These Ecuadorian Banana Packers* Are Really Underrated

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. 
 

Poorly Researched Local History: Star On The Mountain

It is well-known that Alaska was discovered during the American Civil War by Confederate Naval Captain Jasper Fairbanks, who in April of 1863 led a grand but ultimately fatal attempt to attack the Union stronghold of Milwaukee by sea. Sailing an aging sloop-of-war ship confiscated from the Mexican navy, Fairbanks and his squad of 78 rebel sailors set off into the Pacific Ocean, departing Fort Alcatraz with hopes of circumventing the northern and western extents of Canada - an ambitious path that would have covered nearly 9,000 miles. They planned to ultimately approach Milwaukee via Lake Michigan, storming the city's shores with intent to cripple its waterfront Grinding District, where all Union bayonets were sent for their regular sharpenings.

At its onset, success of the mission was believed to hinge on one of the South's greatest gambles of the war: the far-fetched hope of entering the Great Lakes through an unconfirmed Canadian waterway, thought to extend inland through Ontario from Hudson Bay, which Fairbanks and General Robert E. Lee (close friends from their years as roommates at the University of South Florida Military Academy) both falsely believed to exist. Instead, the ill-fated expedition ended far more prematurely, when the fragile vessel sustained irreparable damage after running aground on an unmapped (and then-unknown) peninsula extending from the western edge of the Canadian Yukon territories. The incident occurred near the present-day location of Anchorage, miring Fairbanks and his crew on the shores of the land that would eventually become the 49th U.S. state.

Captain Fairbanks's North American map, recovered from the Alaskan crash site that doomed the ill-fated Milwaukee siege, overlaid with his intended and actual (as approximated from his log) routes.

It is lesser known, however, that Captain Fairbanks was also the first to observe and document the original incarnation of the famous star that overlooks Anchorage from the Chugach Mountains. Now composed of electric bulbs that illuminate the city's northeast sky each winter, the star formation was originally a naturally occurring meadow amongst surrounding mountainside trees.

During the five weeks between the wreck and his eventual death, Fairbanks wrote of the land where he and all but six of his men would eventually perish:

This wild newfound coast land has now dis-abled our sea craft, taken the lives of eleven of our crew, and cursed another two dozen with a most ruinous bout of moose poisoning. Yet it constitutes, truly, sights of God's glory to behold! Daylight at all hours and mountains on all sides.   ...   An easterly peak sports a most unusual clearing of vegetation, approximating shape of a five-pointed star, as though the forest's midsection were blasted by a 12-pounder's shell - much as has befallen my dear brother Cyrus at Antietam, I construe from his letters.

Sadly, the original natural feature was a casualty of the extensive mountainside tree clearings of several Chugach peaks in the mid-1930s, when all vegetation was razed to make space for the U.S. Army Air Corps's experimentations with steeply inclined aircraft landing strips. These proved largely unsuccessful, and the project was discontinued in 1938 after three years of test-flights, nearly all of which ended in fatal crashes. After brief use as a Near-Vertical Arctic Farming (NVAF) site during the early 1940s, the land was abandoned to return to natural growth after the war; for reasons never conclusively determined, the star-shaped meadow did not reappear.

In 1968, Anchorage municipal assembly member Rick Nesson, a military history enthusiast, spearheaded an effort to reintroduce the star to the city's skyline, both as homage to the original shape observed by Captain Fairbanks and as tribute to the hundreds of the test pilots killed on the site (a fitting symbol, reminiscent of the Army Air Corps's roundel insignia). The project was completed and officially introduced to Anchorage residents with a modest dedication ceremony in October of 1969.

Each year, the star's 20,000+ bulbs are illuminated sequentially, one per minute, beginning at midnight on December 7 and concluding two weeks later with an extravagant fireworks show and outdoor music festival on the winter solstice, headlined in past years by popular rock acts including U2 (1995) and Dishwalla (2001). The star goes dark for the summer each year on the fifth Tuesday of May, except for years when May has only four Tuesdays, in which case the star is left illuminated and that year's winter lighting ceremony is forgone.

For a brief time during the borough's financial challenges of the early 1980s, the star and its operation were leased to various local commercial enterprises for the purposes of advertising, producing dozens of variations to the star's iconic white glow. Memorable versions included the two-year run of a blue and green bulb scheme promoting the Anchorage Admirals (an ABA basketball franchise which later relocated to California, eventually becoming the Sacramento Kings) and a collection of distasteful modifications made during its short-lived but regrettable sponsorship by a local gentlemen's club/shooting range.

Use of the landmark for advertising was discontinued when the borough permanently reclaimed operation of the star in 1988 and granted its inclusion on the state registry of historic places. Funding from this designation has enabled the construction of many of the star's modern amenities, including a unique inclined elevator, used to access the site for tours, and the observation deck, which offers one of the area's best views of the recently renovated state capitol building in downtown Anchorage.

Poorly Researched Local History is a recurring feature in which an Anchorage landmark is examined through a lens of outright lies and fake anecdotes that I totally just made up right now.