Alaska Trip, Day 3: Ketchikan
Although Ketchikan has a population of only 7368, it is the fifth largest city in Alaska1. This is partly due to the vast tracts of wilderness and icy waste that dominate the Alaskan landmass, but mostly due to the Alaskan state slogan: The State with a Billion Billion Cities.
Late Alaskan governor Mad Sparky McJuddnick instituted this slogan during his brief, manic reign in the year 1932, despite the fact that, at the time, Alaska (a) was not yet a state; and (b) had only six cities — one of which, Snartifartiburg, existed entirely in McJuddnick’s addled, intermittently functional mind.
In order to make the state match its slogan, McJuddnick pushed through the Tiny, Tiny City Act, which reclassified every Alaskan man, woman, and child as a city, each with his own tiny city council, tiny borders, and tiny zoning ordinances2.
This had the predictable effect on the establishment on actual cities, and on the survival of existing ones. But Ketchikanian mayor Alberto “Punchbowl” Spacklehousen managed to save his own city from the worst of the catastrophe: he took advantage of Ketchikan’s isolation to keep his people unaware of their new status as sovereign municipalities, and to impose strict border regulations forbidding other cityzens from moving to Ketchican until they completed a rigorous course of extreme mockery. And so the city flourished, and became a thriving center of salmon production, and tourism.
The highlight of our stay in Ketchikan was a visit, by seaplane, to Misty Fjords — which is not, it turns out, a Norwegian porn star, but an actual fjord, with mist. And it’s absolutely beautiful. An azure river unfolded beneath us, forking and widening and narrowing through twisting, forested canyons. Thin waterfalls ran down the sides of the canyons, and flocks of seagulls, flecks of white flitting across the eddied blue, wheeled and waned beneath us. Taffeta wisps of cloud floated by, lending the scene a kind of gauzy ethereality. It was, in a word, absolutelyfreakingbreathtaking.
Eventually, we took a sharp turn and descended into a lake, surrounded by rising walls of trees, hemmed in by a low ceiling of brilliant white mist. The pilot cut the engine and we all got out onto the plane’s pontoons and looked out on a world defined entirely by its peace, and its pristine, meticulous beauty.
If the day had been sunnier, the whole scene would have been washed in light, and we would have seen the true height of the walls that surrounded us. But, in a way, I’m glad it wasn’t. This constrained, eerie, quiet world had a kind of holiness about it: a temple made out of the world, for gods that vanished long ago.
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Ketchikan is also, we discovered later, the “nowhere” in the Bridge to Nowhere. I’m kind of pleased that we spent the better part of the day in a place that the politcal narrative tells us isn’t there. It stokes my feelings of existential dread quite nicely. ↩
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In a particularly inconvenient spasm of insanity, McJuddnick passed another statute mandating that all cityzens’ right hands be zoned for salmon juggling, and their left hands for marmoset punching — and nothing else. This left Alaskans with nothing to eat with but their mouths, nothing to turn the pages of their books with but their tongues, nothing to till their hard, cold fields with but their feet, etc. To everyone’s relief, this statute was repealed six months later, soon after McJuddnick was eviscerated by the grizzly bear he was attempting to circumcise — but, to this day, Alaska still produces the best salmon jugglers, and marmoset boxers, in the world. ↩
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