Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

“What’s that? Crying? There’s no crying in baseball driving to Anchorage.” A League of Their Own

So, after traveling hours and hours and hours with an infant (Pugsley), a soon to be five-year-old (The Boy), and a stereotypically male husband, I imagine that The Mrs. wanted to gouge out her eyes with a spoon, because it’s dull, and would hurt more.  But, she got the biggest bonus yet.  She got to continue driving farther south than Anchorage.  I know that most things (including all of the past, current, and future members of Van Halen) are farther south than Anchorage, but Anchorage might as well be Dixie if you live in Fairbanks.

We got to go to Girdwood, Alaska.

Just the name sounds uncomfortable. Gird. Like girth. Gird. Like girdle. Makes me think of William Shatner. Who’da thunk it was a pretty and nice town?

But, we couldn’t see any of that. We got there at about 8:30. After driving through some of the most beautiful scenery imaginable, yet just dark enough that my camera would have produced pictures of what you might think were whales mating in some deep Pacific trench where fish don’t have eyes.

But we got a bonus.

The New Boy decided he was hungry in Anchorage, and the decision was
a. feed him then and there or,
b. push on to the hotel.
The Mrs. made the call: push on. And we lived with a crying baby for the duration of our trip to the hotel.  A crying baby really didn’t stress me out.  I’m a man, and a dad. That gives me a selective deafness that would allow me to sleep through a jet landing on our house, if it came ten minutes before my alarm for work went off.  Crying babies don’t bother me.  The fact that The Mrs. was stressed did.

When The Mrs. ain’t happy, nobody’s happy.  (I counted up the negatives, and I think I got that right).  We got to the hotel, and The New Boy promptly decided that all people around him who were capable of holding a bottle to his mouth were either dead or incapacitated by avian flu, and became quiet as a mouse.

Now, you may be saying – “How dare you not feed a hungry baby? That could be bad or something.”

You haven’t seen this baby.  He’s huge.  Not any fatter than a usual baby – he won’t be featured in a paper anytime, but he gains about a pound a week.  He eats about sixteen quarts of formula a day, and we’re thinking of moving him up to ribeye steak flown in directly from some Japanese farm where they have a string quartet that serenades the cows as they feed them beer and massage them, because that would be cheaper than the baby formula. He gained a pound in a week – 1/18th of his current mass – at four months’ age.  He may be big enough when fully grown to look down on Hulk Hogan.  So, don’t worry ’bout The New Boy.

And, drive the Seward Highway when you can.  Wow.  Pretty, even in dusk.

A buddy of mine suggested that we go and visit the Alyeska Prince Hotel (no relation to Artist Formerly Known as Prince Hotel). The Alyeska Prince Hotel (pictured above, I know it looks like a Stephen King novel hotel, but not a single person tried to disembowel me that night) caters to rich tourists that fought in the Spanish-American War and decided to cruise to Anchorage in the summer.  In the winter, it caters to rich dotcom billionaires who want to go ‘boarding in a state where weed is almost legal.  But in the weeks between 24 hour days and fresh powder, the Alyeska Prince is a bargain.  If you have an Alaska driver’s license, where they give a steep discount.

We got there.  The Mrs. was again demanding that her now-tenuous relationship with the food chain be restored. I found a thriving convenience store in Old Girdwood (which I think most of just slid right into the ocean when the ’64 Earthquake hit) that had sandwiches.  And wine.

I bought some wine because I thought that might cap off a relatively stressful last leg of our trip.  When I got back to the hotel, The Mrs. was working on putting The New Boy to bed.

About the Alyeska Prince: The hotel is nice. Head of State nice. In fact, when I was lurking in the parking lot, several vehicles with Alaska Legislature plates were hogging spaces.  I waited for one state senator to move his ass out of the space so I could shimmy in.  The beds were like sleeping on clouds, and customer service was great, even though I asked for two doubles, and they initially put us in a single king.  I love The Boy, but I’m not going to spend the night with his pointy elbows and knees pointed at me.

The wine was good.  The Mrs. was too exhausted to have any, so, in the interests of economy, I threw myself on her share.  And went blissfully to sleep.  Little did I know that the President of Taiwan was lurking, waiting to disrupt not this post, but probably the next one after this, or maybe the one after that.

Next: To Whittier and Beyond

“Remember, attraction is a three-way street. Or is it a one-way tunnel?” – Married, With Children

Girdwood is a nice, pretty, cozy town.  The picture that I took of the hotel (last post) was taken in the morning.  I also took the picture above. There’s a tram that’s built into the hotel, and a restaurant at the top of the tram.  The idea is that the Alyeska Prince is a place where you can almost go skiing without going outside, except for the sliding down the mountain part.  One day the super wealthy will solve that problem, too.  Maybe have folks ski for them.

If it hadn’t been so overcast with such low clouds, I think I would have popped out the money to scoot up the mountain on the tram.  As it was, I think the view would have resembled being in a bag full of cotton balls.  If you’re wondering how I might know what that looks like, remember, I had an older brother.

So, we headed out of the Alyeska Prince and into Girdwood.  Many of the streets were named after other ski resorts, such as Aspen, Vail, and Davos.  I stopped at a restaurant that appeared fully functional and staffed, and was informed that they were yet to open.  Not a problem – but I’m not waiting a half an hour just to order a burger.  Not with a Hungry Boy and The Mrs. also feeling a bit peckish.  We headed down to the same strip-mall that has the State Patrol, a gas station, and a liquor store and hit the diner there.

Note:  it sounds like The Mrs. is always bugging me about going somewhere to eat.  Not the case.  I pretty much starve the family when we drive.  Also, restaurants are also a good place to make observations about Alaskans, when and where they herd together.  It is the watering hole, where gazelle and lion both fill up before clocking in.

It was The Boy’s birthday – five years, and still he refuses to learn calculus.  We stopped and had perhaps the friendliest waitress we’ve had in years.  She focused on The Boy, and treated him like royalty on his birthday.  It didn’t hurt that her birthday was two days before The Boy’s birthday.  The Boy had a cinnamon roll the size of his head.

The diner was nice – it was the kind of place that tobacco-chewing hunters were in peaceful co-existence with dredlocked euro-eco-tourist types.  The graffiti in the bathroom referenced “The Family Guy,” and the guy exiting the single-stall mens’ room indicated, “You might want to wait a bit before you go in there – wheew-ee, dunno what I ate.”

The valley that you enter as you head to Portage Lake and Portage Glacier has the steep sides that you’d expect in a land carved by glaciers periodically over geologic-type time scales. What surprised me, however, were the constant waterfalls. They were like veins of silver etching down the sides of the mountains, and they were everywhere. These are fed by the glaciers in the mountains above the valley. They made me think of restrooms.

It was nearly time to head to Whittier. Driving to Whittier, there’s only one road that leads in. It leads through the Anton Anderson Tunnel, which is the longest tunnel that’s a part of a road in North America. Anton Anderson was the engineer who built the tunnel during WWII, working for the army. This particular tunnel was designed for trains, and is still used by them. I believe it’s owned by the Alaska Railroad, and hence not a publicly owned road.  The nice thing is that I don’t think the railroad police could give a real ticket that you should you violate traffic regulations – maybe you’d just get a railroad ticket.  Then you could use your railroad ticket to go somewhere nice.

The tunnel is one-way, and you pay to drive it, $12 for the round-trip. Cars and trucks are staged and, in best railroad fashion, the road is scheduled – you go east for this hour, west for the next hour. As we entered the tunnel we had no idea what we would see on the other side. In a truly serious note, what we saw could not have been odder.

Next: Whittier
After that: The President of Taiwan and Me (I think that’s how it will work out).

Things to Do in Denver Whittier When You’re Dead

Whittier, Whittier.

What can you say about Whittier?

I’ll start with the bumper sticker, “Whittier: A quaint drinking village with a fishing problem.”

(above – proof of fishing village status)

Then the comments:

My Friend Brian:  “What’d you do this weekend, John?”
John Wilder:  “Went to Whittier.”
Brian:  “Did you see the Wh-idiots?”

That may sum it up.

Whittier is a former Army supply base. Whittier has some advantages for this – it’s a deep water port that’s ice-free year round, and is a major supply location for Anchorage. Ships dock regularly and drop off stuff that gets on a train and goes to Anchorage.

All that may be nice, but you have to be just a bit off to live here. Really. Right now, everyone lives in the old Army barracks – essentially in one building. All 172 people. I did see one address that showed a PO Box number above five hundred . . . but I figure the first digit is the floor of the old army barracks that they live in, so if your PO box number were 788, you’d live in room 88 on floor 7.

All of the rooms are condos, so, the bright spot is that there is someplace in Alaska that condos make sense. Which would be one location. Whittier.  I asked what the winters were like – the answer was that winters in Whittier are hellish, but the special kind of frozen hell reserved for people from the tropics who did something really, really bad.

Folks in Whittier live with constant wind, and in the winter it gets up to 100mph shooting up the fjord that they live in. Add that to a temperature of -29°F, plus the town getting no direct sunlight (no, not above the Arctic Circle, just high mountains surround the place) from November to February. Then, add in 25 feet of average snowfall, plus being within a hundred miles or so of the fault that has produced the largest earthquake ever recorded, and you see what I mean about having to be off to live there. Whittier is the edge of the world.

(above – more of Whittier – the long white building is where they used to practice Army stuff, but is now essentially abandoned, except for some killer freeze-tag games)

We were there in mid-September, and the touristy businesses were mostly closed. Whittier is shutting down for the winter (and, it snowed up in Fairbanks last week, so, winter is getting closer).

(above – the harbor at Whittier – beautiful, but, it’s in Whittier)

As if all of the above weren’t enough, Whittier is also hard to get out of. The Mrs., The Boy, The New Boy and I did most things that a tourist can do in Whittier without a boat, and decided it was time to go back toward Anchorage. We drove back to the tunnel. It was 1:04 PM. The big lighted sign above the tunnel said, “NEXT TRAFFIC RELEASE 2:00 PM.” So, we went back toward the same six open stores, kicked around, took a few more photos, and generally sat in the car until 1:45. I was not going to be late and become stuck in Whittier for however much longer until the next traffic release – I was going to be there early. I mean, the lady in the shop that sold Fudge had been nice but we were ready to leave Whittier by now.

(above – the old fuel depot at Whittier, with a looming glacier in the background, just sitting there looming)

So, back through the tunnel we went. A fairly large noise was evident when we went through, and The Boy said, “Monsters!”

I explained that those were actually ventilation fans – “air fans” I called them, and he asked why they had “Hair fans.”

I explained that those weren’t hair fans, they were air fans.

He paused a minute. “Then what are hair fans?”

Sometimes my life is an Abbot and Costello routine.

Next: Proof that the President of Taiwan is Stalking Me

Note:  Three posts a year at the beginning of July, I toss in an old trip from my earlier blog.  This is the first of those three.  It dates back to 2005.

“Hey, buddy, how you doin’?  Pizzaland, huh?  Yeah, that’s lots of fun.  I just called to tell you that you burned my frickin’ house down!” – Aqua Teen Hunger Force

It was time for our trip south.  The Mrs. had been agitating for some time to get the heck out of Fairbanks for a while.  We had originally thought to go earlier in the year, but decided we’d better not when we looked at how much a hotel cost in Anchorage – it was denominated in healthy kidneys.  In mid-September however, hotel rates drop by half or better, so, we rationalized this would be a good time to head out.  Because I’m cheap and want to keep at least one kidney.

In theory, the purpose of the trip was to get The Boy birthday presents in at a place that doesn’t sell groceries as well.  Living in Fairbanks is like living on an island – you drive the same roads day after day, seeing the same sites.  There is a sense of isolation up here, sort of like being trapped in an elevator with Carrot Top.  It must be worse in the villages that are unconnected by road to the rest of Alaska, maybe like being stuck in an elevator with a Carrot Top, but Carrot Top just finished a marathon after eating a LOT of spicy food.

Anyway, we saw the mountain pictured above on the way down south. It’s called Rainbow Ridge, according to the Rand-McNally.  Another picture of Rainbow Ridge is below.

We drove right past Paxson, which, as far as I can see consists solely of a gas station/cafe/hotel contained in a single building and an airport.  At this point, The Mrs. indicates that in some fashion she’d like to be part of the food chain, preferably at the top.  Paxson, though, is pretty far from a place where you can get a hot meal, and rule one of traveling in a Wilder car is once you’ve past it when you’re driving, it no longer exists.  We kept going south.

We passed a blue highway sign with a plate, knife and fork.  The Mrs. indicated through a weary series of near-starvation gasps that she thought that there might be food there.  I slowed.

“Do you want to stop?”

No answer.  I think she did try to answer.  Maybe the hunger had made her weak.  So, we went on. Because I’m a guy, and driving is what we do.

The Mrs. thought that this might be a good time to conserve her energy by sleeping so that her body did not consume itself.  Then the chorus started from the backseat weasels:

First, The Boy: Making car sounds.

Then, The New Boy: Crying.

But they never were making noise at the same time – it was as if an invisible pendulum slowly and inevitably moved back and forth, and when it was pointing at one of The Boys, it was their turn to make enough noise so that The Mrs. could not sleep.  As we passed Dick Lake, I really wanted to stop and take a picture.  Why?  Because deep in my heart I’m still eight, and a sign that says Dick Lake.

I did miss one Alaska site to see due to The Mrs. catching some sleep – we drove right past where HAARP (High Altitude Atmospheric Research Program):

1. Controls the weather,
2. Controls the minds of mankind, or
3. Conducts research into the atmosphere

You choose.

(2019 J.W.:  HAARP was a research program where they shot radio waves at the atmosphere for decades to . . . I don’t know, beat the Soviets at shooting radio waves at the atmosphere.  I believe it was mostly shut down after the Air Force decided that shooting radio waves at the atmosphere was not as fun as watching Netflix®.)

We finally reached Glennallen.  We stopped for lunch at an establishment that I believe was called the Glennallen Roadhouse. Ours was the only car, but they were open.

It’s far past tourist season, and the fifty or so tables in the restaurant were as empty as the logical portion of Susan Sarandon’s brain.  We picked a table and ordered.  For being the only people there, the waiter exchanged no witty banter, nor was he very good at keeping my coffee cup full.  We got some gas at the local station, and a plethora of signs indicated things we shouldn’t do.  Most of them were things that you wouldn’t do, anyway, if you have manners, I mean, who cleans salmon in the Ladies’ Room?  The Men’s Room, sure.  But not the Ladies’ Room.  Putting up a sign listing fifty things you don’t want your customers to do just makes you look unfriendly.  Don’t put up a sign.  If someone does something truly rude, challenge them to a duel.  Anyway, the signs cemented our thought of Glennallen as an unfriendly place.  But, then we found out why.

Every house that we saw in Glennallen was firmly rooted in permafrost.  Which is to say, it is not rooted at all. When you put a house above permafrost, the permafrost will melt.  This isn’t global warming, it’s local warming – houses put off heat, silly.  When the permafrost melts, your foundation will be useless.  All of the new construction that we saw going on in Glennallen consisted of new houses being built on discrete pedestals.  On theses pedestals were screw-jacks so when part of the permafrost under your house melts, you go under your house and adjust the jacks, and, ta-da, your house is level again.

All of this doesn’t help if you own the house above.  It is for sale.  No bank will loan money on a house with such gross structural damage, but, if you did successfully purchase a house like the one above anyway, the realtor gives you a gas can and complementary five gallons of gas:  for the insurance fire.

Perhaps that’s why the residents of Glennallen are so angry – the price of starting an insurance fire has gone up since the price of oil is up.

Perhaps the other thing that irritates them is that they live right next to an active volcano.

Mt. Wrangell is visible from Glennallen, and has been heating up since the 1964 earthquake.  So, you live on icy muck, and there’s a volcano for your backyard.  We couldn’t see Mt. Wrangell from the road, it was too cloudy that day.

But there was more ahead – things that would shock us to the very core of our existence. Okay, that’s a lie.  Actually it was just a pretty drive was next.

________________________________________________________

Chapter 2

Peasant: “Who are you?” King Arthur: “Your King.” Peasant: “I didn’t vote for you.” King Arthur: “You don’t vote for kings.” – M. Python

So, we headed back west from Glennallen. The permafrost, as shown by the prevailing taiga, still surrounded us. The road likewise showed the effects of the permafrost, maintaining the consistency of Fruit by the Foot® thrown over piles of spare change. Which is, I believe, standard road construction technique in Alaska.

The mountain above was visible for about the first twenty minutes out of Glennallen. It looked like it had been sprinkled in gold – with the sunlight, as far as I could see in the panorama before me, shining only on its slopes.

The rest of the trip took us up and down through winding roads. The Glenn Highway is on the north side of a large valley, and never dips down.  The north side of this valley consists of the Talkeetna Mountains. The south has the Chugach Mountains.  The Chugach Mountains were the epicenter of the 1964 earthquake, a 9.2 earthquake.  Besides containing more force than Madonna’s breath after a garlic-laden dinner, this earthquake lasted five minutes.  Five minutes isn’t long when you’re watching the season finale of Battlestar Galactica, but it’s forever if you’re being shaken around like a tiny chew toy by a frenzied teacup poodle.  These mountains and the pretty things we have in Alaska don’t come free – we gotta pay with the earthquakes and volcanoes from time to time.

The Chugach are also covered in glaciers like a pile of fries are covered in ketchup. We passed three major glaciers, and the last of them, the Matanuska, is shown below. I pulled off the side of the road on what looked like a rough trail to get this picture. I could see the campers and 4×4’s of moose hunters beyond, so I figured the road would work for me. The road narrowed alarmingly, with the passenger side dropping off about eight feet. I soon saw that the road that looked like it headed to the parking lot below (as we continued to climb) was really a trail for four-wheeled ATV’s. I imagined it starting to go in directions that my 4×4 could not follow.  Fortunately, the trail leveled off widened out and I could see a way to get back out.  This is not to say, however, that The Mrs. was entirely pleased with this lack of planning on my part.  But angels do follow foolish husbands or at least one did that day.

After a few more hours, we finally ended up in Palmer.  Palmer is nestled between mountains and looks like it was conceived in a dream.  One thing The Boy immediately noticed is that the McDonald’s sign was about three feet off of the ground, as were many of the signs on newer businesses.  I figured it must be a new ordinance, to preserve the beauty of Palmer.

This is in contrast to Fairbanks. Recently, the Fairbanks-North Star Borough (remember, we don’t have counties up here) tried to pass an ordinance that would allow them to enforce existing ordinances.  I know that sounds silly, but though there may be ordinances on the books, there’s only one employee that has that theoretical power for a borough of about 90,000 people.  If the lawyer for the borough gets around to it, he might send you a nasty letter, telling you please, please, fence that junkyard that is your front yard.  If you don’t?  He may send you another stern letter.

So it’s simple and logical that the borough would pass an ordinance that would allow them to enforce their ordinances, right?
Maybe in Fort Wayne. Maybe in Palmer. Not Fairbanks.

The residents of the borough did me proud. To quote one resident, “We came to Alaska to get away from this!” According to the News-Miner, there was a near riot. The Assembly rejected the ordinance.

There are damn few places you have the freedom from silly regulations of local government, telling you what you can and can’t do on your own land. This is (mostly) one of them.

Amen.

Next: The Hotel and The President of Taiwan.