Seems Like I've Been Here Before

As we tour around Alaska, I'm hoping the Clark H Smith Family of Wife and Children will participate in this blog by sharing their views and impressions live via cell phone. We'll see. Dad's aspirations are seldom embraced by his progeny - but that's yet another blog altogether.

With only 4 days in Fairbanks, we'll be a Kansas whirlwind tearing through the Heart of Alaska. Here's a rough list of what we plan to visit and why (and if we don't get there, I'm just going to click my heals and pretend we did). (I never visited Anchorage during my 12 years in Alaska so I've got no tracks to retrace there.)

Greeting Ethyl Maybe not our first stop, but our first priority is to see Miss Ethyl Peasgood ("Aunt Ethyl" to my siblings, wife, and children), my first grade teacher, dear family friend, and most positive and encouraging person who ever drew breath on earth. She's 102 and still writes to family, friends, and former students across the world. There is no estimating the impact she has had on the hopes and dreams of thousands and thousands of people. She is a saint.

Walking Home The Original Nordale Elementary School was torn down some years ago and rebuilt afresh. But I'll miss the old one. My mom taught at Nordale for 16 years. I was all but born there, certainly raised there, and whatever Ed Wheat had to do with my "rear"ing (which was considerable since he was the vice principle in charge of swats) happened there also. We'll park at Nordale and walk due east on Eureka Ave, three blocks, 0.38 miles. For seven years (kindergarten through sixth grade), I walked those three blocks between Nordale and 309 Eureka maybe as many as 4000 times in all. I walked at 70 below zero with flashlights and squirt guns filled with ammonia to ward off dogs. I walked through the Spring thaw, a Winter's filthy slush melting all around and a couple pounds of marbles in my pockets - harbingers of outdoor life returning to Fairbanks. I walked in the Fall, crunching an apple and loosing a tooth in the process as the birch trees burst into Autumn flame all around me. I don't think there's a third of a mile on planet earth that means more to me.

Drinking Deep We had well water at our house (at 309 Eureka, if that's not clear), but the water table was shallow which meant we had to get our drinking water from some place other than the faucet (what a bizarre adjustment that was to make when we moved to the states). The "rich" people got water delivered to them. Not an option for the Smiths. Plan B was to drive up the Steese Highway to Fox (about 10 miles from home). 10 miles is a quaint afternoon drive unless it's 60 below and you go get water or you don't drink or cook anything. Usually on Saturday mornings, we'd load several plastic 5 and 10 gallon containers in the truck and head to Fox. I've been there at every degree between -70 to +80. (Think about that the next time you hit the tap in your fancy little refrigerator.) Why go to Fox for water? At Fox there was a natural spring. Someone drove a three inch pipe into a hillside and ran it out about 30 yards toward the road. Out of that pipe ran a constant flow of mountain-filtered virgin water that measured 34 degrees year-round. The is no better water in the whole orb of earth that tastes better than Fox spring water. You can look it up. The best part of going to Fox was the regular adventures along the way. We'd often go sledding as part of the trip in the winter or go hiking and blueberry picking along the way in the summer. The Fall foliage along the Steese looks like God was practicing with colors, using all the bright ones in Alaska, before moving south with the common hues left over. That 10 mile drive was my original Oddessy. Safe and fantastic, all at once.

A Day of Discovery My mom's mom died in 1962 before my brother or I ever met her. We met Papa Cowan in 1963 on a very short trip south to Texas. In 1965, Papa Cowan came to Alaska and my mom and dad pulled out all the stops. We splurged and came up with the fare for a ride on Cap'n Jim Binkley's Riverboat Discovery. I don't know what Papa Cowan thought, but I for one was a mesmerized little 7-year old. The Discovery (and her successors) was a stern-wheel paddle boat. It anchors in Fairbanks and makes two tourist-packed runs a day from Fairbanks down to the confluence of the Chena and the Tanana about 5 river-miles away. When I step onto that boat at 2pm on June 22, there won't be 300 other yammering, gawking tourists on that boat with me. There will only be my bride and four boys who'll make four generations of Cowan-Smiths who've plied the coffee-brown waters of the Chena with the Binkley family - and one another. And probably out of my good ear I'll hear the echo of Ernie Cowan drawling "Well, I'll be."

Tiny's Pancake House is gone. Now, you'll think I'm making this up, but for once, reality supercedes my gift of hyperbole. Tiny's served the best sourdough pancakes in Fairbanks in the 60s. That's a simple fact. Tiny's also owned the only KFC franchise in Fairbanks. So you could sidle up to a stack of tangy flapjacks, finger-lickin chicken, or both. You'd think that would be enough, but wait, there's more. In the greatest stroke of marketing genius (with a close runner-up going to the orthodontist who opens an office across the street from a junior high school), Tiny's had a wall of picture windows along the west side of the the restaurant which gave gluttonous moms and dads a framed view of four ground level tramplines which the children universally prefered over seconds of anything. The adults would yack it up inside in pure peace and quiet while the kids would bounce their brains out on the tramplines outside. Nobody ever left Tiny's unsatisfied - on every level. I'd have paid $100 a plate to feed my family at Tiny's this summer. It's not to be.

The End of The Road It's not much to say that virtually every road that leads out of Fairbanks comes to a dead end sooner than later. You'd expect as much from an outpost like Fairbanks. On Tuesday, we hope to take one of those roads to it's logical conclusion at Chena Hot Springs. Along the way, we'll cross the meandering Chena a few dozen times. Graylings and beaver dominate the landscape with moose, fox, bear, and other furry woodland creatures rounding out the choir. The Chena is a fairly fast-flowing, shallow river full of sand bars and gold. It is a little boys introduction to all that is wet, wild, and wonder-filled. (My dad fell through the shallow ice of the Chena one 40 below winter day. That's another story.) At the end of the 50-mile Chena Hot Springs Road is a geothermal menagere - God's ironic gift to a land socked with snow and ice for the better half of its life. The Hot Springs were not our summer resort, but the road there and back was and there will be a memory a mile as we head out and back.

Back to Church On Sunday, the 21st, we'll visit the little Baptist church that was my Sunday home for many years. Our dear family friends, the Whisenhants, still serve there as they always have, now in the second and third generation. I've asked the pastor if I could give a brief testimony, really, I want to say thanks to that church and all the saints that put up with me when I'd rather have been at Tiny's instead of learning about Meshach, Shadrach, and Aded-nego. But now that I have learned about those three dear men, I have a deeper appreciation for those who teach knuckle-heads in Sunday School - and I just want to say thanks.

Turn Out The Lights June 21st is the summer solstice, the longest period of daylight of any day in the year in the northern hemisphere. The Fairbanks minor league baseball team plays a game on the 21st starting at 10:30pm with no stadium lights. It's a tradition over a century old. I never attended the game as a resident, but I'll have six box seats this year and it's going to be a blast.

Before Facebook My party at the game will actually be taking up seven seats. Ever since we started planning a return visit to Alaska, I've been trying to catch up with old classmates. I've let four decades pass without any effort to stay connected. What a shame. I've only tracked down three buddies and only one is still in Fairbanks. So, dear Craig B will be joining us at the game and then hosting us on Monday at his home in North Pole. I remember Craig as a sweet and gentle fellow who never competed for the spotlight I was so enamored with - I'm the baby of the family. Craig has been indispensible as my virtual tour guide, making dozens of great suggestions to get the most out of our visit. I wish I had more time to track down more friends, but I know I'll see Craig for sure and that may just be enough.

There's a half-thousand other places tucked in the crevices (or is that ceviche) of my mind. Tanana Valley Fair Grounds where I volunteered one summer. University of Alaska which was a blessed home-away-from-home during and after the flood of '67. Bill's A&W Drive In (long gone). Avakov's Jewlers - don't know why I remember. The conjoined twin retailers of Safeway / Woolworths downtown - long gone. Northern Commercial - WalMart before Sam Walton. Noyes Slough - still there and of no consequence. The laundromat / bowling alley where my parents dropped my brother and I off to do laundry... and bowl (and where I met my first physical therapist). The Dairy Queen on University which brought the first taste of the "real world" to Fairbanks. The field where they stacked the pipes for the oil pipeline. Harding Lake where I understand "rich" people actually water-skiied. Fort Wainright. Birch Hill where two little boys had the best winters of their lives sledding. And everything in between and beyond. The land beckons.

A Fond Farewell Leaving Fairbanks is another tribute to the memory of Papa Cowan. Don't know how we afforded it back then, but during his visit we mustered up the coin to take the Alaska Rail Road to Denali Park / Mt McKinley. At 8am on Wednesday, June 24, I'll say goodbye to Fairbanks, probably for the last time, as I get run out of town on the rails of the AKRR / GoldStar Service - 270 degrees of glass affording an unobstructed view of 500 miles or so to Anchorage. A 12 hour journey through some of the most awe-inspiring land God sculpted here on planet Earth.

I cautioned you in the first post that this was going to be a painfully self-indulgent blog. I think I've lived up to that admonition in this post. But I also hope the reader has discovered a sense of what this trip means to me - and hopefully to my family when it's all over. And then they'll have memories of their own of a Great Land that they can wrestle with for a few decades, until, I hope, they may bring another generation to drink spring water at Fox and ride the Discovery. And maybe by then, there'll be another Tiny's.