Extending 570,380 square miles across northwest North America, Alaska is a fascinating place. The state features numerous natural wonders like glaciers, volcanoes, temperate rainforests, and the tallest mountain in the United States; amazing wild animals like grizzly bears, golden eagles, and orcas; diverse people born in the state and from places all over the world; and an interesting political culture.
There’s much to take in if you want to learn about the Land of the Midnight Sun. That’s why it’s so helpful to have authors like Heather Lende to guide you through the local and political cultures of the state. In her memoirs If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name (2006) and Of Bears and Ballots (2020), Lende provides fascinating insights into local goings-on in her own small corner of Alaska.
Heather Lende’s Trail to Alaska
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Although her writing career has centered around her life and observations about other peoples’ lives in Alaska, Heather Lende actually grew up on the opposite side of the U.S. from Alaska in the state of New York. Soon after graduating from college, she and her soon-to-be husband Chip drove cross-country to start a new life in the Last Frontier.
In the 40-plus years they’ve lived in the state, the Lendes have embraced life in Haines Borough, which is home to 2,080 residents and covers 2,700 square miles of the northern section of the Alaska Panhandle. Besides raising a family there, the Lendes run a lumber yard and a hardware store in the borough, and Heather has served the community in almost every capacity, from helping out in the library to coaching youth sports teams to writing obituaries for a local paper to serving on the borough assembly.
Lende has also chronicled the lives of a wide swathe of Haines residents in her many books about the borough. Her writing has become so beloved in and iconic of the state that she was named the Alaska State Writer Laureate in 2021.
Death and Life in Southeast Alaska
In If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name: News from Small-Town Alaska (2006), Lende describes life in Haines through an unusual window of writing obituaries for the local paper, The Chilkat Valley News. Though writing about the deaths of friends, neighbors, and other locals may seem morbid, Lende uses her experiences researching and writing those obituaries to depict the interesting lives of many people in Haines, show the deep love that families, friends, and neighbors had for the deceased, and affirm the value of living life fully even as she talks about disease, disaster, and death.
Lende’s book also focuses on life in Haines. She shows many things that she loves about living in Alaska: biking along nature trails, playing with her dogs on the beach, hiking and camping in the mountains, fishing for salmon and euchalon (candlefish) and picking wild berries, cooking delicious meals for local friends and visiting family members, and more. She also describes many tense yet exciting experiences like flying on a plane through a bitter Alaskan blizzard and hunting goats up on a steep, ice-covered mountain.
What makes If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name so great is that Lende provides a richly detailed portrait full of pathos, humor, wisdom, and warmth about a fairly obscure small town. Despite Haines being hundreds of miles away from Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city, and being “a place outside of time” compared to other places in the U.S., Lende shows that the borough has a lively, close-knit community filled with many interesting people, a beautiful natural environment, and a culture worth sharing with the world.
Political Intrigue in a Small Borough
In Of Bears and Ballots: An Alaskan Adventure in Small-Town Politics (2020), Lende discusses her time serving as a member on the Haines Borough Assembly from 2016 to 2019. While she loves being able to hear her constituents’ needs and serve her community, she also has trouble getting liberal policies passed when the assembly has a conservative majority and trying to uphold order when the assembly and its constituents angrily and intensely oppose each other over policy proposals.
Lende has a knack for making political battles far more interesting than they might sound. She details the personal histories and views of the major advocates for each position, describes the potential impacts they might have on the borough, and portrays the conflicts among assembly members and Haines residents in accurate but dramatic ways. She also makes readers feel deeply for her and two other members when they face a recall attempt for voting against a proposed expansion of the Haines harbor on environmental grounds. She shows how hurt she was by people she knew campaigning to have her removed from office due to political differences.
In these polarizing political times, it’s refreshing to have politicians like Heather Lende who make honest efforts to listen to all their constituents’ concerns and keep their desires and needs in mind even if they ultimately vote their consciences. Although many of them disagree strongly with her views, Lende portrays her constituents of all political stripes as real people with valid ideas and genuine concerns rather than just as mouthpieces for her views or partisan enemies out to get her. Politics might be much less polarizing if we approached it the way Lende does in Of Bears and Ballots.
Final Thoughts
Alaska is a beautiful, breathtaking, and fascinating place, but its huge geographic size, wide variety of natural environments, diverse human life and wildlife, and unusual politics can make it daunting to explore first-handedly or vicariously. That’s why it’s so great to have books like If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name and Of Bears and Ballots to introduce you to the many facets of the state.
Heather Lende’s wisdom, wit, compassion, warmth, and humor make her the ideal guide for any reader interested in learning more about the Land of the Midnight Sun. Read both of these books and you’ll definitely start falling in love with Alaska the same way Lende has over the many decades she’s lived there.
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