City of Fairbanks, Alaska, Still Has Frontier Lure

Last fall, Suzi Waugaman had a problem--she couldn’t feed her pet squirrel because a mother moose and two yearlings were bedded down in the front yard.

A couple of days later, Waugaman shooed the moose off the sun deck by exasperatedly tossing the squirrel fodder after them. And as she wiped the nose marks off her windows, the massive trio ambled on back to nibble at the scattered nuts and crumbs and grain.

Waugaman then shimmied herself into a nifty little number by Diane Von Furstenberg, slipped into her Datsun 280ZX and roared off to a reception at an art gallery.

It’s that kind of easy, unself-conscious movement back and forth between two entirely different worlds that disorients visitors to Fairbanks. Equally proud of both their 50-below winters and the no-night, flower-filled summers, Fairbanks residents take perverse pleasure in telling the newcomer that this city of 30-odd thousand is known among many Alaskans as “the northern terminus of the schizoid escape route.”

In that context, it is fitting that Fairbanks was an accident.

Ran Aground

In 1901 a river boat loaded with trade goods was headed up the Chena--a tributary of the Tanana, which is a tributary of the Yukon--and got stuck short of its destination. What the heck, figured Capt. E. T. Barnette, so he promptly unloaded where he had run aground and went into business.

A year later and 16 miles away, Felix Pedro struck gold and Fairbanks, named for a U.S. senator, was on its way.

Eventually, Barnette was on his way, too. It is appropriate to this sometimes contrary sub-Arctic community that Barnette was run out of the city he had founded for alleged irregularities having to do with other people’s money.

Gold has always been implicit to Fairbanks, and even today is responsible for tales as tall as those fabricated during the pick-and-shovel days of the early prospectors.

For example, just about the time Waugaman was pulling into the parking lot of the art gallery, Tony Leveque, a lifelong Fairbank resident, was telling a visitor about taking gold--not money--for wages while working “out in the creeks.”

Stashed in a Hole

That was several years ago, he went on, and he still has it “cached away in a hole in the ground.”

Why in the world, asked the visitor, didn’t Leveque convert it into cash and invest in a good mutual fund or a money market certificate?

“Oh, I guess you don’t know about gold,” he suggested in a most serious manner. “Well, the fact is, if you put the gold back into the ground it grows and doubles its weight every five years. And where else,” Leveque concluded, “am I gonna find an investment that’ll guarantee me a 20% return on my money every year?”

Yeah, well, OK, uh-huh.

Fairbanks is as flat as day-old beer, but take a five-mile run to the hilltop of the University of Alaska and to the south there is nothing but wall-to-wall, purple-mountain majesties. The local expression is, “The mountain is out today,” and they are referring to McKinley, at 20,000-plus feet the most prominent peak on the North American continent.

It’s a dazzling visual delight that can turn from cotton-candy pink to regal blue with just the brush of a cloud painting its face.

Miner ‘Students’

The University of Alaska has been as gold-related as anything else in Fairbanks and, in the old days, was a haven for miners too broke to go outside--what Alaskans call everywhere else--for the winter. Many would enroll as students but never go near a classroom. It was simple economics: The school offered the cheapest room and board north of Seattle.

There are still certain oddball aspects to the University. “Lisa Birnbach’s College Book” awarded the Fairbanks institute top honors in three categories. But again, the perversity: Most Food, Most Serious Drinkers and the Ugliest Female Student Body.

On campus, they immediately elevated their ales in agreement with the first two accolades, but the reaction was mixed as to the appraisal of the women.

A male from New York, Tony Marotta, allowed as, “I’ve heard some girls here have harpoon scars on their thighs.” Somebody else remarked that nobody could look good in long johns and parka. And co-ed Anna Allen sniffed: “I obviously wasn’t here when she took her poll.”

Pleasing Itself

Quite possibly the warmest compliment paid Fairbanks came from a travel writer who said the appeal of the town is that it appears to be pleasing itself, not anybody else. And Fairbanks is very much that hometown kind of place.

Hard by a metal-clad high-rise, the Northward Building from which the Alaska novel by Edna Ferber got the name “Ice Palace,” consists of sagging, still-occupied log relics with grass growing out of sod roofs and sawdust packed around the foundations for insulation.

Peek into the backyard and right there next to the latest super-nifty gas grill will be clotheslines strung between two magnificent racks of moose antlers.

Farther down the street is a prim white picket fence. But the pickets aren’t common slats, they’re cut-off skis with the shoulder-snagging, curvy ends turned courteously away from the sidewalk side. And water wagons still serve homes on the edge of town where drilling has failed to bring in a gusher for the laundry.

And, wonderfully enough, an enterprise calls itself the Yellow Snow Dog Sled Co. that does make those canine conveyances.

Range of Entertainment

Old-timers continue to play a favorite card game of mining days, pan, in the back room of the Pastime Cafe. While that’s going on, just a couple of diversions away the Vienna Boys Choir or the San Francisco Ballet or the Philadelphia String Quartet may be performing.

But Fairbanks isn’t all cards and concerts.

Denali National Park--it used to be called McKinley after its mountain--is just a couple of hours drive south and, closer, there is excellent boating and canoeing and rentals of both kinds of craft. Via either, you’ll find impressive fishing for anything from grayling to salmon.

“Better make sure you’ve got heavy enough a line,” Kay J. Kennedy warns. “The mosquitoes have a nasty habit of trying to make off with the lures.”

Kennedy is one of those remarkable women in which Alaska is wealthy. She was the first bonded female hunting guide in Wyoming, a geologist, and in half a century of newspapering in Alaska has written about everything from Bristol Bay fishing wars to the odd gold rush or two.

Kennedy swears she knows sourdoughs who can tell the winter temperature within five degrees from how straight the wood smoke goes up from the chimney.

End of Highway

Fairbanks is at the end of the Alaska Highway from the outside, the logistics hub of the now-legendary oil fields of the Arctic, and gateway to the Eskimo settlements of the high latitudes and the Indian villages of the vast interior of Alaska.

It all comes together here, the cross-culturization of Inupiat and Athabascan and Caucasian and laborer and lawyer and millionaire. Fairbanks is a classic, largely classless society that except for the constant personal commerce made necessary by isolation and cold and miles of nothing could have become stratified, sharply differentiated and dull.

Fortunately, it’s still the frontier. There’s a nitty-gritty, work-shirted aspect to Fairbanks that has changed in degree, but not in kind.

In the old days one of a young male’s rites of passage was his first summer mining “out on the creeks.” Today that movement from puberty to maturity is the initial season “up on the slope” where the oil’s flowing.

It is not for nothing that Fairbanks refers to itself as “The Golden Heart of the Interior.” But someone even manages to get a one-liner out of that. Says old-timer Don Pruhs: “That’s why when the cops pick somebody up we refer to it as a ‘cardiac arrest.’ ”

Just about the only thing you can’t find in Fairbanks is a straight man.

Comparable Lodging Cost

In winter it does indeed get almost cold enough to freeze the knob off a trailer hitch. And if you have to heat a house or hire a plumber, well, bye-bye bucks. But the basic cost of a stay isn’t likely to be any more than anywhere else in the United States.

For example, double rooms in top-tier hotels run about $100 and up, medium-price places from $85 and more basic accommodations from as low as $45. And there are abundant B&Bs; for about the same as the latter.

Restaurant meals are somewhat higher than outside but, again, there is a wide enough choice that even the very sincere, very stingy backpack traveler can do caloric restoration without breaking the bank. On average, figure meals at 20% above back home.

Tours and other types of activities are unexpectedly reasonable. The deservedly notable four-hour river trips on stern-wheelers run only $25, with hotel pickup an additional $6. A five-hour meander (including lunch) of Fairbanks, the gold fields, the University of Alaska Museum, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and other significant sights runs $33 a head. A visit to Alaskaland, the old-time Gold Rush historical park, is free, and so is the trolley that shuttles back and forth to town all day long.

Canoe Rentals

If a visitor wants to play Alaskan, canoes for use on either the Chena River, which wanders through town, or on the surrounding lakes rent for $30 a day. Fishermen can get on a plane, angle all day for lake trout, grayling and pike, then get back on the plane for rates starting in the $100 range. A three-day non-resident fishing license is $10; a two-week one, $20.

To visit Denali National Park--and Mt. McKinley--will run a little over $100 for a day trip. A long day trip, it must be added.

The local tour office is remarkably helpful and, ideally, a visitor will write in advance for the booklet “Fairbanks--Extremely Alaskan.” It’s full of nicely organized material on hotels, campgrounds, restaurants, tours, etc., and it’s free. Write to Fairbanks Convention and Visitors Bureau, 550 1st Ave., Fairbanks, Alaska 99701, or phone (907) 456-5774.