Valdez. Val-deez. Just pronouncing the name sent me away to Spain. This wasn’t Spain of course but it was Alaska’s Spain connection. The trans-Alaskan pipeline also ended here for ships to tank up on crude and inside me, the engineer and the environmentalist are still duking it out over whether the pipeline was good or bad. Valdez was where I happened upon one of the stranger stores of Alaska. Anne’s Place. The Anne concerned was a bespectacled geriatric lady and her place was an attic loaned to time. Since getting to Valdez wasn’t easy and getting in new goods even less so, it fell upon Anne to use a big warehouse to start stockpiling everything that ever came to Valdez. Old school textbooks, gramophone records, leftover luggage, remote controls without their targets – what would have been an absurd mix of products anywhere else made perfect sense to retain out here. That these objects could have special value based on their location had never occurred to me and the reality of those who lived here before the roads and port came up sunk in just a little more. A tough life, a functional life the citizens of Valdez had for long made out of these odds and ends.
[Part of the Series: Notes from the Last Frontier]
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