Alaska Trip, Day 5: Skagway
One unpleasant side-effect of being a cruise destination is the cankerous rash of tourist strips that inevitably blister the dockward side of your town. These places were my first impression of both Kitchican and Juneau, and they have an unfortunate homegenizing effect on a place: the weary sameness of ugly, repeated ad infinitum.
Or so I thought until we steamed into Skagway, which appears to have entirely jettisoned the tiresome bother of actually being a town in order to focus all of its efforts on being a tourist trap. It’s a strategy that, to my considerable surprise, works brilliantly.
The “town” is a ten-minute walk from the ship, and it’s arranged in a sort of old-west-movie configuration: wide dusty streets flanked by raised boardwalks, laid out in an easy-to-navigate grid. It has the usual compliment of shops: assloads of jewelers aggressively hawking their duty-free shinies; purveyors of worthless trinkets cynically splashed with a glaze of local color; a store called Del Sol that traffics in sun-based products, which was doing a brisk business despite the fact that most of the places we visited got about five days of sun a year. And so on. Skagway gets away with it by investing a great deal of effort in making these places look untrashy, and in embracing their existence as a central tenet rather than an ugly necessity. Of being unapologetic about it. So tramping from store to store here wasn’t the soul-killing exercise in dread and tedium that it had been in Kitchikin and Juneau. It felt right, somehow — like I was fulfilling my assigned role in a world exquisitely tuned to the imperatives of base materialism.
No Comments Yet