Escape to Alaska: Denali is the Finale

We went looking for a mountain.

It sounds a bit odd to say we were hunting for a mountain when the mountain in question is Denali, officially known (according to Congress) as Mount McKinley, the tallest mountain on the North American continent and possibly the most impressive upthrust of rock and snow on the entire planet.

But Denali can be difficult to spot. Blame it on the weather.

The bus driver who takes you into Denali National Park tells you that you have only a 30% chance of seeing the mountain. When Denali does make one of its much coveted appearances, people speak of it as if referring to a shy person or a hermit who has emerged from a cave. "The mountain is out today," they say. The rest of the time? The mountain is not out; it is shrouded in clouds.

There wasn't much suspense involved in our trip into the park. Given that we had had slashing rains during the night, we were pretty sure that clouds still had the upper hand from the mountain's 20,320-foot peak to nearly its base. So we did what all other tourists on the bus did; we concentrated on spotting wildlife.

We saw moose, bears, caribou, and a fox. Unlike most of the others aboard the bus, I didn't rush to the window and stick my camera out and press the shutter release. I could see the animals clearly, all right, but it wasn't a photoworthy moment unless one had a giant telephoto lens. I just relaxed. I enjoyed the ride.

It was an 8-hour round-trip over the dirt road.

 We stopped every hour or so to use the park facilities and snap a few more photos.

An aptly named "braided river"...

The variegated colors of Polychrome Pass

Our driver, Joe, provided lots of interesting commentary about the history of the park and the features of the rocks, plants, and animals.

Did you know that an arctic squirrel hibernates but that brown bears don't? The latter are actually in a trance-like state in which they don't eat or eliminate waste, but they can be aroused awake during the winter. Winter hikers beware!

Did you know that due to climate change the boreal forest is moving north? With warmer temperatures, plants and trees are able to live at higher elevations and latitudes than before. Recent photographs of the park compared with those from nearly a hundred years ago show forests in places that were barren before.

Did you know that Mt. McKinley was named after Senator William McKinley not President McKinley? That a goldminer with ties to the Eastern newspaper establishment named the mountain to call attention to the senator from Ohio who (happily from the miner's point of view) supported a gold standard for the nation's currency base rather than a silver standard. The senator went on to become president.

Or did you know that one Alaskan town wanted to name itself after the state bird, but residents had trouble spelling P-t-a-r-m-i-g-a-n, so they became Chicken, Alaska.

Interesting stuff, but I still wished my wife and son could see the mountain the way I'd experienced it as a young man. Back then, five friends and I rode all the way to the end of the park road, got out, and camped in the shadow of Denali. And it was "out."  In fact, it looked just like the photo in the souvenir booklet that Joe the driver distributed to us at the end of the day.

As I looked at that photo I realized that the mountain was like a lot of things in life. It has to be there all the time even when it's not registering on the senses.

Like joy. A gloomy day comes along and one wonders was I ever happy a single time in my life?

Like love. When you're alone you wonder have I ever had a friend in this world? Has anyone ever really appreciated me?

Or the transcendent. If the world is making no sense it's easy to start to think there's never been a glimpse of some kind of presence behind this reality, some larger thing that actually cares that humanity and I are doing our best (or worst) to survive another orbit around the sun on this little rock we call planet earth.

But then I remember: I glimpsed it once. It was there. It was enormous and real. And even if I never see it again, it's still there, just the other side of the obscuring clouds.

When I believe that, it's a lot easier to move on through the curtains of rain. To appreciate the other, smaller things the sun illuminates when it finally breaks through the overcast.  To say that as long as today is today, this will be enough. - V.W.

Escape to Alaska: A Tale of Two Fish Cities

Fishing boats lined up in front of the processing plant.

Every summer the salmon return from the ocean to find the original streams in which they were born years earlier.

It's one of the largely unexplained mysteries of nature. After so many years of maturing in salt water, how do the fish make the change to fresh water and get all the way home? How do they survive the mishaps and predators along their route? How do they keep from getting caught by the innovations of humans, including hooks, traps, and nets?

Most of them don't. It's  been estimated that for every 25 million salmon eggs that are laid, only two fish arrive home to complete the cycle and spawn in the stream beds.

Yet the salmon keep on coming. By the thousands. Every summer.

We took a stroll along the docks of a cannery that my brother-in-law worked in decades ago when he was an 18-year-old looking for his first good paying job.

This was back when Alaskan salmon marketed to the word was in 16 oz and 8 oz tin cans. You should know that canned salmon is to fresh salmon what canned tomatoes are to fresh tomatoes. Yes, you can eat it, but it's hardly memorable. But canned salmon was all technology would allow at that point.

Gary showed us where a congregation of young and old, male and female, Filipinos, Alaska Natives, and whites worked in those summers long ago. The work was wet and filthy, especially near the so-called "Iron Chink" which was a machine that sliced off the fish heads and tales. Guts and slime abounded.

Wash it all down the drain...

It so happened that Gary had one of the best jobs, towards the end of the assembly line. He was charged with using a machine to tip the sealed cans into their cases.  The box of cans then went to the gluing machine. He held the record at one time for processing 750 cases in an hour.

Today the cannery is closed, but someone has purchased the buildings and attempted to turn it into a restaurant and tourist attraction. Signs explain the original purpose of each building. Unfortunately, when we arrived it appeared that this money-making repurposing of the old cannery was not a going concern. Nothing appeared to have been opened in a while. We stared through windows into empty buildings.

Next door the processing of salmon went on in a more modern fashion. The new plant takes the salmon and flash freezes the whole fish. In this form the salmon is much more valuable than in its humble canned form. It's a delicacy that can be brought to the table at the restaurant and served at a premium price.

I have to admit that it's hard for me to contemplate going back to purchasing a can of salmon and forming it into a fried salmon croquette (my mom's favorite recipe). This defunct salmon cannery seems quaint. But still I can appreciate what this place represents: lives bumping together for a few months in the summer, all in the name of industry and a paycheck. Something important happened here and I can still feel it. - V.W.

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Escape to Alaska: Another Way of Life

Living in Alaska means lots of things.

For example, paying some of the highest gasoline prices in the country even though the state is the nation's largest domestic producer of oil.

It also means having a very cool license plate issued in 2009. That was the year that Alaska celebrated 50 years of statehood.

In Alaska you never live very far from nature and the splendor of the earth, largely uninterrupted by the intrusions of humans. Like  the friends we visited in Homer, Alaska who have this for a view from their living room up on the hillside.

When you live so close to nature you're drawn to be in the midst of it. My brother-in-law took us mountain biking on a trail that was less than a mile from his front porch.

Alaskans like to take advantage of the long growing hours provided by the Midnight Sun and plant some edibles in their back yards. A tall fence is necessary to keep out the rabbits--and any moose that come by, eager for a munch. In addition, a green house helps the plants that need more heat. Until one gets into the Interior, the hottest summer day is mild. Around 70 F. degrees.

Cabbage or spinach, anyone?

The real bounty of Alaska isn't on the land, but in the ocean and rivers.

My nephew took out a boatload of relatives and they fished Kachemak Bay. They came back with fresh halibut, a delicious white fish that can grow to upwards of 300 lbs.

They filleted the fish, cut the rest into steaks, and less than an hour later we were eating it. By then it was 9 p.m. It's a fact that Alaskans tend to eat late in the summer. Why not? With the sun so high in the sky there's little reason to start to think about going to bed until you look at your watch and say, "Oh my, is it really getting on toward midnight?" - V.W.

Escape to Alaska: Wild About Wildflowers

There's an old saying about the northern way of life:

In Alaska there are two seasons. Winter and getting ready for winter...

It's true Alaska's growing season is brief, but everything green makes the most of it.


And the midnight sun means that things are growing almost 24/7.

This explains some of the sights that follow.

A common thing to come across alongside the road or in a field is LOL = lots of lupine...

Even the dandelions here are HUGE and belong to an order of beauty and wonder that makes a person ashamed to call them a "weed."

 

- V.W.

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Escape to Alaska: The Town Where Salmon is King

Soldotna, Alaska. On the Kenai River. This little town bustles and hums in the summer as the RVs, trailers, accompanied by hardware-encumbered tourists, roll in. They're intent on catching red salmon and, the monster of the river, a king salmon.

It's an industry.

f

Translation: On Friday it will be legal to fish
the Kenai River using salmon eggs on a hook.

But that's not why we're here. My wife's brother lives in Soldotna. It's been three years since we've gotten together. He's going to catch us up on the Alaska we've been missing.

So let's slip into the rhythm of the north...

Around 6 a.m. I wake up to clear skies. The sun has been up longer, I suppose. Whatever the case, all the light shining through the crack in the curtains is significant. After a long dark winter, Alaskans crave as many bright, warm summer days as they can get. I know. I lived in this state for 25 years. A dismal summer day with clouds and drizzle was the ultimate downer. But that's not what we have today.

Backyard view Alaska-style...

I  get dressed, pull on my shoes, and go for a run. I'm liking what I feel. For the first time in months the air is friendly. I'm not breaking out in a sweat.

Then it's time to go to breakfast at a local cafe.

Our son orders the Spruce Tree. It's one of a host of gimmicky named entrees directed at the tourist crowd. Nevertheless, this culinary item turns out pretty nice...

That's French toast with bacon to form the trunk...

On the way out the cafe a friendly malemute sticks his head out the side of an SUV and howls a bit for us.

The wild, intriguing face of Alaska.

The day is turning out quite nice. Ahead of us are a visit to the mouth of the Kenai River, some wild flower photography, a walk through an old salmon cannery, and a dish of delectable rhubarb cobbler topped with whipped cream.

After that it will be evening and the sun will be almost as high as if it's still early afternoon.  Who knows how late we may stay up, talking, soaking up every solar morsel of the midnight sun? That's what Alaskans do, and whether in Rome or Soldotna it doesn't hurt to follow the crowd. We can always sleep once we get back home. Wherever that is. - V.W.

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Escape to Alaska: Photos Day One

The ending of my last post was a bit misleading. I didn't suddenly say to myself, "I can't take this heat anymore" and decide to leave.

The tickets for our trip to Alaska were purchased months ago. I just didn't know that at this juncture in life how necesary it would be to point ourselves toward the Far North.

The daily onslaught of high temperatures has been killing us. Packing our bags it feels less like we are going on a two-week vacation than like we're prisoners busting out of a hot house jail.

Our plane takes off, bringing an immediate sense of relief. It's already like falling into a northern dream and we're not even there yet.

Between the fourth and fifth hour of a seven-hour flight I look out the window.

"I think that's Canada," someone in the row behind me says.

They say you can never get a good picture out an airplane window, but I snap another one anyway.

Everything is so large, white, amazing. Just what I want to see. Then, for a while, nothing but cloud cover. Until there comes a parting.

The rest of the way it's all mountains and glaciers.

We land in Anchorage. It's 7:30 p.m., the sun is shining, and it's nearly 50 F. degrees cooler than back home. The sun will not set until sometime after midnight.

We load up in an SUV and start driving south. We're headed to the Kenai Peninsula, the land of salmon. - V.W.

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Whatever Happened to the Great Society?

One thing I know, even in my Van Winkled state, is that we have reached the time of year when caps and gowns are worn and students walk across the stage to receive their college diplomas. This means that throughout America esteemed men and women are stepping to podiums to offer words of wisdom and encouragement to the about to be graduated.



President Johnson articulates his vision
of "The Great Society.".

Forty-seven years ago this Sunday past there was a famous person addressing the graduating class at the University of Michigan. Standing before the microphone and cameras for approximately fifteen minutes, he delivered what some rhetoricians have listed as one of the 100 greatest American speeches of all time.

I refer to President Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" speech of May 22, 1964.

Flash Ahead Two Years...
Back when I was growing up my father worked for a major petroleum company. This explains why by the time I was ready for junior high our family had moved about as many times as I'd spent years in school. Our parents practically had rehearsed lines. Each time they told my brothers and me, "Dad is being transferred. We're going to have to sell the house, pack up, and move to... [city, state]."

In 1966 we received the biggest shock of all. Mom and Dad filled in the blank for their three sons as follows:

"We're going to move to Anchorage, Alaska."

Living Out of a Suitcase
When we arrived in the 49th state it had been just over two years since the Good Friday earthquake that struck on March 27, 1964. That epic earthquake was the strongest ever recorded on the North American continent.

The day the earth shook. Along Anchorage's 4th Ave.
four blocks dropped 20 feet below street level.

Parked cars were left in an odd position.

Two years was long enough that most of the debris had been hauled off. My brothers and I were a bit disappointed. We had seen pictures of downtown Anchorage like those above. Yes, it was tragic, but it was also drama writ large and the childish mind desired to be titillated by devastation.

Instead, the city was in full recovery mode. Especially near our new temporary home, the third floor of the Turnagain Arms Apartments. The oil company was leasing this apartment for us until our parents found us a house to buy or rent.

The Turnagain Arms was an unimpressive structure across the street from the high-rise Anchorage Westward Hotel. The first day we were in town our parents took us for lunch at the Westward. Two things happened.

There was an earth tremor and we stared, mouths agape, as the large chandeliers in the dining room swayed above us.

A bigger shock came when our parents (ever thrifty even when eating on the oil company's expense account) tried to order us the cheapest thing on the menu, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. They'd heard that "due to transportation costs" Alaska prices were 30-40% higher than in the States, but in 1966 they weren't prepared for a $5 PJB.

We never dined at the Westward again.

In 2008 I returned to Alaska and took a picture
of where our family lived in the fall of 1966.

The cost of living wasn't the only problem.

Just down the street from us was the "Buttress Area" where the destroyed downtown buildings had been cleared away. Engineers were supervising crews who were driving iron piling into the earth in order to reinforce it so it could be built upon again and (perhaps) survive a future earthquake.

Clank, clank, clank was our soundtrack. They were driving piling twenty-four hours a day. Like the world's worst headache, it never stopped.

The President is Coming
It was a definite adventure being in Alaska in those days. The city of Anchorage was half raw frontier where you could see how recently the land had been scraped away and the bears and moose pushed back a short distance in order to make a tenuous urban existence for about 60,000 souls. You only had to drive for five minutes and you were out of the city and into the woods.

Modern conveniences taken for granted in the rest of America were a big deal here. For example, people still remembered how the Turnagain Arms Apartments were home to one of the first elevators installed in the city. They said that people used to come over and ride it just to experience it.

All I knew was our apartment was old, the wall-to-wall carpeting smelled of cigarette smoke, and that the once shiny new Otis elevator was rickety and slow.

It was a weird life living out of suitcases (all our furniture and possessions were in storage) and walking through downtown to go to school each day, and on weekends getting into the car to join Mom and Dad when they went house hunting.

We had arrived in August and by the fall, with the first snow imminent, we still didn't have a real place to live. That's when we heard that the president was coming. He would be staying across the street from our apartment. In the Westward Hotel.

The LBJ Style
There's really not much of a record of the president's trip to Alaska on Nov. 1-2, 1964. Perhaps that's because it was just a stopover. LBJ and Lady Bird were ending a 17-day Asian tour. They overnighted in Anchorage, which meant they were with us only 9 hours total.

Still, it was memorable.

We kept waiting for a gentleman in a suit to knock at the apartment door, show us a badge, and ask my mother a few questions about who we were. Oddly, no one from the Secret Service came by. I say oddly because it was only 6 months since bullets cut down President Kennedy in his motorcade and it was all too apparent that the windows of our apartment would give us a sniper's view of LBJ's limousine as it arrived at the Westward Hotel.

The president issued an executive order.
Everyone would go to the bonfire located on
the west end of the Buttress Area (red star).

A further breach of security occurred courtesy of the president himself. Was he worried about his safety? Hardly.

As soon as the limo pulled up we leaned out our windows for a perfect view. The president got out, waved, and shook hands, exposing himself directly to the crowd.

Soon the people in the street was surging forward in an almost uncontainable fashion. LBJ deftly backed away and got on the running board of the Lincoln Continental. He grabbed a microphone that was wired to a speaker on the car while the Secret Service agents, some of them holding Thompson submachine guns, no less, nervously scanned the crowd and those of us dangling out the windows.

"Now everybody stand back. We don't want anyone to get hurt," LBJ said in a gentle drawl. "We're all going down to the bonfire."

It seemed that Lyndon Johnson had a spontaneous urge that night. The president's Alaska hosts had built a giant fire in the Buttress Area in honor of his arrival. There were plenty of demolished building materials to ignite. Although it was not on the official schedule, LBJ had decided he wanted to check out the "bawn-fower," as he pronounced it. Why? I have no idea. Maybe he thought it would be neat to see. Maybe he thought it was the polite thing to do. Maybe it reminded him of his youth. Maybe he was cold...

So to the bonfire the presidential party went. The limo rolled ahead, out of my  sight.

It was the closest I ever got to a president of the United States.

The Beginning and End of Something
I have to admit that until now I've hardly thought about Lyndon Johnson. But with the anniversary of the Great Society speech I find myself taking stock. That speech represented Johnson's vision for his presidency. If you read it or listen to it, you'll notice that there were three areas he believed should be improved in order to make a better America: our cities, the natural world (what today we'd call "the environment"), and education.

And it's also worth noting that four times in a speech that was only 1,800 words long LBJ used the word "beauty," including my favorite paragraph in which everything is summarized thusly:

    The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich
    his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome
    chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness.
    It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and
    the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for
    community.

What happened to the Great Society? Well, the record shows that Congress passed 84 bills submitted by President Johnson. Everything from Head Start to Medicare to the National Endowment for the Arts had its genesis in this ambitious reshaping of American civil and cultural life.

But that was never supposed to be the whole story:

      The solution to these problems does not rest on a massive program
      in Washington, nor can it rely solely on the strained resources of local
      authority. They require us to create new concepts of cooperation,
      a creative federalism, between the National Capital and the leaders
      of local communities.

Ah, we supposed to all work together. But look at what happened.

By 1968 many of the cities LBJ wanted to regenerate were in flames as race riots spread across the country. Crime was on the rise. City streets were not safe to walk.

As for the beauties of nature and LBJ's desire to prevent "an ugly America", ahead of us were Three Mile Island, Love Canal, the Exxon Valdez, and the strip malling of the suburbs.

The percentage of Americans graduating from
high school soon leveled off.

And education? The goal was to increase the number of Americans graduating from high school. For the next five years this number rose from around 73% of the total population. But as you can see in the graphic on the left, it plateaued in the seventies and has stayed at mid-80 percent.


Presidential Report Card
The problem that LBJ was beginning to face in 1966 was a seemingly containable situation that had grown into an enormous conflagration: Viet Nam. This was why he had been on the 17-day Asian trip and was stopping off in Alaska. What would follow would be regular announcements from the White House, echoing the generals who assured the president that we were "winning the war."

Until it became obvious that we weren't. After that the political ground began to shift beneath the president.

People often talk about what America might have become if John F. Kennedy had not been murdered in the streets of Dallas, but I'll always wonder what would have become of us if Lyndon Johnson had turned away from Viet Nam. Could the Great Society have become a project we labored mutually to bring into being? A society where our cities were temples of commerce, education, and culture? A place where leisure meant a chance to both build and reflect? A place where we encouraged each other to seek beauty and community? A place where all of us appreciated the beautiful land we live in the midst of?

I can't help thinking that LBJ's response to the Gulf of Tonkin "crisis" in August 1964 became his equivalent of the Great Alaska Earthquake. His resorting to an ever-escalating military solution shook to the foundations all his Great Society plans to the point that he decided not to run for re-election in 1968.

After LBJ left office others tried to rebuild from the fractures of the sixties and all the rubble that piled up. We heard about George H. Bush's "Thousand Points of Light," Bill Clinton's "Bridge to the 21st Century."

All such dreams may well be unrealizable, but I have to say I still like, best of all, the idea of a Great Society.That's why in my memory I continue to stare at the flames of a bonfire on a cold northern night. If only that fire would never go out, but of course it did and that's what they call history. - V.W.


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