Travel by DAR

Alaska: End of the World, With WalMart

(First published in Madison)

Blame pneumatic hammers. But professional carpenters no longer sport the purple thumbnails by which to know and love them. Instead of the thump, thump, yowch! of olden times, we now have the thack-thack-thack of compressed air tools that, across the land, have effectively spelled the cessation of thumb mauling. By default, the order of the purple thumbnail must go to the good men and women of our 49th state, the land of the cracked windshield and washboard dirt road: Alaska.

Purple, the hue of bruise, the cross shade of black-and-blue, could stand as the state color of Alaska. Everyone wears some mulberry mark of the great outdoors: knuckle scabs, blood blisters, split lips, shiners. And it’s doubtful they ever got them from simple old-fashioned hammering so much as from harnessing dog sleds in sub-zero temps or lashing ice picks to outhouses. Nicks, burns, welts, gashes … Alaskans sport scars the way Hasidic Jews sport sidecurls: as an emblem of their membership in a select society. The difference is that if Hassidim mean it to signify their otherworldliness, Alaskans mean it to signify their intimate working involvement with the physical aspects of their existence - a symbol of thisworldiness.

My son Marshall and I notice it even before we get there. Fellow airline passenger and Alaskan native Roger Watkins lopes up to us at the Detroit airport where, deplaned en route, we’re informed that the entire flight’s bags are missing. “Don’t matter, we’ll wash our clothes in the toilet!” Big Rodge exults. “Y’ever notice how the flushing action really scours ‘em clean?” This, for better or worse, announces itself as the scraped-up Alaskan spirit.

Attaching himself to our father-son team as a lovably goofy appendage in the twelve hours it takes us to hopscotch around the country attempting to catch up with our luggage, Big Rodge is like a guy who’s never had his wallet stolen. A hunter-fisherman by trade, with a mouth full of gold teeth and an Alaskan cap he brags he got at Good Will for 24 cents, he manifests the kind of guilelessness of someone more at home in the woods than in modern society. In fact, we suspect he may have amassed his particular abrasions getting himself caught in elevator doors and pinched by kitchen gadgetry. Nevertheless, he’s a font of hard data for any Alaskan lore we could possibly want to know.

“Bear?” he asks, on the floor of the San Francisco airport where we’re trying to grab some shut-eye. “Picture a couple of rump roasts running after you at 40 miles per hour - and those are just his shoulders. What you’ve got to do is lie down and play dead. You’ll know it isn’t working if he begins to pull flesh off you.

“Elk?” he asks, on the floor of the Seattle airport where they’ve sworn there’ll soon be a connecting flight. “They ain’t no picnic, either. Hormones cloud their brain during rutting season so they think you’re either a competing male or an amorous female. Neither Situation Do You Want.

“Dope?” he asks in the airborne bathroom where he insists on brushing his teeth with me (blame me for not latching the door), “Northern lights on dope is bettern’ the

Fourth of July. Ever do dope with your spawn? It’s the bomb. Course, dope’s a lot more powerful now than when you was a kid. Two tokes will set you on your ass, guaranteed.

“Strip club?” he concludes, shouldering me man-to-man as Anchorage at last comes into view, 10,000 feet below. “You’ve come to the right place. Eskimo women make the purtiest strippers on the planet.”

But if we think parting company with Big Rodge spells the end of rough-and-ready, we’re sorely mistaken. The whole state is slapdash and hurly-burly. The bathrooms of Anchorage International Airport all have clothes hooks by the sinks, as if the powers that be expect patrons to sponge down as part of their ablutions. Airport car washes have people showers, by the same token. Many of the mobile homes and pre-cut log cabins and Quonset huts lining the drive to town flaunt moose antlers above the front door. A fair percentage of the pancake houses and barber shops that constitute downtown Anchorage feature the words “frontier” or “bonanza” or “grizzly” in them - especially “grizzly.” Speaking of which …

“Dad, what’d you do to yourself?” Marshall screams, looking at me for the first time since the airport.

“Shaved my beard off back in the bathroom,” I say, grinning with the grizzled top lip he’s never seen in his 20 years of existence. “The extra hair might slow me down.”

Because we’ve come to Alaska to bike. And, as it turns out, biking is an ideal way to view the state. We’re here to ride up to 90 miles a day with one of the best adventure travel outfits in the business. But first we have to get out of the Anchorage suburbs, which are blighted by the same mall sprawl as everywhere else these days, the same waste commerce, the same people eating junk food who are precisely the people who shouldn’t be eating junk food, the same assaultive ugliness of chain stores. Except this is on the edge of the greatest arctic wilderness on the globe. It’s like being at the end of the world, with WalMart.

Anchorage proper, our starting point, is not a pretty city, but it’s aided by the fact that every one of its 250,000 inhabitants (half the population of the state) seems to take advantage of the short but intense growing season to raise sunflowers or hang baskets of blue delphinium. (It’s not true that the state flower is the 55 gallon drum.) Fishing line is a fixture everywhere, dangling handily from rear view mirrors in case you find yourself in sudden need of flossing teeth or reattaching severed arms. Saloons leave their doors open as in Gold Rush days. “Fireworks make you happy!” proclaim the billboards. And the air, of course, is clear as gin.

Souvenirs? Isn’t it too early to think about souvenirs? But they’re ubiquitous. Try the mosquito trap the size of a bird house. Or the moose turd key chain. Through the profusions of delphiniums, book stores push gift books about Alaska with “dreams” in their titles - as in Crude Dreams, a book about petroleum exploration - but the books you actually find on people’s shelves tend to be bodice-rippers as outdated as the magazines available for perusal while you wait for your two-inch-thick halibut to be grilled (Crochet Today, Spring, ‘89: “Cross Stitch With A Purpose!”).

Truth to tell, there may not be a lot to do in Anchorage. In its entertainment schedule, the daily paper lists a lecture entitled “Choose Your Countertop” at the local Home Depot. To properly do, you’ve got to get out in the country, but this is where you fall into the superlative trap. Simply put, every fact about the Alaskan countryside, every postcard and sound bite, exhibits an hysteria of hyperbole. There are glaciers the size of Rhode Island. The wind is strong enough to blow rocks around. Normal-looking street corners get between 400 and 800 inches of snow a year (the refusal to be pinned down is part of the maverick mystique, but you can assume in winter you’re walking on a snow pack at least the height of a basketball net).

Superlatives have a short shelf life in Alaska; there’s always a better one to take its place. Ten per cent of the world’s earthquakes occur here. Its shoreline is greater than the rest of the country’s, put together. Dotted with over 3 million lakes and peppered with mountains whose peaks haven’t yet been named, much less climbed, this is the place to discover unsurveyed bays and make first ascents. The Wrangell-Saint Elias mountains boasts nine of the sixteen highest peaks in North America, and who back home has even heard of the range?

The sense of being somewhere that’s larger than life trickles down to the most mundane details of breakfast which, at least in our biking outfit’s generous hands, consist of such mythical belly-bombers as sour dough pancakes and reindeer sausage. Even the plant life turns out to have superlatives attached: cabbages grow to four feet in the midnight sun, dahlias sprout as big as dinner plates, you can mow your grass ten days after you sow it. This to make up for the fact that the sun will disappear for weeks on end once the “termination dust” (aka: snow) ends the growing season in September with a powdery thud.

Even the litter is on a grand scale. Forget crushed Camel packs on the gum-speckled concrete of a municipal parking lot. Alaska has world-class detritus - when objects make it to the end of the continent and are discarded here, they’re discarded: abandoned pick-ups set against the cloud-bedecked peaks of active volcanoes, old float planes deliquescing into the boulder-strewn confluence of two glacial rivers, their rusty surfaces as crazed as the skin of a vintage Steinway. This is epic litter, and it makes the grandeur completely unsentimental.

In a landscape this Bunyonesque, it’s inevitable that the people, too, are larger than life. Like Big Rodge from the plane, no one does anything in a small way. People don’t put out two or three bags of garbage but nine or ten. They leave personal statements on signs by their mailboxes: “This Is Not a Toilet or a JunkYard. If You Use it as Such Please Leave Your Name & Adress (sic) so I can RECIPROCATE When I Am In Your Neck of the Woods.” (But is it inevitable that such landscape should also foster an outbreak of the John Birch Society? I haven’t seen so many “U.S. OUT OF U.N.” signs since the mid-60’s.) It’s the end of the line, like California in stagecoach days or the French Foreign Legion - a place where misfits flock.

Which means that every 24 hours Marshall and I run into someone who freely admits she (a.) stabbed her husband 56 times (b.) defecated in her neighbor’s living room to express her dislike of his new snowmobile, or (c.) owns a gold mine 200 miles north of this bar she’ll be happy to show us right now, this minute. The place is loaded with river guides who casually let drop that they’ve been shot “a few times” in the head, as well as bush pilots who seem high on more than altitude as they soar you over the peaks, listening to acid rock quietly, painstakingly drawing pictures of swans from the pencil stubs wedged in their left fists.

There’s more latitude for eccentricity here than in the lower 48. Geezers regarded back home as “questionable” come here and are called “colorful.” Marshall and I can’t pedal by a simple skiff in the water without hearing the yarn attached: “Le Barge” was built by an 80-year-old who snow-shoed hundreds of miles to get here, accompanied only by his pipe which he smokes so constantly his bottom lip is callused. Even the little old lady in the gas station, her hands folded patiently in front of her cardigan as she watches us use her air pump, turns out to wear steel-toed welder boots, drive a Harley, and prefer sleeping outside in winter. We definitely want to stay on her good side.

The sheer expanse of the state’s character - personal as well as geological - is as daunting as it is exhilarating. The chief superlative, Denali (Mount McKinley to tourists, and greater in mass than Everest), exerts a brooding bear-like presence over the whole latitude. Biking in its hulking shadow or flight-seeing among its thousand crags is so overwhelming it dispirits us. Down below the airplane wheels, we spy glacial moulins (holes) that look like pimples but drop 2000 feet to unchartable subterranean passages. A granite face ascends one mile straight up. Witnessing hump after snow-laden hump makes us homesick for human dimension. Metaphor loses all meaning. We can’t even use a word like “shadow” metaphorically, in light of the fact that in June, when the sun is at the horizon, the shadow cast by Denali is 250 miles long.

Thankfully, biking helps us reclaim our sense of scale. Up hills and down vales from atop our Cannondale hybrids at an average speed of 16 miles per hour, with waterfalls cascading on one side and Dall sheep scampering away on the other, we discover that the best way to deal with superlatives is to zoom in on the minute: a wild pink geranium petal floating through air, raindrops forming concentric rings as they drip from a fern leaf. The descent from Thompson’s Pass into Valdez - 15 miles of downhill so steep we’re almost constantly braking - is like slicing a warm knife through butter. But biking against drizzly 40 mph headwinds is also restorative - the hard addictive labor makes us feel we’re the right size for our bodies again. (Of course, it helps that our hosts’ back-up van carrying buckets of Milky Ways and GatorAde is never far behind. And that dinner’s hearty as hell.)

Up above the Arctic Circle in a town called Kotzebue, Marshall and I try to put it all in perspective. Across the Bering Sea, Russia is either 120 or 150 miles away, depending on which inexactitude you choose. A whale vertebra sits atop a wooden pier. Fish are drying on a rack in the wind. An Eskimo woman with 27 grandchildren walks her dog. We spin the radio dial from end to end and get nothing but static. There’s a hospital up here, but if you want a private doctor you have to travel 500 miles to find one. And if you want to be buried, you’ll need a jackhammer to break the permafrost.

Up here on the last night of our trip, in what used to be (before global warming) the polar bear capital of the world, where it can stay minus 100 degrees for three weeks straight and milk costs six dollars a gallon and the most prevalent crime is domestic abuse - wives beating husbands - I decide to take Big Rodge up on his suggestion and get stoned with my spawn. After all, if you can’t do it above the Arctic Circle …

The rest must be a hallucination. We score it from an Eskimo stripper with a pierced tongue. I confess I never gave naked Eskimos much thought before … something about blubber and igloos and mukluks … but here they are in the flesh, all beautiful non-bruised expanse of it, and here we seem to be …

We look at the rusty bear traps in the doorway and the peat moss diaper of the stripper’s baby crawling around the floor. Outside it’s so quiet you can hear a lone dog howling on the town dock. Across the road, the plywood crosses of the permafrost boneyard are going hazy with the first termination dust of the season …

And yet there’s no escaping the fact that, for an amateur like me, Alaska’s the wrong place to alter consciousness. Thisworldliness does not smile upon trance-like states. Even without northern lights, two tokes have indeed put me on my ass. My newly shaved skin has finally caught up with me and I’m feeling exposed … razor-burned … vulnerable … in a word, paranoid. Marshall has to talk me down. “Dad, those Eskimos are not going to jump you …”

This is what I want to tell him: That what I’m experiencing is not paranoid paranoia. It’s legitimate paranoia. I’m scared the landscape is going to be hurt, that all this lovely daunting grandeur will be unable to withstand the onslaught of tourists and souvenir hunters and developers and that when we return ten years from now it won’t be possible to hear a lone dog howling on the docks. Not with the sound of hammers everywhere putting up WalMarts in the tundra, thack-thack-thack …