AKA Talkeetna, Alaska.
First impressions of the land of the midnight sun
6/20/2019
It’s been a little more than a month since I landed in Anchorage, drove due north to Talkeetna and dove into my job as a bread baker. And boy is it different here. The scenery, the people, the pace, the physical realities of day-to-day life — all of it.
The flight into the 49th state was stunning. After hours of flying over dark ocean waters, staring at wispy clouds through my tiny window and wishing I could sleep on planes, seemingly endless ranges of snowcapped mountains rose up out of the mist as we came in to land in Anchorage. The perspective baffles the brain. Instead of flying above the Midwestern checkerboard of toy-sized houses and fields, these mountains made me feel like the miniature one. The sheer scale and number dwarfed what I’ve seen of the West in the Lower 48, and made it immediately clear why Alaska has the most pilots per capita in the U.S. The view made me temporarily forget my armrest-gripping fear of landings.
Anchorage seems like a sprawling city planner’s nightmare, full of multi-lane one-way streets and strip malls as far as the eye can see. But the northward view from its coast is a reminder of what’s beyond the city’s pavement. Speeding up the Parks Highway, past the sign in the flats publicizing the 289 moose killed on Alaska roads and under bald eagles circling green spruce trees in Eagle River, the state’s main highway is lined with lakes, forests and mountains. “The Y” marks the way into Talkeetna after about an hour and forty-five minutes of blacktop, wilderness and smatterings of roadside espresso shacks, motels, taverns, taxidermists and auto shops. Turn right and Denali peeps into view around curves in the road, and then suddenly hits in its full glory at about mile 13 of the Spur Road, before the roadway drops down the hill into Talkeetna town.
A lucky day when the mountain was “out.”
Talkeetna is a charming, quirky town. The 2010 census marked its year-round population at 847, but people here say the headcount triples every day in the summer, and I believe it. I once sat at the Y and watched six full Princess cruise buses pull onto the Spur Road, one after another. Main Street is packed afternoon, evening and night on the weekends. It’s a bustling summer destination, where seasonal workers flood the area and occupy every nook and cranny of housing not beholden to Airbnb, dogs run unleashed through neighborhoods, biking kids weave in and out of cars, tourists amble along the pedestrian walkway with ice cream cones in hand, live music pours out of the local bars and bush planes zoom overhead. Three rivers merge just north of town, and the surviving Susitna rushes by the end of Main Street with a vengeance, taking logs and sediment south with it. When the sun is shining, there are always people camping, people eating, people driving ATVs and biking and strolling and drinking and chatting down by the river.
Freshly uprooted trees and eroding banks at Talkeetna Riverfront Park are casualties of glacial runoff cascading down the Talkeetna, Chulitna and Susitna Rivers.
A busy and blindingly bright day downtown.
I live back up the hill and about three miles from town, with a float and ski plane instruction school sitting between my backyard and a glimmering lake whose glacial temperatures still don’t deter area kids from taking a dip. With the sun beating down from 4 a.m. to 12 a.m., I understand the allure. I bike a generously loaned purple mountain bike two and a half miles to the bakery on dry mornings and rested mornings, and drive a generously loaned red truck on wet mornings and tired mornings. I usually don’t encounter another soul on my way to the 5 a.m. baking shift, except for one misty morning where a mama moose, with two little ones in tow, cautiously crossed the Spur Road just beyond the turn into the bakery. We dodge the tour bus business and its busy-ness on most days, but still get a steady mix of morning coffee regulars, local bread orders, touring families taking a break from their RVs, tourists passing through and town stalwarts. Without a nap after work, I hit a wall at 8 p.m. and either push through the exhaustion in exchange for zombielike sleep deprivation the following day or crash in my flannel-outfitted, sun-drenched bed while the birds keep on chirping and the sun keeps on shining until midnight.
My morning moose sighting.
Acclimation to life here in Alaska is a funny business. It’s uneven, with days where it feels like I’ve gotten the hang of the ins and outs of the area, the work, the people, and other times when I’m drowning in all I don’t know.
I got lucky in so many ways: having a boss who helped me with the logistics and timing of the move here, snagging an apartment with running water (a luxury in a town of many dry cabins and off-the-grid houses), finding a fast friend in a fellow Midwesterner coworker and landing in a town with such a vibrant summer scene. The people who live here year-round make it easy to get a temporary P.O. Box and a summer library card, hear about town events, pass along tips and ask for help. It is truly a community, with people here volunteering their time to get a recycling program off the ground, sending their kids to circus camp together year after year, gathering at the park for weekly outdoor music concerts, lining up early for arts shows and performances at the hangar, responding to bulletin board requests and posting free stuff, wildlife tips and lost & found ads in the “Trader” — an example of what a powerful connection tool Facebook could have been. And I’ve been exceedingly lucky, at least so far, to be happier up to my elbows in dough than I was surrounded by screens, soundbites and timecodes.
But there are still gaps, of course. There is so much I don’t know and don’t know I don’t know. I’ve never used a propane heater before, or had to throw away a dead vole. I’m inept at Alaska geography, tourist-ly terrified of bears, unsure of which town trails to take on a run, hopelessly appetizing to the mammoth Alaskan mosquitos, tired all the time from life in the land of the midnight sun, confronting my embarrassing reliance on electronics with mixed success and really bad at shaping baguettes. But I’m steadily learning and adapting, mostly by asking for help, giving what I can in return and saying yes to everything that’s offered to me. If it were easy, I guess Alaska would have more than 700,000 people living in it. Or it would all look like Anchorage, or god forbid, the Lower 48, and not small, lovely, summertime Talkeetna.