“There’s always time for a beer and a nap somewhere along the line. Otherwise, you’re making a serious mistake.”
- Haines sculptor Judd Mullady
The rough-hewn rock carver knew this place better than it knows itself. Ours is a nap and a beer town.
Except for a few pilings seen only at low tide, the great canneries are gone. Fort Seward is long shut down, its biggest buildings sagging. Most of the great treasures of the Chilkat Empire were whisked away to museums in New York and Seattle decades ago.
We are a town living on past glories, not modern places like Homer or Sitka. We’re more like Carcross, Yukon and Eagle, Alaska, crossroads where history paused for a few notable moments, looked around, and moved on.
People visiting here for the first time ask, “What do people do here?” People from nearby towns who stop in every five or ten years exclaim, “This place never changes. I love it!”
Need to relive Gold Rush drama? That’s just north of here in Skagway. Want to regale friends with stories of whales and icebergs? Go west about 10 miles until you hit Gustavus.
In Hoonah, rebranded as “Icy Strait Point,” you can walk off a cruise ship and into a helicopter taking you to the top of a peak you ride down on a mountain bike to a salmon bake on a beach. Most folks here would call that a lot of work for a fish dinner.
What Haines offers is world-class napping opportunities and spots perfect for sitting and sipping a drink.
You can stretch out a blanket and picnic in the grass at our Parade Grounds and if you’re not lucky enough to nod off, you can watch the ferry, clouds and an entire day pass by. You’ll be richer for it. Maybe our tourism department should market that. They say people find true love only when they stop trying to act like someone they aren’t.
Hello, world. Our name is Haines. We’re a nap and a beer town.
Sure, we’ve got big, scary critters that wander close to homes, but mostly they’re after garbage we’ve left out. And you can indulge your swashbuckling fantasies on our slopes, forests and waters, but that’s also true of most of coastal Alaska.
The folks at the Chamber of Commerce might disagree, but we’re not a destination. Most cruise ships pass us by.
We’re a place people come to visit relatives or to catch the ferry south. It’s quiet enough that when they’re forced to spend a night at an old inn with a good book, they find themselves thinking: “God, I could stand a couple days here, allowing the junk of my life to melt away.”
Most of us didn’t come here seeking excitement but escaping it. Excitement is loud and boisterous and surprising and emotional and most of us had enough of that growing up down south to want much more of it.
On the whole, we are older folks. We understand the cost of ambition and we have set it down like taking off a heavy pack during a long hike. It took us some work to get here, so we are going to sit and enjoy the place.
Maybe the town we’re most like is Spectre, the trapped-in-amber hamlet in Tim Burton’s film fairy tale “The Big Fish,” a town no one has ever left. Cherubic denizens pitch their shoes – representing travel and ambition – entangling them on a high wire, forsaking those dreams to live out their lives barefoot on a green, grassy Main Street.
Like in Spectre, there’s a wistfulness to such a place. You have to be all-in all the time or you’ll miss the enjoyment it has to offer. Long-timers leaving town or thinking about it ask themselves: “If not here, where?” Coy Taylor Sr. dubbed Haines “Hobbitland” and John Schnabel, hardly a romantic, said Coy was on the mark.
In a pivotal scene in “The Big Fish,” when the hero’s announcement that he’s leaving town stops a big dance party in its tracks, the mayor of Spectre turns to him with this warning, “You won’t find a better place.”
“I don’t expect to,” the hero replies, leaving.