$36.99, Target
I went from high school to college to full-time employment with no appreciable gaps. I met my wife in 2003 and we have been together since. I began working for my current company in the same year, with only a single year-long Alaska-based hiatus interrupting an otherwise continuous stint. I once lived with the same roommate for four consecutive years, only to immediately transition to living with a different roommate for four more consecutive years. I have never been evicted or faced any sort of credit crisis or changed my identity or been on the lam.
And despite all of this seeming stability - or lack of a crippling instability, at least - I have somehow now lived at 13 different semi-permanent addresses in the last 14 years.
I have moved due to absurd lease-renewal terms, mandates from the United States military, evolving personal finances, and erratic about-faces in preference re: the ideal percentage of floor area covered by carpet. I have coerced my parents to pick me up in April from a nondescript 8'x10' room in Ann Arbor, make the 1,100 mile return trip to their house, and then chauffeur me back four months later to a negligibly more-descript 8'x10' room three-quarters of a mile from the previous one. In the past decade, I have changed addresses more times than I have gone to the dentist. I own things that are still tagged with enough moving company inventory ID stickers that they have begun to resemble that wardrobe trunk that Lucy got stuck in. When we begin our 25th month here in August of this year, our current residence will be my longest-tenured one since 1999.
So I am familiar with moving. I know it to inevitably leave casualties: the movers will not pack the 7/8-full bottle of rubbing alcohol that I bought after they wouldn't pack the last one, the fancy new kitchen's built-in microwave renders the stand-alone redundant, there is no way I am drying and folding that shower curtain liner, etc., plus I inevitably just amass a whole carload of stuff to voluntarily dump. I actually find this to be a perk of the process - one is less prone to absentminded hoarding when faced with a mandatory annual evacuation of every closet and drawer.
The kitchen trashcan succumbs to the purge maybe every other move, having acquired two years-worth of faint odors and tomato sauce stains that are wholly tolerable right up until the moment that I am presented the choice of loading this dirty, boring, cheap, and eminently upgradeable item into a moving van - right next to all of my clean non-garbagey stuff - vs. the poetic (and usually spectacularly noisy) Ouroboros of aggressively hurling the thing into a dumpster.
We ditched our last one two years ago. It was an unremarkable but perfectly suitable 5.2 gallon Sterilite Touch Top™ whose only fault was being owned by a spendthrift pseudo-gypsy who grew tired of its whole white plastic vibe. I regret it now (the ditching). Great can, that one. Stout. It wasn't even that dirty. But I know by now that this happens at least once per move - when, after all of that excessive clutter-cutting self-congratulation, I must eventually acknowledge that I have thrown out some perfectly good and quintessentially utilitarian possession because I was bored with its vibe, of all things - and I feel completely ridiculous.
So we needlessly bought a new trash can. And I do not care for it.
Procurement and Setup
I follow only one criterion when selecting a new thing to electively replace an old thing that did not need to be replaced: that the new thing be as different as possible from the old thing. This does nothing to ensure that the new one will be any better, and may in fact increase the likelihood of it being considerably worse, but in the moment, it is far more defensible than buying anything that resembles the perfectly good one that I just threw away, creeping regret be damned. So our must-haves for a new can described the opposite of the old one: Black. Metal would be nice. Something slick-looking. A little bigger (completely unnecessary). Maybe one of those pedal-operated lids I've been reading so much about.
Target has an entire aisle full of trash cans. The first half of it is stocked with familiar Sterilites, which I ignore; the second half is the "designer" section, where the ones with fancy styling and complex lid mechanics are available at a 100-200% cost premium. This is clearly where I want to be, as I have temporarily lost my mind.
The high-end models come packaged in individual boxes, made from the shiny kind of cardboard and decorated with well-composed photography and hip fonts. (To reiterate, in case you lost track and thought I was instead talking about a brochure for a condominium building, I am still referring to a container for a container for garbage.) One mid-range option looks to fit our bill - its box is printed with phrases like CIRCULAR DESIGN and MATTE FINISH and STYLISH ADDITION TO ANY KITCHEN and has a small window exposing the actual can, through which I tap one square centimeter of metal with an index finger and conclude that it "seems good". I quickly deem this level of research sufficient to justify spending nearly $40 on a barely-glorified bucket, doubling-down with a matching recyclables bin in silver (not matte, FYI).
It turns out that one handy benefit of selling your horrible overpriced trash can in a box is that the box hides all of the obvious shortcomings long enough for some idiot to buy one (or two). Overall build quality is dubious: the metal is thin, the base is a little wobbly, the lid is slightly askew from the body and makes a weird noise as it aligns itself while closing. Overall, I would assess it to be almost as sturdy as that giant can of hot chocolate mix we bought from Costco one time. There is a confusing metal hoop hanging off of the back of it, through which one might drape a hand towel or something, I guess.
Fitting it with a standard 13-gallon trash bag is a maddening test of patience and fine motor skills. I gather that the process is meant to utilize this dream-haunting plastic ring:
It fits snugly between the top of the can and the lid. Beyond this, I can confirm nothing about its intended use. Is the bag supposed to be fitted directly into the can with the ring pushed down on top of it like an embroidery hoop? Practical, but this leaves several inches of the top of the bag sloppily skirting out over the rim and negates the whole reason for shopping in the designer section (the slickness). Am I supposed to use the hinged metal parts to secure the bag? Possible, but the hinge-points interfere with the bag. My current method involves clumsily fishing the bag through the top and then wrapping the edges of the bag down and around the full circumference of the ring so that I end up with something like a handleless butterfly net, at which point I attempt to guide the entire bag/ring assembly into the can while maintaining enough tension on the bag to keep the whole thing from unraveling. I can typically do this in less than four minutes.
[At this point - after identifying their numerous intolerable faults but prior to soiling them with any actual garbage - you might ask why I did not repack the cans into their suspiciously stylish boxes and exchange them for a more practical choice, such as the larger (12.4 gallon) version of the proven Sterilite Touch Top™. The reason, of course, is that this would be a shameful act of weakness and an admission of failure, not to mention that the cumulative exasperation necessary to inspire a tightly-edited 2,300-word treatise about something dumb I did two years ago never really takes hold if I sabotage it with a regrettable spell of lame up-front humility. Where's the prolonged embarrassment and bitterness in that?]
Lid Operation
The can's weight is approximately equivalent to that of a medium-sized bag of pistachios. This is great if you want to take it backpacking but not if you are interested in it staying in one place while attempting to foot-open it. My preferred pedal-mashing motion is a rotate-about-the-heel sort. The resulting force has a horizontal component, resistance to which relies on the thing being heavy enough to create adequate friction with the floor:
A tiny W means a tiny N which leaves Fx > Rx; the result is the pedal squirting out from under my foot each time I try to depress it and me stomping around the kitchen with a Styrofoam tray full of chicken fat, chasing the can as it scoots away from me in four-inch increments. It is not unlike watching my daughter attempt to pick up a slice of avocado from the tray on her high chair.
To avoid the sliding, I could convert to a pure vertical stepping motion:
But this requires an awkward locked-ankle/vertical-shin arrangement that is practical only if I am attempting to incorporate some sort of mid-disposal lunge routine into the process (I am not). The other option is to keep extra weight in the can, and in lieu of maintaining a permanent base layer of rotting garbage, we have opted to line the bottoms of each 40-liter can with approximately five liters of rocks. This seemed like a convenient solution since several hundred square feet of our yard happen to be covered with largish gravel, although "convenient" is perhaps not the appropriate adjective to describe me carrying 30 pounds of rocks up a flight of stairs (a task which, despite all of this effort towards lunge-avoidance, must surely qualify as exercise) just so that we can properly open our stupid luxury garbage cans.
I suppose I also could have just put a rubber mat or something under the can, which I did not think of until just now.
Bag Removal
The curriculum of my sixth grade English class included Where the Red Fern Grows, a book about which I remember only three things: 1) Some dogs died in it, thereby meeting an apparent macabre requirement that all middle school literature feature at least one horrific animal death, 2) It made specific reference to a dog's disembodied intestines being dragged along the ground, a detail which I recall handling with precisely the level of maturity one might expect of a twelve-year-old boy, and 3) It described a way to trap raccoons wherein something shiny is placed inside of a sort of reamed-out Erlenmeyer-shaped hole in a log, with an opening small enough for the raccoon to get its open paw through but not big enough for it to get its clenched paw out, which works because the raccoon will grab the thing and then be stuck forever because it is too stubborn and dumb to just open its paw and let go of the washer or Werther's wrapper or whatever.
I am reminded of both #2 and #3 whenever attempting to extract even a moderately-full bag from this can, which has evidently been outfitted by a world-class team of frustration engineers with a subtle but suitably catastrophic opening constriction (plus a few random screw heads and metal edges for extra bag-grip). The raccoon trap analogy would be more accurate only if the hole in the log was lined with spikes like a sarlacc pit and if the paw was instead an impossibly thin plastic sack stuffed with two-week-old leftover spaghetti. But the guts-dragging-on-the-floor thing ultimately turns out to be a pretty spot-on visual.
I acknowledge that this specific shortcoming could have been anticipated by browsing the unanimously horrible reviews for the product on Target's own website, which reviews I did not seek until I started writing this. Highlights include: "It takes eight arms, ten minutes, and an engineering degree to remove an even semi-full bag without tearing holes in it", "Just now I watched as my wife struggled to get a bag out. She
needed both hands and one foot, and still had to flail around to get it
out", "I have yet to empty our trashcan without tearing the bag", "Not worth your trash", "The stupidest thing I've ever bought", and "A few times I have had to remove the bag and insert it into another bag due to all the tears", the final word of which could be interpreted in at least two valid ways. I would typically be inclined to dismiss this sort of bad press via the Nobody-Gives-a-Trash-Can-Five-Stars Corollary of Online Customer Reviews, but it is validated here by embarrassing consistency - 14 of 17 reviews make specific reference to Bag Removal Rage, and the only one awarding even 3/5 stars does so with the caveat that he just forgoes a bag and hoses the can down every time he empties it - plus the existence of alternatives with stellar reviews, not to mention my own daily fantasies of smashing this thing like drunk Eli Thompson in a garage crazily pummeling that poor guy with a wrench during Season 2 of Boardwalk Empire.
But I resist that sort of violence for now, instead just making occasional visits to the Sterilite section at Target for a bit of wistful old-can nostalgia. We will move again soon enough. And when we do, there will be a party with hockey sticks and snow shovels and a spectacular piñata de basura.
Summary
Pros:
- Slick vibe
- Opaque construction visually conceals the grisly slurry of coffee grounds and fish parts that is going to be all over the floor in a few minutes
- Bonus rock storage
- Good starting point for homemade toddler-sized costume (cigarette or AA battery)
Cons:
- While adequate for holding trash, does not allow for any reasonable means of putting trash into it nor taking trash out of it
- Is no Sterilite, that's for sure :(
- Is terrible
Overall Score: 700
All reviews utilize their own unique scoring scale, each with no reference datum and extending infinitely in both directions.
Megan
Megan Julia
Stinker
Stink-o
Stinky
Dude
Buddy
Buster
Missy
Peanut
Goofball
Jub Jub
Booger
Snots
Snotty McRosencheeks
Goo Face
Slobbery
Drooly
Megan Droolia
Spitty McGee
Two-Tooth McGee
No-Nap McGee
Jerk
Weirdo
This Baby
That Baby
The Baby
Baby
HEEEEEEEYYY STINKY BABY
Chubbyfeet
Meatball
Sweetie
Cutie
Dear
MJ Pee Pants
MJ Poopy Pants
Bitey
Baldy
Ol' Fuzzy Top
Ol' Broccoli Legs
Ol' Halibut Belly
Ol' Cucumber Breath
Wigglebutt
Antsy Nancy
Dancing Nancy
Fuss Bucket
You are likely familiar with the Iditarod dog sled race, which begins here each year in March. It was on my short list of responses during a panicked word-association exercise that I stumbled through when I heard that we were moving here. (Alaska? Wow. OK. Cold...far...time zone? No sun...then lots of sun! Mountains...Iditarod...whales...Chipotle? Palin...Eskimos...Are we supposed to call them "Eskimos"? Oil spill...Simpsons movie...bears...gotta get a real coat. ("We're gonna need a bigger coat." (Ha!))) A search turns up at least one wire service story about the race in most prominent U.S. newspapers, suggesting there is at least a modest national awareness of the thing.
I gather that the interest in Fur Rendezvous, which happens around the same time but which I had never heard of before we moved here, is decidedly local. Last year, I wrote a bit about it, regurgitating what I read in the newspaper before briefly mentioning that we made no attempt to actually go see any of it:
At the end of February there is a big event in Anchorage called Fur Rendezvous, or “Fur Rondy”, as everyone calls it, or “Frondee”, as I thought everyone was calling it for a while. It’s a ten-day outdoor festival thing that is quite obviously the culmination of a few hundred thousand people being trapped in their houses for three months and looking for some excuse to go out and do something ridiculous. We actually didn’t get out to see much of it; it’s a bunch of crazy stuff like the Running of the Reindeer, a costume party featuring a world-class beard competition, and a softball tournament played wearing snowshoes.
So eloquent. A real local perspective. I think my favorite part is all of the details.
The two events' association with one another seems reluctant but logistically wise. The last few days of Fur Rondy and the ceremonial start of the Iditarod now occupy the same weekend in the same downtown location, with schedules coordinated to encourage attendance of both. But beyond this, the events seem to do almost nothing to officially acknowledge one another, each maintaining its own promotional materials and sponsors and commemorative merchandise. (Fur Rondy even hosts its own race earlier in the week - the World Championship Sled Dog Races, a three-day sprint-style race that is entirely separate from the Iditarod.) A few weeks used to separate the two until the they were overlapped 20 years ago to draw each others' attendees; this is indeed convenient, but it also reduces the number of discrete winter events warranting a trip downtown by maybe 25%.
Last year, we skipped going downtown to see anything from either event, instead only stopping by the park near our house to see the last few mushers reach the endpoint of the Iditarod's first leg. We had decided that this was a savvy way to avoid the crowds, a feat that I now acknowledge to be unremarkable, inasmuch as we live in a state with a population about 1/10th as dense as South Dakota's and a neighborhood that is immediately adjacent to several million uninhabited acres of mountains and forest. This year, we decided that we could either sit around the house for ten days and let everything pass us by again, or we could sit around the house for nine-and-a-half days and then go down to 4th Avenue just long enough to see how crowded it was and to take a few pictures for a lazy blog post. #yolo
This happened almost two months ago, proving that this online format capable of real-time documentation still affords the option of being operated with no more urgency than if I were to just mail each of you a handwritten letter with a stack of 4x6 prints.
The original Fur Rendezvous was a legitimate rendezvous of furriers: people meeting in town to buy and sell animal pelts. It started in the 1930s, and since the REI here didn't open until 1997, I suppose that kind of thing was probably useful. As a festival-defining element, the marketplace concept seems to have been largely supplanted by the aforementioned collection of silly distractions, predominantly the sort that might feature on a Travel Channel countdown of the Top X Craziest Something-Or-Other; in addition to the items noted above, there are outhouse races, a parade of vintage snowmobiles, the "Frostbite Footrace and Costume Fun Run", and a fur bikini contest. [We did not attend any of these, a decision based fully on a lack of interest in doing so and one that I do not regret despite its implications that I might sort of have a bad attitude about the whole thing.]
But tucked into a corner of a parking lot on the edge of all of this foolishness is the modern incarnation of some actual fur trading: The Alaska State Hide, Horn & Antler Auction, presented by the Alaska Trappers Association and affording opportunity for bidders to take home a fuzzy and/or pointy part of an animal that "(was) illegally poached, killed in self-defense/accidentally, or became a threat." We observed bidding on the chunk of bear pictured above, the sale price for which eventually escalated to $2,400. This was apparently a good one, because we watched others go for under $100. (Those appeared to have been killed both accidentally and, one might speculate, ungracefully.) As I do not understand the intricacies of live-auction etiquette, I nervously limited all photography-related motions to the slow, deliberate, below-the-shoulders sort, a precaution that was probably unnecessary and almost certainly looked a bit silly but did keep me out of any unfortunate accidental-bid pickles.
I was especially drawn to the gentleman on stage watching for bids, on the left side of the picture:
I think he might have just hollowed out a lion.
Most of the folks actively looking to procure something were already
wearing some variety of extravagant-looking fur-based garment or
accessory, leading me to hypothesize that there are probably very few
people in the world that own one such item. As with cowboy hats and
Phish albums and Toyotas: you might have zero, and you might have four,
but you probably don't have one.
This currently stands as the picture we would show Megan if she ever questions whether she was actually born in Alaska. I think a picture of your six-month-old self wearing that hat while attending a live auction for dead bears basically counts as a birth certificate.
And this is what the rest of Fur Rondy looked like while we were there. All of the notable events are spread throughout the week, leaving gaps to be filled with this big outdoor carnival, which appears to be the exact same one they have at the state fair in August except that this time it was like 24 degrees outside. This picture captures the approximate moment where my aforementioned too-cool-for-schoolness about the whole thing overlapped with my working professional knowledge of steel's proclivity for brittle failure when exposed to low temperatures and I decided it best to not even cross the street.
Thus concludes this year's installment of "Indifferent Dispatches from Fur Rondy". Please join us next year, for which I will probably provide a cursory overview of another 1-3% of this largely beloved celebration that I do not understand because I am too stubborn to give it a fair chance.
***
Six days later we were back in the same place for the Iditarod festivities:
"Festivities" because a) this isn't really
the start of it - the
"restart" happens the next day in Willow, an hour-and-a-half drive north
of Anchorage, at which point the stopwatches are actually clicked for
the 987 mile trek to Nome, and b) the atmosphere is indeed quite
festive. This first
in-town leg is essentially the equivalent of an Olympic opening
ceremonies, but about five hours shorter and with no creepy giant baby heads or whatever.
If I had been asked two years ago how old this race is, my likely
answer would have been incorrect by about half a century. The first Iditarod was
in 1973. My assumption that they have been doing it for like 100 years was probably skewed by fun old-timey photos
and a well-branded Official Race Tagline, plus a general perception that dog sledding is a historically notable thing in this part of the
world. It is; it just happens that the competitive version's
preeminent race is a relatively modern one that features many
competitors that are older than the race itself, including at least one guy that participated in the second one
40 years ago.
This probably makes it not so much the Rose Bowl or the
World Series of its sport, as I had originally surmised, but more like the Super
Bowl (b. 1967): a signature, ostentatious, bucket-listable event for which
the rich history of the sport that it embodies obscures the fact that there
are James Bond movies older than the event itself.
With little competition, this was the biggest and most unified gathering of people that I have witnessed here. Thousands of
spectators line the path for an afternoon of well-wishing and
picture-taking and WOOOOing. There are homemade signs to show support
for one's favorite musher, which one might choose with the help of the extensive musher biographies
provided on the official race website. There is live radio coverage of
race progress, interspersed with advertisements for race-inspired sale
events at furniture stores and car dealerships, many featuring past race winners
as pitchmen. It is a big deal.
And wading through a crowd this huge, here, was remarkably strange. I found it to be the most notable thing about the afternoon. I am not an accomplished estimator of large numbers of things, but surely we are talking about tens of thousands of people wandering around within a few blocks of one another. While this is probably the same number of people with which I spent three years making daily inadvertent physical contact during rush hour in the Farragut North Metro station, I could probably name only three or four places where I have seen more than a few thousand Alaskans in one place during the last two years - Alyeska, the state fair, and maybe an Aces game, with acknowledgments that we have not attended a Great Alaska Sportsman Show nor a Mayor's Marathon. (Note that there are many summer events that draw more than a few thousand people, but I am attempting to filter out the tourist-heavy ones.) People here seem to value their separation from other humans, and find it easily.
I suppose this is a chicken-or-the-egg sort of deal
wherein one could question whether Alaska draws a disproportionate share
of people content to usher a dogsled 1000 miles by themselves or to
float down a river for a week with two other guys and a bucket of
ammunition, or whether the (relative) dearth of neighbors in a
crazy-huge neighborhood encourages these sorts of things.
Regardless, I did not expect "Stand uncomfortably close to strangers for an opportunity to look at a thing" to be the incentive that would draw the single largest crowd I have seen in two years (I would have guessed "Somebody found gold over there" or "Free boat"). Most here would not seem to regard this kind of thing as the makings of a fun Saturday. 30,000 locals do not gather here for arts fairs or baseball games or any sort of jazz in-a-sculpture-garden nonsense. This is an outlier.
As for the actual dog sledding, the pace is a barely-controlled jog, covering eleven miles over paved streets and an
airstrip and at least one pedestrian
bridge. Each team tows an extra sled with at least two extra people, added cargo that affords some donor-types ("Iditariders", they call them) a
fun way to spend an afternoon but which primarily serves as a handy way
to slow the dogs down while they are around so many people.
A young fan with an objectively adorable homemade sign, the top left corner of which appears to have been autographed. Context clues and semi-informed Googling suggest that it is the signature of 1984 race winner Dean Osmar, although it could also be celebrity physician Dean Ornish, or maybe Milwaukee sports talk radio personality Drew Olson. Regardless: probably a good idea to get home and double check the valuable papers insurance policy.
The downtown start requires a partial closure of 4th Avenue, an often-used but expendable-for-an-afternoon road lined with a lot of especially touristy places (mostly the sorts of gift shops where one can find "I Can See Russia From My House" refrigerator magnets and candy that is meant to resemble animal droppings). The traffic reroute is accompanied by the ironic task of trucking in thousands of cubic feet of snow - necessary for proper use of a sled, it turns out - and dumping it onto the street from which the same trucks have spent months removing it.
The course covers several blocks on 4th before turning south onto a secondary street and proceeding to cross 5th and 6th, two heavily-trafficked one-way roads comprising the primary east/west artery of the area. These stay open to traffic, but are blocked briefly to let each team cross. This means that a similar snow path is laid across them as well, but every time a group of cars and buses cross the path, the snow gets mashed and dispersed in ways that I gather to be non-optimal for sled runners. The chosen solution is that every time a musher is about to cross - every two minutes, for over two hours - a team of volunteers runs out to stop traffic and frantically shovel and rake a pile of dirty snow into something sled-passable. It is quite silly.
The Anchorage-to-Nome route of the race is not arbitrary. It is inspired by the 1925 emergency run between the same two towns, undertaken to deliver a diphtheria antitoxin serum and diffuse the threat of an outbreak. Railroads were available from Anchorage to Nenana (the first 300 miles or so), but the only options for the Nenana to Nome leg, in -50°F temperatures, were apparently a) a vintage (in 1925!), dismantled-for-winter, open-cockpit biplane, known to be unreliable in cold temperatures and manned by Just Some Guy because the two capable pilots happened to be back in the Lower 48 because their plane was dismantled for the winter, or b) dog sled relay, so they picked the sled. This was probably covered in all necessary animated detail in the 1995 movie Balto (never saw it), named for the dog that led the team that ran the last 53 miles of the route and made the delivery to Nome.
As a nod to all of that, children's vaccination has become a cause for which the race aims to raise awareness, primarily via bibs on some of the actual dogs and this Izzy The Immunization Dog mascot, which I assume to be a unlicensed offshoot of and/or apprentice to Izzy The Immunization Bear, which appears to be a California-based entity that posts on his blog even less frequently than I do.
The point is: this guy was there, dressed in a dog costume, which - and this is more notable than it should be - did not appear to be made of actual dog fur.
Megan does not understand what all of the fuss is about.
As is the case for most things that draw a horde of observers, a significant chunk of the entertainment comes from just observing the observers. Things I learned:
- People with zany hair/beard combos love a good ceremonial dog sled race start
- In certain specific surroundings, examples of which I have difficulty imagining beyond those covered in this post, it is considered acceptable behavior to place a dead animal on your head and call it a hat despite no discernible evidence of haberdashery beyond, like, taking the bones out
- They make fur boots in a women's size 28
And let's go ahead and wrap this up with at least one picture of Megan where her expression reads as something other than "Please take me back inside, you maniacs."
I am incapable of transporting a banana from the - what do you call the place where they keep the bananas at the grocery store? It's not an aisle. Usually a freestanding thing. The banana section? Banana stand? Banana shelf? Display? Kiosk? Island? Let's go with island. I am incapable of transporting a banana from the banana island at the grocery store to my house without some degree of careless smashing.**
Despite the lackluster state of most of the local fruit & vegetable supply, bananas here are usually adequate, even in the winter - not because bananas are locally grown in Alaska (they are so, so not) but because bananas are also not locally grown in California or Texas or Florida or any of the other similar places I have saved on my phone's weather app for regular winter morning perusal and fist-shaking, i.e. we get the same imported bananas that all of those places get, just after maybe ten days in transit to get here instead of seven days to California. So while some elitist Costa Rican might laugh at what we consider to be plátanos frescos, they are comparable to what I have always seen in the rest of the country and seem just fine. This is decidedly different from, say, oranges, which are grown in many pleasantly-climated U.S. places, whose short-pantsed citrus-hoarding residents take all the good ones directly off of the trees (presumably) and then send us the misshapen yellowish dregs, probably in a big box with a note that says "Sorry, we each took a few extra so we could make juice for breakfast by the pool tomorrow before we all go play golf, in February. But yeah, that Iditarod thing sounds pretty neat for you guys, we'd definitely like to get up there to see that some time." I guess that's fine because Alaska does the same thing with oil, where we take it out of the ground and then ship it to an out-of-state refinery so we can pay inflated gas prices because of the transportation costs to get it back here and awwwwwww dammit I think we're doing it wrong.
Anyway, the bananas are decent. And even though I always take the time to pick out a near-perfect one with no blemishes, by the time I get it into our kitchen, one end is mashed in and it's speckled with brown spots and it generally looks like I carried it home using a pair of spaghetti tongs that I was clenching between my chin and my shoulder, which is to say: not gently.
That banana has a sticker on it that says it came from Ecuador. It traveled 5,700 miles from some giant South American plantation to the produce section at the Fred Meyer on Muldoon Road in Anchorage, under care of what is evidently a super-cautious team of harvesters, labelers, packagers, drivers, loaders, barge captains, unloaders, more drivers, more unloaders, unpackers, and stockers, arriving in a store three miles from my house without a single discernible surface imperfection, and then the dream team of me and Janet The Cashier manages to beat the crap out of it during its twenty-five minutes in our collective custody, from the time I pick it up from the shelf until I get it home to put it on a different shelf.
The credit must primarily go to whoever packs them up in their shipping containers, which I originally assumed to be some sort sophisticated active-response tri-axially shock-absorbent temperature- and humidity-controlled self-stabilizing pods (which I suppose could be unrealistic for something that costs like $0.40) but may in fact just be cardboard boxes lined with a sheet of plastic, at least according to a clip on YouTube called "Banana video: How they get into the box?", posted by a guy named "Banana" Chris Müller who has finally addressed the Internet's shortage of barely-decipherable heavily German-accented narration over steel drum music. Somehow, these people are consistently packaging boxes that arrive in Alaska full of pristine unbruised bananas while using only the exact same materials I once used to make a house for a pet turtle.
So: Well done, Ecuadorian banana packers. Please forward any advice you might have for finishing the last 0.05% of the journey without screwing it up once it is out of your hands.
*Possible fantasy football team name?
**Oh yeah? Whatever. YOU don't seem like the kind of thing worthy of inspiring an entire blog post.
