Untitled Document

25 January 2001

Anchorage Bears

We were in Anchorage, near the end of the death march around the Pacific Rim. We had flown all morning from Seattle and lost one of the hours we had so painfully gained back. I had ceased to care whether I was coming or going, and let events flow over me as we rode in the van over the icy streets into town.

Anchorage has a raw look to it, with ragged snow and puddled streets adding to the feel. There are no gutters on the roofs and no curbs on the street. Both would be ripped to pieces by the ice build-up. The architecture generally is haphazard and the zoning non-existent. Landscaping is for the lower 48: there is plenty of land and plenty of majesty here.

Man's footprint is small. Shacks lie in proximity to nice places. There is an air of the unfinished about the place, as befits the largest city in the 49th State. Flying in over gray water and white snow and low mountains circling.

If there had been sun, it would have been relentlessly white and bright. There wasn't though, and a pervasive dirty gray wrapped us in. The peaks of the hills around us met the sky and left the horizon indistinct and the gray expressed a wet, dripping cold. The airline had courteously lost our luggage, so we did business in our travel clothes. We wrapped it up fairly early, and turned our attention to the question all seasoned travelers ask. What do you want to eat? And what is there to buy in Alaska? Ulu knives and Russian nesting dolls?

I had my eye on a reindeer pelt. Smooth to the touch, silky almost, the hide tanned to a buttery consistency. Mighty fine looking pelt. Good for my office chair, perhaps. Then I could have fine silvery hairs all over my clothes year-round.

It was $130 bucks, though, and it was the end of the trip. My bags were bulging and I didn't think I could carry anything else. Garment bag over one shoulder, roller-bag trailing me, briefcase in one hand, rucksack over the shoulder. I was developing a distinct hunch to the right.

We dined at the Moose's Tooth, an unprepossessing pizza place on the outskirts of Anchorage. The key to the thing appeared to be the sourdough crust, a sourdough with a culture so old it is related to the Klondike gold-rush.

You can get pizza, or you can get a sandwich, although it amounts to the same thing. The pizza is flat, and the sandwich is a pizza folded over with less cheese. It looked suspiciously like a calzonni to me, but that is just one man's opinion and I'm from out of town.

The real highlight of the place is the beer. From my observation, every place worth its salt in Anchorage brews their own and most of it is good. The Moose's Tooth had both kinds of beer: lighter and darker. We drank both as the dusk fell.

North as we were, the dusk came early in January. The holidays were well behind us now, and we had begun the long slow march back to daylight. Alaska is a high-latitude kind of place, like Scandinavia. In the winter it is dark most of the time, the dawn coming shortly before lunch and dusk settling in during the mid-afternoon. There isn't much to do, except determine if you want to brew the beer lighter or darker. And when you want to start being your own best customer.

The reverse is true in the high summer, when locals find themselves cutting the lawn at eleven o'clock at night. Further up north, around Fairbanks, you only get to twilight and then the light comes back upon you, birds chirping. You get to live twice the life in half the time.

We talked about bears, the universal motif of Alaska. To the 220 indigenous and independent tribes they have a mystical symbolism. To the pioneering Alaskan, they are just something you have to deal with.

Even in town the bears wander, and some get a taste for the dumpster life-style. In the bush you carry a rifle or a pistol and hope the one you meet doesn't have a mean streak. Our guide started about bears. He had been deer hunting the previous season. They had hunted well, shot two cleanly, and one had got away wounded.

They dressed and hung the carcasses high in a tree about fifty yards from their tent. In the night, a visiting brown bear had cut one down and devoured it altogether, and buried the second at the foot of the tree.

When they discovered what had been done the next morning, they hoisted the left-overs even higher and set out to recoup the loss.

Walking across a meadow late in the afternoon, our friend stopped short, seeing that brownie had found the deer that got away the day before and was devouring it. The bear sat worried the deer with his muzzle, tearing off great chunks. He sat up on his haunches suddenly, smelling Man. He cast his rheumy eyes about and acquired the source of the scent. Man stops. Bear looks. Man looks back.

Stand-off. Bears are very fast, faster than horses. If he charges, he will cover the ground between them in a few seconds. Time only for a couple shots. And a bear's heart only beats twenty time s a minute, so even a clean torso shot may not stop him in time. A head shot is problematic: the skull is thick and even a heavy round may just glance off, leaving the bear even more infuriated. Backing away may encourage the bear to charge, so the Man and the Bear looked at one another.

I can't speak for the bear, but the adrenaline was flowing for the Man. The bear reared up a little taller and half looked away. Our friend took that for the only submission he was going to get from the bear and sidled away at an angle, moving more swiftly as he opened distance. The Bear went back to his lunch.

Every institution has a bear. Brown bears. Black bears. And if the place is old enough to pre-date conservation, a Polar Bear. They are mounted and fiercely stuffed. The people we visited were part of an older government institution, and naturally their bear was Polar, and fierce and around eleven feet high on his hind legs. His name was Binky, and we had a group photo taken with him on our way out of the building.

We were staying at the Captain Cook- yes, named after that Captain Cook- since he had got to Turn-Again Bay on one of his three voyages. The hotel accordingly had an incongruous tropical motif. When I ventured out in the rain to see if I could find dinner I looked over my shoulder, but there were no bears.

Not yet, anyway.