AJ McClanahan: from Nebraska to Alaska and back.

• Author: Bohi, Heidi
• Position: NATIVE BUSINESS: SPECIAL SECTION

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As she stared 50 in the face, like so many of her friends and colleagues who had struggled with half-century birthdays, Alaska author, journalist and Alaska Native historian Alexandra J. "AJ" McClanahan had the predictable meltdown.

Happy marriage, beautiful daughter, rewarding career, a rich life and close friends--she knew she had everything to be thankful for, but there was, she says, the "usual mid-life stuff of wanting to do some crazy things before it was too late," along with the realization that "someday" dreams were not going to happen unless she set some specific goals for herself.

Buy a motorcycle, get a master's degree, buy a farm--though any one of those would have seemed like a reasonable mid-life crisis reward to most, in short order McClanahan--then the historian for CIRI--ticked off all three items on her wish list, formidably going from one of the state's most respected authorities on Alaska Native culture and social issues, to an organic farmer in the heartland of Orchard, Neb., a small community in the northeast region where she and many of her neighbors make their living farming cattle, potatoes, tomatoes, soybeans and corn.

First came the motorcycle: a blood-red Kawasaki 175 that, she says, was appropriately named "The Eliminator." While practicing, she ended up breaking her shoulder and sold it after two months. "It did eliminate me from being a motorcycle rider," she says, laughing.

FOLLOWING DREAMS

The following year, 2002, she bought a run-down farm with the dream of eventually replacing her midtown Anchorage office with a farmhouse and a tractor. The decision caught many of her colleagues and friends by surprise, but in fact, she says, the leap was intuitive and in many ways a logical next step for the second half of her life.

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"After writing about the land after all these years, and listening to people talk about their relationship with the land, I realized that I had my own relationship with it," she says of the 80-acre parcel she discovered online and where, at 58, she farms 55 acres of soybeans, rye and buckwheat since moving there full-time two years ago.

At first, she spent most of the year in Alaska, while completing her master's degree in Alaska Native Studies through Alaska Pacific University's special program for working professionals. Her thesis, the book "Sakuuktugut"--suh-KOOK-to-ghut--an Inupiaq word that means, "we are working incredibly hard," is about...