An Alaska Dispatch
Slow Travels in a Northern Winter
“A good place to understand the present, and to ask questions about the future, is on the ground, traveling as slowly as possible.”
— Robert D. Kaplan, ‘The Revenge of Geography’ (2012)
“Alaska has long been a magnet for dreamers and misfits, people who think the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier will patch all the holes in their loves…”
— John Krakauer, ‘Into the Wild’ (1996)
Ninety miles up the coast from Seattle, just before the Salish Sea braids back into the ocean and the Eastern Pacific Rim shatters into thousands of islands bound for the High North, the Matanuska was quietly tethered to port. Locals and frequent travelers called it the “Blue Canoe” on grounds of the hull’s dark royal blue veneer. From the vantage offered by a coffee shop just across the loading dock, the paint-job looked clean, and the crew looked busy running in and out to prepare the vessel for her days-long journey ahead. The water was a flat navy-gray, barely distinguishable from the sky overhead, and both the February air and the late-afternoon light were cool. The islands across the bay were only visible in silhouette by the time we were called to board.
People started to trickle through the ship’s rear gate, and — not unlike a long distance train — immediately separated themselves into an onboard class system by those who had a legitimate place to sleep and those who didn’t. Aboard the Canoe, this partitioning went one step further — as those choosing to go on without a bed split into the outdoor sleepers versus the indoor sleepers. A captain with a barely-distinguishable Australian accent checked me in, and just as I started to wonder how he got to skipping passenger ferries up the Alaskan coast in the winter, he interrupted my thought by saying: “Mate, if you’re camping, might I recommend the Solarium. Good sleep.”
Although I had heard about this Solarium — a half-outside, half-inside glass observation room on the top deck that fills up with tents and hammocks in the summer months — I wasn’t expecting it to be an amenity on offer in February. But it was, and it was fitted with an assortment of heat lamps hanging from the ceiling that passengers began to settle under like bugs to a light. Most people claimed their spot for the next few days with a plastic reclining pool chair, which were plentiful, then rolled out their sleeping pads and bags right on top. Others favored the lounge inside instead and planned to sleep either sprawled across a row of seats or flopped right on the ground — both of which were perfectly acceptable and encouraged strategies.
The Matanuska blew its mighty horn and pulled away less than a minute outside of schedule. This is the last time she’d be hitched to land for 38 hours — until we pushed completely through the northernmost Canadian Pacific and arrived on the southernmost shores of Alaska. While looking back towards land from the stern, the glittering lights onshore sunk slowly into darkness. Onboard, the cafeteria was lively and the hallways were full, as people from both classes explored the ship to see what was on offer (something like the first few scenes in Titanic). Eventually I headed back up to the Solarium, made up a beach chair with hoodies and blankets in the recommended fashion, and read under the red light of the heat lamps until fading off.
The night’s rest was buoyed by cold air and the gentle bobbing of the boat. It was camp sleep: an off-and-on collection of half-remembered dreams reset every few hours by waking up to change position and settle back in beneath the chill. I woke up to discover that we were sandwiched inside of a passage hugged by ice-covered hills and dark forests on both sides; the ghostly nature of our surroundings were enhanced by the pre-dawn, metallic hour. The boat was in the Johnstone Strait — with the Thurlowe Islands to our right and the giant Vancouver Island to our left — moving very quickly up the pass. Not long after waking up, the Australian captain circled back around, wished everyone a good morning, and mentioned that he had just studied the weather report for the not-far-off Queen Charlotte Straight, which was looking like “quite the ripper.” He commended us for sleeping outside but urged this adventurous group of travelers to head down to a lower deck sometime in the next hour. The calm waters that we had been enjoying in this inner passage, guarded from unchecked weather in the Pacific by that fortress Vancouver Island, was about to end.
The narrow throat of the channel gradually opened up, and the islands on both sides receded into thick mist. As we moved out into open water, the boat began to rock side-to-side, then front-to-back, with a slow but unrelenting power, which eventually grew strong enough to be felt in the stomachs of many onboard. Public spaces emptied out as people retreated to their makeshift beds and staterooms to lay down. The big glass windows were sprayed with weather; they blurred the separation of sea and sky outside, and the early afternoon became silver with rain.
Really, outside of the Matanuska — which was filled with global company and local art and lounges packed with seats covered in overly-saturated fabrics — it was rare to see any real color at all for most of the day. The only possible exceptions were the deep, dark blues of the ocean, which had turned to ink black, and the heavy greens of the trees, which were mostly just shadows, and one scattershot collection of tiny huts with orange roofs tucked in a fjord somewhere in British Columbia. Other than these shelters, the entire day was spent moving through landscapes of completely undefiled grandeur — there was very little sign of any human interference.
The open water crossing was no joke — one is reminded that even when it looks calm, the mighty Pacific Ocean is no real pacifist, and that the weather above the water is only one side of the story, distracting you from the bounds of energy and swell that curse beneath its surface. The Blue Canoe rolled around in every possible direction for four or five long hours. Crew members and regulars seemed to mostly enjoy it — whether they were slightly masochistic or just keen on the change of pace is something I never quite figured out. One deckhand that I overheard, who was about to retire after a long night-shift, remarked to someone that he “wanted to catch a bit of the real weather before passing out.” After lunch, I witnessed one poor guy get tossed straight out of the shower and into the wall on the other side of the bathroom, which will probably be the last time he attempts to get cleaned up during an open crossing. The boat eventually moved behind another piece of land and order was restored, at least until a storm hit later that night. Our Solarium was getting ravaged by chilling winds and hard rains, and the heat lamps were becoming too tired to put up a proper defense against this onslaught of inclement weather, so I decided to sleep inside. I found a dark and quiet corner of a lounge below deck, spread out some clothes, and called it a day.
Maps are always insightful, and often times its easy to take what they tell us for granted, but occasionally their place-names and borders seem to jump right off the page and beg you to have a closer look. For instance, when The Prince of Wales Island forms a passage with its counterpart Revillagigedo, or when Port Edward and Prince Rupert are the only coastal towns on the Nisga’a Nation, or when you find yourself in any city not near Britain that is named Victoria, or when with clear weather in Queen Charlotte you can look past Sandspit to catch a glimpse of Huchsduwachsdu. Our overnight travels through British Columbia were such an instance when the map beckoned. We moved behind the Haida Gawaii, past Bella Bella, through the very narrow straits between Princess Royal and Pitt islands, and beyond the maritime border of Canada to reach Ketchikan, Alaska around six in the morning. A few hopped off, a few hopped on. Pretty much everyone stepped onshore for a quick walk. Eventually, Ketchikan proper appeared out of the Friday morning darkness to reveal a colorful little sea haven, thinned-out towards the water by the brown hills behind it. The ferry port was stacked with a kaleidoscope of shipping containers and hosted a few FedEx boats. There was also a shipyard here, where relatives of the Matanuska were hoisted above water and enjoying some repairs. Channel waters were kept busy by big freighters, all of which were either coming from the South or heading towards the South. Smaller ones pushed North. This is Alaska’s “first city” — and it sits on the 55th parallel 1,400 miles from the state’s northernmost outpost, Point Barrow, about the same distance from there as it is from Las Vegas.
No one on the Blue Canoe ever really knows what time it is. After night one, everything on the ship, such as the cafeteria hours, moves onto Alaska time. Although anyone with a phone either has it on airplane mode — to avoid the international roaming — and thus tethered to Pacific Standard Time, or has it active and thus tied to Canadian time — both of which are wrong. This de facto daylight savings keeps the masses just confused enough to be completely at the mercy of the kitchen staff — they could open the doors whenever they wanted, and everyone would have to abide. The propaganda machine is fueled further by the insane fact that the clock outside of the cafeteria is also off by one hour for the first half of the trip, so at any point in time there are bound to be two or three befuddled passengers standing outside of the closed cafeteria doors, and they’ll have to wait another hour for their supper.
Also, our vessel was utterly spotless — every single inch of it was either already clean and tidy or being actively cleaned and tidied. This was largely on account of there being more crew than passengers, given the time of year, but also because of one deckhand in particular, Raoul, who I would often catch passing the time by washing a hard-to-reach window or dusting the underside of a railing somewhere. In the cafeteria, dirty dishes were swooped up not moments after you finished eating. In the mornings, during the three minutes that you went away to brush your teeth, someone would come vacuum the stretch of carpet that you just called a bed. Vagrancy was completely accepted, but that didn’t mean we were going to be uncivilized about things.
From Ketchikan, we moved along towards the next stop, Wrangell, kept company by an occasional shoal of porpoises dancing in the wake of the boat (I thought them to be dolphins but was kindly corrected). The Matanuska expertly negotiated the new waters and slid heavily into port for a quick fifteen-minute stop. The pet owners took this as an opportunity to give their dogs a rare walk on land, and for a quarter of an hour, the single patch of grass in the ferry port parking lot turned into the venue for an international summit of well-traveled mastiffs, labs, retrievers, and other mountain pups — certainly a highlight of the entire journey. Across the lot, the small terminal looked from outside like it was filled with maps and books, which it turned out to be, so I quickly popped in. The maps were nice, but the multiple bookshelves and paperback spinners were absolutely jammed with pulpy romance novels and erotic thrillers. No classics, nothing newer than about 2006. Is this what everyone has been reading all this time? Were people passing their hours with these things on board, and then ridding themselves of the evidence at the communal bookshelf in Wrangell, for someone else to pick up on their way South?
Dusk and dinner crept up on the day, and the Canoe collectively dozed off until making its final port call in Juneau around three in the morning, after a 60-hour journey. We disembarked into a blizzard in America’s 49th state.
Public boats don’t cross the glacier-laden Gulf of Alaska in the winter, and all of the mountain roads are closed, so this is about as far North as one can go in America without flying at this time of year. The Juneau airport, meanwhile, has to be the smallest of any U.S. state capital (in the small single check-in area, a loud man asked the entire room if anyone wanted to bet that his luggage would be over the fifty-pound limit. “I’ve been boxing fifty-pound crates of fish for forty years,” he said, and no one took the offer. But when the bag registered at 49.98, the tiny crowd roared). I learned that Juneau itself is one of the only state or sovereign capital cities in the world that can’t be driven to, save for those on islands. But even island capitals are usually connected to their neighboring cities with roads; to get from Juneau to Anchorage, or anywhere else really, you’d need to take a plane or a boat. And so we crossed the Gulf by air, pulling away from Juneau, and then dropping a few people off in Yakutat, and finally landing in Cordova — each time punching through heavy clouds into the perfectly clear skies above them and then back down below, where frozen wilds revealed themselves and the Earth was scarred by black rivers and icy blue lakes. The airstrips we visited were isolated, lonely places — miles from town — and were made a smaller target by the thick layers of ice on their fringes.
I spent a pair of snowy nights in the skiing and fishing refuge of Cordova, meeting some seriously friendly locals and zero other travelers, then made my way to the seaport for a final aquatic crossing, to Whittier, the last stop before Anchorage. Our boat, the LeConte, was moored to the dock and preparing to make its weekly trip across the Prince William Sound. A few early-rising sea otters floated in the cold water around the boat and welcomed everyone onboard with a chatter. We left before five in the morning, and spent half of a moonlit day swerving around chunks of ice before making our way across.
The ability to confidently hitchhike, as I learned, is an important part of visiting Alaska in the winter if you don’t have a car. The one-hour stretch from the ferry terminus in Whittier to downtown Anchorage was the fourth or fifth time I had to jump in someone else’s ride unplanned; there was the quiet man in Bellingham, the newlywed Texans in Juneau, the local mom in Cordova (who dropped off her son at the airport and was happy to take on another to bring back to town). In reality, these situations were more like hitchhiking-lite, the game of itinerant nomadism played on easy mode — as Alaskans are extremely kind, and as they would be putting someone in a serious jam by consciously leaving them at a remote port of some kind with no cell service and in very cold weather.
It would be easy for many Americans — going about their lives in the lower states — to write off Anchorage as a probably-beautiful but ultimately-lonely kind of city, sitting at the gates of the Arctic in a northern no-mans land, detached from all world affairs. This is off the mark (besides, maybe, the piece on loneliness — but most people here would likely call it solitude instead). Anchorage was at the center of the airborne world during much of the Cold War, as Soviet airspace was closed off to flights from outside the bloc — and as a result, many planes flying between Asia, Europe, and the U.S. learned that they could avoid this huge swath of the sky by connecting and refueling in Alaska instead. This advantage was eventually eroded by slightly more peaceful politics and the buildup of longer-haul jets, but the city remains highly relevant for air travel, especially in the case of global shipping. Anchorage is a less than six-hour flight from much of the U.S. as well as Mexico City, which is a cargo gateway to the hard-to-reach South America. It is almost exactly halfway between New York City and Tokyo, a seven-hour flight from each. It is only eight hours to get from Anchorage to Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul, as well as other growing cities in East Asia, and not much further to reach London, Paris, Frankfurt, or Moscow. On our world map, where many focal points of commerce are shifted upwards in the Northern Hemisphere, Anchorage becomes a very central location.
Realizing these things wouldn’t be the first time that Alaska’s economic advantages were discovered with latency. In the early years after its U.S. acquisition from Russia, the territory was thought to be of little worth by most Americans. The native peoples of the land — in particular those living closer to accessible shores, such as the Athabascans, Aleuts, and Tlingits — were enduring extreme plight on account of their recent confrontations with aggressive empires on the hunt for new worlds. Many tribes had already been decimated by disease or slaughtered outright, and those who survived would have more fighting yet to face — for life and land both. In social networks far away from these struggles, the purchase of Alaska was generally considered a folly. The territory was too far away and too inhospitable to be of any use. Popular opinion changed a bit, of course, once the land’s bounty was discovered. When it was realized that gold, timber, coal, fish, and eventually — oil — were in abundance in America’s newest frontier, people from all over raced North to make their fortunes. Many people began whaling, logging, digging, and mining with reckless abandon, usually with no regard for the environment or the Alaskan Natives. On top of the clear humanitarian concerns, this also made for a chaotic governmental situation, as the state had no civilian government in place. The U.S. Army, Navy, and representatives from the Treasury were sent to Alaska in an attempt to haphazardly govern the huge territory. The real locals were again sucked into conflict with powerful swirling forces outside of their control, but this time, instead of empire, it was capitalism approaching from their horizons.
Today, we face the unfortunate truth that the Arctic Ocean is increasingly becoming a blue one. As more ice melts around the North Pole during northern summers, the expansionary eyes of the world begin to make out two entirely new shipping routes: the Northwest Passage, which slips through the islands of Greenland, Northern Canada, and Alaska; and the Northern Sea Route, which crawls along the highest coasts of Russia. This latter circuit will be especially impactful — as the ice breaks in the Arctic so will the handcuffs on Russia’s access to the world’s oceans. Until now, much of the country’s aggression in Eurasia can be better explained by the fact that it has never had ports that can operate year-round without being frozen. But for Alaska — and its largest city — this matters because both of the new sea lanes will need to pass through the Bering Strait in order to complete their journeys. Harnessing the unalterable power of geography to control chokepoints like this is an incredibly powerful edge in the arena of geopolitics, as a quick look at the histories of Malacca, Panama, and Suez will attest. Many existing shipping lanes that move through these bottlenecks would be made far shorter by taking the Arctic route instead, so as the seafaring traffic of the developed world moves North, Alaska will be waiting.
Arriving in Anchorage myself was like rediscovering color after a week in black and white. The state’s Southeastern coast was sharply beautiful but dark and soaked with winter rain. Now the sky had finally opened, and the Chugach mountains could be seen in perfect clarity — they watched over the low and sprawling city below. People went about their business on slippery streets as puffs of air escaped from their hoods. Planes bounced off of the airport runway every few seconds, beginning or ending their journeys over a frozen bay where the icy surface looked smooth as glass until it fractured along the shores, still intact just enough to shine like a mirror under the falling sun. Every sense was sharpened by the air; it was clean and cold. Eventually the ice turned to indigo and the sky to soft gold as the sun dipped behind an army of glacial peaks across the inlet, and the afterglow held onto the horizon for hours.
The Aurora is a winter train near the top of the world, and it slides through the mountains like a snake with its head in the cold bays of the North Pacific and its tail deep in the Alaskan interior. The line’s twelve-hour run from Anchorage to Fairbanks, serviced by The Alaska Railroad (Amtrak’s tougher, older-fashioned, mountain-dwelling big brother), runs only about once per week in the winter months, and is one of the only true “flag-stop” train services left in the world — one in which the train is obliged to pick up anyone along the way who needs a ride. We would end up helping a few flag-stoppers throughout the journey, mostly during the stretch Southeast of Denali, where the rails split from the road and a few badass people have made a world for themselves away from the madness, in remote cabins deep in the brush, the only clues to any existence of which being the snowmobile tracks darting straight back through the trees.
The coaches boarded amongst a haggard, pre-dawn morning in Anchorage, nearly filling in full with giddy passengers, many of whom were Russian and Chinese tourists, retirees from the Pacific Northwest, or solo travelers looking for a taste of the North. The route maneuvers the Knick arm — that twisted inlet inside of which Anchorage is anchored — and then turns due North, catching up with the Susitna River and following its lead into the realms of Denali. We didn’t catch a glimpse of The Great One that day; its Hurculean ridges stayed hidden behind the snow. But the train rolled past mile after mile of perfectly white snow-covered trees away from any other signs of human interference besides the mileposts along the way. The streams could be seen rushing under occasional breaks in the ice that covered them. Once beyond Denali, the train effectively turned into a winter safari — bull moose wandered alone, trudging their massive heads through neck-deep pillows of snow; the slightly more social reindeer were found in groups along the tracks and the water’s edge; dall sheep blended in with the high rocks on steep hills, looking at our big strange machine with cocked heads; an occasional bald eagle looked down on us from a branch above to see what we were up to.
As one local tells me, Alaska makes a quiet mockery of the other states in the Union when it comes to the outdoors. “Nothing else can compare, man.” Its size is hard to really even grasp, being larger than Texas, California, and Montana put together. All ten of America’s highest peaks are here. The Last Frontier has more coastline than the rest of the country by far. Colorado has alpine playgrounds and the Pacific Northwest has enchanted forests, doubtless some of the most beautiful to be found anywhere, but none on quite the same level of pure grandeur as their counterparts in the 49th state.
The last obstacle for the tracks is the Alaska Range, which is a string of peaks that act as a natural buffer between coastal Alaska and the State’s true interior. After a twenty-minute stop in Denali Village, the Aurora punches straight through it. Huge mountains loom over the tracks on either side like Dementors. Their presence is felt — as the dusk and the colder alpine temperatures frost the train’s glass windows.
The final few hours of the trip moved quickly, and our Polar Express finally pulled into Fairbanks.
Billie Cook has been operating a hostel out of her Fairbanks residence for 30 years. Hers is a quiet and genuinely welcoming home, filled with grandmotherly touches; it’s a warm respite from the negative temperatures outside and a welcome outlier in the often uncomfortable world of cheap accommodations. I arrived close to midnight on a Saturday night, and Billie was there to greet me in her pajamas, checking me in on her personal computer in a room overflowing with books, antiques, and old photographs from travels around the world. From the outside, the house is painted cherry red and proudly flies the flags of eight or nine different countries from its roof — although many, many more nationalities have stayed here in the past three decades.
As I come to find out, Billie and her place have local reputations that are nothing short of legendary (as you could imagine anyone in their eighth decade who still welcomes explorers into their home on a nightly basis would have). She is a mother of seven and an international traveler herself. The guest log in the kitchen is a treasure trove—an anciently-bound journal filled with literally thousands of entries from people who have spent a sleep on one of the twelve beds here at some point since 1991. Nearly every single passage is beautifully written in its own way. Some were stylistic renderings of natural wonder that the author found in Fairbanks or on the way here:
“…from the deck of the boat the cold air stung like fire, and snowflakes drifted down across the canvas of the dawn like bits of ash, eventually becoming part of that beautiful Alaskan Sea until the next meteorological go-around...”
Some were wild ramblings on travel:
“…in brief, I was in Southern California at a Phish concert, or some such, took acid for the first time, never came down, had a vision to come up to Alaska, so I hitched up here, got lost for a few months, etc etc etc — and eventually returned to the UK feeling like I was clinically insane, and the key but also the antidote to this psychosis was Alaska, so I came right on back…”
Some were long-form soliloquies on personal discoveries:
“…where to start…it’s all just been one crazy and unexpected adventure, through peaks and valleys, but all good. I guess my own story starts a few months ago, but at the same time, I could start years ago, so here goes…”
Some were hilarious windows into a different era:
“…if anyone needs to check their email while they’re here, there is a good internet cafe down the road. I have drawn a map (not to scale) for reference, in case people find it to be of use.”
Some were poems:
“…they say in Alaska you find the spaces in between,
that held in them the secrets that before had been unseen.
They say in Alaska that the moon is selfless with her light,
offering true salvation to those who search through the night.”
Some were tales of truly unexpected adventure:
“…it all started on a nice warm and sunny day in Vancouver, walking down East Broadway past a shop advertising cheap flights. I saw a posting for a $138CAD one-way jaunt to Anchorage. So I stopped, pulled out a Canadian coin, and said to myself: ‘heads I go to Alaska, and tails I stay in Canada.’ Well it must have been heads because I’m here now aren’t I!!!…but unfortunately now I must go and travel to wherever the road leads next, first back to Vancouver and then to Toronto and on and on…”
One incredible page told the story of a writer who met Billie on the train to Fairbanks, and then stayed at her place for a week, which in turn set off a multi-year chain reaction of connections and acquaintances that ended up with him buying property and eventually getting into local politics:
“…dear Billie, in May 1996 I came North, for ‘a night’…now, as I pen these words, it is July 11th, 1998, and in a few hours I am flying North again to Deadhorse, to meet back up with that world-adventurer Masatoshi. Together we will travel to Barrow, as one-week guests of the mayor…”
Almost all of the stories were brushed with a veneer of pensive itinerancy, with realizations — doubtless inspired by the existing pages of sincere scribbling and the odd pathos of a guestbook where everyone is truly putting it all out there — that unfolded down the lines of paper, describing what brought this person to the interior of Alaska and what they had found there. This was not a book filled only with traveler’s platitudes — with can’t wait to come backs and we loved this places, etc etc. It was filled instead with honesty and interesting stories, and it was incredible to read. Try to not plan another trip after burying your head in that book for an hour or two.
Just after checking in, I met a few other travelers in Billie’s kitchen who were about to head out and chase the Northern Lights — a common nocturnal activity in the Fairbanks winter. I hopped in their ride and off we went, out into the darkest and coldest hours of the night, looking for that illusive lightshow. The five twenty-somethings in the car represented five different home countries, and we traded dirty vocabulary lessons along the way. Our Colombian struggled with the swinging tones of Mandarin, our Mandarin-speaker couldn’t roll her R’s, and we all failed miserably at Polish. We also didn’t see the Lights — as it was snowing heavily — but it was nothing less than an adventure to try. It wouldn’t be until late the next evening, by which time most everyone at Billie’s had gone their own far-flung ways, when I got lucky enough to catch a glimpse. It had dumped all day, but now, around three in the morning, was utterly and perfectly clear outside. Frost-sharpened stars sprawled across the sky, piercing bright holes in the celestial canvas above Billie’s red roof, which was weighed down with four or five feet of snow. There was no wind around so all of the flags up there were resting. The temperature was very deep below zero at this hour, easily able to penetrate a down parka and direct your gaze back to the warm hues of inside. And just then, crawling over the street’s tall pines came a flicker of lime-green light. The Aurora Borealis is fickle. It likes to pulse gently back and forth like a wave at low tide, changing every second and sometimes disappearing completely only to come back dancing a few moments later. That night, the Lights hung in abeyance for a good ten minutes before extinguishing, at once leaving you standing dumbfounded in the cold and inviting you to come back sometime to try again.
My mind being filled with the words of Billie’s guestbook, of wanderers who found themselves in a bunk bed near the Arctic Circle and decided to spend a few minutes thinking about that fact, I tossed around some ideas for what I could personally contribute to these pages. It was an intimidating thought, given the literary and adventurous firepower that had already been loaded inside the book. But I did come up with a few things. I’ll spare anyone still reading this the details, though — you’ll have to get to Billie’s to find out for yourself. There is some seriously great stuff in there. But amongst all of the beautiful writing and pure earnestness and inspiring journeys, one sentence stuck with me above all the others. It comes from a passage written six weeks before the turn of the millennium — it’s direct, it’s personal, it’s declarative, it’s perfect, and it most certainly became my rallying cry for the rest of the trip: “WARNiNG — To All My fellow wanderers. My name is SAM.”
/S
Doha, February 2022
