Northern Exposure I
_{In Alaska, Late 1999}

PLOTTING - I can trace our return from the songs that I wrote. I'm not so certain about our departure. Were we gone a week plus week­ends? Something like that. I know we were at Chena Hot Springs on 5 October 1999, and I know we flew from Fairbanks AK to Anchorage AK to Seattle WA to San Francisco CA on Sunday 10 October, so we probably left Forestville CA on Friday 1 October. Something like that.

I can imagine remembering the preliminaries: It's SOLAR MAX time, sunspots at their highest levels of agitation and eruption and general pissing around. The Aurora Borealis displays are usually vibrant around then. WE HAD TO SEE THE SHOW!

Somehow we discovered a 'deal' at the remote Chena Hot Springs resort, northeast of Fairbanks AK, not far below the Arctic Circle. Online research also led us to a nice riverfront motel in Fairbanks for staging in and out of the state. We booked our rooms and wheels and flight, gathered up the appropriate warm clothes and laptop computer, and set forth.

TAKEOFF - I can imagine recalling the takeoff. We're packed up as of Thursday night, we've left our cat+dogs in the care of our tenants, and Friday we drive our new used Ford Explorer (mid-size SUV) from rural Sonoma County down to suburban Marin County. Maureen goes into her tiny cubicle office building, while I wander around being useless. After work we drive through San Francisco and grab a meal, maybe something funky and exotic, and go on to a motel near the airport. The usual deal: stay a night, and you can park your car for a month.

Saturday morning it's breakfast at the motel, then catch their shuttle to the airport. We show our tickets and check our bags to Fairbanks (but they go to Fargo ND instead). We get our seat assignments, wander around the terminal nervously, and finally board Air Alaska for a one-stop via Seattle to Anchorage, where we change planes for the hop to Fairbanks. The inflight meal is good, some of the best airline food we've ever had. (On the return flight we get really lousy sand­wiches, some of the WORST airline food ever. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

I don't remember what I read on the flight or the rest of the trip, but I know I took a couple of Tarot references. I was writing a song-cycle (click here) based on Tarot themes, even though I don't "believe" in the stuff myself. It's an interesting paradigm around which to con­struct stories and rhymes, prettier than a set of Rorchach ink

LANDINGS - We landed in Seattle. Too foggy-cloudy-rainy to see anything out the windows, of course. We landed in Archorage, waited around the terminal for the next plane, still couldn't see anything. Maureen spent three years here in the 1960's. She told me how great everything looked when you could see anything. I nodded carefully.

We landed in Fairbanks around dusk. It's cold already. We're anxious to retrieve our bags, put on our warm coats. No bags; like I said, they went to North Dakota without us. The airline folks promised they'd have'em back the next day (Sunday). We sure hoped so, as we were scheduled to leave for Chena on Monday.

The car we'd booked, probably some midsize K-car (front-engine Dodge) sedan, wasn't available, so we were upgraded (at the same price!) to a Ford Expedition (big SUV). Our first stop was the local Fred Meyer superstore to buy some survival gear, like long johns and sweaters. Then on to the lodging for a nervous night's repose.

FAIRBANKS - Sunday we drove around the most desolate state capitol in the nation, a low-lying grubby frontier icebox that oil money has boosted to bizarre levels. A modern insulated university; ditto the government buildings; many bars, few bookstores; log cabins and tin shacks and stucco stumps; everything scattered on streets wide enough for turning snowplows around. A historic district near the old river crossing. Exploring the town doesn't take long.

Back to the airport in the evening, and our bags (or what's left of them) have been retrieved. One has been torn apart and taped together; the other is merely scraped. Were they dragged in from Fargo behind a supercharged snowplow? Alaska Air staff apologize profusely and give us a new bag to replace the assault victim; a rather nice one, really. We head to the late-night lock-down Subway sandwich bar for take-out 'dinner', and we're done.

TO CHENA - Monday morning we throw our gear into the big boxy unstable Expedition (the center-of-gravity is too high for anything but straight-line driving) and chug over 100 or 120 miles of mostly unpaved roads through dense dark Wendigo-haunted forests to our dream resort, Chena Hot Springs. In past the funky entrance and we see the old lodges and the new 3-story hotel structure. We thought we'd have a lodge room. Ha ha. Up into the Howard Johnson clone, pilgrims.

We were excited. Auroras tonight! The dining room was closed for a few days but the bar was open, sandwiches were scraped together for us, beers were quaffed, and we dove into sleep early, to arise late in the evening for the light show.

Wasn't much of a light show. Too cold to go outside. We sat in the room and peered at acute angles through the narrow windows at faint flickers in the sky. No color, but there were definite flickers, yup. And so we gazed, dazed, into the wee abyss of oh-dark-hundred. And then we collapsed in exhaustion, not expecting to be up before lunch time.

EXCITEMENT - Sometime after dawn, the fire alarm sounded. We jumped up and ran around confused — did we have time to dress or must we run naked into the snow? Where's the fire? And the the alarm stopped. Were we safe? What's going on? We gathered ourselves together and called the main desk. They were surprised, they hadn't expected anyone to be in this large cold building, so they had run a fire drill. A FOCKING FIRE DRILL!! AT SEVEN FOCKING O'CLOCK IN THE FOCKING MORNING!! The assistant manager apologized. Sorry about that. Maybe when the manager shows up in a couple days, he'll apologize too.

I seem to recall staggering around the resort that day. Dining room is still closed, so for a couple days it's (variously) egg stuff and coffee and sandwich stuff and beer at a table in the bar with a view of lodge rooms and trees. And I remember the hot springs.

THERMALISM - Ah, the hot water! In our room we don our swimwear, warm clothes covering, and head across the terrain to the pools. We show our room key and are issued towels and a locker key; we stash our stuff and enter a room maybe 120 feet long, 35 feet wide, the ceiling about 20 feet up, the long side walls fitted with large glass windows, not too clean. The interior stucco is a bit cracked. The long room contains one or two large, cooler pools, and a smaller, hotter pool. Move yourself up and down the thermal ladder, adapting. I recall that the bottom of a larger pool has a tile design of a sea creature — an octopus? Something like that. Is not my memory perfect? Ha ha.

On the far side of the pool building, the side away from the main resort complex, is a deck with a smaller, hotter, uncovered pool; really a large hot tub. Beyond is a much larger, free-form pool complex, which at the time was undergoing construction as a wet fantasy playground, with boulders and bridges and spires and lights. And beyond that, the forest.

At first timid, we gradually inhabit the cooler inside pool, then the hotter, and finally (especially on cold nights) the outside pool. From its open surface we let our heads emerge and we watch the stars, the clouds, the moose walking by. If we've brought (necessarily) cold beverages, our hands might occasionally slip out and grasp and pour and replace and resubmerge. At warmer and more crowded times there may be several occupants outside, variously down or up or entering or leaving or just sitting around.

MEDITATION - I especially liked swimming in the larger indoor pool in the evening, with nobody else around. I would slowly backstroke (or flip my long feet) in slow circuits whilst considering geometrical constructions (more on those later) or song lyrics or the condition of the universe or whatever. Hot water; slow movement; the low ceiling; distant thoughts; quietude; all combined in a most pleasurable way.

Oftentimes I was there alone because Maureen didn't feel well. None dare call it food poisoning, but that's what it was. Bad eggs; and after the dining room opened, just bad food. Some dinner entrees emerged half-done. Eventually the supervising chef showed up. After one especially raw-underbaked special, he came to our table and apologized, explaining that good help was hard to find, and that it was difficult to convince them to wash their hands. Oh yes, we felt MUCH better after hearing that.

So Maureen spent much time in the room, and I spent much time in the pools. Late in the evening I'd be joined by a young couple of staff members; to protect their careers (and because I've forgotten their names) I'll call them Bert and Mert. After recovering from the more serious bouts of intestinal assault, Maureen might join in. We talked of life and work and our mistreatment. Bert and Mert were apalled, and offered some useful tips which we later applied to the management (more on THAT later too). Yes, I meditated on revenge.

PRODUCTION - When not swimming or walking or eating or sleeping, and sometimes even while swimming or sleeping, I thought about songs and stars — geometrical stars, with six to fifteen points, with various ways of connecting those points. I conceived of these connecting paths as useful in various types of algorithms. And for the songs, I thought about Tarot cards and standard playing cards, and the stories that could be told with each of these.

So I scribbled away at diagrams and notepads, pulled out the laptop and keyboarded the songs and their website, read whatever crap I'd brought along to pass the time, and wondered if we'd ever get away from Chena Hot Springs alive. I didn't keep journal notes, and more's the pity for that.

EXPLANATION - We heard an explanation for the chaos and sloth we encountered. The owners were upgrading the resort, preparing to lure massive numbers of Japanese voyagers to their remote location. We were told of a legend, that a Japanese emporer would be concieved under the aurora. So some cold nights as we sat in the outside tub, we would hear rustlings and scufflings in the trees and bushes, as Japanese tourists screwed fitfully under the weakly flickering sky, hoping for imperial offspring. And so the owners had crews working on the fantasy pool and fantasy lights and various other embellishments.

We saw no substantial guidebook in English, just a couple of pamphlets. But we saw (and obtained) a copy of a spiral-bound Guest Directory (click here) promoting the resort in Japanese, illustrated with curious crude line drawings and even more curious Engrish captions. My favorite is a childish rendering of a log cabin under pine trees, titled WOODY WOODY LIFE (click here). We cheap gringo visitors couldn't hope to match the attention garnered (and the bonanza produced) by the upcoming Oriental influx.

ESCAPE - At last our sentence was up, and we packed to leave. We talked to the management, applied some of the tips mentioned by Mert and Bert (like, threatening to write bad reviews and send them to every travel publication we could think of), and received a refund of a major portion of our bill. Then we jumped in the rental SUV and got the hell out of there.

We took our same comfortable room in Fairbanks and collapsed. The next day (Saturday) was free; we drove around the raw countryside, north to the beginning of the Prudhoe Bay (North Slope oilfield) road, east along the Tanana River valley, and south towards Denali (Mt McKinley). Snow and clouds obscured our vistas, but we saw a lot of trees. And we nearly rolled the Ford Expedition; that sucker is NOT good on sharp road turns.

Sunday morning we boarded the plane for the short hop to Anchorage. The clouds had cleared. We flew directly over Denali and the Alaska Range. We saw every glacier, every crevasse, every giant snow worm chasing and devouring desperate dogsled teams. The view through the tiny cabin windows was stupendous, while it lasted. Thus, the high point of this trip came just as we were leaving. Hmmm...

As I mentioned, the return flight to San Francisco featured terrible food, but at least it didn't sicken us. Our bags were not lost this time. We landed safely, successfully retrieved our car, and returned to our home and our lonely pets. Now all the pets are dead and we're going back towards Alaska. Maureen says it's beautiful, I'll love it there. I can imagine worse Alaskan adventures than our Chena trip, like maybe being eviscerated by polar bears, so whatever happens there from now on is bound to be better, right?

SONGS - I wrote a number of (mostly Tarot-inspired) songs on this ill-fated trip. To access them, click here. Sing along. La la la la la. Can you carry a tune in a bucket? I can too. How fortunate.