In search of the great indoors in Alaska

The thirteen-hour bus tour through Denali National Park with a driver who looked like an extra on the SNL commercial skit for Gray Adult Pigtails and didn’t put down the intercom the entire time, saying things like “Well, too bad I’m not in charge of bears, or I’d get them out here for you, but remember that time 20 minutes ago when we saw a possum?” had me praying we’d actually see a bear, not for the photo op, but so I could throw myself off the bus and end my misery. Add to that, the weather was drizzly and overcast, so we couldn’t see any of Denali’s 6 million acres of wilderness. But if we’d been able, would we even want to? After all, it was just more nature.

I’m not a fan. Yeah, I said it. It’s a free country (well, sorta). I’m not mad at nature. I don’t wish it ill; I compost, I recycle and I GoFund environmentally-friendly innovations. Occasionally I can even be found doing nature-adjacent things like Instagramming a cocktail on the beach. Or at a campfire. Perhaps even spending Christmas in East Africa on safari or walking the Camiño de Santiago de Compostela in some misguided gesture towards midlife reinvention. But at heart, I’m an indoor cat. Like the Laurie Anderson song goes, I’d rather see this on TV.

So how did I end up spending my first gasp of freedom, my first post-COVID trip, in Alaska, a place whose brand is nothing but nature?

I blame a few things.

First, of course, COVID-19. In July 2021, I emerged blinking and fuzzy-headed from my lockdown burrow. Much like an Alaska black bear, I was ravenous after 16 months to start traveling again but also wary of destinations without mask mandates or outdoor activities. Alaska promised both freedom from #ZoomLife and healthy blue skies.

Second, I blame my husband. Normally I have to trick him into taking vacation, much like luring a puppy to the vet. I leave a trail of treats leading to an open car door, then it’s a bag over his head, slam the door and peel away from the curb, while he beats against the window. Upon reaching our destination, he bounds out, declaring that vacation is good for him. So when my friend Karim suggested Alaska and offered to do all the planning, and my husband actually cheered, confiding that ever since immigrating from Nigeria he’d wanted to go to Alaska, I was stuck.

The third thing that tricked me into Alaska was the promise of King Crab legs and luxury train rides, not necessarily together. Karim knew that train travel essentially was how to get me to the vet, and Alaska’s trains did not disappoint. The four-hour Coastal Classic between Anchorage and Seward, and the eight-hour Denali Star from Anchorage to Denali, the latter for which we snagged GoldStar Dome Service, were my favorite moments.

And why not?

The nature was outside, where it should be, making a spectacle of itself in sparkling glaciers, snow-capped mountain peaks, lush gorges, plunging waterfalls, glistening lakes and aloof moose. We drank it in, from both open-air and glass-domed observation cars, fortified by reindeer treats and a cheery bartender at the front of each carriage dispensing drinks and tourist information. This consisted of survival-useful factoids, like “There’s an earthquake in Alaska every 15 minutes” and “1.3% of the population owns and can fly a plane,” not bus-driver-with-a-captive-audience useful, like “In 30 (then 20, then 10) minutes, we’ll be at the rest stop, and when the lavatory handle is green, that means it’s available and when it’s red, that means it’s occupied.”

Whoever said nature was free wasn’t talking about Gold Rush Alaska in tourist season. We had already blown our gold on pricey transportation and hotels, not to mention bus, raft and boat tours (the highlight being a wildlife cruise around Seward’s Kenai Fjords and Resurrection Bay with whales breaching next to calving blue glaciers and jagged islands studded with red-footed puffins and barking sea lions). And crab legs. We can’t afford even pricier bear safaris and helicopter rides and deep-sea fishing. I was ready for the outdoor portion of Alaska to end.

My husband, who loves reading a good plaque, opted to learn about Alaska’s 224 federally recognized tribes and 20 Indigenous languages while wandering the Native Heritage Center. It was an impressive resource albeit a little outdoorsy for me; I preferred the Anchorage Museum, a gem Karim had been keeping in his back pocket. The Living Our Cultures permanent exhibition of 600 Alaska Native pieces was a mesmerizing, dimly-lit forest of photographs, clothing, tools and art suspended in floor-to-ceiling glass cases accompanied by environmental sounds and storytelling. The Contemporary Alaskan Native Art was a fascinating cultural mashup, from the Circumpolar North influences of pioneering sculptor Ronald Senungetuk (1933-2020), to hybrid carvings by Erin Gingrich, mask installations by Nicholas Galanin, decolonial mixed-media by Rebecca Lyon and photography by Erica Lord critiquing Blood Quantum laws.

On the ground floor we discovered an exhibit on Black Lives in Alaska. Archival photos and oral histories traced the Black presence (and complicated relationship with Indigenous tribes) back to the 19th century, with the 1840s arrival of multiracial whaling crews consisting of immigrants, free men of color and the formerly enslaved. In 1899, at the tail end of the Klondike Gold Rush and two years after Bessie Couture, the first Black person to own a business in Alaska, opened The Kitchen Restaurant, Buffalo Soldiers were deployed to the Klondike. In an interesting bit of serendipity, Anchorage’s first Black police chief, whom the Anchorage Assembly had unanimously voted into office on the department’s 100-year anniversary, was sworn in the afternoon we arrived.

That evening, as I scrolled through my phone over a last plate of crab legs, I almost Instagram-envied myself. Every photo showed us looking sporty and happy against stunning natural beauty. Once my memory faded and was replaced by this photographic account, I may forget that it was probably just post-pandemic freedom giddiness, as Walt Whitman wrote in “Song of the Open Road”: Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, / Healthy, free, the world before me.

I may come to believe that my grins mean I actually like nature.