“Well, what should we do then?” Chris asked.

It wasn’t quite 10, and the motel said that we wouldn’t have a room until noon. It still wasn’t quite time for lunch, so we had yet another hour to kill.

“We should go back and see Fred Meyer’s. We can shop until it’s time for lunch.”

Wasilla had more places to shop than when I lived there. Wasilla has a right to be called, even if my no one else but me, the Strip Mall of Alaska. The ‘strip’ would be the Parks Highway, but still.  They’d closed down the real non-strip mall of my youth, but in an early trend adopting move, they’d fully stocked the area with big  box stores. A full Sears, a full Super Walmart, a Home Depot, the already discussed Carr’s grocery store. And then there is Fred Meyer’s.

There had been a Fred Meyer’s in Anchorage for a long time, even when I was a teenager. But when I was an adult (barely) they opened it up to be a full service Fred’s. Grocery store!

So that was ..gasp…15 years ago. And Fred Meyer’s has made a good relationship with Alaska. On their website they advertise bush delivery. Next day even, as long as the bush  planes are flying.

I had been wanting Chris to see the inside of a Fred’s. I’d described it to him before, but really, it was something you have to experience.

Where we live now, Super Walmarts are feared and protested against.  In fact, there was a long grocery store strike because the owners were tightening belts against the onslaught of Walmart carrying grocery-store items. The workers struck for cherry benefits, and it went on for months. In the end, the workers just gave up because unions have little-to-no power on the west coast anymore.

Anyway, the Super Walmart idea is to have a full grocery store with dairy, produce and everything in the same store with all the usual Walmart things–which means everything.

Chris and I had encountered a super Walmart on our trip to Yellowstone in Bozeman Montana. But Bozeman is small. And their walmart was small,  comparatively.

As a shopper, I was familiar with the idea of having everything in one store-BECAUSE I’D EXPERIENCED IT IN FRED MEYERS. In Anchorage. I thought it was a great idea, very convenient and it should come to Los Angeles already.

I hadn’t been to Wasilla since the Fred’s opened there. I wondered what this one would look like.

So I wanted Chris to see this. We wound our way back to the Fred Meyers and entered through the side next to the garden center.

Garden center! Landscaping. My former city was civilizing itself. Hard to believe.

So we went inside, and beheld a store that had a slightly more finished interior than a Costco. The floors were covered, not just plain concrete, and the shelved contained inventory that was not still Plastic-wrapped. But that was the extent of the polish.

Directly in front of us were couches. Full upholstered, huge-armed couches that Chris and I had learned to associate with living rooms that were not cramped for space. To the right, we saw large packages of assorted fireworks. To the left, fishing tackle and hip-waders.

We walked over to the couch. “Not bad.” I said.

Further on we found an entire aisle of identical dining chairs stacked seat to seat. Further on was an aisle of insect repelling devices.

“We need to get you a maternity muumuu from Alaska” Chris was delighted with the thought. “Where are the clothes?”

We walked through aisles of dizzying diversity, took a right at the deli, bakery, and espresso counter and found the clothes. We looked through the ladies section, and though there was a large selection of large sizes, I couldn’t find the maternity.

I spotted a store employee and asked her “Where is your maternity section?”

“We don’t have one.”

!

!!

I guess it wasn’t an everything store after all.

I showed Chris where to find the Palmer-Wasilla Highway. It’s not really a highway, just a substantial road (meaning two lanes with the occasional turn lane).

It was drizzling.

Palmer is really close to Wasilla. It’s a farm town, though, and was started by “the colony”. During the depression, President Roosevelt tried anything he could think of to boost the economy and called these collective stabs in the dark “The New Deal.”

Palmer was one of those deals. He persuaded a bunch of down and out farmers that Alaska couldn’t possibly be colder than the midwest in the winter, so why not go? He would give them a place to live and 40 acres for free. Remember, this was before Alaska was a state (1935). I cannot imagine why this would give the economy any kind of boost. But, hey, I wasn’t there.

A bunch of families from Minnesota in particular, and surrounding states, came up to Palmer and were housed in a tent city to await their 40 acres (no mule). This was not what they had in mind. True, the winters in Palmer were actually less cold than the winters in Minnesota. But the SUMMERS! summers are far far far less warm. So far less warm that tent living was not a pleasure.

Some of the people stayed. Many left. Palmer was peopled by folks who understood what a town was for and why it might be a good idea. Civilization was not something that the Palmer farmers were running from.

Therefore, there were houses of a certain vintage in the area. Original Colony Houses. These houses had a kind of charm that made them very distinctive in their surroundings. They would have been unremarkable if located in North Dakota or Minnesota, but architecture and homeyness was scarce in Alaska.

So, Palmer has a fairly concentrated downtown area. They boast a soda fountain, a fabric store, near the library and post office and train station

And a Carr’s grocery store and a McDonald’s across the street is around the corner.

Palmer did not have a mall, or the many big box stores that Wasilla has.

“This does look a little more like a town,” Chris admitted.

“We never came here,” I said. “I guess it was too far away, and we just didn’t have a reason. I guess I remember coming for special things, like maybe for 4-H.”

“What else is there to see here?”

“Um…” I said. “This is it.”

Ohh…it felt so good to lie still with my eyes closed. I slept, and Chris ‘rested’ for a good hour and half. We roused a little before 9.

Nine! The hour when the hotel was staffed. We turned around and went back to the hotel.

It had stopped raining–mostly–and the road had become very familar by now. Three trips in less that many hours.

The hotel was locked. But another guest let me in.

The first room I passed had a young woman cleaning it. The office was down the hall. No one was in it.

So I walked down the hall back to the cleaning girl. “Oh, yes, just a minute” she said.

She was the only worker there. I looked pitiful and begged to get into the hotel early. She said that  they were totally booked.

‘But I guess I can get a room ready for you by noon.”

“Thank you so much!”

There was a promise of a bed. We just had to get through the next three hours.

“Where to now?” Chris asked, back in the car.

“Let’s go check out Palmer.”

Hatcher’s Pass is a place I best remember for our sledding trips. Every once in a while, in the winter, someone would get a sledding trip together and we’d get up there and sled down the incredibly steep slopes.

It wasn’t that far away though. This is the view from the intersection with the corner store near my house:

That mountain is one side of Hatcher’s Pass. My mom had some kind of obsession (as it seemed to my teenage assessment) with going hiking there. She’d go with Dad a lot, and be all rapturous when she got back. She always wanted the whole family to go.

I could think of nothing I’d rather do less than go hiking with my family. I put up a fight. If I’d been born 25 years earlier, they would have called it anti-social. But I wasn’t anti-social, I was just anti-PARENT at that point.

Sledding, though, that was fun. If mom had suggested THAT, I might have gone along with it.

Anyway, this was summer and no sledding was going to happen.  In a weird twist, we’d be doing exactly what I’d always fought against my mother to not be doing. Just looking at nature.

Amazing how close it was. I had always remembered it as further. Here’s what we saw:

And I can’t leave out the river:

This is not a desert. It’s a damp, cold land.

It was raining (not evident in the pictures). So we drove on. We saw the Independence mine buildings, something I’d never paid much attention to while living there. Hatcher’s pass is an abandoned mine, a fact wholly obscured for me by it’s sledding promise.

Chris and I saw it, and we saw the river and the not-all-the way melted snow. I just wanted to sleep.

“Stop. Let’s just sleep.”

“No, they will charge money. See?”

Oh yeah. I forgot this was a state park. Yep, it was 5 bucks. I was tired and weak, and I wanted to kill Chris at this point, but I was too weak. He turned around, a familiar maneuver, something that promised YET AGAIN no sleep.

I thought about venting my murderous thoughts at my husband, but I remembered he was pretty tired too. And really, would it improve the situation? We were stuck as we were.

And then! and THEN! we had stopped. Chris found a pull-out just outside the park. One that DIDN”T CHARGE FIVE DOLLARS.

“Do you want to stop here and sleep?” Chris asked.

It wasn’t even 7 am. “Yes, yes” I said. The car was warm. Since we were in one place, I could shut my eyes and finally rest.

I sipped the last bit of my warm coffee and pulled my shawl up to my chin.

sweet oblivion.

We’d passed it at least 4 times, but the Carr’s grocery store right next to McDOnald’s had a big sign with orange letters

OPEN 24

So, we pulled into the parking lot and went inside to find some food.

Carr’s grocery stores was an Alaskan chain. Safeway (known as Von’s in L.A. where we live) moved up to alaska I don’t know when. But as long as I could remember, Carr’s worked their butts off to make their grocery stores a dream of what a grocery store could be.

Deli counters and in-store bakeries are de riguer now, but those were always part of Carr’s, even back in the 80s. Plus, a full service espresso bar, and an ice cream counter.  They had a HUGE produce section, which for Alaska is no small feat. There was also a large, several aisles worth of health food selections, sort of like a Whole Foods–Gluten-Free, Carob, granola, what have you.

Pretty much anything you could imagine that a grocery store might possibly have, they had. Because they wanted to run Safeway into the ground. The standard for grocery stores in Alaska was very high.

After I moved away, Safeway bought Carr’s. End of an era.

So I expected that the quality would have also fallen. Maybe they wouldn’t be 24 hours anymore. Maybe they would have shut down the ice cream counter or the espresso bar.

The people who told me that Safeway owned Carr’s sounded sad and disgusted with the situation.

But the store was even BIGGER. I know for sure it was bigger because I remember that part of the strip mall being a fabric store. Now the grocery store had taken over that space.

There was a whole long aisle of nothing but all varieties of chips. My grocery store here in L.A. has maybe a half aisle.

I was happy to avail myself of their bathroom, a  welcome change to a flush toilet after the outhouse earlier.

The donuts were very fresh, still being transferred from the baker’s racks to the clear-door cabnets. I took a fritter and Chris got a bagel.

Then I wanted a coffee. Alaska has the best coffee.

We went back to the car. I looked around in this familiar strip mall to see what was changed.

This surprised me:

A Kaladi brothers coffee shop in Wasilla. I regretted getting my coffee from the Carr’s now. I remembered how they had brought espresso to Alaska when I was a teenager and how it was SO GOOD.

Well, a rising tide lifts all the boats. My  coffee was better than anything I’d had in California in many years.

“Did the coffee wake you up?” Chris asked.

“MMmm..it’s good. I feel better. But I still want to sleep. Maybe we could stay here?”

“It’s too crowded,” he said.

“um….Maybe we could go see Hatcher’s Pass.”

We left the subdivision and Bull Moose Drive. Back on Shrock and then at the cross roads of the corner store/ gas station again.

“where now?” Chris asked.

It was close to six. Maybe we could finally get breakfast. “Back to McDonald’s, I guess.”

Through the rain on the roads that were becoming familiar to us both now. We got to the parking lot and parked right by the door. I was so tired I couldn’t decide which would be better, getting out of the car or not moving.

There was a man cleaning the parking lot. I remembered doing that when I worked there. I felt bad for the guy though, because it was raining. At least it was a good sign that a worker was there. It wasn’t quite six yet. I got out of the car to ask him when the place opened.

He was older than I realized. “When are you open?” I asked.

He kept his head down and focussed on sweeping. “They open when someone unlocks the doors,” he muttered.

Old men who work at McDonald’s seem universally crabby. I got back in the car.

Chris: “What did he say?”

“Not very helpful. But look, there are more poeple waiting.”

Some trucker type men in baseball hats were piling up by the door. “Good,” I said to Chris. “When they go in, we’ll know that the doors are open.”

I admired the men standing in their T-shirts in the rain. They were unconcerned about the cold and wet. I remembered being that way too. Even now, I am significantly more willing to be rained on than almost anyone in L.A. But not this morning.

Our car clock showed 6:03. Then 6:10.  Maybe our clock was fast?

But the shirtsleeves were getting restless. They pounded on the door. Clock showed 6:15. Finally a girl came out, with the drive-thru headset on. She spoke to the men.

I got out and asked her, “What’s going on?”

She spoke in an unapologetic monotone: “The computer is down. We can’t sell you any food.”

“When will you be open?”

“The computer is down. I don’t know when it will be working again.”

Back in the car, I told Chris the computer was down. “She didn’t even apologize. I think when I was working here, they would have apologized, and maybe put a sign in the window.”

“Well, where can we eat?” he wanted to know.

“ummm..” Now that a warm place with table and chairs wasn’t available, I guess we’d have to make do. “We could to the grocery store and get a donut.”

“A grocery store? At 6 on sunday morning? They won’t be open.”

“Well, when I lived here, Carr’s was open 24 hours. Let’s go see. It’s right here.”

I wanted to show my husband the lake where I’d spent so much time.

When we moved there, we were told the lake was Memory Lake. Later we learned the name had been changed from “Swamp Lake”. You can see it that link that the lake is kinda two lakes with a little connecting bit. We only knew the near side of the lake for the longest time.

When we first moved to Wasilla, I was in 7th grade. I was still in school, that bus ride away to Peter’s Creek. I did NOT want to move to Wasilla, because I knew my social standing would drop immediately. There were NO cute boys in Wasilla. Okay, maybe one but he was not very nice.

But it didn’t matter because almost right away I was informed that I would be homeschooled. Social standing was a thing of the past. Social flattening was more like it.

But THAT left us a lot of time to learn the mysteries of the lake. My brother Chris liked to fish in the lake, and caught about 10 little trout or landlocked salmon. They were 9-12 inches long, really not big enough to eat compared to real salmon. We fed them to the cat.

We wondered where the lake got its water. We kinda tried to go around the perimeter to see if a stream flowed in. But there were houses all around the lake, so we were nervous about trespassing.

This was our lake. There was a public lake, Wasilla lake, that people would go swim at. People would even drive from Eagle river sometimes to go swim at our lake. They used to swim in Mirror lake, just past Peter’s Creek, but then Mirror Lake got Beaver Fever and you couldn’t swim in it anymore. But this was our lake. We could walk to it anytime.

Chris was the one who stuck to it. And he discovered that there was a whole second lake  past the choke point.

The subdivision had it’s own well, and that empty lot was how we accessed the lake. The lake was surrounded by swamp, so we learned the art of choosing the highest bumps of plants in the flat meadow of swamp between the road and the lake. Otherwise, we’d get a shoeful of bog. I had no interest in fishing, but I liked the lake. I liked ice skating and went every day I could. Chris Ice fished with holes that other people left, because he didn’t have a borer.

In the summer, he would go somewhere and fish from the shore. Sometimes we would swim, but I couldn’t swim near the fishing line for fear of getting hooked. Mom didn’t want me to swim alone, but I talked her into letting me if I had a life jacket on.

Here’s the picture: Alaskan summer, where temperatures above 70 are rare. The lake, aptly named Swamp Lake, colder than the air, with lake weeds and leeches and deep silt at the bottom.

We tried to fathom the muck at the bottom of the lake once. I wiggled my feet down into it as far as it would go. It got colder as you went down, very cold. I stopped when it got up to mid-calf, but only because Chris suggested that the leeches probably lived down in there. It was harder to get my foot out than in.

I checked my feet carefully for leeches after that. It was true, the leeches lived on the bottom mostly. The strategy when swimming was to leap out into the water and touch the bottom as little as possible. The life jacket helped with this, and we usually kept our shoes on. Even aside from leeches, the bottom was very slimy, ucky, cold and definitely something to avoid.

The leeches weren’t too bad. Wasilla Lake had worse leeches. I think we found a leech on ourselves a maximum of 5 times. The leeches were small, only about three brown slimy inches long, and you just pulled them off with a squeal and a shudder and that was the end of that.

We did discuss whether or not the lake weeds could tangle in our feet and pull us down to our deaths. Chris said yes. I thought it was unlikely. But we avoided them, since they were definitely slimy.

But when husband Chris and I drove past the entry point to the lake, it was very overgrown. I remembered a gravel lot. There were a lot of trees and bushes now. You couldn’t see the lake from the road anymore.

And it was raining, and neither of us felt like getting out and seeing the lake. I figured we’d get shoes full of bogwater if we tried.

“What do we do now?” Chris asked.

No breakfast or warm place to sit and eat it. McDonald’s must open at 6 on Sunday. There was nothing I wanted more than to sleep, my stomach wasn’t feeling that good anyway.

But we had a car and we had to go somewhere.

“Umm..” I said.

“Maybe we could find our hotel,” Chris suggested.

Oh God. Please, please let us find out hoteland go to sleep in it. I would pay anything.

“Yeah, It’s supposed to be near here,” I said. The address said Bogard road, which was right behind the McDonalds.

So I directed Chris on how to get to Bogard and we started looking at addresses. This hotel was not at all where I thought it would be. And Bogard was a lot longer than I remembered.

“Maybe they will have a vacancy and they’ll let us in early,” I hoped.

We did find it, a little hotel in a part of Wasilla I swear I’d never seen before. VERY little hotel. It was locked and the sign on the door said it opened at 9. They did have a number to call for out of hours.

“Let’s call and ask if we can get in early,” I begged Chris.

“I don’t think it would help our case to wake them up at 5 in the morning. Let’s just wait until 9.”

That made sense, even if I didn’t like it.

“Where to now?” Chris said.

“Um….I guess we could go see my old house.”

We turned around and headed off to Wasilla Fishook road. I kept being surprised at just how many trees were on the sides of the road.

I had forgotten that Shrock road did not exit directly off Fishook. There was a little dogleg, Seldon road. And even more surprising, Seldon road had this:

A real stoplight!

I had no trouble remembering THIS:

As a teenager, I would occasionally gather toghether some coins and go down to this corner store and buy candy. But it was a 45 minute walk there, so I didn’t go that often. I remember it as something I might do with a friend who came over when we were looking for a way to kill some time. I didn’t have TV or anything else at home, so, walking and talking seemed a good idea.

The little green-roofed shed in the front was certainly not there before. These things were all over in Wasilla, and they were drive through espresso stands. Unbelievable.

We went on to Shrock and then passed Black Bear and Red Fox (or some such roads) to find Bull Moose drive.

It sure wasn’t paved when I lived here. But I remember those mailboxes well. With almost no other way to socialize in home High School, I had many many pen pals.

I remember I stole mom’s  mail key. She took a while to notice, and then said that Dad liked to pick up the mail when he came home. That it was a nice thing he enjoyed. But there was no way I was going to wait the 4 or 5 MILLION hours between when the mail was delivered and when Dad came home to get any potential letters. I came up with a cunning plan. I would go LOOK at the mail, and if there was a letter for me I would take it and secret it home. The rest of the mail could stay for Dad.

The days were LONG people. Let me tell you. I waited for the mail to come almost every day. During the summers, I had to be by the window and watch the cars go by to see if the mailman went past. Sometimes I would get impatient and walk down to the mailbox a couple times, just in case.

But in the WINTER! The mailtruck wore chains on its tires every day. I could tell if it went by by the marks on the snowy/ice buildup on the gravel road. So I would not have to walk allthe way down to the mailboxes, I could just go check for tracks on the road.

Winter always lasted longer than summer.

But the house itself. Still standing:

But where did the stairs to the front door go?