What Life is like in Wrangell

Your opinion of a place depends largely on why you are there, where you have lived before, and how connected you are to the community. This, is one of 2,435 (the 2021 estimated population, plus 5 Yoders :) opinions on life in Wrangell. 

 I have never felt so welcomed into a town. Right away nearly everyone who walked by our street either shouted and waved a "Hi! Welcome to Wrangell!" or stopped to chat for a while.  I have never once lived in a place with such a welcoming, safe, serving, and group-oriented community. It is so refreshing! 

How many people wish they had a sense of belonging, a group, a circle, or a gang? Even before COVID I heard many a depressed client respond when asked that she doesn't really have many friends, or doesn't get out much. It's a human condition to desire community. But what is community? This is what we have already seen in the short 10 days since our arrival:

Down Town

 Community is... seeing a poster for a community clean up day and actually showing up. It is making little brown bags of secret toys for boys or girls signed "From the Toy Fairy" and placing them around town for children to find. It's volunteering to work the concession stand, help coach a little league team, or starting an event called "Touch the Trucks" where kids get to go inside police cars, fire trucks, ambulances, and dump trucks. It's hearing that there's a new family in town without their belongings and inviting them to use your washer and bringing them fresh baked sourdough bread, toys for the kids, a queen mattress, French press and freshly ground coffee. It's volunteering for the fire department or starting a non-profit organization to help grieving loved ones pay for a funeral. It's posting on the community facebook page that you found a mitten on the trail, holding it for the owner to claim. Community is EACH PERSON taking that step that they wish others would. I'm sure there are "the Loners" as a driveway sign reads at a home out the road. But the large majority of residents here embrace the community mindset. We have been told by many life long Wrangellites, "It's a great place to raise kids!" If only more towns would follow suit. 

Driving in Wrangell is a breeze. With such a small town it is a quick an' easy 2 minutes to down town to run errands at one of the surname stores. I'm still trying to get them all straight, after walking into many asking for an item only to be pointed across the street.  If you want to drive "out the road" (up the one longer stretch of road), it's about 20 minutes or less to campsites, cabins, trails, and a lake. And there is literally NO waiting on traffic!! (cue angels singing). The Wrangell town passed a law that it is legal to drive ATVs on town roads so I just take the side-by-side down to do my grocery shopping and errands. It's so convenient! But sometimes you don't even need to drive. Cyrus walks to school and walks home, hallelujah! I feel like I have so much more time in a day! He and Darius can also walk to the school playground together and my neighbor even sends her 7 yr old son to walk to the post office to get mail. It's very safe and the community helps keep an eye out for kids.

Simovia Hwy, AKA "Out the Road"

Everyone in town has a P.O. Box instead of a mail box, and everyone is on town sewer and town water. We've heard the town water system is old and has traces of 5IAA. As our water filter hasn't arrived in our moving pack yet, I drove up the road and filled jugs up with water piped from a fresh spring. It gets tested regularly and tastes great!

We enrolled our kids in little league baseball and T-ball, which is a first for us. It's such a community event, parents volunteering or chatting and siblings playing in the playground and sand pit together. It feels like a slower pace of life, rather than rushing to this and that event.

This is the entirety of the produce section of City Market grocery store

Grocery shopping

Grocery shopping is a bit different. There are two basic “grocery” stores. The barge delivers on Tuesday to each, so the best time to get fresh produce is Wednesday. However, some produce is just never fresh- similar but slightly more so than in the Mat-Su Valley. We expected prices to be much higher, and for most things it is- like a carton of about to spoil strawberries for $10. But there are a few random items with prices similar to Wasilla, both in produce and dry goods. I also discovered that if something is on sale it’s not because it’s approaching it’s expiration date, it’s because it’s already expired! 

Sorting and picking up our Costco order. 

In an effort to be thrifty with money the people of Wrangell use multiple avenues for obtaining food and items. Group Costco orders is one of them. The minimum shipping cost for a Costco shipment from Juneau or Seattle is $300 so if you get enough people to order together it is worth the shipping cost. However, the more people on an order the more chaos and work. The picture to the left is with just four families ordering. The woman who complied the orders and entered them spent 5 HOURS on it. And then when it arrives we all have to take our lists and find each item in the unorganized jumbles of giant packages. They only order about once a quarter so you have to get what will last a while. But try to avoid oversights, like accidentally ordering 6 gallons of olive oil 😬 At least we’ll use it eventually.  It’s a work out just getting groceries!  

Other items are expensive here as well. Gas is currently $3.49/gal. Our house cost way more than other states for the 3 bed/2 bath home with basically no yard pictured here (on Wrangell terms this is a lot of yard!). Paint is $42/gallon for interior wall paint. And a large supreme pizza is $40!

Everyone in town is connected to town water supply  we heard that it is high in the the chlorine like compound called 5IAA. So some people (myself included until our moving packet arrives with a water filter) get water from a fresh spring “Up the Road” at the “nine mile pipe.” It was recently tested and negative for E. coli and tastes great! And kinda fun to go fetch my water from a healthy source  

Everyone seems to have a dog here. They walk them in the park, throw a ball for fetch, and clean up after them pretty well. I can't wait to get our Irish-doodle puppy in June! She will be so well socialized.

The first thing my 8 year old son said when he saw the town from the ferry was, "The houses are so old, and right on top of each other!" True, there is not much real estate in the town, so houses are closer than in Wasilla. Not so close that you can reach over and touch both at the same time, and not town houses or apartments (other than a few apartment buildings), but just close quarters. I could dwell on missing my huge green yard in our former home but honestly there are a lot of benefits of living close. The kids in our neighborhood roam around between houses playing every day. I often have no idea whose kid is in my yard! My children have been playing outside ALL day and coming home as dirty as a bug. Cyrus is in kid heaven. 

And the ocean is ALL around. After all, we are on an island. But the town is also on the point of the island, the beak of the flying duck. If I walk to the top of the hill we live on you can see ocean on three sides. The views are incredible. I have never enjoyed ocean so much, and I haven't even gotten out on the water yet. I guess we're just not "hot sandy beach" people, but Mountain Ocean, now that's exciting. My kids adore playing in the tide pools. We could probably stay out there all day, but watch out for the rapid twice a day tide change that can be up to a 20 foot difference in depth.  I emphasize depth, because what you see in the distance the water moves closer to your belongings that you thought were safely stashed, is much different. We honestly saw the water move closer to us  

about 1 foot every 5 minutes! At a "minus tide" (when the water level is lower than the average low tide) that's the peak time to find all manner of edible clams, sea cucumbers, mussels, and seaweed. I am not the expert on this (yet ;) but we endeavor to learn as much as possible. Our whole family thoroughly enjoys having fun AND gathering food at the same time. Hunting, trapping (to come), and foraging for animal, vegetable, fruit, and mushroom is a blast!

 

In addition to the sea, there is the Woods. As mentioned, it is a temperate (cold climate) rain forest. That means there are HUGE trees with hanging moss and very little undergrowth. There are multiple nearby hiking trails, a campground, and forest service cabins for rent first come first serve. There are also old logging trails for ATV use over the entire island, which we will explore as soon as the snow melts at higher elevations. 

Another notable change for us is the birds. I forgot how I noticed the absence of song birds when we moved to Wasilla from Pennsylvania. But here in this temperate rainforest there is a host of feathery friends I've never seen or heard. It's such a soothing sound I had missed and didn't even know it! A blue tailed crested bird, and red headed wood pecker, a back-striped black bird and several birds singing beautiful songs whom I wasn't able to spot the singer. There is a bird fest going on that I hope to get some more local fauna information from. 

Once we get a boat we can set crab traps, see the entire coastline, and visit neighboring island friends. We have so much more to explore! 

So from a 15 day new resident who moved from Wasilla, Alaska and lived mostly on the east coast of the lower 48, this is what life is like in Wrangell, Alaska.