The tale is a familiar one...
Shares of a small Canadian metals company skyrocket by 250 percent after the US government agrees to support the company's exploration efforts with a road in remote northwest Alaska.
"The White House on Monday announced a partnership with Trilogy Metals as part of a push to unlock domestic supplies of copper and other critical minerals in the Ambler mining district in Alaska," reports CNBC. "Opponents of the long-debated Ambler Road project, a 211-mile industrial road through the Alaskan wilderness, have said it will harm landscapes that support local communities and wildlife."
The news story recalls the mystery novel Interruptions, set in Sitka and first published more than two decades ago, later released as an e-book in 2009.
Two teenaged boys enjoy exploring the wilderness near their homes in Sitka, Alaska, and that includes following a mining engineer who is consulting on an unpopular road project. Gavin convinces his best friend to skip school and follow the engineer, intent on gathering evidence to to stop construction of the road crossing Baranof Island.
The boys steal the engineer's backpack and trouble soon follows. One child is murdered. The other boy's mother, a leading opponent of the road, abruptly goes missing. Mother and son have no choice but to work separately to find the killer and expose secrets behind an unnecessary road that would forever change the character of an Alaskan community.
Back to the news: "The Ambler Road Project is a proposal for a 211-mile industrial access road and is intended to facilitate the development of at least four large-scale mines and potentially hundreds of smaller mines across the region," reports an opposition website. "It would cross 11 major river systems...."
The two proposed roads, one from a mystery novel and the other from the news, are more than a thousand miles apart and yet both have ties to mining exploration and Alaska Native corporations.
When Interruptions was first published, Sitka was Alaska's fifth largest city with a population of 8,800. Its rank has since fallen to twelfth with about 8,200 people. On the other hand, Wiseman, near the Ambler road project, has about 24 people.
