The Seward Highway and railway line follows the shoreline of Turnagain Arm. Photo / 123RF
The Seward Highway and railway line follows the shoreline of Turnagain Arm. Photo / 123RF
More than 20 years after hearing a song, Nigel Richardson sees the frontier city that inspired it.
Anchorage, Alaska, is one of those unloved places that just about everyone feels free to take a pop at. To the Lower 48, as the contiguous United States are referred to in America's largest state, it's a boondocks kind of town. To Alaskans, it's not nearly hairy-chested enough.
"Anchorage? It's just like the Lower 48," said a fisherman I met in the Alaskan Panhandle. "Except for the moose wandering down the road."
Moose. You can't escape 'em. On my first morning in Anchorage, I was having a breakfast of reindeer sausage and eggs in the Snow City Cafe on West 4th St when I clocked the headline in that morning's Anchorage Daily News: "Calving season: moose population doubles".
The previous day, the newspaper's front page had featured a photograph of a moose with her baby. Moose are news, because they, too, are residents of Anchorage. Mother and baby live near the airport, while their protuberant-lipped kin mooch about on the cycling and hiking trails by which the encircling Alaskan wilderness infiltrates and permeates the city.
I came here because of a pop song that got under my skin more than 20 years ago. Anchorage by Michelle Shocked made me resolve that some day I would walk the streets she sang about; and here I was, finally, in those strange days nearing midsummer when daylight hangs around like an unwanted party guest.
Shocked's song has a romantic tinge to it, but actually there is no mystique to this modest town. With Alaskan forthrightness, the name tells it like it is.
Anchorage started life in 1915 as the main construction camp on the Alaska railroad between Seward and Fairbanks. Materials and manpower were sailed up Cook Inlet to a convenient anchorage on a dart-shaped peninsula. In a clearing hacked in the forest grew a sea of tents known as "the white city". One belonged to a Swedish immigrant called Oscar Anderson who built a wooden-framed house, now a museum, overlooking Cook Inlet that he lived in until his death in 1974. For much of Anderson's life Anchorage retained a makeshift air. Then came the city's defining moment.
Anchorage is overrun with moose in the breeding season. Photo / 123RF
On March 27, 1964, at 5.36pm, southern Alaska was struck by the second-biggest earthquake (of 9.2 magnitude) recorded. Its epicentre was at Prince William Sound, about 160km to the east, but Anchorage took a big hit. Photographs show a gaping hole where 5th Ave had been.
Rebuilding, with the arrival of Big Oil in its Stetson and size 13s, has shaped the modern metropolis. But Anchorage hasn't quite shaken off that tent-city feel. All the action is pretty much on 5th Ave, marked by a cluster of medium-rise buildings, a disused cinema, a drunk or two and a vendor of reindeer hot dogs.
The lingering dusk fuels a faint air of unreality.
It took me a while to realise that the real buzz is to be felt behind the doors of several excellent downtown restaurants. And when you have eaten your fill of the freshest, tastiest salmon or halibut you are likely to find, the thing to do is hit the road towards one of the mountains that are always visible on the horizon.
The best road of all - one of the most scenic highways in the world, surely - is the Seward Highway, which follows the shoreline of Turnagain Arm past a series of rocky and forested headlands with the monumental mountainscape of the Kenai Peninsula looming across the bay.
This scenery was captured in the paintings of the landscape artist Sydney M. Laurence, several of whose canvases hang in Anchorage Museum.
CHECKLIST
Getting there: Air NZ flies from Auckland to LA and San Francisco with onward connections to Anchorage on partner airlines.
