ANCHORAGE — She didn't know diaper wipes could freeze so fast. One moment they were a stack of moist towelettes, next they were an icy white brick.
Patti Tobias had left her infant's wipes in the back seat of the car on a morning when the temperature dipped to 7 degrees below zero. "Huh," she said, inspecting the block and grinning.
Her relatives in New Orleans would get a kick out of this.
She would share it as part of the chronicle of "a little black girl in Alaska," the story of her new life as told to friends and family in daily long-distance phone conversations. Her dispatches included stories of moose and mountains and white people. Patti, 39, had never been around so many white people. Most have been quite nice.
No one refers to her as a little black girl; it's Patti's tag for herself, partly a joke and partly a declaration of her exile. She is a Hurricane Katrina evacuee, as far from home as she could be in the continental United States.
"This is me," she says, "a little black girl with three kids and three suitcases, in Alaska, wearing three layers of clothing!"
Most Katrina evacuees stayed within a day's drive of their hometowns in the Gulf Coast. A few ventured to the West and East coasts. The Red Cross counted about 90 evacuee families that made the 5,000-mile journey to the Last Frontier. They came because of family and church connections; they came, as in the Tobiases' case, because a stranger beckoned.
The evacuees scattered throughout the state, with the highest concentration in Anchorage. Six months after Katrina, though, many have returned to the Lower 48, leaving only the die-hards -- no one knows exactly how many. The Tobias family is one of eight left in Anchorage public housing.
Patti says she would like to stay in Alaska for the adventure.
But some states need all four seasons to reveal themselves fully. Driving on ice, for example, has become a part of daily life. With a cold snap upon them, and more to come, Patti and her children are only now learning what it takes to be Alaskan.
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Patti wears a hat inside her cottage. It's a Wednesday afternoon, and she's pacing the living room with a cellphone to her ear. Her 1-year-old, Ginsi, sleeps on the couch, so bundled she looks like a pillow.
Outside, son Tokobey, 12, pushes his 6-year-old sister's face in the snow. Her name is Gionni. She later reports that her brother did it three times that afternoon. Tokobey believes it to be an Alaskan pastime.
