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Barrow, AK
Today was Barrow—for real this time! We got up at 5:00, time enough to eat breakfast and realize we could have had another half-hour or so of sleep. Met a couple of guys from Missouri in the River's Edge van (Scott and Dave) who had been traveling all over Canada and Alaska in a Mazda pickup; they were on their way to Barrow too, though not on the package tour with us—they'd just booked the flight through River's Edge. This time we boarded the plane without incident, and it wasn't even full this time; the flight was uneventful and short, flying over 500 miles of totally overcast Alaska backcountry, and getting us in at about 9:00 AM. There are two jet flights into Barrow from Fairbanks per day; these, we found, are the means by which Barrow residents do their exchanging of news, food, and people with the outside world: everything revolves around the twice-daily flights, which hardly ever arrive on time as posted—more often than not, they're a half-hour behind or ahead of schedule, owing entirely to the unpredictability of the weather patterns. (This, in turn, leads inevitably to Alaska Airlines' vaunted spot as the least on-time airline ever.) Our flight, as it happens, arrived about 20 minutes early, and the tour bus driver for some reason hadn't shown up for work, so the manager (Ira) had to come out with his Blue Bird bus and load the 30 of us up. While waiting for Ira, we took stock of Barrow (gloomy and muddy), the Barrow airport (all contained within a single squat building), and our tour-group-mates, which contained a lot of eager-looking adventurers (including a young couple from Holland), as well as one grumpy guy in a red jacket who had impressed us all in the Fairbanks airport terminal by screaming at the security screeners about something (he was trying to bring animals on board, if we heard him correctly) to the point where the screeners were threatening to call the cops. In Barrow, this guy constantly griped and sniped at the rest of us and at the tour guide (at one point, during a break, he went up to Ira—native to the area in every way—and said, "What a terrible place. Why would anybody stay here?"). Yet he'd paid the significant money to come up and spend the night. Riddle me that, why don't you.
So we drove around the town through a light 45-degree drizzle; saw the burial mound on the beach where an ancient family had been unearthed; saw Arctic Pizza and the AT&T satellite farm south of town; then saw the cemetery, where everyone kept trying to get Ira to explain what the pre-Christian burial rites were like, but he answered every single question—no matter how clearly enunciated—with "What?" before responding with monosyllables, until finally we all pretty much gave up asking him questions. "So didn't your people have their own traditional burial ceremonies before modern settlement came here?" "What? "...Didn't your people have their own traditional burial ceremonies before modern settlement came here?" "Uh... yeah." He's clearly not a tour driver in his primary capacity. We did see the various schools, the gym, and the only traffic light in town, which never goes red. All the streets in the town are unpaved; every home, even the ones clearly built recently, look like they're built with 50-year-old scrap lumber and surrounded by piles of junk—wood pallets, signboards, random planks, presumably—I hope—for burning in the winter. Some houses had caribou chunks drying on lines in the backyard. A pretty dismal place, to be sure, but it's also one of the most inhospitable places on Earth to live, and I'm sure people have plenty to worry about without having to deal with urban beautification codes. Besides, perhaps as a side effect of Grumpy Evil Man's sneering and snarling, we were all trying our best to see only the cool and interesting aspects of the town (which were indeed plentiful), not to focus on the obvious failures to meet the standards we're used to.
We had lunch downtown at Pepe's, a surprisingly classy Mexican restaurant with great décor and (unfortunately) terrible prices and small portions. For example, you could order a "beef burrito" or a "bean burrito" or a "beef & bean burrito" or a "beef & cheese burrito"—starting at $9.00 and going up from there—which consisted of a little taco-sized tortilla rolled around a couple of spoonfuls of ground beef. Much more involved entrees could be had for about three times the price. But they did have complimentary calendars and postcards that patrons could send from there for a quarter. (I wrote one to Michael & Julie, but didn't have their address on hand, so I addressed it to myself to forward on from home later.) After lunch we went to the Inupiat Heritage Center to witness demonstrations of a couple of dozen traditional dances, which to my untrained eye and ear all seemed to have identical rhythms and motifs and movements, and differed (presumably) only in their lyrics, though I couldn't be too sure of this either—the language seemed to consist solely of vowels, and they didn't spend a lot of time explaining what each song and dance was about. Each one was just introduced with a short title—"Killing the Walrus," for example, or "Sunrise Dance"—and then proceeded through a segment of quiet chanting and reserved line-dancing, followed by a segment of loud rhythmic banging on skin drums while the same lyrics and dancing was repeated with more gusto. I wish there was more I could say about them, but that's all we were given to understand about each dance, which—again—all seemed to be indistinguishable from one another in structure, tune, tempo, dance steps, and everything. Tap, tap, tap for sixteen bars, then BANG, BANG, BANG for another couple of minutes. I hope that's not what the sheet music looks like.
(Grumpy Evil Man slept through most of the dances and the subsequent demonstrations, as he had during much of the bus tour. Which was fine, as it kept him from complaining, but why was he here in the first place, let alone staying overnight? It's $499 a person. Does he get off on blowing that much money on things he hates?)
Then there were demos of Eskimo games of skill and chance, such as ones where you jab sticks into holes in pieces of bone, and demonstrations of the proper use of wolf scarers and Eskimo yo-yos, shown off by the kids of the town. Then there was the blanket toss, where all the tourists took part in helping toss a youngster from the troupe up to the ceiling of the hall. I'm not sure why it's done indoors, except that it's too dang cold and rainy outside (a valid concern); but the promo material showed it being done outside under blue skies on the grassy tundra. But I gather that blue skies are one of those things seen about as often as volleyball players in Barrow.
After the show was over, we headed out to the Cape (or as close to it as we could get); visited the shore and the "palm trees" (made by local jokesters from driftwood and pieces of whale baleen) next to a plain full of "vacation homes"—shacks on the windswept beach that the locals use during summer; saw the college (on the old army base) and the DEW line; and turned back toward the hotel downtown. Chilled in the hotel lobby for a while (I went out and got photos of the downtown buildings, including the Wells Fargo branch, where I got some money out of the ATM just so I could keep the receipt), then caught the bus back to the airport, where we hooked back up with Scott and Dave and compared notes. Apparently we're likely to meet up with them again on the ferry ride on the 14th; we'll see. The flight back was pleasant (Paul slept); we got our ride back on the River's Edge bus to the Best Value Inn (Scott and Dave are staying there too); got some sandwich fixin's at Safeway; relaxed with Adult Swim.
It's been a weirdly draining day. Denali tomorrow.