AK The State, Not The Assault Rifle...

Part I: Daylight, Forever

It’s Wednesday night. It’s 11:47 and the sun is shining like it’s five in the God damn morning. What the fuck!? Did I slip off into an alternate reality? Sort of. I’ve traveled off to the world of the Midnight Sun, the last frontier; Fairbanks, Alaska.

Having spent the past 8 hours in various modes of transportation, I’m pretty fucking out of it. My watch says quarter of midnight, my body says it’s three hours later than that, but my mind is screaming at me to stay awake. Wake up you asshole! It’s still light out! It’s an incredibly disorienting feeling. It feels like 3 a.m. but look like 4:30 in the afternoon – like that feeling you get when you’ve tied on more than a few cocktails before noon and have just stepped out of the bar into the bask of the mid-day sun. Give a stretch, catch myself from falling over, and make my way to dreamland.

It’s now Thursday morning, 7:30 a.m., and they’re redoing the roof on the neighbors’ house, RIGHT OUTSIDE THE BEDROOM WINDOW! Great. Good morning Dave, hope you didn’t sleep at all. Gee, thanks, hey can I get a cup of coffee? No, we just have steamed piss, will that do ya? Fuuuuuck.

Never mind, time to hit the links.

As I made my way over to the golf course – yeah, I played golf in Alaska – I started noticing things that I hadn’t seen through the haze of travel the day before. Almost every building I saw was a tin box with windows. There were four strip malls on the 10 minute drive, none of which had any stores that I recognized save the Radio Shack. Almost every car I saw was either fifteen years old or banged up. This town is fucking poor. Fairbanks is 30,000 people but feels like 5,000 spread out of two hundred miles of white trash shit hole. Or as the Lady Luck put it, “it’s like a third-world country with fast food joints.” Clearly I had crossed the tracks somewhere. Hey, you wanna grab some Arby’s? What, they only have Cheb’s? What the fuck? We’ll get back to this later.

Part II: America’s Pastime

There’s something to be said about watching baseball about as far north as possible. Or when it’s still light out in the 13th inning of a game that started at 7:30 p.m. “What” you say? “What the fuck are you talking about Dave, have you gone and double dipped in the bag of reds again?” No sir, I have not.

In the middle of the northern-most state that is united, in the middle of a city that looks a poor El Paso, Texas, there is one day that Fairbanks, Alaska is famous for. Unfortunately due to some untimely events, I missed it. But I did get a partial experience for my trouble, so I guess I can move on. The Midnight Sun Game is held at Goldpanner Field every year on the Summer solstice – this year being the 100th anniversary. But I don’t have enough facial hair to schedule myself correctly. Too much hair of the dog is more likely. Either way, it was an experience. For those unfamiliar, the Alaska Baseball League is a training ground for college kids looking to make their way to the Big Leagues. When the losers come home from the College World Series, they make their way to various teams, in various leagues, in various states, around the country. Southern California, Hawaii, Florida, and various East Coast states have leagues.

Why the fuck would they come to Alaska then?

The ABL is one of the tougher leagues to play in and the Goldpanners are one of the better teams. Bob Boone, Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi, and Dave Winfield are among the players who have graced these fields in the barren wasteland that is Fairbanks. The turf infield, with yellow base paths, is not glamorous but it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. The players who aren’t playing are keeping the book and manning the radar gun from the stands and the dugouts would be almost embarrassing for most high-schoolers. And yet, it was a great experience. There were probably sixty people there and most of them had clearly spent a fair amount of time watching these teams – the eighty year-old chewing on the ump the entire game was especially entertaining. “Hey Blue! That was a foul ball, incase you wanted to know!” Is that me? Am I a clone of that asshole? They even have season ticket packages.

Part III: Depressing Impressions

Back to being a poor city - that’s not all that’s wrong with Fairbanks, Alaska. It’s right in the middle of the largest state in the union, and also the most desolate. There’s twenty hours of daylight during the summer which you would think would be uplifting, but you’d be wrong. It’s one of the most depressing places I’ve ever been. It’s sunny and warm, yet it’s dark and dreary at the same time. There’s mountains and trees and blue skies, but there’s a feeling of dread just beneath all of that beauty.

“It’s like when you’re sifting through the last of your bottles under the sink a week before payday just looking for a taste and you stumble upon what you believe is Jameson, but ends up being cleaning solution you stored in the empty bottle.” – Johnny San Gria

When he’s right he’s right. I’d rather likened it to the bottle of cough syrup that you had to refill with water to keep your wife from finding out you’re thirteenth step, but we’re just splitting hairs here. It’s a horrible place to go, to be, and imaginably, to live. I don’t know how they do it. I suppose that if it’s all you’ve ever known it’s not that bad, but it just has a suffocating depressiveness about it.

I’m glad I went because it was definitely an experience. We did spend a day in Denali National Park which, unlike Fairbanks, was beautiful. I’m glad I got to see where the Lady Luck grew up because I now have a better understanding of her mental state when she speaks of that place. It’s a tough, ugly place, full of tough, ugly people, and one place that, if I can help it, I will never venture to again.

Oh, and I lied earlier. I was double dipping in the bag of reds, but it was all I could do not to slit my own throat.