Wrapping up Soldotna Pride

After attending Soldotna’s Pride events on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, the more party-oriented pride goers continued their celebrations with things like late-night karaoke and drag shows. Meanwhile I decided to recover my introverted energy that was spent over several hours of chatting with new people at the promotional table I had set up.  I accepted an invite from my local friend Jamie to chill out with movies, cheeseboards, and an overnight stay on the floor of her spare bedroom before driving north again.  

We caught up on nine months of life …. relationships, work, her long Alaskan winter, and the stuff I was diving into for All the Genders.  Then a gunshot interrupted us, splitting the tranquil air of Jamie’s living room, freezing our chatter and cheeseboard munching.  We each held our breaths and peeked out the window as another gun shot rattled her small house on a quiet corner.  A snowshoe hare that had snapped to attention in the front yard then haphazardly scrambled to find a safe place with the second shot, kicking up a spray of dirt behind it. 

Jamie’s nervous energy shot upwards as she realized that two men were shooting rifles in front of her home.  They seemed to be aiming down a straight dirt road that stretched into the forest, serving as a peaceful walking route for neighbors with their dogs.  She snarled that they were on her neighbor’s privately owned land.  My first reaction would have been to call the police.  I spent most of my adult life in military neighborhoods, where, if a troubled veteran or soldier were wandering around just brandishing a weapon in the open, no one would even consider stepping in the cross hairs of whatever PTSD haze of hypervigilance that person was stumbling through… just let the military police handle it.  

But, we were in Alaska … where 65% of the population owns guns (outpacing Texas by a long shot, at 45%), and Jamie had lived here just long enough that her reaction was different than mine. I cringed a little as I watched her stomp out the door to confront the weaponized strangers head on, and emptyhanded.

Shootings and Massacres in my Own Workplaces and Neighborhoods: Virginia and Texas

When working on the wildlife refuge outside Soldotna, I thought I started getting more comfortable with the laissez faire mentality surrounding lethal weapons in Alaska.   It seemed more people owned guns here for responsible hunting (often subsistence hunting), than the number of people who owned guns just for the sake of exercising second amendment rights.  This felt more comfortable to me than the uneasy mentality that many people carried around gun ownership in Texas, a state that had been my home for nearly a decade.  

About 11 years ago in San Antonio, I left a 9 hour day of doctorate classes the moment the instructor flipped to the last power point slide. As I finished the short, 5 minute drive home, my phone blew up with messages from my peers who had stayed in the military classroom to study and were now barricading the door with heavy furniture. ‘If you made it out the gates, don’t come back … there’s a shooter in the building.’  Seven shots were fired in the building, all of them landing in a female instructor who taught in the same building; the rounds left my classmates still in the building wondering if the gunman was on a rampage … would they be next?   My classmates were okay emerging after a harrowing afternoon of trying to get information from our barricaded classroom; the Army captain who was shot seven times in an attempted murder by her ex-spouse now likely faced years of recovery, and the shooter himself …  was only sentenced to 20 years in prison. 

During my last year in Texas (2019), now in El Paso, my partner and I experienced our low crime, peaceful desert city flipped over into sorrowful upheaval.  An out-of-town gunman horrifically massacred 23 people in a crowded WalMart only a few miles from our home; they shot 45 victims total. We didn’t personally know anyone killed that day, but many of our friends and co-workers did. That didn’t really matter, my heart was still enraged for the gentle peaceful culture here that we had become attached to after five years and two moves back to the border town. I cried for our community, then moved on, almost too quickly, needing to normalize the violence that devastated our adopted community, but disappeared by the next week’s news cycle.

We now live in Virginia, a state that is ranked 15^th in having strong gun safety laws.  Gun ownership rates in Virginia still rival Texas though, with 45% of residents owning a gun.  Only a few years after the El Paso Walmart massacre, a WalMart manager in the next town over from our home in Virginia, shot 6 people dead in their breakroom, and egregiously changed the lives of six more who were hospitalized.  A six year old who shot their school teacher in the chest only 10 miles from our home here, gained the most sensational news attention last year.  This overshadowed the fact that ONE hospital alone, in our small city on the bay, treated more than 500 gunshot victims in 2023.  

I was on a walk with my partner and only a block from our home a few months ago, and we slowed down as we saw a likely intoxicated man stumbling out of his apartment singing … and indiscriminately waving a pistol as he careened towards us on the sidewalk.  I thought of the two different people who were shot next to our apartment in the past year … in the parking lots where we walk every day and park our cars. We’re in a so called “nice” part of town but there are no invisible barriers restricting gun violence to “good” or “bad” neighborhoods.

My long term partner carries his own type of unease around lethal weapons, after experiencing a range of violent experiences in overseas combat. A different type of violence than Americans being careless with weapons on their own soil, and it’s only his experience to share. However, it’s still a category of gun violence that we have both ended up carrying as the fallout of PTSD in the past reshaped our young marriage overnight, and still continues to lurk in some shadows many years later.

So, I carried this unease surrounding guns north to Alaska, without acknowledging it was there.  Just try to ignore the insanity, and keep moving on. Sometimes this is how we need to live and move forward.

A Detour to Encounters Working on a Wildlife Refuge in Alaska

Pistols for Bears, Weapons Walking Away and Just Assume Everyone has a Gun

Alaska’s gun culture in some ways had been feeling more comfortable to me, with the illusion that gun owners here are always just more responsible… and many residents do have a legitimate need for a weapon. Mass shootings are also a rarity in the massive, sparsely populated state.  

At the same time, Alaska’s abundance of lethal weapons could still feel uncomfortable.  It was commonplace in my rounds on the wildlife refuge to encounter an urban RV camper nervously stalking the perimeter of their small lakeside plot for the weekend, ready to reach for the pistol sticking out of their belt if anything rustled the trees.  I would politely edge into a conversation about the wildlife they had seen on their trip, then use it to segway into wildlife education, specifically moose and bears … please don’t use your pistol on the bears … ‘there are people on the other side of these bushes too … just clean up the feast of processed human snacks that are spread all over your campsite … and keep a can of bear spray handy.’  

A more seasoned co-worker taught me to think twice in how I approached strangers on the refuge.  We passed a person laying unconscious (or sleeping??) behind a highway guard rail on the refuge.  My first instinct as a previous healthcare provider was to jump out of the truck and see if he needed medical help, but my co-worker urged me to get back in.  We weren’t going to wake him up; given the rate of gun ownership in Alaska, there was a high likelihood he might have a weapon and didn’t want to risk startling a sleeping, possibly weaponized human.  We called the police, and rolled back and forth a few more times to assess from afar as the police started their 30 minute journey from town to approach the sleeping person who eventually woke up, and started stumbling down the highway.   

The next week, a frazzled man burst out of the forest with a reddened face and white beard, franticly waving down the refuge truck I was driving.  “I left my rifle on the lake shore before I took off in my boat … then when I came back it was gone!! Someone stole it!!”  He didn’t even look embarrassed that he had completely forgotten a weapon unattended in a semi-public place … but was agonizing over the expense of his new weapon.  I wondered who might be wandering the campgrounds with a new gun, and hoped that someone had turned it into the police.  The rest of the day found I my senses were more alert as I roamed the rest of the campgrounds … not knowing where the expensive rifle was – that had grown legs and walked away. 

Finishing the Story of our Weaponized Intruders on Pride Weekend…

I cautiously trailed Jamie out the door staying way behind her, my only weapon being a phone in hand ready to dial 911.  I tried to assess which way the rifles were pointing as I peered through the trees that lined her front yard.  Hmm… I think they were pointed away from us … not totally sure.  But Jamie plowed ahead to lecture the men … she seemed to feel safe enough.  I decided to hang back, and stand just close enough, being in the two men’s line of sight to let them know my friend wasn’t alone with them on the quiet road.

Jamie was getting more and more wound up … lecturing the two men as they argued back.  I couldn’t hear a lot of the interaction, but saw the two men move in on either side of her with threatening body language, one with a handgun in the back of his pants, and the other pointedly placing his hand over the rifle that sat on the roof of a beat-up compact car.  Now she was finally registering a threat, and raised her voice, saying “my friend is standing right over there!!”  They startled for a moment; apparently they hadn’t noticed me.  I gave them a scowling wave, and projected false confidence through my body language.  “Ohhh .. your friend is cuuute ..” the younger man jeered.   Ugh dude – just leave.   Jamie glanced at me pointedly holding up my phone in an offer to make an emergency call, but she motioned that she would be fine.  It seemed to take her an agonizingly long time to wind down the hostile interaction, before retreating back to her house with me.  

Back in her house, we looked out the windows again, wondering why the shooters’ car was still parked there.  They suddenly stepped on the gas and peeled into her driveway, hitting the brakes to stop a few inches shy of my precious car’s bumper, which had made it from Virginia to Alaska twice now in one piece.  Now Jamie’s alarm bells went off more, and she freaked out, still not calling the police, but frantically called her neighbor as I checked the locks on her doors, and the armed men with loaded weapons approached her house.

We hid away from the windows in case they decided to make use of their weapons.  “Now I’m going to call 911,” I told her.  “No it’s okay… ‘Dave’ has guns!  He’ll be over in a minute!”   I felt uneasy about the potential weapons showdown, but still held off on a 911 call. She waited to open the door until she knew the two intruders saw ‘Dave’ strutting up the road, without his guns; he had cleared all lethal weapons from his home to welcome his son home after a recent prison release.  Fortunately it didn’t matter that more guns weren’t added to the mix, and his presence alone, as a beefy, grizzled man in his 60’s with two sons towering over him was enough to make the cowardly intruders run back to their car, and peel out of the driveway. 

Should This be our “New Normal?”

Am I trying to paint Alaska as being full of irresponsible gun owners by relaying these few incidents?  No, not really. This were just a few of my experiences here, and they’re in the minority, but they still happened.  I felt more comfortable here than in states with more stringent gun safety laws and officially lower gun ownership rates.  But … this accumulation of carelessness ranging to aggression to violence around me and people close to me, adds to the sense that I, or loved ones, could easily walk out of my door anywhere, in any state, and be wiped off this earth by a stranger, anywhere, at anytime.  It’s not an unreasonable sense. The lives of people in my greater communities are being threatened, devastated and taken over and over again.  

As I reflected on this, I realize how much I’ve tried to normalize our rising gun violence that stays only mostly in the background of my daily life.  A new Canadian friend in a remote, rural town brought this closer to the forefront of my mind on my road trip last fall, after they expressed some of their angst over living next to a militarized state.  I silently judged them for a moment … really, a militarized state??   I then asked with genuine curiosity if they could expand on that more.  They described their experience of seeing tanks rolling down a city road in central Alaska, and watching the U.S. news cycles imploding in violent deaths by gun violence – every, single day.  This was nowhere in their normal existence as a Canadian citizen. Their description of the U.S. as a militarized state was really not wrong.

I had to take a step back, and later re-evaluated my own experiences … I’ve blended all these parts of my own life into the background, to adapt, as we all do, but this should not be normal.   Why am I sharing thoughts on gun usage and violence in a blog focused on queer adventures and issues?  Well, I’m a person, and just happen to be queer, and this is part of the background of my story and too many others.  Americans as a whole are truly abhorrently affected by gun violence compared to other first world nations; LGBTQ+ people (and communities of color) are disproportionately affected by gun violence even more.  I’m actually not against gun ownership, but also don’t really have a good answer for how we solve this forever snowballing issue, other than writing about what I’ve known and personally experienced.  I do know, that this should not be our society’s normal state.      

Written late 2023