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LEARN HOW A FRONTIER WORKS

This chapter will show you how a frontier works, exactly why a frontier helps you make the most of yourself and contribute the most to others. Like an automobile with an engine, the frontier has a mechanism.

Romantic realms like frontiers change people. You have to have what psychologists call the "set" (certain ideas about a place) and the "setting" (a certain kind of place).

Here are two examples. John Reeves had the frontier frame of mind right from the start. Dante Foster was an accidental frontier woman who developed the mindset after she arrived, as I did.

The Man Who Struck It Rich

John Reeves told no one where he was going. He just put a note, "Gone fishing," on the door of his college dormitory room, stuck out his thumb on Interstate 75 in Gainesville, Florida, and hitchhiked to Alaska. Now Reeves can buy his own jet plane if he wants to. He has a net worth of, well, he isn't saying, but most people put it in the millions. He also has a smashing wife, five children, and the time to enjoy his family and plan his next wild escapade.

Reeves got the idea of going to Alaska from his swimming coach at the University of Florida. "If you don't win, I'm going to buy you a one-way ticket to Alaska," his coach would tell him. So he figured he'd go see this Alaska his coach kept threatening him with.

Reeves traveled to Alaska with just a backpack, a jar of peanut butter, a shotgun, and a sleeping bag. The trip took almost four weeks. A huge, muscular guy carrying a shotgun, John was not the sort that people stopped to pick up. But he only spent $12 getting there.

Florida, well, he had grown up there. "Florida was no big shakes." He did return to the University of Florida, but ended up leaving again.

Now a two-time college dropout, a distinction that would raise no eyebrows in Alaska, Reeves headed back to the frontier. After bouncing around for a while, Reeves got a job hauling freight. Then, one day, his boss asked him and his buddy if they wanted to buy out his business for $10,000. The boys trudged from bank to bank, but no one would lend them any money.

At the last bank, their last hope, the manager put it to them straight: "Guys, you've got no collateral. You've got nothing."

"I'll co-sign their note," said a man standing nearby.

"You guys know him?" asked the bank manager.

"Nope."

Their frontier angel turned out to be Dean Markland from Dean's Glass and Salvage. "He just took a look at us and knew we were hard workers. He didn't ask us nothing."

They repaid the note fast. In 1974, construction was starting up on the Trans-Alaska pipeline, which would stretch 800 miles from Prudhoe Bay in the north to Valdez in the south. The greatest engineering project in history! Cost: $8 billion. Boom time on the frontier and they were in on it!        

"Boys, I gotta tell you something," said the guy who had sold them the trucking business. "So far you've been making $60 or $80 a day. That's going to change here real quick. You've got the exclusive contract to handle Consolidated Freightways' airfreight. That's everything north of the Alaska Range."

"What does that mean to us?" they asked.

"That means you are going to get rich. Your first delivery is sitting over at Reed Tool right now. Go over and unload it."

What they saw when they got there was 40,000 pounds of drill bits. But they didn't have to lay a hand on the freight. All they had to do was sign the paperwork. They had made $1,500 in thirty minutes.

Reeves and his partner could hardly keep up spending all the money they were making. Swaggering into a restaurant, they would say, "We're buying the drinks, everything for everybody. Give us the bill!"

Did his partner need mosquito repellent at his gold mining camp? Sure, Reeves could have driven up the highway with a crate of spray. But it was a heck of a lot more fun to charter a plane, buzz the camp, and drop the crate out the window. Flying off, Reeves guffawed as three of the cans exploded on the rocks and his pals galloped through the woods, collecting the others and taking showers with the stuff. Reeves' trademark was to turn ordinary life into the stuff of romance.

When the pipeline boom ended and the bust began, Reeves didn't have much left to show for it.

"We had a good roll. We had a good run. I wouldn't have traded it for nothing," Reeves said. He went to work as a claims staker in NomeÑroom and board and five bucks an hour.

But Reeves knew how to spot an opportunity, and the frontier was bursting with opportunities, just like the masses of purple fireweed growing alongside the road in August. Driving down the highway one day, he spotted an abandoned gold dredge. He stopped his car and hiked in to take a look. So did six other people. They walked away. Reeves didn't.

The dredge was a mess with beer cans all over and the windows smashed in. But Reeves didn't see what was on the ground. He saw a vision in his head. Built in Pennsylvania in 1928, Gold Dredge No. 8 was one of the last working units in the region. Reeves located a local businessman who owned it and made a deal. Like Donald Trump, Reeves loves to make a deal.

Reeves turned No. 8 into a first-rate restaurant and tourist attraction. He saved other historic buildings at the site, including a bunkhouse that was to be demolished. He lived with his family in the rescued bunkhouse while repairing other buildings with original tin roofs and old wood he salvaged from cabins the Park Service was demolishing. Reeves ended up selling No. 8 to a national tour company for serious money.

Reeves had discovered he had a passion for historic restorations. He bought other old buildings, like a log library on the Chena River that had been the site of the historic land negotiations between U.S. Judge James Wickersham and the Tanana tribal chiefs. Up on the Fairbanks River, he bought Dredge No. 2, which was twice as big as No. 8, and then added No. 5, along with the historic Fairbanks Exploration Machine Shop, where the dredge parts had been built and maintained. He purchased the last remaining turn-of-the-century gold rush camp still standing in Alaska, a deal that included thousands of acres of patented land in the Fairbanks Mining District and made Reeves one of the largest individual landowners in Alaska, a state where less than one percent of the land is in private hands.

Sure, Reeves got rich on the frontier. But then Alaska is also the richer for the frontier history Reeves preserved. Reeves saw gold where other people saw an abandoned dredge surrounded by smashed beer cans.

Would John Reeves have struck it rich if he hadn't gone frontiering? Possibly. Reeves came to realize that boring old Florida ("no great shakes") had a lot more opportunities than he recognized at first. But he did well in Alaska. And he contributed more to his new home by restoring historic old gold dredges than if he had developed one more tourist attraction in Florida.

The Woman Who Caught the Fast Track

Dante Foster offered me a bite of her ice cream the first time I set eyes on her at the Fairbanks airport. She was spooning it up right from the container. "All things bright and beautiful" was the phrase that kept running through my head when I met her. With her chocolate hair and deep-set eyes, with her lyrical way of speaking, Dante is indeed bright and beautiful. But then so are many other young women.

So why had Dante Foster been named one of the top twenty students in America by USA Today ? How come it was Dante Foster who won the Truman scholarship, a $30,000 award for graduate study in public service? How come Dante Foster won the even more fiercely competitive Marshall scholarship to study at Oxford?

Dante's parents had hardly pushed conventional ideas of success on her. "My dad would be either running around in his bathrobe, that was his most comfortable work attire, or he would be coming up with some crazy scheme that he wanted to describe to anyone. He called me a couple of days ago and told me he was buying a turtle preserve."

Dante had been aiming for the ski slopes, not the fast track. That's one reason she had chosen the University of Alaska instead of a college in New York City. Alaska had intrigued her since she was sixteen years old and going through her phase of "wear black, dye your hair, be very depressed but lyrical about it." She and her best friend dreamed of standing on icebergs in the night, their hair flowing, looking very dramatic. Alaska had fit her image of the romantic and exotic. She'd even asked the admissions office if they issued bear spray to new students.

Going to college in Alaska proved to be a fateful decision. Dante's rocket ride to stratospheric success began with a telephone call from a Dr. Karen Erickson of the university's political science department. Why would some crazy professor she didn't even know call her while she was at home in Portland one summer and talk to her about winning a $30,000 scholarship? That was Dante's question.

The simple answer was that Dr. Erickson needed Dante. Students weren't applying for awards as they were at Ivy League colleges. Dr. Erickson recruited applicants from a list of honors students. That's were she found Dante.

Dante hadn't known the Truman Scholarship even existed. She had no idea how to write a winning application or make herself interesting in an interview. She had no idea that she could be competitive at the national level. After many weeks of mentoring, Dr. Erickson sent Dante and another student off to interview for the Truman. The selection committee was captivated by this engaging young woman who lived in a log cabin in Alaska without running water and volunteered as an emergency medic.

Dante was stunned when she won the Truman. But then, she was just as stunned that she had gotten to be an emergency medic in Alaska.

"In Oregon, if you wanted to work on an ambulance, you would have to go to paramedic school and you'd have to compete with five thousand other people. In Alaska, all you have to say is, 'Well, I'm kind of interested in that,' and the next thing you know you are in the middle of it. All I had to do was take an emergency medical course.

"A lot of people are needed to help out." Dante put her finger on one reason frontiers have such powerful effects on people. There is always a shortage of people, and this means easy entry and less competition for whatever you want.

Would Dante Foster have won a Marshall or a Truman or made the USA Today's top twenty students if she had stayed in Oregon? Not a chance. She hadn't even known such a world existed. If she had known, she wouldn't have had the confidence to apply. Those honors were for other people, she told the newspaper, like a guy who had developed a vaccine for cancer by age nineteen. But these honors built her confidence and made her look at herself in a different light. She applied to Harvard Medical School, and the school was glad to get her, this accomplished young woman who wanted a career in rural medicine.

Alaska became Dante's trampoline. But her idea of success stayed differentÑgiving medical care to Eskimos and Indians in remote villages.

You're not going to rise to the top on the frontier if you don't have talent to start with. But if you have the talent, it's sure easier to get where you want to go on a frontier.

The mechanism:

Small places have big powers

Kansas is an odd place for a research breakthrough, but then Kansas was once a frontier, the end of the Chisolm Trail, the route the Texas cowboys had used to bring herds north to the railroad. The state had been subjected to so many calamitiesÑwind, droughts, prairie fires, blizzards, tornadoes, and locustsÑthat only the strongest people would survive. Like Alaska, frontier Kansas once was thought of as a "state-of-mind, a religion, and a philosophy all in one."

The discovery of the force of "undermanned settings" begins with Roger Barker, a fussy, meticulous man obsessed with measuring things. Places, he realized, have powers. People behave differently depending on the setting in which they find themselves. A pep club car wash, for example, calls forth different behavior and feelings than a school assembly. At the car wash, students will be. . . well . . . peppy, active, working, and most likely proud of themselves. At the assembly, students will be spectators, inactive, indolent, and most likely bored.

Barker called places like the car wash and the assembly "behavior settings," and he and his team at the Midwest Psychological Field Station set out to investigate the powers of different behavior settings. What experiences did students have, what forces played upon them when, for example, they attended a small school versus a big school? In the early 1960s, school consolidation had been the great educational debate. Should rural students continue to attend small, community schools? Would they be better off if they were sent to big consolidated high schools with their cornucopias of classes and activities? Sounds like a no-brainer. It wasn't.

After all the numbers had been crunched, after all the statistical tests had been done, after all the graphs had been drawn, the researchers came up with an astonishing conclusion: "To an outside observer, a large school with many students is impressive: its imposing physical dimensions, its seemingly endless halls and numberless rooms, its hundreds of microscopes, its vast auditorium and great audiences, its sweeping tides of students all carry the message of power, movement, vitality, purpose, achievement, certainty.

"In contrast, a small school with its small building, its three microscopes, its dual-purpose gymnasium-auditorium half-filled with students who assemble and depart, not in tides, but in a tangle of separate channels is not impressive.

"The members of the fieldwork team were repeatedly impressed that the directly experienced differences between large and small schools were, in these respects, so compelling, like the differences between a mighty river and a meandering brook."

The power of the large schools had turned out to be an illusion. In many ways, the small schools had the force. Studies showed students at small schools were more likely to participate in activities and hold important and responsible positions, to participate in a club car wash or be president of the student council. These students reported more satisfactions from the experiences of taking on tough tasks and developing competence.

The large schools did offer more classes and a greater variety of activities, but individual students did not participate in as many activities as did students in small schools. These students were more apt to stay on the sidelines and not get involved. They were less likely to hold office in an organization. They were more likely to report satisfactions gained from passive spectating, from watching something rather than from doing it.

To the researchers' surprise, the small schools had another unrecognized advantage. They drew in the marginal students, the odd ducks who were left out at big schools. Why? The small schools needed them. If they didn't go to the Friday night dance there wouldn't be enough people to hold a dance.

From this "Big School-Small School" research and other studies, Barker and his colleagues developed the theory of "undermanned settings," places where there are not enough people to fill the available roles. Think about a school play with two leading roles and eight supporting roles. In a small high school with one hundred students, there is a one in ten chance of getting a part in the play, and a one in fifty chance of getting the male or female lead. When there are 3,000 students, a person has only one chance in 300 of getting a part, and only a one in 1,500 chance of playing the male or female lead. Yes, the large school can offer more plays and other activities. But not enough more to give students the same chances of participation and stardom they would have in a small school.

When I came to Alaska, it was just such an undermanned setting. Only one other person at the university was studying the education of Indian and Eskimo children. He was middle-aged and not so eager any more to hop on a bush plane to go live in a boarding school in Nome. Even though I was young and inexperienced, I had no trouble finding exciting work.

Undermanned settings, according to Barker, have a set of predictable effects:

1. People participate in a greater variety of tasks and roles.

2. People take on tougher and more important tasks and responsibilities.

3. People don't need to rub off their rough edges to get the job.

4. People try bigger things and have more vivid experiences of both success and failure.

This does not mean performance is better in an undermanned setting. As you would expect, the quality of the performance is often lower. When you can pick from among 3,000 students, you are apt to get better actors for the play than when you have only 100 students. People in undermanned settings often have feelings of insecurity, they know they are tackling tasks that test the limit of their powers. They are often surprised at what they find they can do.

If you are after personal growth, go to an undermanned setting.

Frontiers have even bigger powers

Roger Barker believed that the force of a frontier would be even more formidable than that of a small town. Yes, frontiers are undermanned settings, but they are undermanned settings with a difference. They are not like small, rigid towns where everybody knows his or her place and newcomers find the social barriers hard to crack. Frontiers are open and turbulent worlds where just about everybody comes from somewhere else. Frontiers are strange and new. Pioneers must figure out how to cope with problems they did not face back home.

Frontiers are also unfinished. No churches exist, so people have to create them. No clubs exist, no civic or professional groups. So much to do!

The "Frozen Chosen," the Jewish congregation of Fairbanks, for example, had no synagogue. Meetings were held in the chapel on the local military base. After his mother died of cancer, Jay Ramras figured he would create Fairbanks' first Jewish synagogue in his mother's memory. This was not a daunting prospect. He did not have to raise millions of dollars. Instead, he worked with the hundred or so people who made up the Jewish community to buy a day care center that the members could remodel into a synagogue. So was born Congregation "Or HaTzafon" or "Light of the North."

These are the reasons frontiers have power:

1. You enjoy easier entry, less competition, and better odds of success.

Lee Salisbury grew up in New York City, surrounded by the unemployed actors and directors who hung around his father's bookstore, which specialized in theater memorabilia.

"Don't go into theater. Don't go into theater," his father had warned him. "There's no money in theater. We know so many actors who are starving." But Lee was already hooked.

In New York, Salisbury found he could only make a living in theater by becoming a high school drama teacher. He did radio soap operas on the side and summer stock in New England. Then, through a relative of his wife, he got a job at the University of Alaska. Salisbury was shocked when he was hired to become the head, as well as the only faculty member, of three departmentsÑspeech, drama, and radio.

Alaskans were prime material for acting, Salisbury discovered. So many of them were characters right from the start. One guy played a politician and liked his role so much, Salisbury says, that he ran for the state legislature.

Salisbury was bringing something new and needed to Alaska. And he got a lot of appreciation.

"I was introducing theater to the state of Alaska. We brought theater to the capital and to Eskimo and Indian villages. Once an old miner came up to me and said, ÔYou know that Antigone. She is like the state of Alaska, fighting for independence.' Everything I did, everybody liked. It was all very flattering." But frontier institutions are like that. People like you are scarce, you are needed, and you get to do big things.

In New York, Salisbury was a high school drama teacher. In Alaska, he became a theatrical legend. The Lee Salisbury Theatre at the University of Alaska is named in his honor.

2. What matters is what you can do, not how old you are or what credentials you have.

"Tom Foote had always liked books," wrote author Joe McGinnis, describing the small, remote town of Bethel, Alaska, in the 1970s. "Within six monthsÑhis lack of academic background notwithstandingÑhe was hired as the Bethel librarian, and was discovering federal grant programs that enabled him to order hundreds of new titles every month, giving Bethel one of the finest libraries, for a community of its size, anywhere in America."

Competence, not credentials, is crucial on the frontier. That's what Dante Foster discovered when she became an emergency medic. That's what David Guttenberg discovered when the local Democratic Party made him its accountant, even though he didn't have a college degree. The electronic frontier is a contemporary illustration, what gives you "guru" status is your ability to solve problems, not the degrees listed after your name.

3. Frontiers stretch people rather than specialize them.

University of Alaska professor Jenifer McBeath was on sabbatical working at the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C.

"Why don't you stay?" her friends there asked her.

"Your research in Washington is well-funded, " McBeath told them. "But you are like well-fed animals in a zoo.

"I am like a lone wolf on the tundra. I may not know where my next meal is coming from, but I have the whole horizon in which to roam."

McBeath liked the diversity of her work in Alaska. In most places, bacterial, viral, fungal, and nematode diseases of plants would be different specialties. But Alaska has few plant pathologists and lots of agricultural needs. McBeath moves from lettuce to cereals to grasses to decorative plants. She has made one contribution after another, such as developing a way to make sure potatoes are virus-free.

"It's pioneer work, like plant pathologists at the turn of the century before everything was specialized," she said.

Are people like Lee Salisbury or Jenifer McBeath nothing but big fish in a small pond? Have they only made it big because they avoided the big time?

Not at all. They grow big in the pond. If you think about it, you can see why on a frontier, you actually become a bigger fish. You get more varied experience and expand your skills. When Alaskans move to competitive places like New York City or Washington, D.C., many find they have that frontier edge. They have broader experience, they are more versatile, and they are used to just taking on the big jobs, just doing it.

4. You take on tough tasks. Many people leave, but those who stay become more resourceful and more inventive.

"We were the quintessential baby boomers, and we were always warm." That's how Pam Haskin describes the life she and husband Jeff had in Arizona.

"We were on our way to success in life, but we wanted more from life than a thirty-year mortgage and a new car in the drive. We didn't want to get to the end of our life and say, 'Well, we really had a nice house and we drove a new car all the time.'"

Jeff's taxidermy business was making money, and Pam had a good job as a medical secretary. In fact, Jeff's business was doing so well Pam had been thinking about quitting her job to help him out. Instead she and Jeff left to homestead in the town of Central, Alaska. Their relatives thought they had lost their minds. How could they just walk away from a successful business?

Lands were open to entry for homesteading in Alaska into the 1990s, and the state still has land sales to carry on the homesteading tradition.

Jeff and Pam won a homestead in Alaska's land lottery. But to get title to their land, they had to build a cabin and actually live on it for twenty-five months over five years. When they moved to their homestead in October, several feet of snow had already fallen. Their land was off the road system, so they had to carry in all their supplies. They melted snow on the stove for water and bathed in a metal bucket. To build a cabin, they chopped down trees and peeled off the bark. They dug a hole and built an outhouse, its walls made from aluminum press sheets that the Fairbanks Daily News Miner sold for $25 for a bundle of fifty. Since the ink was still embedded in the sheets, they could sit in their outhouse and read the newspaper. They joked about how little the news changed over the years.

Jeff had gone to work at Prudhoe Bay to earn the money they needed to build their homestead when Pam faced her first real test. While cutting up chicken for dinner one night, Pam sliced her hand, the knife cutting so deep she could see muscle beneath the layers of fat. She couldn't stop the bleeding. She had no telephone to call for help, and she couldn't walk out with a wound that deep. So she wadded up rags to stuff in the wound and finally the blood stopped.

"Part of me hopes the scar will never fade away," she said. "The scar reminds me of what I can do."

Going to Alaska had meant going against her family's desires: Dutiful daughters stay home. Her family thought her husband had kidnapped her. But Pam was developing her own dreams of becoming a professional writer. Guideposts , a magazine offering stories of hope and inspiration, started publishing her stories about the tests of character that occur in a wilderness and she wrote a book, A Deliberate Life , that was picked up by a national publisher. Even Oprah Winfrey sent out feelers about Pam's appearing on her show. And her family has come around. Now they are proud of her.

Pam and Jeff have clear title to a homestead worth about $50,000. They have had offers, but the land is not for sale.

Frontiers are tough and dangerous, and not every story has a happy ending. Most homesteaders never prove up their land. Forsaking security for adventure feels great when you are young, but when you are old, you may wish you had that health insurance. However, as I will show later, you don't have to go to homesteader extremes to find a frontier. You can find one right next door.

5. Frontiers are strange and new, bringing different cultures together. Frontiers push you right out of your rut. Your creativity surges.

Frontiers are crossroads where different people and cultures meet. The result can be tumult, but conflict and confusion also inspire creativity. As the eminent French historian Fernand Braudel points out, the crossroads is a place of innovation. "The mountains almost always lag behind the plainsÑeven if the races in the two places are the same. Potatoes and the English language both reached the Scottish lowlands before they reached the highlands."

Go to an Alaska bazaar and you'll see a festival of cultural exchange. Athabascan women make beaded eyeglass cases while Swedish men make Athabascan dream catchers from grouse feathers. Sweaters are spun from sled dog fur, jewelry boxes are crafted from whale vertebrae, and wilderness fantasies are made from petrified moose antlers where carved animals are perched.

Alaska Native artists are creating new art forms, which at once continue tradition, break with tradition, and transform tradition. Theresa John tells the history of the Yup'ik people in a one-woman, performance art show, "Yup'ik Arnaq" (Real Woman). In her hand-sewn squirrel-skin parka with its ruff of wolverine, she compresses centuries of Eskimo life into one theater, one hour, one female body.

"In our culture you are not supposed to focus on one individual. A one-person show is new in our cultural ways," Theresa told a reporter.

Even the physical world of a frontier stimulates creativity. A new place wakes you up. During Alaska's winter, you encounter all sorts of strange things. Cars get hitched up to electric sockets, like horses tied up to a post. In the cold your steering wheel becomes so rigid you can't turn it. Don't lock your car door in deep cold because the key can snap in the lock like a piece of plastic. Ice fog covers the town like a charcoal blanket, so thick you can't find your way down streets you have driven for a lifetime. You risk frostbite if you forget to take off your earrings (or your nose ring). Vegetables grow to record size in the continuous light of summer and people garden at midnight. All these sights shake you up. You start to feel the world is far more interesting than you ever thought.

"Yankee ingenuity" is a phrase born of life in tough, new places. Frontiers create new problems to solve. Think about it. Often you can't get what you need: you are too remote or the market isn't big enough for anyone to make what you need. A lot of times you can't buy your way out of the problem, so you have to find your own solution.

Rusty Hagen gets too tired to hitch up his sled dogs every day and give them the exercise they need. So he built a dog carousel, which looks like a merry-go-round with doghouses sitting on the spokes of the wheel. After Rusty hooks up the dogs to the spokes, he switches on the motor that turns the carousel. The dogs run around in circles, chasing each other with joyful whoops. If an animal gets tuckered out, it can just jump up on the platform, go into its doghouse, and hitch a ride.

Nat Gerson is the creator and marketer of Nat's Packsaws, which bush pilots can use as survival tools. Since the saws fold up, they are easy to carry, and they are so tough that pilots can use them to hack out of heavy brush an improvised runway in an emergency.

6. The wilderness itself creates spiritual feelings that can change your values and priorities.

The wilderness fills you with awe. So much open space. So much grandeur. You feel large and small, all at the same time. In Alaska, the northern lights shimmer in the night, swaying in great canopies of red and green, blue and purple, silver and gold. As I sit at my computer writing this paragraph, the sun is rising over the blue mountains. Bare, black aspen trees shoot into the sky and the clouds hover, filled with delicate shades of rose and purple light. You feel expansive. Your ideas match the mountains.

From the beginning of time, spiritual seekers have gone into the wilderness. The great world religions began in the wilderness.

Many of the trappers I have interviewed told me about the religious feelings, the changes in priorities that come when they encounter the majesty of the natural world.

"The things we talk about, you wouldn't talk about these things in town," said Nate Turner, who trapped in Alaska with his father and brother. "Once you are out there, you start to think about spiritual things."

"From the wilderness, we learn who God is," said his brother, Matt. "You feel a oneness. God becomes real in a way He hadn't before. You get a gut feeling, an inner peace."

In the winter, Matt spent seven months alone on one of the trap lines. How could he stand to live alone for so many months each year?

"I just can't understand it," I told him. "I hate to be alone."

"Why?" he asked. "Aren't you comfortable with yourself?"

I bristled. He hadn't got me right, but I hadn't got him right either.

"You see the trees and the rivers and you glimpse who God is. People have isolated themselves physically and spiritually from the natural world and the declarations it makes, so loudly, of the existence and active presence of God."

Pioneers who went to the American West were overcome with its beauty and majesty. Spiritual and aesthetic feelings, not just easy entry and less competition, drive the personal changes many people experience on a frontier.

7. Frontiers let you escape the shackles of the past.

As the passengers filed out of the Alaska Airlines gate, Larry Nelson couldn't stop shaking. Which of these women was Sheri, his mail-order bride? Like many men who mine or trap in Alaska, Larry Nelson had been searching for a woman. His magazine advertisement in Ruralite magazine brought almost a hundred replies.

Sheri was a biker who wanted to shed the rough life that had given her nothing but bleeding ulcers. She happened to pick up the magazine with Larry's advertisement in it. "I was thinking to myself, you really had to be desperate to have to advertise in a magazine."

But after they had corresponded for a time, Sheri sold her Harley and bought a one-way ticket to Alaska. She had enough money left to get back if he turned out to be a jerk.

The man waiting for her at the airport turned out to be well muscled, with thick black hair, an easy grin, and a dashing air. He looked a lot like Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind. Larry drove her to the golden log cabin he had built himself. The windows had a view of the Sawtooth Mountains.

" How do you like it?" he asked nervously.

"It's beautiful," Sheri replied.

Sheri found herself in demand on the frontier. Even Larry, a guy who looked like Rhett Butler and was an accomplished raconteur besides, had to beat out the competition. After a few years, they married.

Sheri developed a passion for working with beads and creating fantastic arctic wilderness designs. It had started when Larry said he wanted a pair of beaded mukluks. But Sheri didn't know how to bead, so she taught herself. She created original designs, like orcas jumping out of the ocean, dancing to the waves of the northern lights. Beaders across the country clamored for her patterns. Sheri published two books, Alaska in Beads and Cabin Fever Designs . She also started a Web site, and held beading workshops that attracted people from all over the country.

From biker to beader with two books to her credit. On the frontier, Sheri Nelson had shed her old life like an outgrown skin. She had left her old friends and come into a new place where she was in demand. Her growing self-confidence caused her to try new things, and she succeeded beyond what she could have expected back home.

In a new place, it is easier to make a fresh start because the people back home who have doubts about you don't come along. It's easier to change on a frontier because so many people come from someplace else themselves and don't always talk about their pasts.

Who in Alaska knew or cared that Cindi Creager, the news director for KTVF-TV in Fairbanks, had once hit bottom? Before Cindi came to Alaska, she was wandering homeless on the beach, her legs covered with bug bites. She didn't come to Alaska to frontier. She came to be with her boyfriend. But the frontier mechanism caught her in its jaws. Her journalism professor, Claudia Clark, saw much raw talent in Cindi and became her frontier angel.

In Alaska, Cindi Creager became a morning news anchor, the gal who got the crime footage, who did the exotic stories about oil in Prudhoe Bay and the Midnight Sun baseball game. Back home, she would have had little chance of getting an anchor job. Even if she had, the stories she covered would have been small-town news. But Alaska stories are often big news, like the Valdez oil spill. Or amusing news, like the wandering dog in the tiny town of Cordova who cab drivers take back home when he gets loose. Big news outlets such as CNN often pick up Alaska stories. In Alaska, she was noticed and she was needed. If Cindi Creager didn't get out of bed at 5 a.m. to get to the station, there would be no morning news. If Cindi Creager didn't go out and film a fire, why, people weren't going to see footage of the blaze.

Alaska became her trampoline, catapulting Cindi Creager to the Columbia School of Journalism and then to ABC News. In Pueblo, Colorado, she might be whispered aboutÑ the daughter of the prominent family who dropped out of college, who was hospitalized for depression, who ran away from home and became a bum on the beach. In Alaska, Cindi became a TV personality, recognized when she walked down the street. She developed the broad experience and the confidence to go for the big time.

8. The very trait that is holding you back elsewhere can be an asset on your frontier.

Don Logan's quirkiness would not sit well in a Wall Street law firm. He keeps his bar certificate hanging in the ladies' room at the Howling Dog Saloon. He practices law only when he's broke. Most of the time, he's out in the Pacific with his girlfriend on his vintage 1951 sailing vessel, the Scotty Ann. When she arrived at a bar luncheon on a motorcycle in thirty degrees below zero weather, Logan knew she was his kind of girl.

But the people who won't hire an individualistic lawyer like Logan are making a mistake. Take the time he was handling a case in Los Angeles. Riding up in the elevator, Logan overheard the lawyers defending the other side call him a loose cannon. So Logan had a T-shirt made up saying "Loose Cannon" on it. The next day he wore the shirt instead of a suit to a deposition. He won the case.

Logan enjoys practicing law because he feels like he's helping people. He often flies into town with less cash in his pocket than he needs for cab fare. Once he called a lawyer friend who owed him some money to give him a ride from the airport. That night at dinner, his friend wound up handing over to him all the cases he didn't want to bother with.

But once Logan has money, he's off again on the next adventure. He wound up in Harare mostly because he didn't know where it was and the tickets were so cheap. He found out why they were so cheap the locals at his Zimbabwe destination were putting some tourists' heads on sticks.

In Australia, Logan wound up in jail after a little misunderstanding. Forgetting that, to the Aussies, he was just a Yank and not a lawyer, he went to the assistance of a new friend in trouble with the police. When the authorities tried to let him out of jail the next morning (a couple of guys had spent much of the night shouting "Yank in the Tank"), Logan refused to sign the bail form and insisted on returning to jail until he got a full release. The exasperated judge finally let him out, urging him in the future to "confine his defense activities to his own jurisdiction."

Yes, Don Logan is an odd duck. Why do odd ducks contribute on a frontier? Frontier societies admire quirky people, characters with the guts to break free from convention. If you're a maverick, head for a frontier. There, people will appreciate you. The other part of the answer lies in the saying, "Find yourself a tuba."

A little boy wanted to play in the band. He was thinking about the saxophone or the clarinet. "Play the tuba," his mother told him. "Tubas are hard to carry. Nobody else plays the tuba. That way you will always be needed."