Book review: The memoir “Hardship Alaska” by Donald Proffit is a unique and valuable coming-of-age story set against an Alaska that was itself on the cusp of adulthood.
1970 wasn’t a good year to finish college. The Vietnam War was escalating, more men were being drafted, and graduates lost their student deferments when they received their degrees. A lottery system based on birthdate determined who would be drafted. Donald Proffit drew a low number. Unless he received conscientious objector status, went to Canada or jail, or admitted to the military that he was gay , he was going to war.
After driving up the Alcan back in the gravel days, a story he tells well, Proffit arrived in Anchorage on Halloween 1970 and took his position with Alaska Children’s Services, working as a relief counselor for two church-run children’s homes. From there Proffit’s employment situation grew somewhat undefined. He shifted between facilities, sometimes witnessing abusive treatment of children, who themselves exhibited extreme behavior.
Other than the Eddys and couple of others, Proffit mostly kept his sexuality to himself, even though he had lived fully openly at home. Desperately in love with a college classmate, he didn’t consider himself in the market anyway.
From a historical perspective, Proffit offers glimpses of two parts of Alaska that could almost have been on different planets then, and both physically changed today. He saw Anchorage before its population surged, and the community at Point Hope before it was relocated. And he provides a personal account of being draft age, in college, and against the war, finding himself on one side of a national fault line not of his making.
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