Part 9 - Anchorage: The Last Day

 

Anchorage: The Last Day

            My return flight out of Anchorage was at 11:45PM, so I had the whole day to kill. I had plans with a friend that I met on the train the week prior. Her name was Rose. She lived just north of Anchorage. We met up just before lunch. I didn’t have a car, so she picked me up. First item of business: lunch.

 

We stopped at a restaurant named the Moose’s Tooth Pub. It’s one of Anchorage’s best pizza places. When we were looking at the menu, both of us couldn’t agree on which one we wanted. We decided to do best of three in rock, paper, scissors for it. It’s only fair. If I won, we’d do he All-American pizza; if she won, we’d order the Fire House. 

 

With both of us ready, we went for it. Rock, paper, scissor, shoot: both of us did rock. Ok. That didn’t work. Round 2: both of us did paper. Ok. Refocus, pizza is on the line. “You got this. Round 3 is all yours,” I told myself. I knew what I was going to do: scissors. But she had the same idea. A three for three tie. I guess it wasn’t in the dice. We ordered both pizzas in small. I have to admit though, the Fire House pizza was better. She had the home field advantage after all.

 

After that we went to the Anchorage Museum. Alaska residents get in cheaper, so, for the time, I was an Alaskan resident. The museum was cool, but they had some odd exhibits. The first room was dedicated specifically to photography depicting Alaska. The strange thing, however, were the scenes of the photographs. There wasn’t much special about them. For example, one was a picture of an Alaskan park which doesn’t seem strange on the face. But the picture was through the metal chain-link fence. Like, can’t you go inside the park to take the picture? Weird perspective, but ok. Then there were other, even more questionable ones. A picture of a moose, which doesn’t seem weird in writing, but it was the taxidermied moose on display in the Anchorage airport. Literally anyone could take that picture, why put this on display? And to think, an entire room of about 30 pictures like this. The whole thing was odd. But it gave us something to talk about and we certainly won’t forget it.

 

Next, we went to the theater room. It was also scenes from Alaska, but it was even more questionable. We were the only two in there. The first video we saw was some lady walking slow and odd through the snow on a mountain. This lady was walking with a purpose other than the obvious purpose of walking: to get somewhere. It took literally five minutes for her to go twenty feet. One wonders what went through the director’s mind. He couldn’t have possibly thought that this was the shot, his calling card. Or could he? That was just one video, what could be next. The next was a scene of a snowy mountain from an aerial point of view. Everything was in black and white except for this bar that slowly made its way across the screen. The bar made its way about as fast as the lady from the previous film. And this video just ended, with credits and all. Then came another. This video started with horror-like screeching music, then came the subject of the film: trees. But not just any trees. Trees with scrapes all over them. Nothing like a film pan of trees and their scrapes. I think the video was entitled “Scrape” in fact. This was just weird. And for the last film. Picture it: a frozen lake. What could this one be about. Well, let’s add a person and a metal rod. What could he be doing? This video literally showed the man, metal stick in hand, dragging it, carving a line in the ice in a random, continuous pattern. This film was so uninteresting that even the cameraman at times forgot to pan the camera toward his subject. What the hell? Anyway, through the entire film series we had to create our own narratives to avoid the onset of sensory deprivation. Sometimes the boring is memorable.

 

We made our way through the other exhibits. There was a small case to show how the Northern Lights worked. On one end was metal ball that represented the Sun. One the other end was a smaller metal ball that represented Earth. Both were electrically charged and you could turn knobs to increase the current and make a small version of the Northern Lights appear on the Earth. You could also manipulate the angle of the small Earth to see how it affected the lights. In this example, electrons were shot at the charged Earth much like the photons that make contact with our atmosphere to create the green lights. At another exhibit was a seismograph. Alaska experiences quite a few earthquakes, so it’s only fitting. Basically, you could position yourself around this and jump to see how the lines are affected at each spot.

 

Eventually we went upstairs for an exhibit called “Sounds from Alaska.” There were various cubes you could stand in to hear various songs artists had crafted from recording these sounds. It was really cool. We had to listen to them all.

 

After that, we went north.  We were going to hike Hatcher’s Pass, but we were too tired and it was getting late. We ended up eating some Mexican food. At about 9PM, we made our way to the airport. Traffic was absolutely terrible because of construction. I unloaded my backpack and stuffed it into this large duffle bag I had. I thanked Rose for the nice day. I had a great time and was sad that it was over so soon. I ended up missing my flight though. The only other flight was one through Phoenix at 1:30AM. Luckily, I was able to get that one, otherwise I would have had to wait an entire day to get home.

 

All in all, this was the best trip I’ve ever done. Alaska fever is real.