Day Eleven: Seattle, Washington to Fairbanks, Alaska via plane

Thursday 3 October -- Up at 4:00am.  Sea-Tac is easy.  Flight is fine.  Sleep mostly.  Arrive in Anchorage at lunchtime with a one-hour layover,  eat a sandwich and drink part of a Fairbanks-brewed beer in an airport bar that includes this warning to women hoping to meet men in Alaska:  “The odds are good, but the goods are odd.”  Actually, I don’t notice any disparity in numbers during my brief visit; nor do I notice anyone who seems unusually odd.

And by the time I was walking around town,
it was positively temperate.

The next plane lifts off and passes through the same bumpy bits as the first plane passed on descent.  Anchorage, from the air, looks like a patch of ungainly suburban sprawl.  Seriously, the airport looks bigger than the rest of the city, but that can’t be right.  Can it?  Across a bay from the sprawl there are woods and – well, I guess that’s probably tundra.  Squeee! as B.D. would say; I’ve never seen tundra before.  Everything is irregularly polka-dotted with more ponds and lakes than I can count, and oh, yes, majestic mountains abound.  Then the plane starts bumping and we’re in the clouds again.  The pilot mentions that it’s right about freezing in Fairbanks, which seems a good portent for a relatively mild day, as it’s only 10:15 and there are still vestiges of sunrise in the sky.

The clouds clear away after about ten minutes’ flying, and I can see mountains, mountains, all snow topped, and rivers between them – really wriggly rivers.  As we get closer to Fairbanks, though, the land beneath the plane turns flat flat flat flat flat, though the far horizons are still mountainous, and everywhere streams and ponds.  The descent into Fairbanks is easy and quick.

Fairbanks airport is tiny; Alaska Airlines meets its 20 minute guarantee for delivering checked luggage with time to spare, and my rentacar is waiting.  The people ahead of me in the rentacar line ask the agent if what the chances are they’ll see a moose, and she says, “In Fairbanks?  No chance.  They don’t come into town.”  At a stoplight, I glance left and notice the Kia Sorrento next to me has an Alabama license plate.  Other than that, it’s pretty much just Alaska.

Tyla

My B&B proprietor greets me kindly and introduces Tyla the cat.  She’s a six-year old Siamese, and she’s curled up on my bed, napping.  She’s a lot plumper than my beloved and recently-deceased Jojo, and has different coloring, but I am very glad indeed to meet her.  She and Jojo are clearly kin in some degree, as Tyla has the same trick of clonking over on the ground to show it’s time for pats, which she does shortly after I disturb her rest by moving in all my stuff.

The Chena runs calm through Fairbanks

When Tyla and I are done patting, John, the proprietor, offers numerous helpful ideas for a walking tour of Fairbanks, and I head out briskly.  It’s about two blocks to the Chena River, which flows through Fairbanks, and I spend some time crossing bridges.  One of the bridges is decorated with the flags of all 50 states (I don’t know about DC and the territories).  It looks very festive and welcoming.

After her lengthy career, Ganges is sick of posing for photos.

There’s a gift shop and mini (very mini) museum devoted to the Yukon Quest, a 1,000-mile dog-sled race.  I meet Ganges, now 13 and actually in tip-top shape, bar the blindness in one eye, and in her prime a lead dog for Dave Dalton.  Ganges looks like an athlete, though sleepier.  Her current handler assures me that if he let her off the lead, she’d run out the door and all over town and he’d never be able to keep up.  He also tells me a lot about Yukon Quests of the past, and that one-third of all Americans work for the federal government.  I contest the figure, he notes that it includes private-sector employees of government contractors, I ask whether he’s including all employees of say, GM, if GM gets a small portion of its revenue from the government, and he says then you add in all the state and municipal employees and zowie.  He shakes his head in dismay while I try to rearrange my face from the highly-skeptical expression it has assumed without my consent.  Then I ask a few more questions about sled-dog races, and I suspect we’re both happier that way.

The Fairbanks Community Museum contains lots of photos, posters, documents and newspapers.  There’s one section dedicated to the 1967 flood, which did tremendous damage but caused relatively little death and injury.  There’s a room devoted to sled-dog racing, and another to the gold rush of the early 1900s.  The woman staffing the front desk, a life-long Fairbanksan with an East Texas dad, reminisces at length about listening to live radio broadcasts of the dog-sled sprint races that featured the great rivals George Attla (local, cool, native) and Dr. Roland Lombard (patrician, Massachusetts transplant, veterinarian) in the 1960s and 70s, when Alaska didn’t get live sporting events from the lower 48.

A few shops, some art galleries, including the Doyon Corporation’s lobby, where this native mining company welcomes visitors who want to look at its collection of native art.

'Spirit Quest'

Guess oh guess*

And this

Knife-maker Patrick Holland with knife

On the other side of the river, one of the shops carries the proprietor’s hand-made knives.  He cuts and grinds the steel from palettes, and etches designs into it, and then he builds the handles from antler, bone, wood and maybe stone.  They are gorgeous.

A little piece of Italy

Happily tired in brain and somewhat less happily in feet, I choose the only restaurant between me and the B&B.  It is called Pasta Bella and seems incongruous, as it is resolutely decorated in Tuscan motifs.  Back at the B&B, I fall asleep way faster than a person who needs to spend some time digesting fettucine should.  A few hours later, Tyla starts chatting, so I open my door a crack and she strolls in and jumps up on to the bed with me.  Shades of Jojo, though Tyla does not lie down on my sternum.

 

*The vertical one is a made from a moose's bladder; the horizontal one from a moose's pericardium.  No info as to whether the same or different moose.