Strip Malls and Mountains 

The night before I took off for Anchorage, I was at dinner in Seattle with some friends of friends, asking around the table if anyone had any intel on the Alaskan city. Only one guy had been to Anchorage and couldn’t think of anything more to say about it besides, “strip malls and mountains.”

My hotel room overlooked a massive cemetery, but with very few, sporadically placed gravestones. The vast lawn below the hotel teetered between a cemetery and a nice open park, but the moment a grave popped up from beneath the grass, no matter how few and far between they were, it became clear that it could never really be a park. 

So there is a large plot of land for this cemetery, yet not enough dead people to fill it. I thought about the gorgeous park, the perfect great lawn, it could have been. A Leslie Knope moment (started watching on the plane). Maybe people didn’t die much in Anchorage…maybe the city had one too many cemeteries that they couldn't fill…Maybe there weren’t enough living people to bury the dead ones…

Anchorage had the same kind of scarcely scattered living people as it did dead ones. 

I was in Anchorage for an astronomy conference, and in my eerie strolls around the city, I was either greeted by other conference attendees or strange characters lurking around corners, almost camouflaging into the surrounding sterile strip malls, yet vigilantly staring until you stared back. These characters, like the gravestones, were spread out but often in small clusters. I spotted one guy vacuuming the empty sidewalk with two vacuums, one in each hand, and he certainly didn’t work for any city cleaning committee. I never heard anyone speaking to one another, even in the small groups; the city was silent besides light traffic, wind, and the two vacuums blaring. 

As a New Yorker, I am used to seeing all kinds of people on the streets exhibiting all sorts of behavior, but the abundance of it and the number of people around, makes me desensitized to it- I am less concerned about my safety and less emotionally impacted by the sadness surrounding a lot of it- which is sad in itself!  Here, however, I found myself incredibly emotional from what I witnessed, from seeing the empty cemetery above from my window to seeing the pockets of people on the streets. I felt torn between a sort of fear for my safety being alone on these deserted streets with people that I had no understanding of what their energy and actions could be; and then, a new kind of empathy that I was too numb to ever let myself feel in New York…who were these people? How did they get here in Anchorage…so far away? Was it drugs that got them here? Was it the long, cold, and dark winters that derailed them? 

I don’t feel guilty for being afraid of them. As a woman, I am afraid all the time, and it’s natural to be nervous on an empty intersection alone with a man that has two vacuums barreling down the street. I do feel a strange sort of guilt about the empathy I feel for them. The guilt is that all I can do is try to empathize, but not actually understand at all or be able to help. And empathy isn’t always good enough. You empathize and for a second feel like a good person because you are empathizing and feel so sad for them, and then you immediately feel like a bad person for your superior lens that you’re looking at them through and your inherent judgment and bias and assumptions you place on them. They are so sad, they are so broken, they are on drugs, but in reality, you have no idea. Who gives you the right to feel bad for them, when that’s probably not even what they want. Again, I see unhoused or people on drugs all the time in NYC, but it took eliminating all the other noise and people and chaos of the city for me to really think about them and feel it. Maybe that sounds terrible, but it’s honest. It took being on the street completely alone and sitting in that discomfort of fear and empathy and then guilt to really try and understand how to think about this crisis most cities face.

June in Anchorage entails nearly 24 hours of daylight and an abundance of sunshine that soars down from the mountains encircling the city, yet there is a slightly ominous darkness that looms. Light is being poured onto the streets and illuminating nothing. It’s as if the mountains are desperately trying to nourish and resuscitate the city, but what’s below is too far at odds that it can’t absorb anything to revive itself. So in the emptiness, shadows and ghosts fill the bright city.