For those of us who only occasionally get out of small-town Alaska, a trip to the Lower 48 is like an infant’s first experience of ice cream. We have no resistance.
Sunshine. Restaurants. Live music. Bookstores. Universities. Strangers. What a fascinating world.
I’ve long held that the only worthy companions for a trip south are friends from Haines. Only they share the same enthusiasm for the wonders of life in a big city, for miracles like commuter trains, modern public art, farm-fresh produce. Sure, traffic is bad and there are road-rage drivers and nut jobs lurking with machine guns.
But there are also professional athletics, a stunning variety of landscapes, airports where you can rent a car at 5 a.m., and dry cleaners that can remove any spot from a suit of clothes. The world is a variegated and advanced place. You tend to forget that living in a small, remote Alaska town.
You remember it when as you sit down with an old friend and a glass of wine at a restaurant with a cozy dining room, an intriguing menu and a waitstaff that understands the importance of a night out. “Here, take my Visa,” I want to say when I walk into such a place. “Do whatever you want with it.”
I went south for three weeks in October: one week with family in Philadelphia, one with friends in northern California, and one mostly by myself in downtown Seattle. I have this to report: Civilization is alive and well. People are still decent to strangers. Apart from the worsening conditions of air travel, there are reasons for hope you won’t find on the evening news.
If this sounds all very rose-colored, I admit: The places I visited are deep in Blue America, where most people believe education is a value, tolerance is a virtue and that there are gradations that make some pleasures more pleasurable than others.
But my travels also drove home this realization: Even among scenic, small towns, Haines is not as special as we sometimes tell ourselves. There are small, beautiful towns in the Lower 48 that are every bit as appealing as Haines, Alaska, but with lower prices, better restaurants, and more attractive downtowns. It’s important that we acknowledge these places, learn from them, and consider how to set ourselves apart.
In Philly, the great pleasure is food. A few years ago, when I learned that Pennsylvania ranks near the top among states for percentage of native-born residents, a friend from Pittsburg responded: “It doesn’t surprise me. Why would a person move away from all that good food?”
What can I say? I was young. I didn’t appreciate the culinary heritage of southeastern Pennsylvania, where centuries of immigration generated a spectrum of great food. The Italians and their hoagies and cheesesteaks, the Germans with fresh breads and soft pretzels, Amish creations like scrapple and shoe-fly pie. Philadelphians eat for the same reasons Alaskans hike: Adventures abound.
A highlight of my trip was a cheese pizza from Gaetano’s in Upper Darby, on Philly’s western flank. That’s right, a cheese pizza. Nothing but cheese and red sauce and crust. The crust was thin, crunchy and stiff. The sauce had simmered for hours under the watch of a person who knew their way around the spice drawer and where to find real tomatoes. And here was the trick: Provolone instead of mozzarella cheese.
Provolone and mozzarella are made from the same ingredients but provolone contains the lipase enzyme that gives it more bite and flavor than its more famous brother, or as one website said, “a little more complex intense flavor profile.” Some pizzas are more pleasurable than others. I’ve had pizza all over the country and I’d put Gaetano’s simple cheese pie up against any on this side of the Atlantic.
For an after-work visit, I picked up some take-out hoagies from DiCostanza’s in Aston, Pa. Like many of the most famous hoagie shops around Philly, there’s no dining in at DiCostanza’s. A crew of about five workers make your sandwich in front of you, starting with a roll baked earlier in the day. (A brother of mine, a chef who owned a French restaurant, says, “A sandwich is all about the bread.”)
Then they carve into an assortment of Italian meats the likes of which have never seen the inside of a Subway. The Italian hoagie is dressed with olive oil – never mayonnaise – and provolone is the only acceptable cheese. Sweet and hot peppers are essential and a customer gets a choice: from a jar or homemade.
A Philadelphia hoagie dwarfs nearly every sandwich of the same name. You can just about get your hands around the thing. It feeds three hungry adults and comes swathed in a sheet of waxed paper fastened with masking tape.
Philly’s food thing trickles all the way down to its convenience stores – the ubiquitous Wawas. Wawa started out as a dairy company and its stores were originally little more than a place to pick up a gallon of milk and eggs without going clear to the grocery. Now they’re mini delis with fresh coffee served all day, fresh rolls and sandwiches, Tastycakes (Philly’s local answer to Hostess cakes), newspapers, lottery tickets and of course, soft pretzels.
The soft pretzel is king of Philly snack foods, and for good reason. Not too chewy, not too sweet, this salted creation is to Philly what the bagel is to New York City – the city’s signature street food. Schoolchildren get them as mid-morning snacks. Once the province of downtown street vendors, you can find them now in grocery stores, Wawas, even at the Philly airport.
Interestingly, the traditional Philly soft pretzel is served cold. (Pretzel vendors would sometimes put a can of Sterno in their pretzel bins, but that’s mostly for show.) The fact is a cold Philly pretzel tastes better than a “pretzel” served as a restaurant appetizer in other cities and ones served hot in shopping malls across the country and slathered in a mysterious “cheese” sauce.
(Philly has its share of hot pretzel joints, too. Philadelphians just love pretzels. They reportedly eat 12 times as many as does the average U.S. citizen. A Philly-area supermarket typically features an entire aisle dedicated to hard pretzels, including varieties like “special dark” and “old-fashioned.”)
Another Philly highlight was a performance of jazz acts at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philly’s Old City. The acts ranged from a 30-member ensemble that included high school students and recent graduates to ska group from across the river, in Camden, N.J. That Camden, one of the nation’s most blighted cities, can produce such sounds beautifully refutes the notion that environment dictates destiny.
I was one of only a few white folks in the audience for the show, which also provided a delightful change in perspective.
I arrived in Oakland amid the fires in the wine country to the north and drove 150 miles east to a friend’s house in Arnold, a hamlet tucked into the foothills of the Sierra Mountains.
Arnold shares a lot of similarities with Haines: A former logging town transitioned to tourism with an aging population (64 percent of its 3,800 residents are 45 or older), adjacent parks (Stanislaus National Forest and Calaveras Big Trees State Park (featuring two groves of sequoias), a health food store, some good restaurants, a commercial zone straddling a highway, and many vacation homes.
At 4,000 feet, Arnold gets a little more precipitation than Haines, with colder and snowier winters and warmer, drier summers. It’s a pretty place, just down the road from the 9,000-foot Ebbett’s Pass, boasting a scenic viewpoint called “The Rim of the World.”
My friend – who has lived in Haines and loves it – also loves having a career in the city. In Arnold, she gets a small-town experience and a quiet, lovely neighborhood, without giving up big-city life. She mostly lives in Oakland, but she also works sometimes from her place amid Arnold’s big pines.
With its pretty roadside lodge, good Italian restaurant and well-stocked lumberyard, Arnold was impressive enough, but twice as charming was Murphys, the town of 2,200 people 12 miles down the hill. Murphy’s is to Arnold what Skagway is to Haines: Cuter, hipper and wealthier. An historic gold-rush town, Murphys has very good restaurants, vineyards, a dozen wine-tasting rooms, museums and a leafy Main Street.
Like Skagway, Murphys holds the ace card for tourism towns: Architecture. Old, picturesque wooden and stone buildings, tightly arranged, create a storybook affect that makes visitors want to linger. And to shop, or to own a shop. Either way, its appeal is powerful. You walk through the place and immediately want a room upstairs in the old hotel.
So do others. Murphys gets flooded during holidays and special events by visitors from San Francisco and Sacramento. Even on a mid-October weeknight when I visited, Murphys was very much alive.
I mention Arnold and Murphys because the American West is dotted with such places. Google “Best Mountain Towns” and you’ll get the rankings that pop up annually like dandelions in outlets like Outside magazine and Men’s Journal. It started with Vail and Telluride and Park City, but as rankings need to be refreshed each year, the Crested Buttes, Bends, Ukiahs and Bisbees all had their five minutes of glossy magazine glory.
(Haines’ turn came on the cover of the August 2004 Outside magazine, when we were ranked among 20 “dream towns” in the U.S. – along with such notables as Lanesboro, Minn., Etna, Calif. and Mountain View, Ark. Coincidentally, Salida, Colo., was ranked in the same August 2004 edition, a few years before a Salida chiropractor Chris Thorgerson moved to Haines and started buying up downtown properties.)
That these rankings are made annually tells you just how many charming mountain towns are out there. They’re in California. They’re in Arizona. They’re in North Carolina. Call it nostalgia for mythical, small-town America or the residue of suburban burnout, scenic small towns are now prized, even more so ones offering varied recreation, clean air, and adjoining wild lands. For the past 20 years, baby boomers have been buying them up and planting their dream cabins there.
Our town can’t compete with these places for proximity, low prices, farm-fresh groceries or noted chefs. With the exception of Fort Seward, we don’t have architectural charm (though our Main Street is looking much better than it did even five years ago). So how do we hold visitors here besides weekend festivals and streetlight banners and hanging flower baskets? It’s a question worth asking, again and again. Because the competition out there is stiff.
My final stop, Seattle, was where my Alaska odyssey started 34 years ago when I answered a newspaper want-ad for fish processors in Alaska. I was 22 and seeking adventure and I’d watch the Alaska ferry steam into Pier 48 and think: “Jesus. I am far from home. There’s a boat from Alaska that lands here.”
Like it or not, Seattle is Alaska’s mother city. The Emerald City launched the Klondike Gold Rush, the Alaska fishing industry, and a good chunk of the state’s tourism effort. Per capita, Alaskans relocate to Seattle in greater numbers than residents from any other state in union. But despite all that, Alaskans love to say they hate the place.
(Alaskans’ antipathy toward Seattle has always puzzled me. It apparently dates to when Washington fishing interests ruled the state’s economic fate so jealously as to oppose Alaska statehood. The rap was that the Seattle cannery titans lorded over Alaska as their private colony. But the truth is that Alaska is still very much a colony – still lorded over largely by distant corporations and their minions in the Alaska Legislature. Why hold that against a beautiful city?)
I arrived in Seattle in 1983 not knowing a soul. To this day, I know only a few residents but it’s a town where a stranger quickly feels at home. It’s warm and green and scenic, with real neighborhoods, cool public art and a decent transit system. Sure, it was discovered and got crowded and expensive. So was Paris and no one claims it was ruined by the world’s attention.
When I lived there in 1983-84, Seattle newspaper columnist Emmett Watson launched a fictitious organization called the KBO for Keep the Bastards Out. At the time, Californians and Oregonians were discovering the city’s charms. Many more were to come. Nowadays, old-timers bemoan the changes of the past four decades, but to my perspective, Seattle is what it’s always been: A walkable city with a rich history and interesting characters, where you’re never too far from a good restaurant or a great view.
The Moore Hotel served as my hub for five days. It’s one of the few, old, continental hotels still operating downtown (Second and Virginia) and it earns its Frommer’s Guide recommendation with cleanliness, charm and its location three blocks from Pike Market. (A room with a shared bath is less than $100 a day.)
I’m partial to the Moore because it harkens to the days before downtown gentrification, when you could stay at cheap hotels in downtown Seattle and San Francisco for less than $20 a night. In Seattle, the Moore is about all that remains of that era, before there were 1,000 channels on TV and the world appeared on your phone, when the proximity of the public library added to a hotel’s charm. So I gladly forgive the Moore’s nod to modernity – in-room TVs and Wi-Fi – and feel grateful for my old, high-ceilinged room and a window I can open to listen to the sounds of the city below.
Then I hit the streets. I took in the Seattle Art Museum and Seattle Public Library, impressive not only for their collections but also for their architecture, a few minutes’ walk from the Moore.
For a take-out lunch, I stopped in Delaurenti’s deli in Pike Street Market near the newsstand and grabbed pickled raisins, cherry peppers stuffed with prosciutto, seafood spreads and fresh rolls. Kastoori Grill, a block from the market at 94 Stewart Street, served up a mind-blowing Indian lunch buffet with fresh, hot offerings, great service and an immaculate dining room. At $11, it may be the best inexpensive meal in the city.
As long as you steer away from the old, established restaurants that sit on prime real estate and rely on past laurels instead of return customers, dining out is fairly safe bet in Seattle. I ducked into a tiny Thai restaurant during a downpour and had hot, tasty meal for about $10.
For dessert on the go, the chain-store Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory (1419 First Ave.) offers an amazing selection of dipped apples. But curiosity got the best of me and I instead stopped at the hot cider stand at Pike Market and bought an Arkansas Black, a burgundy-colored apple with a sharp flavor described as tart, but unlike any tart apple you’ve had. Wikipedia says fresh ABs are “notably hard and crunchy” when fresh, as mine was. If you like apples, this one’s a revelation.
As my week included stops on the downtown fringe, I rented “app” bikes parked randomly around the city. Once you download the app on your cell phone, all it takes is pushing a few buttons to unlock a bike and get going. Customers are free to pick up or leave a bike anywhere, so renting is a breeze and the fee is minimal. I jumped on and off the bikes for three or four days and spent about $10 total.
I’m hardly an expert on Seattle nightlife, but I can say this: Don’t miss the view from atop the Space Needle at twilight. To watch the twinkling ferries cross Puget Sound and see downtown’s lights set the fog aglow is to understand that the romance of cities happens at night.
Besides downtown music theaters (including at the Moore and The Showbox), there’s a burlesque joint called Can Can near Left Bank Books at (94 Pike St.) that books up early. (Left Bank has a fun collection of progressive and radical titles.) Highway 99 Blues Club (1414 Alaska Way South) bills itself as Seattle’s Home of the Blues and offers a cozy venue but featured a tepid act on the weeknight I stopped in.
A few blocks north of downtown, the Belltown neighborhood has clubs and eateries that stay open late. Expect to pay a cover for live music. As I was feeling cheap, I instead hit the karaoke bars in Pioneer Square and Belltown. It turned out to be a good choice. Karaoke, it seems, is a locals’ special regardless of what city you’re in.
Nearly everyone in those joints is there to sing – or dance – and most of the singers are regulars enough to know each other. So once you sing or dance, you’re in their club and invariably they love you, even if you don’t want them to. Either way, you’ll be rubbing elbows with locals, and that’s the better part of travel. But you have to sing.
A favorite night out was catching a new-release movie at Regal Cinemas Meridian 16 (7th and Pike). For the ultimate, big-city experience I chose the climate-change disaster flick “Geostorm” and the showing that was in “4DX,” defined as 3-D with the added sensations of “wind,” “lightning,” “fog,” “rain,” “vibration,” “scents” and “bubbles.”
(A clerk said he and co-workers were still waiting for the first movie to feature the dispensing of bubbles.)
In any case, as I watched vengeful weather systems wreak havoc on civilization, my seat rumbled and pitched, I was hit with puffs of air and moisture and I think at one point maybe a bolt of lightning shot across the theater. I’m not sure.
As they say, that’s entertainment. It’s part of that big swirl of life that doesn’t touch down in Haines and probably won’t anytime soon. So yes, it was worth every penny, even without the bubbles.