Respect the People
— an excerpt from Chapter 3 —
The key item for driving Alaska is The Milepost travel guide, the bible of Alaska travel since 1949. Since much of Alaska is traveled by one road, including from Anchorage onto the Kenai Peninsula, you don’t look for addresses. Everything is noted by its milepost–mileage markers along the way. The Milepost is like the Yellow Pages of everything in Alaska, noting at what mile you will find it. Even in the digital age, a hard copy is a highly recommended item.
Kris Valencia, the longtime editor of The Milepost regarded the Seward Highway from Anchorage onto the Kenai Peninsula as the most scenic drive in Alaska. The 125-mile stretch of road was built in 1951. It runs through the Chugach National Forest, the Kenai Mountains, and along the Turnagain Arm. The longtime Milepost editor’s advice for first time visitors to the state? “Take it slow. When you take it slow it is an epiphany.”
Unfortunately, one of the highway’s highlights, the Bird House Bar in Bird Creek, burned down in 1996. The bar was easy to spot because it had a big blue paper mâché bird sticking out of the peak of the uninsulated log cabin. The interior of the bar was covered with things people had stapled to the walls and ceiling–money, draft cards, photos, divorce papers, even underwear. Opened in 1963, the bar was small, intimate, and unique. It began tilting the year after it opened as the ground sank during the Great Alaska Earthquake. When you sat at the Bird House Bar, you sat at an angle.
A seasoned Alaska traveler told us we might encounter “survivor syndrome” among the locals. Alaskans living on the Kenai Peninsula spend long winter months isolated from those coming from elsewhere. Every time we encountered a Peninsula resident, they stood close and their first question was “Where ya’ from?” From our experienced Alaska traveler, we learned Alaskans weren’t interested in whether we were from outside of Alaska, so we always responded with “Down from Anchorage.” Their reply was always the same. Their mouths and eyes would widen and they’d say “Oh, the road is open!” We were the first people they had seen from off the Peninsula since the winter locked them down. Their primary interest was in learning from us that the roadway could now be traveled to Anchorage. We respected their months of isolation by providing them the one key piece of information they wanted and nothing more.
Respecting people as you travel, and making you more comfortable in a distant place, supports dressing more as the locals do. On the peninsula no one looks alarmingly at you if you are wearing a Bowie knife and bear bells. Think of the big jingle bells that Santa would hang from the reindeer that pulled his sleigh. On the Peninsula, you wear a string of those off your belt to scare the bears off before they see you.
Our driving trip took us nearly two hundred miles from Seward to the western end of the Peninsula and the town of Homer. I planned a camping night there on the public beach at the end of the Homer Spit. The Spit is a five-mile-long piece of land jutting into the Kachemak Bay. As we drove by the Salty Dawg Saloon, two members of a fishing crew crashed out of the door throwing fists at each other. We didn’t stay to see who won the fight. Instead, we crossed the Salty Dawg off our list of things to do on the Homer Spit.
The camp site was a gravel beach. Thousands of sea birds squawked all night hoping to get the remnants from the popular halibut fishing tours or the commercial canning company across the road. My spouse still maintains the hum from the canning factory, the noisy birds, and tent camping on a gravel bed in the Land of the Midnight Sun were grounds for divorce.
The Milepost informed me of a laundromat up the road from Homer where, in addition to washing your clothes, you could also take a hot shower for only one dollar. It made for a good date, shoring up our marriage after the night on the Spit. As I stood under the stream of water I reveled in the simple pleasure of a shower, far from a spa-like setting. I thought of how Alaskans valued a full freezer and an open road. How the fundamentals of humanity, and our respect for them, are the true values that make us rich. In clean clothes with washed hair and clean bodies, we put on our bear bells and Bowie knives and headed back up the road.
As we made our way back to Anchorage, I wondered what they would say back home if I wore my Bowie knife and bear bells and jingle-jangled into a 7-Eleven gas station convenience store. I wondered if they would simply think, “Oh, the road is open.”