans affairs for the state. Alaska offers vets opportunities in oil fields, health care, mining, aviation, military contract work and the federal workforce. In a place where bears eat out of trash cans and moose rut in cul-de-sacs, nobody makes a big deal about owning guns. And Alaskans tend to value self-reliance and practicality, Bowen said.

“A lot of the veterans come up here; they want to be on their own,” he said. “A lot of veterans are of an independent mind-set.”

Read the rest here.

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For The Guardian: In Alaska, homeless on the frozen streets (with Ash Adams photos)

Julia O'Malley — Tue, 27 Dec 2016 20:34:34 +0000

Two weeks ago, photographer Ash Adams and I spent a few days at Bean’s Cafe and Brother Francis for a story for The Guardian about homelessness in Alaska.

Here’s how the story starts:

As soon as she glimpsed at the body on the icy street, Marie Nickolai knew it was Jackie Amaktoolik. He’d been drinking outside. People said he had collapsed.

She wept as friends coaxed her from the scene. “That’s my brother,” she said.

When homeless people die in Alaska, it is often like this: outside, facilitated by a lethal combination of alcohol and cold.

Nickolai’s stepbrother, known on the streets as Isaac, died on 13 December. The temperature was 6F (-14C).

Nickolai, 42, and her stepbrother grew up among eight siblings in the remote Yupik village of New Stuyahok along the Nushagak river in western Alaska. She said it was a childhood of picking berries, hunting moose, fishing and attending the Russian Orthodox church.

However, for years in their adulthood, Nickolai and Amaktoolik lived on the streets of Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city. Both lived with chronic alcoholism.

Alaska has some of the highest per capita rates of homelessness and alcoholism in America. From October to April, when temperatures can fall below freezing in this city of 300,000, bodies turn up outside with grim predictability; they are found in cars, hunched for warmth near transformer boxes, or in makeshift camps in the city’s many wooded parks.

Read the rest here.

Here are some of Ash’s gorgeous and heartbreaking unpublished images from our reporting:

ANCHORAGE, ALASKA – December 14, 2016: Carl, 28, holds a sign on a corner in Anchorage on the morning December 14, 2016, when the temperature remained in single digits. Carl has been homeless for most of his life. According to him, his 20th anniversary of being homeless is coming up next month, shortly after his birthday. He says physically, the hardest part about being homeless in Anchorage is the frostbite; he typically suffers 5 bouts of frostbite each winter, and is presently suffering his second bout this season./ASH ADAMS

ANCHORAGE, ALASKA- December 12, 2016: Shara Summers, 32, sits on her bed in the women’s dormitory in Brother Francis Shelter in Anchorage. Summers says she has been homeless for most of her life./ ASH ADAMS

ANCHORAGE, ALASKA – December 13, 2016: JD Hoskins, 58, makes his bed for the night at Bean’s Cafe, a soup kitchen that serves also as a men’s overflow homeless shelter in Anchorage. JD has been volunteering at the cafe to make sure that he has a bed for the night, and hopes to work towards self-sufficiency. /ASH ADAMS

ANCHORAGE, ALASKA – December 12, 2016: Michael Charles, 39, and Gabriella Tinker, 23, stand together outside of Brother Francis Shelter. Tinker has been homeless since she was a teenager. Charles came up to Alaska from California recently to work in commercial fishing, and stayed after the season ended. Charles says he is now looking for work. The couple say they were married a few months ago but have never had a photograph made of them together./ASH ADAMS

Marie Nickolai sobs while her husband, Steven Moses tells Nickolai’s other brother that their half-brother died earlier that day. ” I just couldn’t call him,” she says./ASH ADAMS

ANCHORAGE, ALASKA – December 12, 2016: People wait in the nightly line to get into Brother Francis Shelter, the largest homeless shelter in Anchorage, which accepts over 200 people every night. Beds are limited, however, and on some nights dozens of people are turned away. Some will be able to get into one of the overflow shelters, while many others will have to find shelter on the street./ASH ADAMS

Steve Moses and Marie Nickolai sit on a mattress in Bean’s Cafe, a soup kitchen which also serves as one of the men’s overflow shelters in Anchorage when the shelter across the parking lot, Brother Francis Shelter, is full. Marie’s half-brother, Jackie Amaktoolik, who was also homeless, died earlier that day in the parking lot. Due to the special circumstances, Bean’s Cafe allowed Marie to stay the night on a mattress separated from the men’s. Before lights out, however, Steven and Marie are kicked out of the shelter for drinking./ASH ADAMS

ANCHORAGE, ALASKA- December 13, 2016: “Rabt” in Bean’s Cafe in Anchorage, says his name came from “up there.” Rabt has been homeless for many years. When he isn’t staying in the cafe, he says he lives in a camp down the street./ASH ADAMS

“Rabt” has been collecting jewelry from trash since he was 7 yeras old, he says. He wears many different pieces around his neck and carries a variety of jewels with him in his pockets and wallet./ASHA DAMS

ANCHORAGE, ALASKA – December 13, 2016: A man walks towards Bean’s Cafe and Brother Francis Shelter in Anchorage, Alaska. The city has experienced temperatures in single digits for the past week./ASH ADAMS

ANCHORAGE, ALASKA – December 13, 2016: Art Helms, 56, stands outside of Bean’s Cafe, the soup kitchen across from Brother Francis Shelter in Anchorage, Alaska. Helms has been homeless for about a year and four months, and says this is the first time in his life he’s been homeless. Helms, who says he used to work in the oil field and other laborer jobs, says he is trying to get disability status after an injury that happened years ago has made it difficult to work. For now, he volunteers at Bean’s Cafe to make sure that he has a bed every night./ASH ADAMS

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For ADN: A look at prostitution in Anchorage from someone who lived it

Julia O'Malley — Sun, 18 Dec 2016 17:52:56 +0000

In today’s ADN:

The first time Amber Batts traded sex for money, she said, she was 30. She had two small children, her husband at the time was hurt at work, she said, and they needed money. She answered a newspaper ad and soon found herself at a trailer in view of the giant neon tattoo shop gun in Spenard. She knocked on the door. A man ushered her inside.

He gave her the rundown: always get the money up front; don’t do anything extra without a condom; don’t do anything that doesn’t feel safe; let somebody else know where you are. She sat on a couch and watched women come and go. Her “date” arrived, a white guy in his 50s. He wore glasses and worked an office job. He was nice, she said. Afterward she felt no emotion. She was numb.

“It was really easy. It was too easy,” she said. “I made about $300 of my own that night.”

Find the rest of the story here.

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There’s more to my relationship with this place than politics (For The Guardian)

Julia O'Malley — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 18:09:15 +0000

I didn’t vote like most people here on Tuesday and I was surprised by the result of the election, though maybe I shouldn’t have been. As a gay person and a journalist, this election makes me worry for my job and my kids, but it also makes me better understand my neighbors. There’s more to my relationship to this place than politics. I think a lot of Alaskans feel that way. I wrote about this yesterday for The Guardian.

Here’s how it begins:

My dad and I have been rehabbing my old porch this fall. We’ve done most of the work ourselves but for certain things we’ve hired help, and so I’ve been spending some afternoons with an electrician and a painter. They are kind, hard-working guys. I’m always happy to see them in their trucks, backing into the driveway.

The electrician went to school with one of my younger brothers and lived for a short time at my mom’s house when he was a teenager. Now he’s a dad and a former marine, something that makes me proud of him. He’s thoughtful, mature and competent.

He was also leaning towards Trump last time we talked.

Our sons started kindergarten on the same day this fall. We exchanged pictures of them in first-day clothes. We were both emotional. Me, because of passing time. Him, because he worried for his kid’s safety. It might not be rational, he told me as I watched him twist wires, but that’s how he feels. As the conversation went on, he lifted his pant leg to show me a small handgun strapped to his ankle.

Many people own firearms here in Alaska, and many people carry them all the time, often concealed. It’s part of the culture, and practical in rural places. Even so, I thought about my electrician friend later, about feeling like it might come down to that, that you might need to protect yourself and your family because nobody else would.

The next time he came by, we talked about the election. He’s self-employed. Alaska’s health insurance situation under Obamacare might be the worst in the country. That alone was a reason to want a change. Plus, he’d read somewhere about Clinton being in poor health. I told him I was voting for her. I wasn’t passionate about it, but I’m a journalist, gay, married, with children, I said. I didn’t want to end up in the clink.

We both laughed. He flipped on the lights and they worked. It was about time for him to head out, he said.

Next came the painter…

Read the rest here.

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DIY foraged, wire-hanger wreath with Natasha

Julia O'Malley — Tue, 25 Oct 2016 21:44:40 +0000

By Natasha Price

As part of my never-ending quest to be an adult, I’ve been trying to purge my home of wire hangers. It’s sort of an awkward struggle to throw away a hanger. They poke through the trash bag and when you bend them in half it doesn’t seem to make it any easier.

So today when I was tossing my recent dry cleaning hangers it dawned on me that I could easily convert one into a wreath base and, how convenient — there’s already a built-in hook!

So I put on my winter boots and took a nature walk to collect twigs, plants and other dried-up pieces of nature to wire into a simple wreath.

After completing my autumn wreath I was reminded why I’ve never been interested in wreaths: I have a hideous front door. It’s metal, it’s dirty and no amount of spruce boughs, berries or ribbon will make it look attractive.

So I was stuck with a gorgeous wreath and no place to hang it. Thankfully, Julia has a beautiful front door just begging for a wreath to match.

Make one! What you’ll need:

1 wire coat hanger
floral tape (available at craft stores)
1 paddle of floral wire (available at craft stores)
bits of dried-out nature such as spruce boughs, yarrow, alder cones, grass, rose hips and fireweed
scissors

First, form your hanger into a hoop shape. Using the floral tape, start wrapping the hanger from the top twist, around and back so the only bare metal remaining is the hook. This will keep the greenery from sliding around and will camouflage the wire better.

Take a small clump of greens, such as a sprig of spruce and some grass and cut the ends so there’s about two inches of stem. Place the clump at the top of the wreath base. Start wrapping the floral wire around the stems so they are securely fastened to the base.

Create another clump of greens and secure a little farther down the wreath base. Work your way all around the hanger until you’re back at the top. Hide the stems of the last clump behind the greens of the first clump and wire in place.

Now hang up your wreath on your picturesque front door and admire your crafty resourcefulness.

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