Copy of Letter to Eligibility Tech I Bradley Johnson at the Alaska Permanent Fund

State of Alaska
Permanent Fund Eligibility Tech I

Mr. Bradley Johnson; to remove any possible confusion you may have about my Alaska residency I will reiterate here the main points of my home ownership at Wrangell 1990 through 2008 and at the Mat-Su Otter Lakes subdivision 2008 through 2010 and my effort to move to build a new home beyond the Susitna River at the Otter Lakes subdivision in 2010. I bought that subdivision lot in 2008 and hoped to move my things from Wrangell there after buying a skiff and motor and building a geodesic dome. Fate and the lack of state work presented destitution outside (not down south) as the future home instead.
I first arrived in Alaska in 1974 and worked several months in Juneau before returning south. I returned to Alaska in 1977, 1979 and 1983 thereafter remaining in the state continuously until 1994 (except for visiting Seattle, Hawaii, Europe and Mexico on vacations from the Alaska State Department of Labor and going active for military service on a few occasions).
I quit employment at Worker’s Comp and moved to Fairbanks in 1988 to attend U.A.F. I also transferred membership in the Alaska Army Guard to the U.S. Army Reserve. In 1988 the reserve sent me to Ft. McClellan Alabama for several months and I returned to U.A.F. in September. In 1989 went active for training at Ft. Bliss Texas and after discharge returned to live at Juneau.
In 1990 I completed two college degrees-one from U.A.S.E. (I lived at the dorm one semester after returning from a trip to Wrangell where I got lost in the forest in late winter doing some damage to my feet) and the other degree-a Bachelor’s, from Excelsior College at Albany (an external studies educational facility accredited by the middle states association of colleges).
I bought a lot at Wrangell in 1990 five miles south of the airport. It was in a roadless area. I was purchasing it with my permanent fund checks yet was going to let it go. An emergent situation in 1990 led me to decide to pay off the property and move material stored in Juneau to the Wrangell property. I moved a few hundred pounds of material south including taking a stationary bicycle via boat and a trail to an empty forested, roadless lot.
In 1991 I built a small home at the lot. I had never built anything before and it was an interesting effort constructing upon sloped muskeg with selections of minimal logs to cut to serve as foundation footings.
I first built an 8’ by 6’ hut with a steep roof where I spent the first winter. I added a small plywood porch for extra working space.
That hut only lasted until the year 2000. In 1992 however I built an 8 by 10 shed roofed building with a metal roof that never required snow shoveling as it faces south. I tore down the original hut and used the materials from that refinishing the outside of the newer building in 20O0. In 2000 the new hut thus had its first door.
The state gave the City of Wrangell waterfront development rights to that subdivision in 2000 and the city surveyor stopped at my home as I was removing the original hut. My home was on the back row of the subdivision up from the waterfront.
My idea was to construct a long-term temporary storage building that was also livable to keep my things in until the road to the subdivision was constructed. I rightly regarded my home as my home since I had no other.
By 2007 the road actually had made some progress when the drop in timber prices made the logging and road building operation unfeasible. With a road to the property I might have had a real home built on the lot if I had saved enough money from work elsewhere –perhaps in Juneau or Fairbanks. I was not unhappy without a road though, as wolves, bear and other wildlife still wandered across the property line and there was no noise from snow machines. I travelled the 14 miles r.t. to town for supplies by boat usually because a walk through the woods before the road extension required six hours one-way during dry weather.
I learned quite a few practical building concepts over the 20 years at Wrangell. I discovered that one can buy an Incinolet electric toilet for $1500 and not need a privy. It needs to be emptied just every 6 months and runs on propane or electricity. I learned about producing energy at home with wind generators, and researched making hydrogen for fuel cell power. I had hoped to use these concepts and more practical low-displacement building ideas at new Otter Lakes subdivision that I was compelled eventually to relinquish, along with any hope of vegetable gardening and northern pike fishing there.
Building at Wrangell was quite a bit of work as I transported supplies several miles by small boat from town with just one load delivered by commercial vessel and then I carried materials up a trail.
I first damaged my right shoulder carrying pieces of ¾ inch plywood cut in half on my shoulder with upraised arm in 1991 and 1992. The plywood set in the top of the shoulder pushed the arm out of the socket. I saw a chiropractor who temporarily put it in place and the ligaments did not pervasively rip out until about 2006.
It was about that time (1991) that the Alaska State radio network harassment began. Something I have regarded as a form of state terrorism. Consistently designating my home ‘the lem’ and sending rave death by a thousand cuts is costly to a single individual. By 2007 I realized that owning ‘the lem’ at Wrangell was adversely impacting my life socially and financially.
Stripping my home ownership of the usual social privacy and of my freedom to quietly go about my private interests in my home and work created social adversity. The state’s power to generate the big lie and to corrupt equal rights (as in the PFD fiction about my having no history of Alaska residency in 2009 or before 2010) and equal legal benefits (the PFD) generated socially by Alaska State APRN terrorism-and that of NPR as well, meant that I should relocate to another address and cut the coordinated tie-ins networked and leaning on my home (not in a legal sense). When enough preferred target location connections build up eliminating the target validity still presents the phenomena of continuing attacks on the no longer valid target for at least two or three years.
I did get much writing done at Wrangell and began copyrighting some science fiction stories written there as early as 1990-92. Yet by 1994 I was fairly well starved out and rowed an 8 foot inflatable boat to Juneau. It took 18 days in the month of April. I left Wrangell weighing 148 pounds more or less and gained a couple of pounds on the way eating fish and clams, kelp and four pounds of flour.
In Juneau I camped out and eventually got 6 weeks of work as an administrative clerk non-perm with the State. That was the only work I got with the State government since looking for a job with the state from 1987 to the 2011 putting in hundreds of applications over the years.
I should make the point here that I did travel to Houston in 1992 to try to continue graduate school after U.A.F. thrice denied admission to their M.A. program in Northern Studies. Including my one year of C.L.E.P. credit scores my g.p.a. as an undergraduate was 3.8.
It is true that I had attended one trimester at Chemeketa C.C. in Oregon from which I did not officially withdraw before receiving an unexpected grant of 200 dollars I used to hitchhike to Houston and look for work prospecting for oil again offshore, yet U.S.N.Y. where my B.A. is from only accepts passing grades, and the U.A.S.E Associates Degree is of no value-I wish they would consider taking it away because when I started it was named U.A.J. and I don’t like the name change.
That costly exclusion meant a waste of time and money searching for a quick replacement. Since student loan funding was cut off to the entire school (The Houston Graduate School of Theology) there because of the default rate I never completed the M.A. program and never became qualified to become a journeyman educator with a decent annual income. I had a 3.5 g.p.a. at H.G.S.T. when I left school.
I had planned to get two M.A.’s with the first being in Biblical Languages and the second from a different school in philosophy and history.
Thus I paint houses when I can find work. Just last month the Settlers Bay Lodge in the Wasilla area let me go after one day of washing dishes.
My home in Alaska at Wrangell slowly improved when I could afford to bring supplies in. I had initially planned to use my place as a storage facility and to keep it low-key until retirement, and hoped to get a job with the state or complete my graduate education and be an educator in a rural Alaska in the meantime. There never was work at Wrangell besides the Alaska Pulp Corporation predominantly which closed its doors in 1994 I believe after polluting the water and defaulting on contracts I seem to remember. The null income scenario changed that however.
With little work I spent more time at the hut and made a few more emergency rowing trips to Juneau eventually moving up from an 8 foot inflatable boat to a 14 foot monarch scow with a tarp for a square sail. I also made several trips outside to paint and buy sailboat and attempt to sail it to Alaska without success.
In 2008 I sold my home at Wrangell to some people from the lower 48 whom I had worked for painting and roofing two summers. I bought a new lot of 4.99 acres at Otter Lakes with the proceeds of the sale of my home at Wrangell and then needed to find some way to solve the logistics of the move. That was to be my new home when work occurred locally in Alaska to afford the transition.
A couple matters complicated the situation. There wasn’t that much money to work with though I sold the Wrangell place for a fair price. I found a cheap sailboat in Maryland on eBay and bought it yet it sank near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and it cost 2000 dollars to have it refloated and destroyed. Coincidently the seller was retired from Dutch Harbor. It was a good boat with new keel bolts that could have made it to Alaska. I planned to store it at a low cost place in the North Chesapeake Bay area near the cut to Delaware until some time when I might have tried the Northwest Passage with it-or maybe Cape Horn. Sailing can be very treacherous in socially crowded environments such as Chesapeake Bay if one is poor.
In 2009 I made an addition on to the hut at Wrangell to keep snow sheets from sliding off the roof down on to the front entrance. I experimented with making strong little gusseted tresses as in a storage shed sold at Home Depot.
I also wrote a novel in 30 days there named eventually ‘St. Novilistricka Dimensions’ (available at my online bookstore at http://www.lulu.com/garycgibson).
I took Russian and Alaska history courses at U.A.-Juneau and read Dostoyevsky in Fairbanks during a course on Siberian exploration. A Mrs. Bartlett at U.A.F. was my course instructor for a philosophy course of independent studies that I took while going through my second time through basic training at Ft. Bliss and an air defense school in 1989. I had sent a science fiction story to Moscow Russia from U.A.F. in 1989 seeking to earn money for publication. It was about rockets, seventh heaven and Coney Island. A drill sergeant at Ft. Bliss gave me the letter of rejection from Moscow at Ft. Bliss the day before issuance of security clearances-yet the Russians pulled out of Eastern Germany a week before in December 1989 anyway. My active duty ended early in 1990. At least I saw the space shuttle on the runway at El Paso.
During the three winters I lived in Fairbanks during the late 80s I usually walked around. One winter I had a Honda civic wagon with a rusted out floor that let 45 below zero wind flow in at 60 m.p.h. with the heater blower motor broke-I drove with the windows open to exhale out in order not to frost the windows. I moved from Fairbanks to Wrangell in 1990 via Juneau. Having completed the work for both of my college degrees I applied for admission to U.A.F.’s Northern Studies Program and had every reason to believe I would be admitted since I had good recommendations from Professors Olsen and Fitzpatrick at U.A.J. I was not admitted, an emergent situation developed and I ended up paying for the lot at Wrangell.
I left Wrangell to go to Juneau in October 2009 and camped out at Douglas. I had two inguinal hernias and an umbilical hernia and no idea of how to pay for it. I had torn my rotator cuff on the right shoulder three or four years before and had not had surgery. If I could get work with the state I would have medical insurance and get the repairs made.
Of course I did not get hired to work for the state or anyone else. The Hospital did write off the surgery costs (one time for most poor people) a priori so I was surprised when a bill arrived for an additional six thousand dollars eventually. The surgeon and the anesthesiologist are not on the Hospital Staff and did not write off their fees.
I had researched the cost of hernia surgery and thought it was 3000 dollars-so the 13,000 dollar charge was a little surprising. I gave the surgeon my Otter Lakes subdivision lot across the Susitna River where I had planned to move to, and move my things at Wrangell to via small boat from Deshka Landing at Willow and portage a half mile from a navigable tributary.
So after surgery post-op four five weeks I got a job at Taku Smokers in Juneau. Unfortunately there was an occasional heavy lift of a tub filled with fish and water that weighed more than 200 pounds. I had to quit as my groin was being damaged. A year later it is still stressed though it doesn’t need surgery.
I flew to Anchorage in April of last year with the hope of getting enough work to buy a replacement property in the Otter Lakes subdivision. That wasn’t good judgment for I could not find work and spent the winter except for a few weeks sleeping outside without even propane to heat coffee. The State Permanent Fund division informs me with the most galling and importunate timing possible that I never had the intention of being a resident before 2010 in Alaska, that I never had a home here. If I were a good brainwashed idiot I almost might believe you. If there was a need for state taxes or military conscription though I am fairly sure the state would determine that I have been a resident the last 25 years at the least.
I need the perm fund check this year in order to exit Anchorage and Mat-Su. I will not have luck finding work here and want to move toward Juneau and my sailboat on the beach near my former home at Wrangell. The bitterness I get from this galling experience is a reason why I do not apply generally in years when I am eligible for a PFD. One obeys the laws, follows the rules and has the government simply corrupt things and profit victimizing the poor-that’s the way of the world too often generally isn’t it?
So a sadistic state government might choose to decide that I have never intended to have a home in Alaska now that I am have lost my last real estate (in February 2010) and must sleep outside. I suppose the state will make the same determination next year and the year after if I am still here since things won’t get better. As a social philosopher I feel the inequitable allocation of resources is disturbing.