Letter from Juneau, Alaska

Tonia and I went to Juneau, Alaska, on the Fourth of July. We went because the guidebooks said Juneau was beautiful and you could hike on paths right out of the city and it was Independence Day, my favorite holiday. And yes it was beautiful and yes we took a hike right out of the city and yes Juneau has a big festival on the Fourth. And yes Juneau is a small town.

Really small. The guidebook said 30,000 people, but Juneau feels smaller than that, probably because it is spread out over hundreds of acres, making it one of the largest municipalities in the nation. The town itself has maybe two main streets and 300-400 homes. One drugstore. One movie theater. Thankfully, blessedly, almost no brands: no Gap, no Nordstroms, no Barnes and Nobles or Cineplex Odeon or Wal-Mart or Albertsons. One McDonalds (new; although there is one thirteen miles out, at the airport). A local paper, the Empire, that has articles on barn dances, and boating safety, and a 56.77 lbs. King Salmon caught in local waters, and a lost and found section that featured:

FOUND
Retainer by Mount Roberts Tramway Terminal.
Call 789-5555

Juneau also has stores with faux Tlingit totems to please the tourists, who make day stops on huge, fourteen-story ships hustling up to Glacier Bay National Park. Since the tourists eat on their barks, there's not a decent restaurant in town, and any one with a passable menu serves halibut in every configuration imaginable (Do not, under any circumstance, even in the spirit of adventure, eat the Halibut Nachos at Fisherman's Wharf). Two bars left from pioneer days, filled with character and character-seeking tourists. Dozens of bars filled with cheap beer and abject desperation.

Because while Juneau is a small town, it is also something of a frontier town. A little rough, as you would expect a town built on mining and fishing and timber. The two main drags, Franklin and Front street, filled with ever-cute souvenir shops for the cruise set, double as hangouts for the roughnecks, for unemployed loggers and inebriated Indians and toothless whores. So you have the odd contrast of freshly scrubbed couples from Des Moines passing filthy drunken Indian hookers in the street. Sooner or later the city fathers will figure out that the drunks and hookers fit poorly into the mall that Juneau must become if it is to remain part of the cruise ship sweeps. They'll pass an ordinance and refurbish downtown and give tax breaks to the Gap and Planet Hollywood and the Hard Rock Café and discover (as was reported on the news the day we left) that they're still not generating a whole lot of revenue from the tourists. But by then Juneau will have completed the inevitable Disneyfied developmental path of moving from a place where people do things to a place where people have done things. Which, by the way, it's not far from now.

Juneau nonetheless has enough small town ambiance to make Independence Day delightful. Town boosters got tired of being in the farthest time zone west and celebrating the Fourth last in the nation and so now set the fireworks off at exactly 12:00 am Alaska Time July 4, making them the first community in the nation to celebrate. They follow it the next morning with a ball game, a watermelon eating contest, a sandcastle contest, a homemade pie sale, a beef barbecue dinner, races and dances and a paragliding demonstration. And, of course, a parade, about two hours long, which Tonia and I watched, greedily hoarding the salt-water taffy showered upon us from the floats.

It was exactly as an Independence Day parade should be, like the ones I remember from my childhood when I visited my grandparents in Terre Haute, Indiana. The parade was led by the local fire department, which brought out their antique tankers for the occasion. The high school band followed. The swim team and football team piled into shining pick-ups donated by the local car dealer. People dressed in old-time miner outfits marched to remind the crowd of the city's roots. A bagpipe team drilled in step. Multiple Queens of the parade followed, representing all ages and categories, from Mrs. Alaska to Miss pre-pubescent Jon-Benet Ramsey types. It's an election year, so local and state politicians marched, the incumbents in floats, the challengers on foot. They handed out plastic flags imprinted with the Stars and Stripes and, in small letters, "Made in China." Clowns passed balloons to the kids. A man in a beat up brown Honda somehow made his way through the barricades and got stuck in the parade. The Echo Bible camp had a float with a picture of George Washington beneath a huge cross, happily violating the separation of church and state. The families of gays and lesbians, their float adorned with purple balloons, represented the left. The Filipino immigrant community presented two groups of marchers, the Filipino Kings and Queens, and dancers in celebratory native drag. (The local Native Americans, by the way, did not march in the parade. Instead, the biggest Indian Corporation, Sealaska, set up booths celebrating native culture at a remove from the main festivities.) The Shriners drove miniature cars. The Salvation Army Marching Band played, although they had to be imported from Vancouver. Wizened vets floated by. And the National Guard contributed our favorite: a blow-up, 14-foot soldier identified as Sergeant Snuffy.

It was a parade and celebration invested with the spirit of small-town democracy: civic pride, politics, family and commerce. The whole town turned out, plus two boatloads of cruisers. The kids got candy (except, naturally, from the local diabetes foundation, which handed out plastic animals) and balloons. People leapt into the parade and took photos with their marching friends. The vets received the thanks of a grateful community. The entire experience was delightful.

The Fourth the way it should be: somewhere in our culture are the remains of the ideal small-town democracy. It's a little bit hard to separate from a Conservative sales pitch, because they've made a fetish of it, but it's there in Juneau, and was there in Terre Haute, and there in the small town I grew up in, Pensacola, Florida. It's really a Midwestern ideal, laid out with the Northwest Ordinance, a Jeffersonian concept of a tightly knit community of self-reliant farmers. The prairie romance cultivated by local historians from Salem, Ohio to Alliance, Nebraska. It's in that famous photo of Wendell Wilkie standing in a car during a 1940 campaign parade. It's the substance of It's a Wonderful Life. And it is absolutely false.

Since the 1920s there's not an intellectual in America who has bothered with the ideal, other than to protest it. The complaint informs Our Town and Babbitt and is summarized by anyone standing in a contemporary small town like Juneau, Alaska, saying to themselves I can't imagine living here. Because small towns are also about intrusive neighbors and rabid conformity and bounded horizons and most of all, boredom. No one really wants to live there, except for burned-out hippie romantics retreating from their own irresponsibility.

Or maybe that's a little harsh. After all, there was a time when I wanted to live in a bright shiny town where you knew everyone's first name, and we made clean, rational decisions like good democrats. There was a time when I wanted to live in a Norman Rockwell painting.

But, of course, there's not a small town in America that's really like that. Juneau is typical: it's got the parades and personal relations. It probably has a wise and indulgent schoolteacher, a happy and carefree immigrant barber, an oafish but well-intended major, a resolute but forgiving sheriff. But it probably also has aging whores, drunk Indians, filthy bikers, wife beaters, homosexuals, heroin users, tax fraud, pious liars, abused children, sado-masochists, crooked businessmen, slackers, malcontents and incest. Next to the article on the King Salmon, the Empire carried a story on a local teenager killed while van-surfing. A tragedy typical of a small town: bored and drunk, the teen finds one way out of town.

I should know. It was all I could do to get out of Pensacola, and not because Pensacola was so bad. Looking back on it, I'm happy I grew up there. But despite what my friends and coach and teachers and amorphous culture said, it made no sense to make a life there, not when there was New York and Paris and London. I believed when I left I was making a conscious choice-against everything I was told-to strike out into the world, and search it out. In retrospect, I wasn't. Because through television and movies the amorphous culture also told me I should leave my small town and venture to some locale where my abilities and talents would be turned to better use. In retrospect, when I left Pensacola the United States of America did not need another farmer, or someone enamored of the small town life.

Societies demand, as part of their deep fabric, as part of their work discipline, ambitions. The secret of these ambitions is that they are always perceived by individuals as their own, unique, special to them, when in fact they are shared and shared in order to get people to work according to priorities set by impersonal and unfair societies. Jeffersonian America demanded productive families turning the land to good use, and idealized the small town in hopes that those limited horizons would be enough to bind people to the soil. It offered the same romance for the frontier, which was never the thing of cowboy novels. And the protests of the twenties-believed by people at the time to be shocking breaks with tradition and grand gestures towards freedom--were nothing more than a turning from the small town, a sign that it had lost its use in the broader political economy. It was a redefinition of the ideal. The city-especially in any guise smacking of Europe--never took as an alternative, probably because of the attraction yeomanry has in America, but the suburbs seized hold, definitively, magnificently, the picket fence crucible of Nixonian fantasies, the perfect geographic locale for a nation committed to the twin goals of Cold War militarism and consumerist excess.

America doesn't need suburbs or small towns anymore, so it strikes me as sick and false to demand contentment with them. But then I've moved into the next geographic ideal for a post-national America: the urbane internationalized city, with touring African art exhibits, nouvelle Asian cuisine and everywhere European barristas. The perfect virtual town for post-modern information-age globalized workers: worldly (sort of), and happy (sort of). And I am a rebel for living here, an individualist who consciously rejected the small town that might have trapped me, the suburb my parents still insist I should retreat to. Yeah, right.

There will come a time when my ambition is played out, when teenagers from Alaska don't want to move to Seattle and write code and argue about marketing computers in Argentina. The sooner, the better.

In the meantime, as much as I needed to get out of the small garrison town of Pensacola, Florida, as much as I could see the fraud in the small mining town of Terre Haute, Indiana, as much as I cannot conceive of living in the small tourist town of Juneau, Alaska, I am thrilled and happy those towns are there, and that every Fourth of July they rally the neighbors around an exhausted holiday and cornpone parade: an implicit hale and hearty fuck you from the outmoded to an inexorable social process that bends every hope and ambition to a hidden work discipline.

Three cheers for small towns. Happy Independence Day.