Alaska: Part Three "Seatbelt/Insanity"

I hope you all can humor me, as I ramble on about Alaska and what it has done to me. So much of who I am is traced back to my Alaskan roots. At least, I'm hoping to blame anything weird about me on Alaska!



I'm not a total seat belt nazi, in fact, some people think I'm downright irresponsible and illegal. I never wore a seatbelt, in my life, until my roommate at BYU made me buckle up, in her car! No one I knew wore seatbelts, EVER! There are no seatbelts on 4-Wheelers, the vehicle of choice to many Alaskans. (You call them Quads, we Alaskans call them 4-Wheelers) And helmets are for sissies.


That nerdy kid on the back wrack is an 11-year-old me. How come I'm the only kid in my family, dressed like a homeless child? I found another photo of my dad driving us kids around, on a 4-Wheeler, and I was dressed just as poorly. I mean, what kid chooses to wear brown shorts with knee high brown socks and grey velcro shoes at 11? Something might have been wrong with me, then. And Guess who was on the back wrack of that picture, also? I'm starting to think my parents might have been hoping to get rid of me and my bad fashion sense.

Another memory just came to mind . . . Dad tying our sleds to the back of his snow machine and pulling us up and down our street at very fast speeds. No helmets. Maybe that's what happened to my brother, Michael. Ha, ha, I'm kidding, Mike (he's the only one of my bros that reads my blog!)




Alaskan roads are full of potholes and are painful to travel at speeds more than 20mph. If you drive your 4-Wheeler, you can go twice as fast and hardly feel the bumps! No wonder people own more 4-Wheelers than cars!

This is a typical parking lot in AK filled with one beater VW bus and two 4-Wheelers.

(Please note the tin roofs on the building next door. In areas with a lot of winter snowfall, every building has a roof like this. They appear to look like the roofs in a shanty town, but are very practical. The steeply sloped tin roof allows huge amounts of compacted snow to slide off, preventing a roof cave-in. Little tidbit that will be important in my future post: Alaska: Part Six "Snowed-Inn")

How about this shot, taken in another town? One of these 4-Wheelers was driven by a 10 year old, whose mom needed him to run to the store and buy some milk. The legal age to drive motorcycles/4-Wheelers on the streets is 14. I think that laissez-faire attitude about seat belts and laws, in general, was instilled in me, BY MY STATE! It's really no one's fault, it's just an internal Alaskan thing.

This lovely photo was taken outside of Talkeetna. It's a beautiful clear view of Mt. McKinley, the tallest mountain in North America (Sorry Texan, you don't have one of these!) Another very common way to get around in AK is a little plane.

My dad had a pilot's license and a plane like this one. There ARE seatbelts in airplanes, and he always made us buckle up in his, thank goodness, because he wrecked two planes. After he ripped the wings off one, landing in the trees, he build himself an Ultralight.

I don't have any photos of my dad's Ultralight, but this photo will give you an idea. It was basically a visquene plane he "welded" together with a hairdryer, and flew with a lawnmower engine. Either my mom wouldn't let us go in that plane, or it wasn't big enough. I'm guessing she asked Dad to increase his life insurance policy, with his first flight in that little "experiemental aircraft."




It wouldn't really matter if you buckled up in one of these, if you went down, you would die.


We never worried, though, nothing could hurt our Dad. We'd seen him do flips & helicopters off virgin cliffs at our local rope-pull bunny hill. My dad could rock and ICE climb. He took to the white waters of raging Alaskan rivers, swollen with winter melt off, in a KAYAK (and yes, he did wear a helmet when he did that!). There was nothing our Dad couldn't do. So maybe my laissez-faire attitude is actually inbred insanity, and has nothing to do with the state??