Fire, Oil, or Ice

Tok is cold, and there is no reason it should be inhabited. Surrounding lands don’t contain any economically extractable resources. The Coast Guard maintains a soaring antenna array here, but otherwise Tok exists as a junction of Alaska’s two most notable highways. Coming from Canada on the Alaska Highway, Tok is the place where you can either turn left and go to Anchorage or continue on to Fairbanks. Subsistence living and road kill keeps its thousand odd residents alive. Several nearby native communities contribute a few more souls to the census. Moose is common on menus, as is minus seventy on thermometers. Cut wood all winter through, and your house will still be cold in Tok.

Oil flows through Tok’s heart. Town smells of it. The oil burning furnace that heats my cabin spews exhaust fumes. All my clothes reek of burnt fuel. A carbon monoxide detector is requisite. I haven’t felt good since I got here, and I fear a minor case of monoxide poisoning. Not acute; just enough to give me symptoms enjoyably akin to dysentery. Still, it’s been negative twenty five most mornings when I drive to work. Poisoned has to be better than frozen solid.

Steamy exhaust pours from everything. A dirty pall drifts overhead. It isn’t as bitter cold as minus twenty five could feel, but standing around for long simply begins to freeze you. Burning oil holds the chill at bay. A scent of petroleum surrounds everything human. The electricity plant runs on it. Without it, little of Tok would remain.

Jeff Hermanns at Tok Forestry looks at countless acres of burnt spruce forest north of the Tanana River and sees another fuel source with which to satiate Tok’s appetite for combustibles. A massive fire scar, what remains of 2004’s Taylor Complex blaze, spans vast lands across the Tanana Valley State Forest. It is filled with standing dead wood, kiln dried by the fire’s intense heat. Jeff’s aim is to get Tok off North Slope oil and onto Tanana Valley biomass.

Biomass is not going to save western civilization. It would take many times the amount of arable land available in America to grow enough soybeans to fully replace diesel in the United States. All current biowaste production can account for only a fraction of what is necessary to keep us operating at existing capacities. Even if every possible acre of productive land in the world grew crops for energy, it wouldn’t be enough to power the grid.

Not so in Tok.

Tok, Alaska, is off the grid; its electricity comes from a diesel fueled generator at the AP&T power station downtown. Alaska Power and Telephone, who is significantly vested in oil futures I must assume, provides electricity to town and several native villages by burning petroleum. Jeff looks at the millions of board feet around him, considers the amount of electricity used by the local community currently, factors in the generation capacity of modern technologies and the cost of infrastructure, and still believes he can cut the price of electricity in half by fueling Tok’s power plant with biomass.

Because population is low in Tok, Hermanns believes Alaska’s state forest can sustain the local community’s fuel needs using just the timber harvest currently allowed. In theory, the allowable cut should leave forest reserves in quantities ample enough that at no time will another cut be precluded. A biomass fueled power plant in Tok would be capable of providing for all of town’s electrical needs while providing cheap district heat to entities such as the library, university extension, and emergency services.

Forest literally carpets Tok. It continues unbroken in all directions like a blanket. Spruce as thick as dog hair comes up nearly to my doorstep. Fire has threatened to raze town on several occasions, and potential exists for exactly such an event at any time. In defense, Jeff’s fire crew at Tok Area Office, funded by National Fire Plan money, treats hundreds of acres of urban forest, reducing fuels and creating fuel breaks along roads. Around Tok School, biomass from treated acreage is piled and left to dry. It awaits the chipper and biomass boiler Hermanns and Tok School’s grant writer, Scott McManus, intend to purchase with funds they have been granted.

It all makes great sense. Oil delivers more bang for the buck than biomass and is more easily transported. Despite AP&T’s resultant loss of revenue within the local market, biomass power in Tok frees up oil that could be sold elsewhere or, better yet, saved for future generations. An added benefit is timber industry in Tok, employing local workers to provide for local needs.

Tok School biomass project is smart and progressive. It lowers the threat that Tok School will be destroyed by wildfire and essentially guarantees the facility will be heated for the foreseeable future, oil or no. After the fuel reduction wood is consumed, chip wood will be purchased from local vendors.

The problem with Jeff Hermanns’ vision is that this is America. We’re not socialists. Education is about the only thing we are guaranteed, other than death and taxes. In theory, State of Alaska can’t develop infrastructure. That’s a service provided by private sector, for profit.

One might hope that native corporations in Tanana Valley would see the opportunity to invest in themselves by both funding and constructing infrastructure that benefits their own communities, but so far that appears unlikely. Subsidies foot much of residents’ heating and power bills, so most Alaskans simply continue status quo. Every tax dollar Alaskans give Washington is returned to the state twice fold in the form of federal funding, which minimizes the impetus to change. The constant flow of North Slope oil south is worth that much.

What Jeff in his role as Area Forester and the State of Alaska can do is continue to develop the potential for sustainable biomass harvest and extraction from the Tanana Valley State Forest and promote biomass industry within the local community. Someday rising oil prices will force Alaska to look to its forest resources for light and heat. For now, Jeff is running ahead of the curve, which is the definition of progressive.

The handyman called today to report what he found wrong at the cabin. I have no experience with oil furnaces, but my gut feeling that it was pumping exhaust gases into my living space was confirmed. Bad layout had caused the outlet pipe to collapse where it made a right angle. Fumes were backing up into the house, a potentially fatal situation. Pretty bad air, was how he described it.

Don't Be Scared, Cobe

I’ve been hanging out in Hamilton with Brandi. We met this past summer while we were both working wildland fire in Kootenai Country. She is pretty amazing. When I first met her, she was quite the conservationist, but I’ve been doing a real good job breaking her of such sensible habits as only driving when she has to, walking to the store, not buying things she doesn’t need, and turning off lights when she leaves a room. We have been getting along very well, and I have high hopes for us, if we can only get past Alaska.

As I mentioned, I was working on the Kootenai when I met Brandi. I’ve been working in fire management since 2000, and one day I had an opportunity to take a new position within the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, working dispatch in Lincoln County where I grew up. At the time I took the job, I was working in Missoula and getting awful tired of that town. The job on the Koot seemed like just the ticket; I could stay at my pop’s cabin for minimal rent and get the dogs out of the city. Besides all that, I had planned on moving back to Troy anyway, to research and write a novel. This was perfect.

That attitude didn’t last too long. A funny thing about hometowns; no matter how much you change while you’re away, or think you do, they always seem to bring you back around to who you were. By the time fire season 2008 was getting started on the Kootenai, I was looking for a way out. One day at the office, my buddy Slick Rick and I got talking about Alaska. Working in a dispatch office, you’re always trying to find something new to Google. That’s what I should do, I said. I’m gonna Google jobs in Alaska.

One Google search and two emails later, I was filling out an application for a new dispatch job with the State of AK Division of Forestry in Tok, Alaska. If I thought the job on the Kootenai was good, this was great. The job announcement was for the position of lead dispatcher, which meant I would get the supervisory experience I hadn’t been getting a chance at here in the Northern Rockies region. And talk about peace and quiet to write; Tok was literally in the middle of f’n nowhere, despite its dubious distinction of being the first Alaskan town after Canada along the Alcan. I’d already gotten all I needed out of Troy as far as research for the novel. When they offered me the job, I was on top of the world.

Not because of the job, however. The job offer had taken on a rather bittersweet flavor, actually. No, the reason I was on top of the world, as I told my pops the afternoon it happened, was because Brandi McCoy called me. Sure, I’d been subtly pursuing her, but it was more due to the fact that I couldn’t NOT pursue her than through any belief that it would truly amount to anything. Still, it had amounted to something, and that something has turned out to be much more worthwhile than I could ever have imagined.

So now we’re preparing to say our goodbyes. The ferry to Alaska pulls out of Bellingham, Washington, on February 20th, and the dogs and I will be on it. How’s that going to work out, you ask. I don’t know. Brandi is an absolute beauty, in every sense of the word, so I’m feeling a bit insecure about the situation, as you might imagine. We have been at each other’s throats lately, to be perfectly honest. We’re both just scared, I guess. It’s been pretty good, this thing we’ve found, and we’re worried we might lose it. And we might.

Brandi is going to get her own dog. I’ve been fighting it tooth and nail, but I couldn’t tell you why if you asked. I would give you a lot of reasons, but I couldn’t really tell you why. My best guess goes something like this: Siberian huskies were what I brought to the table; if she has one of her own, where does that leave me?

In Alaska, I guess, but there will be plenty more on that later. Check back.