Blackfox’s Alaska Hiatus (2017)

I am the Black Fox provocateur of the mind. A while back I lost mine and decided to take a break from the media. I took a trip to the Arctic Circle, The North Pole, home place of Santa Clause whom I’ve not yet been granted the honor of smoking with. This was my chance to save and get priorities straight. I’ve since secured my finances and resolved many of my more destructive, depressive tendencies. I’ve left Bangor and broadcast ambiguously. I am locked in an underground bunker. The Black Fox will be hard to find.

     In Bangor, I was depressed and getting shitfaced every day. I found it difficult to deal with existing. I could think of nothing other than death every day all day. The alcoholism lead to rage that took months to dampen. I lost my job at Wal-Mart and stopped trying to find work after a 2nd job after that also didn’t pan out. I was offered a trip to Alaska to stay with family for a few months and took it. When I returned I thought, I could establish myself underground with Anonymous Radio.

Before my subterranean transformation, I was in Kotzebue Alaska, an oasis in the white deserts of the north-westernmost tip of the continent. A town called a “city” with a population of 3,245, 30 miles north of the Circle. You can swim in the Arctic Ocean from a road on a beach next to the Post Office. That road is covered in snow at the moment sadly.   This town is just south of Barrow, a place just recently renamed to Utqiaġvik for cultural reasons and home of the 30 Days of Night hellscape. In the end of the movie a middle-aged, red haired woman warns that the vampire legion that plagued the main characters in the film would hit Point Hope next. Point Hope is 149 miles NW from Kotzebue, perhaps you can go further northwest… The creepy vibe from this marooned graveyard town makes the vampire scenario all the more believable. Abandoned shacks litter neighborhoods, old rusted vans, tires and ATV parts with the addition of four or more graveyards make for half the occupied space in the area. Mad Max is another famed fable that comes to mind. Hoth from Star Wars maybe?

Beneath that decay drenched wasteland, lay an outpost of humanity. A world dwindling near the apocalypse couldn’t ask for a better example of off-the-grid living here in what looks like the old west. While the majority of residents occupy housing arrangements of one degree or another, many villagers especially outside of Kotzebue will live in fishing shacks for a good period of the year. Many will work on boats for a season. For those at home, due to a disastrously high cost of living caused by corporate monopolization, mutual living arrangements are commonplace regardless of their vicissitude. People here however seem cooperative and without intervention could self govern. Where there are benefits there are pitfalls. You can drive an ATV to work and kill a bear in your back yard, but the price of a gallon of milk is 12$. After taxes and rent, even for the worst shit hole in town runs $800 minimum. The criticism exists still towards people on welfare, but due to a verifiably high lack of employment opportunities, subsidiaries are a must for many. The minimum wage is 12$ an hour and living off the land and out of your neighbor’s pockets is a way of life.

I visited a graveyard as I generally do in places I visit. I wanted to get a feel for the cultural attitudes towards death. The native people bury their own, make their own coffins and line them. They wash they’re dead and make their grave markers. It’s a community experience and a social gathering, “oh, there’s a funeral, let’s go check it out.” A local friend I smoked with told me he used to hop from funeral to funeral. It’s how he got the nickname “Bender” …I suppose there is alcohol at these funereal ceremonies, or maybe the name is from partying. The details were a bit skewed. The ceremonies consist of your typical church wake sometimes in the Russian Orthodox way, sometimes others. After the wake, the body is then transported in a pine box to the burial site. Potlatches or as we know them, Potlucks, are held after all services are complete. A Potlatch is a get together where the life of the lost one is celebrated with food and sometimes booze. As the days pass, like the times I’ve passed this graveyard, I feel more like it’s destiny, to work and be placed in the burial ground next to the only general store in town. A bleak outlook indeed, to live and die in almost the same place. Looking out from the back steps on my break at AC, where I worked for 3 months, only supported this feeling. You can see the graveyard lot… (picture below) A lot of the locals don’t make it far… work is non-existent outside of AC, the hospitals or law enforcement. Many turn to self-destruction only to be ridiculed by said law enforcement.

The village is very degraded. Twenty percent of the houses are abandoned or near that point. Half of the vehicles are driveway ornaments and most of the driveways are unpaved and uneven which is mega dangerous in the slippery winter. Roads are unsalted during the winter with Sand and grating techniques employed to minimal effect. ATVs are a standard in transportation. Internet services are monopolized and thus limited to Gigabyte plans by GCI, the worst internet provider on the planet so far. Alaska is famous for its dogs, Huskies specifically. You see them littered throughout the area like refuse.

The howling of dogs – kept too, as ornaments – can be heard from every corner of Kotzebue. They are left outside even in the coldest Alaskan winters. Many of them poorly cared for. Some used in races like the Iditarod. I lived 50 meters tops from the victor of one such Iditarod sled dog race. (Picture below) The dogs in his yard I always felt deserved better considering their hard work, but are well fed. I notice everything as I’m walking around.

It’s not a methlab. Even if it was, you wouldn’t notice.

ATV storage. . .

Storage storage. . .

Cool spot to spark up.

When did they decide it was too far gone and 86’ed it?

I have smoked some of the finer buds over 3 months in Alaska. Cannabis isn’t hard to come by and in AK it’s legal, but isn’t cheap. An eighth is $100 unless you have the hookups. I met this cat at my work who got the connects and has never failed to deliver rather on demand. The grass is all very Indica, meaning it’s lethargic and munchies causing material. Here’s a pic from the Cannabis section of this site where I document it’s effects.

The stuff is very green like there aren’t a lot of colors on this bud. From how it all smoked, Kotzebue seems notorious for Mid-Grade home-grown and stuff shipped in from Cali. The stuff from Cali is very compact. It gets you interdimensional at first, but it wears off quick. I smoked myself sober a few times. After the first couple weeks, it becomes more of a sleep aid. The same can be said about the home-grown.

On my days off, I’d smoke a bowl and walk around taking pictures. Here are some of my favorites.

On the bottom-right, sled Dogs as previously mentioned. In the center-bottom, sunset on the beach just off the road the Post Office is located. bottom-left, A scrapped trailed in what looked like a junkyard. Top is of a house at the end of a pathway to the Old Friends Church.

Marooned in Kotzebue AK. (Final edit) from Anonymous Radio Redux on Vimeo.

I went to Alaska to recover my mind and my situation. I spent 3 months north of the Arctic Circle to find a new appreciation for fertile ground… You can’t help but pity the inhabitants who spend 9 months out of a year living in this cold. Certainly there are cultural reasons to justify it. I couldn’t have spent my youth here I had thought, reminded of the parts of my own youth that were lost to mistreatment and misguiding. I was lied to and given many psychotropics as a kid and their residual effects can still be felt. I didn’t start doing better mentally until I stopped taking them. I come to find later that it was the pills that were causing the mental issues to begin with. I lost a lot of time because of this. Days I would’ve spent doing things teenagers should do I was unable to in my vegetative state I found myself in by 18 years old, when the drugs were really taking their course. I felt as I were missing something, I moved to Bangor to find it. For a while I had gotten away from my problems, but crashed after a few years in Bangor.

Here in Alaska, I can just think of all the experiences many in these villages will never have. As I return to places where plants grow, both I found new appreciation and have plans to plant my own seeds. The feeling of Angst and Depression that drove me this far away seem to have subsided. Money has been saved and equipment ordered. I have everything setup. The next step I thought would be to finally launch my Anonymous Radio project as it is meant to be, a fully self funded 24 hour radio station. As of December 1st, we are officially operating.

– Blackfox