This week we’re hearing from Katy Laurance of Anchorage. She recently moved back to Alaska after a 12-year hiatus in Seattle.
LAURANCE: We relocated here a year ago, but I’ve lived here from when I was born til I was 18. We were in the Seattle area for 12 years, but Alaska’s always been home. You know, I think people who grew up in Alaska, there’s two kinds of us. Those who can’t wait to leave and those who can’t wait to come back. We were in the latter category. It’s always been home.
We have two kids: 13 and 4. Two boys. In the wintertime, we cross country ski. It’s been fun introducing our boys to all those winter sports, they didn’t get access to down there. We hike a lot. My husband’s a mountaineer so he’s training to do McKinley, or Denali, in a couple years. Summer time now, so we’re biking everywhere. We’re hiking.
There were a lot of things to do in Seattle. And the cosmopolitan things to do, you know, going to museums, going to aquariums. That sort of thing. They were excellent, but it was always colored with that added planning that you had to do. You really couldn’t do a lot on a whim. At least where we were living. Even in the suburbs out there, you never really felt quite safe to let your kids just run around outside. Not for crime or anything; we were in a perfectly safe, nice community, but there were cars everywhere. And so you really didn’t feel like you could set your kids outdoors to really play. And here, that’s not a problem. You know, you can let them out and they can play in the woods, they can build a fort, play in the creek. Those are all the things that I remember from my childhood here that I wanted to give them that I couldn’t give them there.
You know, it’s not that we’re letting them run feral, but they get to be self-sufficient. They get to have free play and we don’t have to have a regimented time schedule to put them on to achieve play. That seemed really kind of productive. As our kids got older… My oldest is 13, and the childhood that his younger brother’s going to get is going to be very different and much more free here than it ever would’ve been there.
We feel incredibly fortunate that we were able to get an experience. We were able to go to college and get a good experience out of state, but then we were also able to come back home. We had a lot of people that were kind of skeptical when we said, ‘Yeah, we’re moving back to Alaska, given the state of the budget and everything here. But coming back, and the people that we’ve talked to here. There are a lot of people that do feel invested in the future of Alaska. Regardless of our ties to oil and what that looks like in the future, there is a young population here that sees the lifestyle benefits of living up here, and even if things get tough, even if it means attacks, there’s a lot that we are willing to do – willing to pay – to be able to live up here and to be able to enjoy the lifestyle that we get up here. And I think if we get the chance to speak up and talk about new inventive ways to bring new industry here – to bring new investment opportunities that are outside of what we’ve done in the past – I think there is so much that makes this place worthwhile. Like I said, we’ll be here through thick and thin.
Ammon Swenson is Alaska Public Media’s Audio Media Content Producer. He was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska. He graduated from UAA in 2018 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and integrated media. He’s previously worked for KRUA radio, the Anchorage Press, and The Northern Light.
