Anchored down in Anchorage
I’m back up in Anchorage, Alaska doing what half the folks I meet here are doing: looking for a job. Flew in on the noon run after getting up pre-dawn — really, post midnight — and now I’m beat, hunkered down in the Puffin Inn, a motel at the edge of town. The edge of town, at least for us thrifty tourists, is almost affordable, at least now that summer’s over and the salmon runs too.
My first visit I stayed in the Captain Cook Hotel, a downtown upscale joint with multiple doormen and valet parking. It would have been nice but I had a 104 degree fever, chills, vomiting — a good case of the flu in a city locked down by an icestorm. Second time in, I stayed at a seedy wreck of a place the reviews recently called ‘the worst motel in Anchorage’. Admittedly it was rundown and located in the worst part of downtown. When I inquired of the manager, a nice Pakistani whose young daughter studied her school assignments in what passed for the lobby, about the possibility of breakfast, he seemed confused. No, I figured but I thought I’d ask, how about coffee? Oh yes, he nodded, happy to oblige. He pointed to a thermos on a counter nearby and I said that would do nicely. Two cups of bitter java later he approached me with another cup. Crackers? he asked, holding out a cup of Saltine crackers. My turn to be confused, but finally I realized he was making the gesture toward providing a Continental style breakfast. Well, if not continental, maybe Kashmir. Or Syria.
My next visit I decided to play it safe so I stayed at a Motel 6 quite a ways from the Alaska Suites and their Saltine breakfast. Kind of felt bad I wasn’t loyal to the owner, but hey, life is change, adventure, danger! The Motel 6 was, I’m sorry to disagree with the reviewers who thought the Suites were the worst motel in Anchorage, because the 6 was genuinely creepy. Prostitution, drugs, all night parties, hallway fights, you name it, they had it. Well, no Saltine crackers. Genghis Khan could hole up there for months without garnering undue attention. There’s probably a Motel 6 Gang, an offshoot of the Crips, paying by the month and menacing the neighborhood.
The neighborhood, unfortunately, was me. So I’m at the fabulous Puffin. My window faces, well, a wall. So far it’s relatively quiet. And the lobby — half a block away in a separate building — has a breakfast nook, 5-9 am. Probably Triscuits and Tang. I didn’t come for the food, though, I came looking for a job.
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