Still confused? Hopefully the answers to some Frequently Asked Questions can help:

A blog? Isn’t Substack kind of…lame?

While Substack isn’t always the coolest of platforms, it is pretty easy to use on both ends. Also, I’m not smart enough to make my own website from scratch, and I didn’t want to ask my brother how to do it, so here we are. The reason I have a blog is that I have now graduated from Swarthmore College (!), and as I have no social media, I have no way of keeping in touch with literally anybody that I once knew. Yeah, I could just get instagram, but I think I’m more built for something of this caliber.

The subreason for the blog is that I am moving to rural Alaska for a year (maybe longer, who knows), and I wanted a way of both documenting and sharing what that entailed. If you know anyone in the Bethel or Western Alaska area (and it’s a big area), drop me a line!

Rural Alaska? What in God’s name are you doing there?

Short story: I’ll be working at the Kuskokwim Consortium Library in Bethel, AK, both as part of their general library team and more specifically doing library/educational outreach in Western AK.

Long story: Subscribe to this Substack and hopefully we will both find out.

Isn’t it cold and dark up there? Sounds terribly depressing.

Yeah, well, it is Alaska, so it will indeed be cold and dark. Trust that I was aware of that when I applied for the job, and even more so when I accepted it. I’ll buy a sun lamp and some vitamin D pills, it’ll be fine.

Why are you doing this? Couldn’t you get a job in Seattle or Philly or somewhere normal?

Maybe? But honestly the job market is rough, and I had a good offer in Bethel and decided not to turn it down. I also wanted to do something totally different right after graduating, and you can’t get more different than subarctic tundra. There’s really no other time when I can just decide to move to rural Alaska, so it might as well be now. Besides, if it’s terrible I can leave after a year, and like Vienna, I’m sure Philly waits for you.

Why is it called Big Orange Coat?

If you’ve ever seen me in the winter, you’ve probably seen me in my giant neon orange coat—I practically live in it between December and March. Yes, it’s garish, and doesn’t cut an attractive silhouette, and makes a crossing guard look Vogue-ready, but it’s my Big Orange Coat. It would be a crime to name this blog anything else.

So what’s this blog even about? Salmon reviews? Snow monitoring?

Hopefully about whatever’s going on, though I’ll try to keep the salmon talk to a minimum. There was a real lack of Western Alaska blogs on Substack when I was trying to figure out if I should move there or not, so maybe this is a niche I can fill. Besides, what else am I to do in my postgrad days? Make TikToks? I think not.

Do I have to subscribe?

Not at all. Close this tab and never reopen it if you want to—Big Orange Coat will still be here. If you want, you can even just pop in every few months to see what’s happening, or maybe just check back in by August 2027 to see if I survived a whole year of Bethel. Or don’t. Whatever works.

How often will you post? Is everything going to be as boring as this one?

No clue on frequency, but probably every few weeks or so; depends on how exciting things get up there. But anything remotely interesting (or mind-numbingly tedious), you’ll be the first to know.

Can I come visit?

Absolutely. If you can get to Bethel, you’ve got a place to stay.

The real blog will get up and running in early/mid-August 2026, so stay tuned until then!

“How exciting!” They respond. “Where in Alaska?”

“Oh, it’s called Bethel,” I say casually, as if most people have heard of it. “It’s a bit west of Anchorage, kind of a smaller town. Really beautiful, though, I’m really stoked.”

At this point, I should come clean: most of that statement is a lie. I sold my parents on moving to Bethel by saying it was “a bit west of Anchorage,” but the truth is that it’s closer to the Bering Sea than to any other city or town. So far west, in fact, that you are actually almost east:

Yep, that land mass to the left of Bethel is actually Russia. Only 50 miles away, a bit closer if we’re just talking territorial waters.

If you want the comparison to the rest of the country:

You might say it’s a bit far from everything else.

So, it’s a jaunt to Kamchatka but it’s 400 miles to Anchorage, 520 to Fairbanks, and just under 1000 to Juneau or Sitka. But surely that’s not so bad for the largest state in the US! Just a brief, 8 to 10 hour drive on the scenic Alaskan highway….

At least, it would be if there were roads that connected Bethel to the rest of the state. But as I soon discovered, Bethel is actually a fly-in, fly-out town, meaning that the only way to arrive or leave is landing a miniscule plane on the one strip of concrete out there. There’s also the option of taking a boat down the Kuskokwim River, but that does lead back to the Bering Sea, and I’ve seen enough Deadliest Catch to know I’m not cut out for a king crab lifestyle.

So it’s a bit more remote than I initially made it out to be. But surely it’s got the conveniences of a typical US city, right?

…Not exactly. Most people among the 6000 Bethelites there buy their groceries by the pallet-load in Anchorage, because it’s so expensive to ship things to the town (one box of LaCroix = $19.99; don’t even get me started on the price of Nutella). Prohibition laws on drinking remain, so it’s illegal to purchase any alcohol there, even in 2026. Nightlife? Well, the sun won’t rise until 11am and then will set again at 3pm in the winter, so technically everything counts as nightlife there. And there’s 16 miles of road in Bethel, but only 50% of it is paved, which is why most pictures of it online look something like this:

At this point, you’re probably asking, “Why the hell are you moving to Bethel in the first place? This sounds like a terrible plan!” And I would tell you that despite all of what I’ve just written, which admittedly does paint a regrettable picture of Western Alaskan life, I really am quite excited about moving there in August.

Why? Because Bethel is actually America’s hottest new locale, and I’m the first one on the scene.

Top Seven Reasons Why Bethel, Alaska is The Place To Be:

1. Let’s face it, off-the-grid is in right now. Any old schmuck can go to your standard major metro area, drink an identical matcha latte, get your typical prepackaged groceries and take a semi-functional public transport system home. But what these people really want, deep down, are the hidden gems: the places most people only read about in National Geographic or The New Yorker, the stuff that would’ve made Thoreau pee a little. Weeks that don’t get above zero degrees. Negotiating with your roommates over the last of the good cereal. Feeling like a lumberjack as you get to work in the morning. Transcendentalist type-shit.

2. Developing niche passions. Game night? Out. Ice fishing? In. There’s no better place than Bethel to get involved in a bizarre and extremely-specific hobby. Ice sculpting? Hell yes. Whaling? Never been more back. They’ll be calling you Ishmael in the lower 48 with the baleen you’ll be packing.

3. Taxis literally everywhere. Move over SEPTA, there’s a new transit system in town, and her name is KuskoCab. In a shocking twist, Bethel actually has the highest taxi-to-person ratio in the nation, with 1 taxi for every 84 people; by comparison, NYC has 1 taxi for every 149 people. This is a Passenger Princess Daydream Lifestyle—and it’s only $5 to go anywhere in town. Budget friendly and the perfect excuse to never get behind the wheel again.

4. Your socials will never have more glorious Golden Hour pics. Sure, the sun will not rise until 11am in the winter, but when it does it’ll look like this:

   

   Tell me you aren’t moved by the majesty of a tundra sunrise. Plus, in the summer the sun sets at 1am and rises again at 2:30am! So really, you can’t complain that it doesn’t balance out in the end.

5. The Kuskokwim Consortium Library is absolutely insane. I may be biased as a future employee, but let me tell you it’s a destination in and of itself. The stacks are stacked. I’m talking physical and digital materials out the wazoo. Now’s the perfect time to enter your classic lit girlie era.

6. Cultivating a sophisticated palate. We’re in expensive times, and Bethel is no exception; traditional groceries can and will set you back a pretty penny. As I’ve always said, however, the tundra will provide. Sure, you won’t have Doritos, but you will have every cut of moose you could possibly want, alongside some rarer meats like ptarmigan and walrus. And five years from now, you can delight in telling your friends and family that no, actually, this ribeye steak really can’t compare to a freshly grilled seal topped with foraged tundra berries. Imagine all the doors to pretentiousness that Bethel will unlock for your future self.

7. Getting some phenomenal stories for the future. Bethel might have it all, but I won’t pretend that it’ll always be easy there—the cold, the dark, the remoteness, the not-insignificant risk of getting trampled by a charging herd of moose. But consider Bethel to be an investment in your future social life: the ability to seamlessly work into a conversation, “Wow, this reminds me of that time in Bethel when I learned how to brew moonshine in my neighbor’s shed and then got super drunk and accidentally dogsledded twelve crates of salmon all the way to Denali and had to sell my only parka to buy a plane ticket back to town.” Think of the anecdotes! Your future self will thank you, I promise.

This is just a preliminary list so far; as I move to Bethel in the near future, I’m certain it will continue to grow and change, so look for addenda in the future editions of Big Orange Coat. And if you’re a subscriber, you’ll be sure to get the latest news from Western AK straight to your inbox, hot off the keyboard, beginning in August when I move up north.

And if you’re considering planning a trip to Alaska in the 2026-2027 year…drop me a comment and we can talk about an air mattress arrangement.