Thirty-five years ago, laborers old and young gathered in the Fairbanks union hall hoping for jobs on the trans-Alaska natural gas line. The oil pipeline from the North Slope to Valdez had been completed, and oil was flowing. The men who built the oil line were no longer needed. They were unemployed.
Day after day, eager hands hungry for work rose from their chairs to ask the business agent as he entered the hall, "How's that gas line looking?" And the business agent, summoning an air of confidence, replied "It's looking good brother, it's looking real good."
In the second decade of the 21st century, the gas line is still looking good, real good. Just ask Gov. Bill Walker and members of the Alaska Legislature who recently met in a special legislative session devoted to the gas line. But the gas line has never been built. The construction workers who were 30 to 40 years of age in 1980 are 65 to 75 today, living on memories and retirement checks. Maybe, they think, their children or grandchildren will get dispatched to seven twelves on the gas line, the long hours that produce big checks. Yes maybe.
The writer Peter De Vries said, "Reality is that which won't go away no matter how much you want it to go away." Reality is there is no gas line, and waiting for the gas line has become reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's "Waiting For Godot." Fruitless, hopeless, pointless. In "Godot" one character says to another, "We always find something ... to give us the impression we exist." The second character replies, "Yes, yes we are magicians."
Oh sure, the media is full of news about the gas line -- news about who will own it, how much it will cost, how many many construction workers will be employed, how soon gas will flow -- but whatever this means in the heads of lawmakers and captains of industry, it means nothing in the real world. There is no gas line.
Whoever said, "Patience is a virtue," never waited for the gas line in a union hall or in the halls of the Alaska Legislature.
A psychiatrist might call gas line thought delusional. How is talking about an imaginary gas line different from talking about an imaginary friend?
The gas line has resisted the pull of political gravity because the building material for the line has changed. Steel is no longer necessary. The gas line can be built of something softer and easier to obtain, although not necessarily inexpensive: Wishes and dreams.
Alaskans are people of the big dream. This has been true since miners searching for gold set off stampedes to remote creeks at the turn of the 20th century. Relatively few miners found gold in abundance, gold to make them rich, but they all shared the dream. Rex Beach, a 19-year-old law student who left Chicago for Alaska in 1897, described his fellow stampeders as so green "not one in ten of us knew how to toss a flap jack ... Gold had been discovered, to be sure, but we could only guess what it looked like in the native state."
For Alaskans, the big strike is ... somewhere. Over the next hill, across the next valley, down the next river. The lure of the big strike is as captivating to Alaskans as the promise of "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" was to hobos dreaming of a land where "The hens lay soft boiled eggs / The farmers' trees are full of fruit / And the barns are full of hay."
The dream came true for the majority of Alaskans once: The oil line provided a bonanza in the 1970s. We want a rerun, we want a repeat, we want... Apparently it's not Alaska's destiny to build a gas line; it's Alaska's destiny to want a gas line.
Psychologists have longed marveled at the power of belief, one of the most influential forces in shaping human consciousness. People have demonstrated many, many times that when the facts prove their beliefs wrong they can make adjustments that allow them to continue their beliefs. Cults predicting the end of the world provide a sterling example: When the world doesn't end on the predicted day, cult members make adjustments that allow them to continue believing the end is near.
In our case, we believe the beginning is near, the beginning of construction of the gas line. We know it deep in our Alaskan bones, and our bones don't lie.
Michael Carey is an Alaska Dispatch News columnist.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.