Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, Alaska Public Media reporters have reached out to dozens of Alaskans to see how the pandemic has changed their everyday lives. We’ve talked with business owners who had just opened their doors when the pandemic started and health care workers treating the state’s sickest residents and people in assisted-living homes reuniting with their families after some restrictions eased.
As the pandemic approaches the start of its third year, we wanted to check in with some of the Alaskans from those earlier stories. We asked about how the past two years have shaped them, how they’re adapting and their hopes for the future.
They spoke of illness, loss and isolation. But they also spoke about growth — a new baby, a new house — plus reuniting with friends in different ways and optimism that the worst is over.
Hear from five Anchorage residents, in their own words:
Melissa Hutchinson, a waitress at Gwennie’s Old Alaska Restaurant:
“Early on in the pandemic, I was very concerned with the closures of the restaurants, concerned about all of the people who were going to be out of work, you know, myself and my coworkers included. The struggle of being able to pay bills and everything was very real. Luckily, in the short term anyway, the added unemployment did seem to help everybody through that.
As things progressed, when we re-opened, there were constantly changing protocols. We were continuously trying to keep everybody safe but keep everybody working. Then trying to get people back to work was really difficult — so lots of hours actually, putting in a lot of work trying to make things work with less staff than we had anticipated coming in the next year.
In an effort not to work people into utter exhaustion, we eventually had to take our night crew, bring as many of them as we could to days, so we could open a second kitchen for the summer. And yeah, so we’re strictly breakfast now. We close at 3 p.m.
We’re definitely, I think, past our major fear of the pandemic now. Pretty much everybody I know has gotten COVID. We’ve moved past it. I know several people who’ve lost someone that they loved, usually an older person, usually people with some very serious underlying conditions. So I think we’re kind of moving past the absolute terror phase of all of that, which is a good thing. It’s still a bit of a challenge, for sure, trying to keep everybody safe but still trying to get back to normal.”
Connie Mast, director of nursing at the Providence Transitional Care Center:
“From the beginning, I had to eat separately from them. I had to sleep separately from them. And when I go into the house when I get home from work, I have to tell my kids, ‘Don’t go near.’ I have to take a shower right away before I can even go out with them. I had some fear because I work in a health care facility. I even told them, ‘We don’t go out. No friends allowed in the home.’ They can’t go out with friends. We just have to stay more of the time.
But now, I don’t know, the key is really the vaccination. My kids are vaccinated, my husband, all in the family are vaccinated. So now, compared to before, we’re more open. There’s still caution when they go out. For me, there’s fear, but I want them to move on with their life as well. Two weeks ago, they wanted to go out to a movie. I had hesitation, but I let them go out. I said, ‘Go out with your friends, but always wear a mask. Do not eat or drink inside the movie theater.’ But we have to enjoy, we have to explore things. We have to go out for mental health and emotional support as well.
There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. This will be it. We’re moving forward toward a new 2023 without having this. It’s like normal, it’s like the flu, that we just have to be vaccinated every year to be protected, so that there will be no host that they can do another variant again. So I’m very optimistic that this will be the last thing, then we’re going to go to normal.”
Chuck Seaca, planned a wedding for July 2020, until the pandemic forced his plans to change:
“My at-the-time girlfriend, now wife, and I had just moved back to Alaska, planning a huge wedding that summer. I think we were planning to have over 300 people up in Talkeetna. We originally decided to postpone the celebration, but to have a small ceremony on the glacier in Wrangell-St. Elias, where we had gotten engaged, and then we were planning in the summer of 2021 to have the big wedding reception.
At Wrangell-St. Elias, it was a wonderful wedding. I think there were 11 people there just out on the glacier. Super meaningful and super small. It was disappointing to not have family there. We figured they’d all be at the celebration next summer, and then we decided to cancel that celebration once COVID didn’t calm down.
Before the pandemic I was not married, didn’t have kids, didn’t own a house, and now all of those things are true. We bought our house last year and then had a little baby girl that just is about to turn 6 months old this month. She’s healthy and just started sitting up and she can giggle now. Of places to be during a pandemic, taking care of an infant and getting to work from home while that infant is around has been quite the opportunity. I think we’ve brought her outside of the house only a couple times throughout her entire life, so definitely excited to be able to bring her to other people’s weddings and see all the family that’s there.”
READ MORE: These three Alaska weddings were derailed by the pandemic. Here’s what the couples did next.
Shawn Idom, owner of Hair Science barbershop:
“The pandemic for us, it was kind of a rough point in the beginning. It was the first time that we had ever been shut down, or had a mandatory shutdown. I’ve been in business for 15 years and that was the first time that had happened. So that was the biggest adjustment, being considered a nonessential worker, and I think we were out for 6 or 7 weeks. So that was a big adjustment.
And then just getting everybody back. We were always… being a barber you have to kind of stay up on the sanitation, disinfection and things like that. But we really wanted not only to make sure that our customers were safe, but to make sure that our staff felt safe. A lot of our customers were appreciative of a lot of the health things that we were doing to just make them feel comfortable. Because in the beginning there was so much uncertainty, like: ‘Do you get this if somebody just rubs elbows with you?’ There’s a lot of different things that we just didn’t know. So we just tried to do our part as a business owner, but also as Alaskans just trying to do the right thing, which is making sure we weren’t compromising anybody’s health.
I’m just grateful the doors are still open. There was some economic repercussions, even still, that people are going through. During the summertime, for example, tourism hasn’t been as busy as it usually is, so that’s something that all businesses are affected by. Because those are the extra population, extra people that come in every summer, that we just haven’t had in the last few years. But, the base of our clientele — the community that we’ve been able to rely on for years and years — they showed up. And I’ve got to contribute most of our success in being able to weather this to them.”
READ MORE: At this Anchorage barbershop, the vision is ‘unapologetically black’
Tisha Pike, an Eagle River mother who started to homeschool her son after the pandemic closed classrooms:
“When the pandemic started, honestly, I had just had my knee replaced. I was one of the last surgeries before they shut everything down. So I was on lockdown a lot harder than a lot of people.
Our biggest challenge was schooling. The Anchorage School District was going to school, and then they shut everything down and they went to ASD virtual learning or whatever. And some kids just can’t hack that, my kids was one of those kids that couldn’t hack that, and we struggled for a while. If parents have time to sit their kids down and do homeschool, it’s fine. Most homeschool programs are set up so that it’s learn at your own pace. So if we can only do school one day a week, then we do school one day a week. If we can do it five days a week, we do it five days a week. There’s so much room and flexibility in there.
My big concern is him getting socialization. I mean, education or whatever, we can cover that with books and learning apps and all that kind of stuff. We can cover that part, but it’s the socialization that you can’t make up for.
We have certain parameters where we can’t go out and hang out with everybody because of the pandemic. I have health issues and I can’t catch COVID, I can’t get sick. So we’ve been hunkered down a lot more than other people, but what we have done is we’ve made sure everyone in our circle is vaccinated. He gets to play with his cousins or our friends’ kids, and we do that at least two or three times a week, so he is getting some socialization. But through elementary school, that’s when they learn how to behave and it molds them to be a better person and how they’re going to do at work and if they’re going to be an introvert or extrovert. So it’s been a struggle to make sure that he’s getting everything. I think we could do homeschool until fifth or sixth grade, but at some point he’s going to have to go back to public school.”
READ MORE: In the state’s largest school districts, families wait for last year’s food assistance
Note: The interviews were lightly edited for length and/or clarity.
Wesley Early covers Anchorage life and city politics for Alaska Public Media. Reach him at wearly@alaskapublic.org and follow him on X at @wesley_early. Read more about Wesley here.
