Friday 4 October -- Fireweed jelly for breakfast! Ah Rose Marie puts on quite
a spread in the mornings, and strives for local goods when available. John offered me the eight most-popular
breakfast cereals in America, rhubarb shortbread from a local baker, Alaska
wheat bread and Dave’s Killer Bread from Portland, scrambled eggs, fruit salad,
two dried-fruit salads, juice, tea, yogurt and scrambled eggs. There may have been more. Fireweed is a purple-flowered herb that grows
well after forest fires, hence the name.
It makes a quite bright-red jelly.
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| The museum that looks like Alaska. |
I tidied up a few things online, then said good-bye to Tyla and John
and headed to the Museum of the North, hosted by the University of Alaska at
Fairbanks. Fairbanks has a great
road-naming system. The main street
through downtown is called Main Street.
To find the U. of A., try University Road. Looking for the airport? Yes, Airport Road. If you’re looking for the Museum of the
North, you can also look up, as it’s located on a bit of a promontory. Or you could scout around until you find the
other building in the town that seems to have been designed for beauty as well
as utility. (Doyon Corporation’s
headquarters is the other, and it’s at the other end of town.)
Once you get there, put at least $2.50 in the parking meter. I started out with $1.00, for two hours, and
had to go back out again twice. This is
a great museum. As mentioned in an early entry, my ex has
many excellent qualities; one is a ready and sometimes quite dry wit. When we went to museums together, he would
take me by the arm in the lobby, look me steadily in the eyes, and say,
“Remember, you’re only allowed to take one
thing home with you.” Not a tricky decision at an aviation museum
(“Which of these things has the highest resale value?”), but very, very challenging
at the Museum of the North.
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| Otto the bear greets visitors to the Gallery of Alaska. |
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| Fossilized mammoth bone with "Please Touch" sign. |
There were four principal spaces:
two for art and two for history and culture. The first art room is small, with multiple
paintings by each of about six well-known Alaskan artists, mostly of the late
19th and early-20th century. The main space, the Gallery of Alaska, is
divided into five areas corresponding to Alaskan geographies: three in the south (Southwest, South Central
and Southeast) and then the Interior and the Western & Arctic Coast. The exhibits ranged from a 36,000-year old mummified
bison to 2,500-year old ivory carvings to a 19th-century silver
Russian coffee service. There’s a bit of
interactivity, and consistently helpful signs.
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| Very modern outhouse comprised of less-modern components |
Upstairs is the main art gallery, with works from ancient carvings and
textiles to an extremely modern sculpture of an outhouse, made with license
plates, posters, liquor bottles and other found objects. The curators present artists from Alaska and
from outside Alaska, of Native, European and Asian heritage and maybe others,
ancient to modern. They had one
selection of mostly paintings by Alaska-born artists and another by
non-Alaskans, and asked whether viewers noticed any consistent differences. I think the non-Alaskans were more likely to
choose dramatic landscapes and events as their subjects, while the Alaskans
tended to show smaller landscapes and domestic scenes.
Downstairs again, in the special-exhibit gallery, there were artifacts
presented with a timeline of the first successful ascent of Denali, in 1913. The timeline was comprised of quotations from
writings and interviews with the four men who made the ascent. The driving force for the journey was an
Englishman who’d come to Alaska after taking a degree in Tennessee and becoming
an Episcopal minister. As Archdeacon for
Fairbanks, he was looking to raise funds for the church. An earlier team had claimed success at
summiting, and even though none of the locals believed them, they garnered
considerable wealth through books and articles, and maybe a lecture tour. There was also an engineer from Chicago, a
athletic native, and a missionary from Tennessee. Their support team was two native boys, one
of whom went home once base camp was established, while the other kept the
base, which included the vitally important dogs. Each of the four summiters makes a point of
noting how happy he was to see the dogs so fat when they got back to base. Ganges, the sled dog I met yesterday, is
emphatically not fat. But people had
different standards of fatness 100 years ago, so maybe they just meant, “not
starved.”
Four and a half hours later, I emerged into beautiful blue skies and
cool sunshine. Hopping back into the
car, I got a little lost. Since I was headed
for the Chena Hot Springs Resort, I of course needed Chena Hot Springs Road,
but none of the streets is called This Way to Chena Hot Springs Road
Street. Fortunately, my wanderings led
me in the direction of the Pita Place, a roadside falafel joint that was
closing for the season the next day.
They had some fine pita (not Detroit fine, but very good indeed) and
excellent fillings. While I was there a
young couple came in and asked about almost everything on the menu: What’s falafel? What’s hummus? What’s pita?
One of them was wearing a U. Kansas sweatshirt, but it was a gift from a
friend; he’s a native Fairbanksan. I
speculate that middle-eastern cuisine may not be as popular in the frozen north
as it is in the east.
Chena Hot Springs Road is 56.5 miles of well-paved, one-lane (in each
direction) not-highway-but-people-seem-to-treat-it-like-one, except it’s
traversed by school buses, which stop and put on the flashers and the stop sign
so little kids can scamper across the street.
Cool. It passes a gas station and
four or five stores and ‘lodges’, several driveways and side streets, and many
acres of birch, popular and spruce trees.
It crosses three or four creeks, the Little Chena River, the West Fork
of the Chena River once, and the North Fork six or seven times.
The resort is what one Fairbanksan called “Alaska luxury – don’t expect
marble and crystal, it’s wood and plastic like everything else.” One does not go there for the décor, though
(nor for internet connectivity, as I later discovered), but for the woods and
hills, the ice museum and geothermal plant, and most especially for the
hot-spring fed rock lake. Swimsuit
unearthed, I strolled over to the pool complex.
There are two indoor hot tubs, chlorinated, a fair-sized heated indoor
pool, also chlorinated, and the outdoor rock lake, festering with whatever
minerals and bacteria and stuff nature sees fit to provide. The lake reaches temperatures of 147F, they
say. I’m pretty sure I would be stew if
I’d found the 147 degree part, but in the coolest places I tried it was like a
very, very, very warm bath, and there were spots I found uncomfortably toasty. So I stuck to the less-hot end, floating on
my back, looking up at the sky – which was beginning to cloud over, expletive
delete it.
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| Hot springs, steaming in the Alaska air. |
There are geese on a small pond near my room, and as I type this, at
about 7:30pm with the sun disappeared behind the hills, they are kicking up an
awful ruckus. (It will be many days
before I can post what I’ve typed.) The
resort takes pride in growing much of its produce in geo-thermally heated
greenhouses, and serving it up in the not-as-pricey-as-you’d-expect
restaurant. I keep worrying that their
“Chena Grown!” boast might also apply to the roast fowl on the menu, and don’t
want to look out the window to see who’s doing what to those birds. Maybe the poor things are just being attacked
by arctic foxes (which actually I would love to see. There’s a stuffed one in the Museum of the
North, and it has the most lovely, long white fur.).
Now the electricity has gone out.
The hotel directory in my room warned me this might happen. Apparently the geothermal energy process they
use here is not 100% reliable, but I have no fear that the resort’s
highly-trained technicians will get everything running again. It went out while I was swimming laps
earlier, too, and it was nicer that way – though there was still plenty of
sunlight at that point, filtering through the polyurethane roof to keep me from
banging into the sides of the pool.
No internet, no electricity – this is why our pioneer forebears were so
sturdy. They got plenty of sleep.
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