Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

Alaska Trip, Day 4: Juneau

Juneau is an odd city, and possibly the most uncapitalish looking capital I’ve ever seen. The main government center, behind tourist row, makes a sort of half-hearted attempt at gravitas: a city hall with the requisite set of doric columns, a modernish courthouse with dull brick walls and a glassed-in entrance protuberance on the ground floor, a dull line of soulless office buildings fronting a more or less standard stretch of urban blacktop.

But you can tell the city isn’t really trying — walk one block over and it settles, with an almost audible sigh, into the haphazard quirkiness that marked everything else we saw: houses hanging gamely off the side of the mountain, pressed tightly together, no two alike. Narrow winding streets that forked in odd and unexpected ways and rose suddenly in steep, knee-shattering inclines. An subterranean internet cafe (rows upon rows of illuminated rectangles glimpsed throw a window flush with the sidewalk) next to a tattoo shop. A pinkish house suspended over a sharp drop into the valley, at the bend of a street that suddenly, and unceremoniously, becomes a mountain trail. This is a place with the largest number of motorcycle riders in the United States, per-capita, whose weather only allows you to actually ride motorcycles three months out of the year. That’s pretty awesome.

It’s not a pretty place¹, but it’s absolutely fascinating, even at the scratch-the-surface level. An isolated city rising improbably out of the wilderness, charmingly failing to reconcile its outback inclinations with its metropolitan aspirations. I wish we’d had more time here.