Newspapers, #1

DENALI PARK, AK - - As a news 'junkie' I like reading the daily newspaper....or two or three. At the library back home in Ormond Beach I had an even larger selection. My partner, LH, is now former news junkie in withdrawl whose only real interest in 'fish wrappers' is the crossword puzzle.
IN Skagway last year, if you wanted to read today's paper you only had to wait until about 8pm that night when the papers arrived from Juneau on the mail plane. So you read yesterday's news in today's paper as they were printing tomorrow's paper with today's news in it...or something like that.

DENALI has been a pleasant surprise ain that we can get the Anchorage Daily News at 6am on the day it is printed. Since we have trains running between Anchorage and Fairbanks and the other way around I (wrongly) assumed that the paper was dropped off (or more likely tossed off) a train as it slowed to pass through the Denali Park Train Station.

SO I cornered the newspaper lady at 5:30am as she dropped off the papers one morning and learned that: (1) The papers are picked up in Anchorage at 9:30pm fresh off the press. "We get the first ones off, load up the car (a Honda Fit) and take off," she related. (2) Talk about a paper route! The papers are delivered to stores and newspaper vending boxes along a 250-mile (one way) drive which ends in Hinton, 11 miles past Denali. That's 500-miles round trip.

THE next morning I saw the same car, but driven by a man...her husband. "One day on, one day off," he explained. "You drive two days in a row and you get a bit stressed and very tired." How is the drive that early in the morning I asked. "I wish we could do it in a pickup truck or a good SUV because that would be more space, more convenient and more comfortable. The problem," he continued, "is that anything comfortable and functional burns up too much gas." What he didn't say right then is that driving something bigger is safer. "You have to stay alert all the time because of the animals," he noted. "I had a close call with a moose last year which dinged the driver-side headlight, the fender and knocked off the mirror. At least it didn't make the car into a convertible...hitting a moose can do that."