Just how rural is Alaska?

From "Our first telephone" by Leslie Leyland Fields:

Out here in the Alaskan bush we want it all: we want choice, we want privacy, and still we want to listen in.

We got our first phone in 1989. It cost $5,000 and took a week to install. We had to do part of the work ourselves -- erect a fifty-foot aluminum pole with four guy wires, each a hundred feet long, tied into pilings that we sank and cemented into holes as deep as we could dig. It was a lot of work for something I didn't want. One of the great boons of living out on an island in the Gulf of Alaska had been having no telephone to answer.

Boy, that's even more remote than the village in South Africa that I grew up in. Mind you we were only 20 miles away from the nearest city. The islands in the Gulf of Alaska are hundreds of miles from civilization.

We got our first phone in 1959. I remember that day like it was yesterday. The huge black phone had a handle to crank which called the operator. It was a party line so you sometimes heard other peoples' conversations. The number was 460. I loved it and hated it too because all of a sudden other peole could intrude into your life.

I didn't get my own phone until 1980 and then I got an answering machine to deal with it. I didn't get a cell phone until 2004, a year after I moved to the boonies and realized that I needed it because of the long distances that I have to travel - just to call AAA in case I broke down.