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.

There Are No Cats In Texas

For Christmas, we attempted our first trip out of Alaska with Megan, and the first for Kristen and me since June. We flew to Dallas to spend a week with my family after managing to reserve the least painful commercially-available itinerary, which still involved a 1:45 AM departure from Anchorage and two 3+ hour flights separated by a too-short-for-breakfast layover in Seattle. Before leaving, I had mentally sketched the framework of a potential post about whatever embarrassing/exhausting/infuriating/hilarious things might come of spending more than 13 (nonconsecutive) hours flying with a lap-bound infant, one who admittedly is calm relative to what she could be but is nonetheless the most volatile thing I have ever carried onto an airplane. Four incident-free flights later, the four-and-a-half-month-old version of her appears to be an excellent and very sleepy traveler, which is great except that now I need to find something else to write about.

But there are no cats in America
And the streets are paved with cheese
Oh there are no cats in America
So set your mind at ease 

I do not have distinct personal memories of An American Tail as a notable part of my youth, despite its ostensible entrenchment in the sweet spot for being one: an animated film with anthropomorphic singing animals, released when I was five years old and featuring voice work by Dom Deluise, who in 1986 was a mere seven years from establishing himself as a favorite amongst my brothers and me for his virtuoso work in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, appearing as Don Giovanni in a single Godfather-spoofing scene which we could not possibly have fully appreciated at the time (having not seen the original) but still thought was hilarious because he is holding a plastic lizard. I probably did see An American Tail at some point - I think I vaguely remember watching part of it in school - but ours was a family of loyal Disney animation elitists, with Ferngully and The Land Before Time and All Dogs Go To Heaven all missing the cut for an otherwise extensive VHS collection.

But Kristen grew up watching and loving it, so much so that she can recall the slightly deeper tracks from the soundtrack (non-"Somewhere Out There" division) even after years since last seeing it. So the fact that "There Are No Cats In America" came to her mind leading up to and during the trip is perhaps not as random as I originally found it to be. It is sung in the movie by the European mice as they embark for the United States, having so exaggerated to themselves the virtues of America that they expect to arrive in a utopian wonderland, absent everything they hate about where they come from but overflowing with the good stuff. 

This was an entirely appropriate parallel to us in the weeks leading up to our trip. A couple of Papa Mousekewitzes, counting down the days until we could escape this morose winter isolation and flee to the place universally recognized as Earth's most magnificent paradise: the north suburbs of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. We'll spend time with all of those people we miss! No snow! It will be warm enough for Megan to wear a sundress and lay on the grass outside! We can eat Chick-Fil-A and great Mexican food and fresh, moderately-priced fruit! [Prominent national retailer] has [more than zero] locations within fifty miles of your location! We can check out that park they built over the highway downtown! It was going to be amazing.

Of course, it turns out that there are cats in America, a fact alluded to in the latter half of the original movie and later capitalized upon as a surprisingly bleak plot turn in the sequel, Fievel Goes West, the second act of which concludes with the protagonist being gruesomely devoured by a cougar in Arizona. [This may not be true. I never saw it because it came out in 1993, same as both the aforementioned RH:MIT and the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast, so my twelve-year-old self was fully occupied that year with one of those bizarre adolescent confluences of interests, alternately quoting lines from a Dave Chappelle character in a Mel Brooks movie and fine-tuning a French accent for an impression of a cartoon candelabra.]

But I'm pretty there were some cats, just like we didn't quite get to see everybody we wanted to see for as long as we hoped to see them, and the Mexican food was not quite as many notches above its non-Texan competition as I had remembered, and we never made it down to that park but it looked smaller than I expected when we drove past it, and it definitely wasn't warm:

Snow in the front yard of my parents' house on Christmas day. In Texas. It was 80 degrees there on December 18. COME ON.

I do not mean to suggest that the trip was not fulfilling - it was fantastic. You could say it was everything that we should have hoped it would be. But it turns out that voraciously anticipating a thing for weeks on end is a pretty good way to ensure that the thing can't possibly meet every ridiculous expectation you have made for it, which inevitably tempers your fun a bit and is totally unfair to the thing. It's not Dallas's fault that we had been romanticizing it for the last two months, so I suppose we should cut it some slack if people there drive a little worse than we had chosen to remember or if one of its many superior shopping malls closes earlier on Sundays than we had hoped. I even caught myself thinking about Alaska a few times, once wishing for a coffee from our local shop and later missing the mountains. And while we were gone, as snow was falling in Dallas, a rare December warm front even blew through Anchorage, melting enough of the accumulated snow here that we could actually see some green grass in our yard when we got back.

If given the option, would we live somewhere other than Alaska? Definitely. Will we be just as excited the next time we leave here during the winter? Almost certainly, yes. Will that again bring on unrealistic expectations for our destination? I assume so. Have I derailed my first metaphor about the song from the immigrant mouse movie by introducing a second and more tenuous one about the grass being greener elsewhere? It appears that I have. Am I a serious- and skilled-enough writer, then, to eloquently divert this conclusion back into the context of the original theme? Probably not.
 

Daylight Hours at 61 Degrees Latitude: The Half-Assed Astronomy Lesson Nobody Was Asking For

A common question asked to us by people who have not yet visited Alaska (or those who have but somehow timed their visit to roughly coincide with an equinox) is some version of the one about how long the days are at different times of the year. One way to answer this - favored by some of the particularly engineery engineers that I used to work with - is to say, "Every day everywhere is 24 hours - that's how long it takes for Earth to complete one full rotation about its axis." This is met with the superlative kind of eye-roll typically reserved for reaction to a sixth-grader carrying around a book of language trivia and testing out newly-learned smart-ass grammar gotchas like how he can put his plate in the dishwasher but you never asked if he would. The question is of course not intended to be about the length of the midnight-to-midnight stretch (which has a fun technical name that I totally would have Balderdashed to instead be some sort of dragon) but rather how much of that period is comprised of daylight, the variance in which is admittedly kind of interesting and different from the Lower 48 but not as different as people might think.

Executive Summary

The shortest day of the year is December 21 (everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere). On that day in Anchorage, the sun rises at 10:14 AM and sets at 3:42 PM; dawn to dusk is more like 9:30 to 4:15. The sun arcs shallowly across the south horizon and spends a good part of the morning hidden behind the mountains, making the days feel even shorter; in late December, we can't see the sun at our house until almost noon.

The longest day of the year is June 21 (also everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere).  On that day in Anchorage, the sun rises at 4:21 AM and sets at 11:42 PM, but even at 2:00 AM the sky is not anything that I would call "dark". The sun rises in the northeast, traveling elliptically around the south sky and eventually down to the northwest before ducking behind the north horizon for a few hours.

Every day in between is something in between.

Thanks for reading! Here is a link to Google for continued internet browsing.

Totally Unnecessary Exposition (Optional Reading)

Why does the length of daylight vary throughout the year? If you're like me, you probably learned this sometime in middle school but then sort of forgot about it when you didn't have a reason to think about it every day, until you found out you had to move to Alaska and started vaguely recalling it while frantically researching whether you would ever again see the sun in January, and after about a year-and a-half of getting asked about it a lot you also (separately) just happened to have recently started writing this themeless blog with no self-imposed restrictions on subject matter, which seemed like a great place to write an indefensibly long post about it that probably could have just been two sentences with one picture and maybe a link to Wikipedia.

In simple terms - I do not mean this in a patronizing, "let me see if I can dumb this down" way, but more of a "I am almost certainly about to omit some critical nuance that I am not aware of or do not understand" way - two primary things affect the amount of sun exposure a given place on Earth sees on a given day: the latitude of the place and the tilt of Earth's axis.

If the axis of rotation were not tilted (it is - PAY ATTENTION - but if), things would be simple. Every place on the planet would have 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night every day of the year because every place would spend half of each day on the light side of the globe and half on the dark side. Also, the apparent arc of the sun in a given place would be exactly the same every day of the year: at the equator, the sun would appear to arc directly overhead every day; in Alaska, it would follow a consistent year-round arc closer to the South horizon. This result of consistent daylight hours + consistent sun angles would be no seasons - for any given place, weather would be effectively the same in June as it is December.

But the axis is tilted relative to the plane of Earth's orbit around the sun, so everything changes slightly throughout the year. This is explained well enough here (Go Wolfpack!), including several useful pictures that are remarkably similar to the ones I was originally intending to produce myself until it became apparent that doing so would be quite redundant if considering the entirety of the Internet, never mind my eventual realization that this is not a textbook or PowerPoint presentation and that my time might be better spent on, like, laundry.

The takeaway is that the Northern hemisphere is pointed more directly towards the sun during a certain part of the year. We call this "summer". This change in astronomical perspective affects both the apparent angle of the sun relative to the horizon (when a spot is pointed more directly at the sun, the sun appears to travel more directly overhead of that spot) and the amount of time the sun is visible in the sky (a larger portion of the spot's path around the globe - i.e. that spot's day - is illuminated). This effect is magnified as you move further from the equator such that things get wacky at the poles: in the region from the North Pole to 66.5622° degrees latitude - the technical definition of The Arctic - there is a stretch of the summer during which the entire path around the globe is lit by the sun, meaning that the sun never sets. The opposite is true in winter, when the Arctic is entirely on the dark side of the globe and the sun never rises.

Anchorage's latitude (~61.2 degrees N) puts it just below this area, such that constant daylight or darkness never quite happens, although it comes close. The longest summer day sees only about 4 1/2 hours of "darkness", during which the twilight lingers and it is still light enough outside to read a newspaper but perhaps not to track down a fly ball. This is interesting and fun in ways that I have anecdotally described elsewhere, but it is also a little disconcerting being outside after dinner and a few drinks (or worse, leaving a dark bar) and feeling so tired in broad daylight. It is reminiscent of taking a flight from the East Coast to Las Vegas and going straight to a 10:00 PM dinner reservation at a restaurant in one of those indoor promenades made to look like it's outside, with all of your environmental clues suggesting it is early in the evening until you realize it's effectively 1:15 AM and you have been drinking for several hours and no wonder you are falling asleep on your appetizer.

In the winter, the shortest day gets just over 5 1/2 hours of official and legitimate daylight, and although dawn and dusk do bleed a bit into the hours prior to official sunrise and after official sunset, this is not fun. The most unexpected (to me) annoyance of this time of year is the low sun angle: driving south during the daylight hours of winter involves staring directly into a low but surprisingly intense glare:

Southbound driving on clear winter days. This was taken at 1:08 on 12/21/12 - exactly ten minutes after "solar noon" (when the sun reaches its high point over the horizon) on the shortest day of the year.

Strangely, real estate listings here highlight south-facing windows as a huge amenity. We do not have any, but I am not so sure that I would want them. Although I suppose that is what the blinds are for (blocking the natural light you paid extra for).