Jeff & The Duchess’ Eating Tour of Alaska
by Jeff Somers
ONCE again I looked around groggily and found myself on an airplane, packed into a tiny little seat, sweating and needing to urinate desperately. I turned my head and sure enough, there was my wife, The Duchess, reading a tabloid magazine. She glanced up and smiled at me.
“Only eight hours to go!”
I stared in horror at her. “You drugged me again!”
She shrugged, looking back down at her magazine. “It’s the only way to get you on the plane. Otherwise you cause such a scene, what with the crying and the begging and the sudden, mysterious loss of your pants.”
She sighed. “And you just missed the beverage cart.”
It had all started months before, when The Duchess had reminded me that her birthday was coming up. This is always dangerous territory, because a certain amount of pomp is required for The Duchess’ birthdays, and any perceived lack of pomp or enthusiasm for pomp is punished, immediately and severely. Generally speaking, The Duchess likes to celebrate each birthday in a different exotic locale, the farther away the better. Now, since I rank traveling to exotic locales on the same level as having oral surgery, I’m always falling short on the enthusiasm part. This is dangerous, because The Duchess has a keen eye for lack of enthusiasm. Under her steely gaze I often get nervous and made terrible, terrible mistakes. Like suggesting that we travel to Alaska to celebrate her birthday because I’m too stupid to realize that Alaska is further away from New York than just about everywhere else in the universe.
You see, I have difficulty with conceptualizing things like time or distance. I can rarely ever tell you how long things will take or how far away things actually are. Under pressure, when asked where we should go, I went for a part of the United States because my muddled brain has no spatial mastery whatsoever, resulting in a commitment to spend eleven hours on airplanes. I could have said Italy and it would have been seven hours, tops. Once more, my vague grasp of reality had screwed me, and for once booze didn’t save me.
So, we went to Alaska. I didn’t have too much vacation time since my current job considers vacation to be something only commies and evildoers desire so they can stay at home for a few weeks building bombs and studying building plans. With just five days to spare, our trip was going to have to be a whirlwind no matter what, but that was fine, because I knew my wife: The trip, like all trips, would be all about dinner.
Weeks before we left, I knew where we were eating dinner and what she planned to order. I’m not anti-dinner, by any stretch, but this level of devotion was frightening. We even knew where we were eating our first night, despite jetlag and the fact that it would feel like 3AM for us when we arrived. A woman who under normal conditions cannot stay awake past 10PM was going to let nothing stand between her and a good slice of pizza at a place called the Moose’s Tooth in Anchorage.
ANCHORAGE
Boarding the plane was the first hint that Alaska is a different place; First Class was packed full of bearded men handing the tiny airline bottles of booze to each other. As I discovered over the next few days, there are more bearded men in Alaska than anywhere else in the world.
Anchorage, feels like any midwestern city of moderate population. There isn’t much of a skyline, and the whole place feels like it was built last week—which isn’t surprising in an area that has only been a state for 47 years. I was born in one of the original thirteen colonies, bubba; 1959 just doesn’t seem all that long ago. There’s nothing wrong with Anchorage, but I didn’t have a whole lot to say about it. We were only there for one night, stayed in a nice hotel, had a nice dinner, and left the next morning. It seemed like a nice enough place, but nothing special. In the morning, we went to Gwennie’s for Reindeer sausage, sourdough pancakes, and coffee. Lots of coffee, because we were planning to drive south to Homer.
MEALS: Pizza & Microbeer beer for dinner, huge Pancakes & Reindeer sausage for breakfast.
HOMER
Driving south from Anchorage, you almost immediately plunge into what can only be described as wilderness. Alaska is largely unsettled, with 80% of the state owned by the Federal Government in the guise of National Parks. You start off on Highway 1 South on the coastline, and then enter the mountains, and once in the mountains you lose all radio stations—most of which were playing country music anyway—and any chance of seeing a town or even a rest stop. The highway is the only sign that man has ever stepped foot in this area, and if the car broke down I am still not sure what our approach to the problem would have been.
Well, what my approach to the problem would have been. I can sketch out The Duchess’ approach pretty easily: Nap in the car until I either come up with a solution or until she got hungry, at which point she would beat me over the head with a rock and eat me for sustenance.
It’s a long drive from Anchorage to Homer, about 4-5 hours, and it was mostly raining and dark the whole way. Still, the sheer beauty of the environment made it worthwhile and enjoyable, and we arrived in Homer in a good mood, ready for some dinner in a cool small town a millions miles from anywhere I’ve ever been.
And that’s exactly what we did. We checked into our hotel (at the very end of Homer Spit, jutting out into the ocean, the darkened landscape of North America mere shadows across the bay) and then ventured down a winding country road to a place called The Homestead, where we had delicious locally brewed beers and a terrific dinner, across the street from the combination general store and post office. Homer is a hippie-ish little burg. The Spit is lined with a lot of tourist trap stores and a couple of cool little bars—the Salty Dog was a particularly grungy local place to have a bourbon and some conversation—and Homer itself looks like a strip mall when you first see. But it’s a strip mall of artist storefronts and funky little stores—the sort of places you’d find in Manhattan’s less-reputable areas, except in buildings constructed about thirty years ago, on average. We also checked out the local winery and then it was time to hop back into the car for the slightly shorter drive to Seward.
MEALS: Seafood, pasta, and microbrews for dinner, huge, amazing burritos for lunch.
SEWARD
And then. . .we hit Seward.
It seemed like a good idea. Seward is where the Iditarod begins every year, and is supposed to be a cool little town nestled in the mountains, near the water and near glaciers. It sounded like a good idea. And then we actually got there, and the eerie stillness hit us almost immediately. Granted, we were there in the off-season, but I’ve never actually experienced a ghost-town before. Even though there were people in Seward, it felt empty. The silence was amazing. We checked into our hotel—which was a nice, pleasant place—and took a walk around to see the breathtaking scenery, but saw hardly any other people and quickly decided to take a nap and then head out to dinner.
Dinner was nice, in a local waterfront place named Joe’s, where the food and the microbrews were good. It was about a half mile from the hotel, but we opted to walk to get a better sense of Seward. Normally, a brisk walk through a beautiful town is invigorating, but this time it just left us uneasy. Seward might be a bright, cheerful place in the tourist season, but in the off-season it looked run-down and populated by unhappy teenagers in pickup trucks.
Walking home from the restaurant, nothing overt happened, but the sheer number of pickups tearing up and down the roads without any concern for pedestrians, the booming music, and the complete lack of other people outside freaked us out. Maybe it’s because we live in the New York City area, where walking the streets is common and you can find people out and about at any hour of the day—whatever the reason, we power-walked our way back to the hotel, fearful that we’d end the trip (and our lives) fighting off the undead citizens of Seward as they tore their way into our room, murmuring “Brains…eat braiinnnnns!”
Instead, we slept fitfully, got up at the crack of dawn, and headed out to a nearby glacier for a quick hike and some photos, and then hopped into the rental and didn’t look back until we’d reached our next destination.
MEALS: Seafood pasta and microbrews again for dinner. Didn’t hang around long enough for another meal.
GIRDWOOD
Girdwood is a ski resort type of town midway between Seward and Anchorage. This was the most expensive hotel we stayed at, the Aleskya Resort. During the season it’s really pricey, during the off-season it’s merely expensive. But what the hell. It’s a beautiful hotel in the mountains, and by this point we’d done so much driving, walking, hiking, and fearing for our lives we intended to have a relaxing day, just laying around, boozing it up, and, of course, eating.
The bar on the third floor had Glenmoranjie right there behind the bar. I almost wept in joy.
We stayed in the room for a while, ordered a cheese plate (to go with the bottle of wine we’d bought in Homer) and just vegetated in front of the TV, regaining our strength. Later we prowled out to explore the grounds, which were beautiful, and then it was back to the bar for some drinks—sweet, glorious Scotch, thank the lord! Then dinner at one of the hotel restaurants, and back up to our room for a shower and some sleep. We saw nothing of Girdwood itself, but when there are unlimited supplies of Scotch, fireplaces, and cheese plates, why in the world would we bother?
MEALS: Cheese plate for lunch, a steak for dinner, along with plenty of beer and Scotch to wash it all down.
TALKEETNA
Driving north through Anchorage and pressing on up towards Denali, we found our way to a tiny, tiny little town called Talkeetna. Rumor has it the town was one of a few Alaskan communities that formed the collective basis for the town of Cicely in the television show “Northern Exposure”, and I’d believe it. There is no mention of the show anywhere—at first I worried that there would be all sorts of cheesy touristy tie-ins to the show, but the only time we heard it mentioned was when we asked. Or, to be honest, when The Duchess asked, while I cowered a few feet away, mortified to even hint at interest in such a subject.
At first it seemed really. . .crappy. Dirt roads, ramshackle wooden structures, and people that seemed likely to murder me for my delicious, tender meat. After a few moments of wandering the town, however, I got more comfortable and began to see the charm. We had a great lunch in the local roadhouse (where they rent rooms and single bunks—a bunk was $21 a night) and then headed for the airstrip, because the reason we’d driven all the way to this tiny dot in the wilderness was to get on a small plane and fly up towards Mt. McKinley and land on a glacier.
Now, normally flying in a puddlejumper and landing seven thousand feet up in the middle of the mountains would sound to me like the beginning of a horror movie, one of those stories where everyone ends up being eaten by the end. My character would merely be called Victim #1 in the credits. I’d be the guy who makes wisecracks about how impossible it is to crash and end up eaten by ravenous cannibalistic zombies, and then is the first to go, in what passes for irony in Hollywood today. Two things made me decide to go ahead and do it. One was my wife, whose displeasure you invoke only after careful thought and prudent distance placed between yourself and her tiny, deadly fists. The other was the realization that rarely will I ever have the opportunity to stand on top of a glacier. Especially since they’re all apparently melting as we devolve, planetarily, into a Mad Max type of climate.
Besides, as has been mentioned in this zine a few times, I know exactly where I’m going to die1, so there was little risk involved.
Of course, the moment we’d landed on the glacier and debarked the plane, the pilot informed us that he was going to take off without us in order to pack down the tire ruts, ensuring a smooth takeoff. So we all stood there and watched the plane take off without us several times. Since it all turned out okay, this is just a humorous addendum to the story, but if that plane had crashed or simply never returned, I would be very, very pissed right now.
MEALS: Just a sandwich at the Roadhouse—an RLT; reindeer, lettuce, and tomato. Goddamn delicious, bubba.
And that was it. A few hours later, we were on a plane back to Jersey, bloated on Alaska’s bounty and glad to be alive. I had two cocktails and fell asleep. The Duchess had two cinnamon buns from the Talkeetna Roadhouse stashed in her purse, so she spent the flight having one last bite of Alaska. I still hear about that cinnamon bun.
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(From The Inner Swine Volume 12, Issue 4)