Alaska’s personal Groundhog Day: The gas line is looking good, as always

On a warm spring day in 1980, a friend asked me to come along to the daily laborers’ dispatch at the Fairbanks union hall. We drove downtown, parked on a narrow side street, walked in and sat down in the middle of the room on folding chairs. There were maybe 35 men present, by themselves on chairs or in small groups at tables. They were a diverse lot by race, by age.

Befitting a spring day, good humor prevailed. A group of guys at a table were joshing and laughing — or, as my friend put it, “swapping lies.”

Suddenly, there was a stir and all eyes turned to the back door. The assistant business agent had entered and was making his way to his office. An older man near me yelled out, “Hey Willie, how is that gas line lookin’?”

Willie replied jocularly, “It’s lookin’ good, brother. It’s lookin’ real good,” and fumbled for the keys to his office.

Forty years later, the men in that room who were 50 are dead. The men who were 40 are dead or near death. The men who were 30 are lined up to get their virus vaccinations. And the men who were 20 are figuring out how much they will receive from Social Security when they turn 65.

The gas line was the working man’s dream – all those hours, all that overtime, all those large checks. But not one single man in that hall or any other labor hall in Alaska ever got a job on the gas line. There was no gas line. Only the illusion of a gas line, a fantasy Gov. Mike Dunleavy revived yet again in a recent opinion piece and news stories.

Yes, my fellow Alaskans, we are going to build the gas line. Just ask the governor. Or any of his predecessors: They all believed in the gas line.

Now, people believe in all kinds of things that don’t exist or are impossible. Optical illusions are common, as in what the Italians call Fata Morgana – clouds on the horizon that merge and take on shapes. During the great plague that killed thousands of Londoners in the mid-17th century, preachers walked the streets in search of God, yelling, “Do you see? Do you see?” The preachers saw the face of Jesus Christ in the clouds, looking down on the city. And one or two of them saw God himself, pointing a giant sword at the city. Daniel Defoe recorded this in “A Journal of the Plague Year.”

In more recent times, there have been preachers who asked their flock to climb on top of their houses and wait for the rapture. People have gone to their roofs all over the United States. As of today, nobody has been raptured.

“How’s that rapture lookin’, Reverend?”

“It’s lookin’ good, it’s lookin’ real good.”

Gov. Dunleavy asks us to look up into the clouds and see a gas line, asks us to climb up on the roof for gas-line rapture. He says a gas line from the North Slope to Fairbanks will be financed by an unnamed investor. Who would that be? Daddy Warbucks?

Is Gov. Dunleavy lying about the gas line? I don’t think so. Politicians are compulsive optimizers. They tell their people things will work out, things will get better, the big dream will come true.

Politicians, including Dunleavy, understand they don’t have to build a gas line. They have to talk about building a gas line, keep hope alive. That’s what the public (and the Association of General Contractors) wants: the comforting illusion.

You might say that Gov. Dunleavy is something of a crooner singing a tune about a gas line. Think of Ella Fitzgerald performing “Stairway to the Stars.”

“We’ll build a stairway to the stars,” we hear from Miss Fitzgerald. The stairway is a metaphor for the bliss she and her beloved will experience when alone. Miss Fitzgerald constructs dreams, not stairways.

Yes, in the spring of 1980, the gas line was “lookin’ good, lookin’ real good.” As it is today, will be tomorrow and shall be forever. Amen.

Michael Carey is an occasional columnist and the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News.

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