Gov. Mike Dunleavy may be the only governor of any state who has been photographed not once but twice pushing disabled vehicles to get them out of trouble. All during a day’s work as governor.
The first was a photo taken by a passing Wasilla driver in June of 2019, when Dunleavy was in his first few months of office. Already, the urban attack team from the former Walker Administration was crawling all over him with accusations and petitions to remove Dunleavy via an ultimately failed recall effort. Dunleavy, helping an Alaskan he had never met, was busy doing what he does; while driving himself to work from his Wasilla homestead, he approached an intersection where a car was stalled, and the car was obviously going no further. Dunleavy, dressed in suit and tie, hopped out of his own car and singlehandedly pushed the disabled car to safety, before heading to meetings in Anchorage.
Fast forward to Oct. 4, 2022, when Dunleavy was visiting the rural village of Elim, along Norton Sound, which had been hit hard by an historic fall storm, a Category 1 remnant from Typhoon Merbok. The beach sand was soggy and soft, but the road was blocked by repair trucks and earth movers, and so Mayor Paul Nagurak decided to take the beach route. Riding in a truck following Dunleavy and Nagurak were Commissioner of Transportation Ryan Anderson, Commissioner of Military and Veterans Affairs Torrence Saxe, and Director of Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management Bryan Fischer.
Once the lead truck got stuck, Dunleavy and the commissioners hopped out and helped rock the vehicle out of the hole its wheel was digging, while Mayor Nagurak pulsed the accelerator.
Dunleavy, who lived for 20 years above the Arctic Circle — teaching children, running schools, raising his own Native children, hunting, fishing, and keeping his house warm in the most brutal weather on earth — seems happiest in rural Alaska, even if it means pushing a truck out of the deep sand less than a year after having had shoulder surgery. His idea of taking a break is to go hunting in rural Alaska, and donate the game to a community nearby.
Dunleavy’s lived experience in rural Alaska hasn’t been seen in the Governor’s Office since former Gov. Jay Hammond, who built a log cabin on the north shore of Lake Clark and was known as Alaska’s “Bush Rat” governor. It may be that Dunleavy is the state’s second Bush Rat Governor — a frontier leader who has, in the weeks since the storms hit the coast, traveled to villages numerous times, helping people without any media around, including offering practical advice for village and town residents with specific problems that needed a creative fix.
The iconic photo of the governor pushing a truck out of the sand is one that Alaskans from a certain era can identify with — it was just another day in rural Alaska, where people roll up their sleeves and got the work done without fanfare.
What the people of the state may also see is a guy who genuinely is at home in rural Alaska in a way that no other governor has been since Hammond was term-limited out of office in 1983.
