I am sitting at my Mac in the bright, sparkling sunshine during what most people think of as late winter, but we Alaskans know as only the half-way mark. Here in Valdez, we have had nearly 400 inches of snow so far, which means that my second-floor office window is now my first floor office window. Now, you mustn't think that all of Alaska is this way. I want you to see a more accurate picture of the whole of Alaska, and why the Macintosh and Alaska have an odd affinity that I've long felt, but only noticed when I thought about writing this article.

Picture it: Alaska is one-fifth the size of the United States, 586,412 square miles, 488 times larger than Rhode Island, two and a half times larger than Texas, and larger than the next three largest states in the U.S. combined, according to our state web page (www.state.ak.gov). We have four highways and one area code. A local call may be made hundreds of miles away in some parts, but our phone lines are terrible.

Our population in July of 1998 was 621,400, which provides 1.01 square miles per person. Many people take that idea seriously, living as homesteaders in the bush. But more than half of us live in Anchorage, a fairly modern city with a small-town feel. Those of us who don't live there or in one of our other large cities such as Fairbanks or Juneau, the state capital (pop. 30,684) think of Anchorage as our shopping mecca. Bush residents make one or more yearly trips into town to spend thousands of dollars for supplies and luxuries. If they live on the road system, they load them into a truck and take them home. But many choose not to live on the road system, so we either spend a fortune for shipping, or we take advantage of the postal rates for state residents and we go to the liquor store for empty boxes, pack it all up and mail it to ourselves.

Supplies can take up to two weeks to reach home depending on the weather. If were lucky, which means the tiny bush planes can fly and the mountain passes are open, our booty might reach us only a day or two after we get home, but that can be fairly unusual. As you might imagine, mail is very important to Alaskans, and if you can imagine that, imagine what email means. In the last few weeks as I write this, there have been countless avalanches in the high mountains, and many places have been declared disaster areas. We've all been feeling pretty isolated, even more so than we usually do at this time of winter, where the term cabin fever was coined and is epidemic.

In order to write this article, I went in search (mostly cybernetically) of the Macintosh in Alaska. All I knew beforehand was our local national-chain computer superstore, one which I have found to be quite supportive and respectful. Specifically, I found the Alaska Mac store, an Anchorage user group which did not answer my query, and a few local designers and technicians, spread out across the state, from Sitka to Nome.

Jason Buck, Mac aficionado at the aforementioned superstore, says he sells iMacs like hot-cakes. Jason estimates that about 25 percent of the store's customers are Macintosh people, and this correlated with the remarks of James Christie, retail manager of the Alaska Mac Store, who said that before they opened the store, they consulted the market research, which indicated that Alaska has a proportionately higher number of Macintosh users than other states. It must be true, because the Alaska Mac Store opened up this very weekend in Fairbanks as well, and they're looking at Juneau and other cities, too.

Could this have anything to do with some of the statistics about the state as reported above, or with the ease of trouble-shooting you get when you buy a Mac? Both Jason and James confirmed this. When I emailed Jason about all this, I asked him if there are many diehard fans like us, and he replied, "Loads. I often don't get all my work done because I talk Mac with so many people. I would say that Anchorage has the strongest Mac community of any city I have ever lived in."

I could confirm this anecdotally, because every time I have been in the store, Jason was surrounded by people wanting to know about the Mac. I have several times watched people slowly walk back and forth between the Windows computers and the appealing iMac, always drawn back to the Mac, conflicted by that prevalent message that the whole world uses Windows. James confirmed this.