Travelers' Tales Alaska

by Bill Sherwonit

  But I am a lapsed anthropologist. I have no excuse for avoiding the culturally insular. Indeed, dangerous as the expedition might be, I have a professional responsibility to explore the big box lot. After all, WalMart is, well, there.

  So I borrow a pickup truck with camper on the back, a cheap passport to the unnerving but intellectually enticing RV club. Friends are incredulous. “You’re spending a summer weekend at WalMart?” Some express pity. My mother, who came to Alaska alone in 1946, fears for me. “Will you be all right?” she quavers as she leaves for our cabin.

  Despite the risk, I am as determined to conquer the pavement as I was to winter camp with Athabascan hunters last year. I climb up behind the high steering wheel, drive down the Seward Highway to WalMart South (Anchorage is blessed with two WalMarts, one in midtown and this one, just off the highway to the Kenai Peninsula) and enter a strange new world.

  Where to park? I cruise the lot a few times, finally picking a spot between a gargantuan RV and an SUV with a tiny trailer. It’s a weak, compromise choice, but I have to get my feet on the blacktop somehow. I park with the back of the camper facing south towards Turnagain Arm (not that I can see it past Stephan’s Tool Rentals). I set out the camper steps, then sit down with my door open, my notebook on my knees. Social scientists call this research method “participant-observation.” I call it “hanging out.” All I have to do is watch, then do—whatever the locals do.

  Not very much, for a while. The owner of the rig next to mine fills a burrito with beans he’s warmed over a propane stove on the tailgate of his SUV. He watched me make camp—along with my stairs, I put a bucket out below my camper drain spout—then leaned across the yellow line on the pavement. “I’m Rich.” Now he gestures toward a truck and trailer with Michigan plates. “I know them from somewhere,” he chews. Burrito in hand, he strolls over to speak with the disembarking couple. Calls to me, “It was Glennallen, a month ago, we camped at the same place.”

  Her name is Rose; his is Woody. His pate is as shiny as the buttons she’s sewn all over her jean jacket. They move coolers from the truck to the trailer.

  “Woody’s a fisherman,” Rose says, as if resuming a conversation we’ve been having throughout the nomadic season. “Fishing” explains the coolers, and the debate Rich and Woody are now engaged in, each jabbing at an Alaska road map. Picking spots to fish. Rose and Woody are spending the summer in Alaska, fishing; they’ll winter on Texas’s Gulf Coast, fishing. They travel year round, relying on WalMart lots across the nation—campgrounds for retirees without a lot of income. “Where else can you afford to buy anything in Alaska?” she asks.

  I head across the pavement to check out the perks of no-fee camping. A WalMart greeter welcomes me pleasantly as I enter the store. The lights are very bright. The store is open from six in the morning to eleven P.M. The phones work. The bathroom is large and conveniently located. I can purchase innumerable Alaska souvenirs—mugs and caps bearing blurry salmon, eight stars of gold on everything from headbands to socks—at reasonable prices. Nearby fitness clubs offer showers. What’s not to like?

  Back outside, late afternoon sun filters through the remains of rain clouds. On the unshaded asphalt, it’s t-shirt weather. The view of the Chugach Mountains is superb. I realize I’ve never seen it from WalMart before. I think fleetingly of friends and family up in those alpine expanses, with their heavy packs and their wind-blown tents. Been there, done that, got cold and wet. Time for supper in the level, propane-heated, bug-free comfort of my borrowed home.

  As I warm soup on the camper stove, I can’t help but see directly into the long rig from Iowa parked next door. Its owners have just returned in a small SUV. Now he plays cards while his wife prepares supper.

  On the lot, there’s traffic. A Mobile Auto Services truck cruises, offering assistance to newcomers, checking on previous clients. A truck with “The Tree Man” lettered on the side pulls in and parks. No trees for him to doctor here. Turns out, he’s from Outside, living on the lot while he sells his services in suburban Anchorage. He’s home for the night. An elderly couple returns to their camper van from the Dimond Center Mall. He pushes her wheelchair slowly, steadily in the dying sunlight. When they reach their rig, he unlocks the side door and gently assists her inside. Then he folds the wheelchair and parks it. Tough to do in the back country.

  John McPhee took perhaps the most famous swipes at Anchorage in his bestseller Coming Into the Country: “Almost all Americans would recognize Anchorage, because Anchorage is that part of any city where the city has burst its seams and extruded Colonel Sanders.… It has come in on the wind, an American spore.”

  Anchorage still merits McPhee’s late-1970s jabs. Poor planning has led to haphazard development and ugly architecture. Much of the city is an appalling mix of malls, fast-food restaurants, box-like discount stores, and massive parking lots. Yet for all this laying down of asphalt and mushrooming of boxy buildings, pockets of wetlands, woodlands, and other wild areas remain scattered throughout Anchorage, and the Chugach Mountains rise grandly on the town’s eastern fringe. Those natural areas sustain a wide diversity of wildlife: Anchorage is seasonal home to Pacific salmon, 230 species of birds, and 48 different mammals.

  —Bill Sherwonit

  Another couple, denizens of a 5th-wheel-style trailer leveled next to Rich’s SUV, has family members in Anchorage whom they are visiting. Ed and Ruth were campground hosts at Cooper Landing, one of the busiest fishing spots on the Kenai Peninsula, all summer. “You know, there’re lots of single women traveling on the road, just having a good time,” Ed tells me. “Mostly the people in Alaska are really good: it’s really safe. But I’ve thought of getting a shotgun anyway, without ammunition. People tend to get scared off if they hear you cocking a shotgun inside your rig.”

  I didn’t bring mine, but I feel comfortable as night falls, even though I’ve never spent a night alone in a city parking lot before. Bears and blizzards are more my style. So far, my fellow campers display a detached sense of community—keeping an eye out for each other, discreetly. A TV screen flickers in one rig, its antenna raised like whale flukes, tiny in proportion to the RV’s behemoth body. I take a late-night stroll around the lot, alone. Rich has departed for the evening in his vehicle, leaving his small trailer behind. So has another lone man, from Arizona. Have they gone dancing? Is that why they park here in Anchorage, for the nightlife a city offers, a respite from their travels in wilder Alaska? “No hookups” takes on new meaning for me.

  The sound of a generator wakes me Sunday morning, carried on a wind that rocks my camper gently. I need the bathroom, and the morning paper, another perk of pavement camping. Returning from WalMart, I bend to pet a dog that nuzzles my knees, but her owner calls her back. He is Dick Francis. He’s talking with two other men, beneath a caribou rack tied on his Montana camper-van. “We were just saying that women don’t like to hunt and fish,” he says. “Do you?”

  “Of course.”

  Three pairs of eyebrows rise simultaneously. In their collective experience, there are not enough women who enjoy the outdoors. “You see those rigs coming up here,” Dick says. “He’s driving and looking really happy; she’s sittin’ with her arms crossed and frowning.” Dick is in Alaska this summer to hunt, fish, and work the busy construction season. Keith Campbell came north with Dick, and the dog, Lady. He’s sailed the Inside Passage twice on small boats. This year he wants to see Alaska’s mainland.

  Tom Kelly, the third man, is having his great Alaska adventure. Introducing themselves to me, Dick and Keith also shake hands with Tom. “You haven’t met?” I ask.

  “Nah, we been talkin’ for three days but we haven’t met,” Tom laughs.

  An hour and three rain squalls later we’re still chatting on the pavement outside Dick’s rig. Dick’s smile disappears into his tanned, seamed face when he laughs. Today is his last free day before a two-month job at Fort Richardson in Anchorage’s east side. Keith’s thick gray curls escape from under a blu
e corduroy Alaska cap. When I mention my mother, he asks, “Does she dance? I’m looking for a dancing partner while I’m here.”

  Most of Tom’s forty years have been bound by what he calls a Midwestern mentality. “Same job, same people, same house. People expect you to be you. Change is not what’s expected.” But when his son said, “Dad, I don’t think you are ever going to go up there,” Tom quit his job and drove to Alaska. A month ago, he stalked bull caribou north of the Brooks Range and killed one with his bow. He kept the backstrap and rack, donating the rest of the meat to the Fairbanks food bank. He shows me a picture of himself with a fish hook through his chin and blood matting his new beard, grinning an impossibly wide grin, the happiest of men. “I kept right on fishing,” he laughs. Then moans, “I gotta get out of this parking lot. It’s driving me crazy!”

  Other rig owners have “For Sale” signs posted. One battered truck and one classic black sedan look abandoned to the side of the RV parking area. “Is there zoning here?” I ask.

  “Nah,” the men say, “but if you got a bucket outside…”

  I do, of course. Is that why my Iowa neighbors, who can see the gray water draining into the bucket from my sink, are so aloof? To each his own, I think. My camper drips, but their rig generator woke me up this morning.

  I trek back to WalMart for some research in the “Books” aisle. A new question has emerged. I pull out a copy of Catch and Release: The Guide to Finding an Alaska Man. Sure enough, it omits all mention of hanging out in WalMart parking lots. I make a note to send an addition to the editors.

  As the rainy day passes noon, I wrap up my expedition with one last stroll around my village. Ed and Ruth are gone for the day, their trailer locked. Bill and Terri plan to camp here all week, until their daughter flies in to meet them. Woody and Rose take off for Talkeetna, “unless the weather stays this bad. If it does, we’ll camp at the WalMart in Wasilla.” The Chugach have disappeared under low clouds flowing like thick cream.

  Dick and Keith invite me for a last cup of coffee, this time out of the rain, at the McDonald’s inside WalMart. Tom ambles by, observing that I’m in danger of becoming a “lot rat.”

  “Better than being a house rat,” I respond.

  After coffee, I take up my sink-drain bucket and lock the camper door. My restless spirit is primed after this weekend among road wayfarers. Now that the Alaska Highway is paved, I could just keep going, on to the next WalMart and the next.… I jump into the truck cab, slide Dire Straits into the cassette player, sing “Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug” and head off down the road.

  Ellen Bielawski is a co-editor of this book. She never camps at WalMart unless looking for a story.

  TOM DUNKEL

  Taking on the Kenai

  Alaska-in-miniature is just a quick drive south of Anchorage.

  ABOUT THE ONLY THING THAT ISN’T OVERPRICED IN Alaska is advice. Folks still dispense it free just like in the Lower 48, and right now I’m getting a friendly earful.

  “Don’t hesitate when you’re here, ’cause you may not ever be here again,” says Eddy, who is urging me to push the tourist envelope during my stay in Alaska. “This is wilderness fantasyland. There’s nothin’ left like it, unless it’s Siberia, and it’s pretty hard to travel there.”

  We’ve never met before. Eddy just happens to be sitting two bar stools from me at Ray’s seafood restaurant in Seward, which just happens to be one of the hot towns on the Kenai Peninsula.… Eddy wears a big cowboy hat, smokes big cigars, and has a small airplane. He lives in Wyoming and frequently flies north to sportfish. He’s crazy for Alaska, so much so that he wouldn’t mind dying here. Apparently, the perfect way to go is to be devoured by a grizzly bear.

  “That’s gotta elevate you to a higher plane,” declares Eddy, smitten by the prospect of traveling first-class to the hereafter.

  To each his own demise. I can appreciate the basic wisdom of Eddy’s travel logic, though. Alaska is Big Country: Colorado on steroids. You can’t let it intimidate you. Don’t be spooked by tales of campers who get filleted by a grizzly. Don’t be cowed by cold air or bug bites. Venture out of your car and off the tour bus. Get dirty. Break a sweat. Indulge your curiosity.

  The Kenai Peninsula—know simply as “the Kenai”—couldn’t be more user-friendly. It’s the abridged version of Alaska: just an hour’s drive south of Anchorage, packed with postcard views, seemingly endless riffles of snow-dusted mountains, rivers that roil with spawning salmon, an abundant supply of moose, bears, eagles, and those comical puffins that look to be wearing false noses, four active volcanoes, and one gigantic, otherworldly icefield.

  I encountered Eddy the Advice Man five days into my trip. By then I was already immersed in the Kenai’s many delights. In fact, I had just spent the day shoehorned into a kayak, silently knifing through frigid Resurrection Bay. Tom Twigg, an architect turned guide, took me and three other novices out for a ten-mile spin. We embarked from a sliver of beach on the outskirts of Seward under a blue, late-summer sky.

  The beauty of a kayak isn’t portability, but rather its idiot-proof buoyancy. Twigg gave us an orientation on paddle strokes and weight distribution, reminding us of the 50/50 rule for cold-water survival (“The average person has a 50-percent chance of surviving a 50-yard swim”). On that sobering note, we shoved off, Twigg in a solo kayak, the rest of us doubling up.

  I hoped that a little low-key kayaking would provide an antidote to the assembly-line adventure I’d experienced the day before, when I cruised the bay on a 150-passenger sightseeing ship. It zipped along at twenty-three knots, looping into a fjord that dead-ended at the glistening lip of Holgate Glacier. The wall of ancient ice thundered as house-size chunks cleaved off and crashed into the water. Passengers gleefully shouted at the glacier in an attempt to induce even more calving. During the six-hour excursion, cormorants and red-necked phalaropes darted overhead, plump sea lions sunbathed on exposed rocks, and a pod of orcas cavorted in the boat’s froth. Splendid sights all, but diminished by the cattle-car viewing conditions. I later learned that this ship had accidentally rammed a humpback whale a few months earlier.

  Now, skimming around at sea-lion level, I felt sprung from a cage. In kayaks, we were part of the actual show of the bay, not gawkers holding admission tickets. Horned puffins gaped from nooks in the cliffs we paddled under, tucked tight in their holes like letters in post-office boxes. Bald eagles lazed overhead—they seem as common as crows here—riding the thermals and oozing majesty.

  Twigg led us up a side creek that was barely knee deep, yet running heavy with pink and chum salmon. Hundreds of them, hyperkinetic as jumping beans, wiggled beneath us, driven by the strange hormonal explosion that propels them ever onward to spawn and promptly die, their bodies providing food for bears and other forest critters. “Dog” salmon the chum are called, suitable mainly for pet food, since their flesh degrades quickly as they near the coast.

  “Once they hit fresh water,” Twigg noted, “salmon are basically living off themselves.”

  While the creek reeked of death, life rolled merrily along out in the open bay. As we headed back at day’s end, a lone sea otter did a slow float about thirty feet ahead of us. He was munching clams. We could hear the crack of shells breaking against a stone on his belly. Sea otters don’t produce blubber; they depend on their thick coats for warmth. To keep the hairs from matting and losing insulation, they groom constantly and execute barrel roll after barrel roll.

  “Sea otters and kayaks have played a big role in Alaska,” Twigg said, as we fought a slight headwind and our escort kept easy pace, snacking away. “The Russians basically enslaved the Natives into hunting otters.” After Vitus Bering’s voyage of discovery in 1741, the Chinese developed an insatiable appetite for otter fur. Overhunted in the Kenai, sea otters have since recovered and are as valuable today as they once were, not for fur, but for Alaska’s tourism industry. That brings its own threats. At Seward, the marina has swelled to 550
slips and now accommodates jumbo cruise ships. With more traffic on the bay, veteran guides admit it’s getting harder to find wildlife.

  I dodge big tourism by begging off Seward’s renovated Best Western in favor of the Van Gilder Hotel, a Victorian-era remnant listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Instead of cable TV and in-room coffee, the Van Gilder offers a walk-up room with antique furniture and lots of character. I half expect to look out my window and see gas lamps lighting the way for sourdoughs as they stagger out of honky-tonk saloons.

  Don Nelson, who gave up wildcatting on the North Slope ten years ago and opened the hotel with his wife, says the new breed of cruise-ship tourists are apt to hop on a day-trip charter bus to Denali as soon as they hit shore. “It isn’t like before,” he says. “They used to rent a car and go off exploring.”

  I have done my own exploring by driving here from Anchorage via Portage Glacier, then down seventy-five miles of highway through a flume of mountains. Portage Glacier is one of Alaska’s top attractions, but more because of its proximity to Anchorage than any inherent grandeur. Exit Glacier, near Seward, has the knee-buckling grandeur.

  I pull into the parking lot of Exit Glacier on a drizzly morning. The sun is straining to bust through the cloud cover—a “sucker hole,” as local pilots call such tantalizing breaks in bad weather. Two short loop trails go to the base of the glacier; another winds four miles uphill. The latter parallels this protruding tongue of the Harding Icefield, a frozen desert that straddles Kenai Fjords National Park and Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. It sprawls over 700 square miles, blanketing the lower Kenai halfway to Homer.

  I place my bets on the icefield trail, and it turns out to be a lucky day for suckers. The clouds lift. The panoramic views pull into focus. I’ve hit the hiking jackpot. The trail climbs through thickets of cottonwood and alder, then through clusters of red salmonberry and pink fireweed. Up and up. Subalpine meadow surrenders to alpine tundra. I bump into Don and Debbie Muggli, a Seattle-area couple who gave themselves an Alaska vacation as a twenty-fifth-anniversary present. Don’s a hunter and bear buff. He points toward a sunny patch of green on the opposite mountainside, about a half mile away.