Word to the wise: bring real important stuff with you on the airplane. American Airlines finally flew my backpack from Dallas to Anchorage last night and came by and dropped it off. I was mid-Sex and the City episode with Karen, my Native-Anchorage landlady whose pasttimes are marathon running, hiking, biology, and apparently watching one of my favorite tv shows (this sublet situation is going to be fantastic) when the doorbell rang. It looked like it was 6:30pm in Brooklyn, it was in fact 10pm in Alaska. The delivery guy was very friendly, and I was very grateful for the change of clothes.

I bought the 'beater' bike yesterday. She is blue with a very wide seat, she has a bobble-esq compass and thumb-clicky style 24 gears, and mountain-bike tires. I named her 'old bones' because she creaks a lot. The weather's chilly right now - I hesitate to say 'chilly' of course, becuase the only context in which I've heard that word used to describe Alaska is tongue-in-cheek at 60 below - windy, 50ish, overcast. The sun's trying to come out. I took old bones for a cruise down the Coastal Trail this morning and then we looped back to my place and from there explored mid-Anchorage, keeping within range of 36th Street because the ultimate destination was the library.

I think - I know - I look like one of those aimless teenage dudes who ride around downtown suburbia endlessly, on bikes that are maybe too small and they are trying too hard to look hardcore, like there's any trouble they could even find. There's really not all that much traffic up here, even on the main roads, so it's easy to just lollygag around on wheels and take in what's around you. The neighborhoods are a hodgepodge variety of eccentric. The streets are wide and quiet and the lawns are flat and look well-worn, nothing is 'manicured' or even matching - I rode by a Gilligan's Island style log cabin today that sat next to a very low typical ranch house that sat next to a converted trailer. Little parks with bike paths weaving through them are, unlike the highway Tony Knowles Coastal trail, bumpy with roots pushing through the concrete and they connect the neighborhoods. I don't know much about trees but they are everywhere and there's a pervasive scent, even on the major roads, of something astringent and distinctly northern, almost pine but different.

There are big box stores a'plenty, but many of your typical lower 48 stripmalls (the places the tourists don't get to from cheesy Downtown) have almost all local tenants. Sure, there's an REI and Outback Steakhouse, but there's also this cute Kaladi Coffee Bros (where I blogged yesterday), a bunch of local sports stores, bookstores, restaurants. The library, where I'm at now, is all bizarre austerity from the front, but once inside there's actually a lot of light.

It can be confusing to bike through Anchorage and see everything from straight flat Florida stripmall, big ol' trucks with Alaskan plates, sidewalks covered in sand from last winter, neighborhoods which range from cookie cutter in the extreme (my neighborhood, including my house, is the Truman's Show meets Northern Exposure set, my house looks so like every other one that I've missed it three times in two days!!) to completely ad-hoc. Yet, like my dear bicycle 'old bones' whose creaking I hope to continue to find charming, there's a sense of liveability that I like. The Alaskan attitude, as I've encountered it so far, is very 'can-do' with no concern for vanity. Of course, the lack of concern for vanity - manifest in the appearance of the environment here - while I find it charming, it's also alarming given that 'conquering the wild north frontier' attitude. The actual consequences of the frontier mindset that rules here are all around - each (wo)man for his own has produced too many cars, homes, and highways, all sprawled in that lovely lower-48 fashion. It's really difficult to even think about asking someone who hacks their way through an Alaskan winter to maybe try getting things done a different way (how about chains and snowtires on that bike come winter, hmm?) because I have respect for what individuals do here.

But I really do have the sense that Anchorage is just a bit in the past, living (although bravely) beyond its means because thus far it has, incredibly, survived. I'm not going to go all melodramatic global warming, but the problem with Anchorage's ad-hoc to-each-his-own fighter attitude is essentially that it overtakes the surroundings from every, individual front without actually addressing environment in any unified way. The result is what I've described in the above paragraph - all that sprawl, all those individual homes, cars, people. There's got to be a way to consolidate somehow.