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Note: The following is spawned by my deep desire to not go up to Alaska this month. I don't want to - I've got a show to work on, a wedding to plan, a marathon to train for (and Guilder to frame for it), and yet I must. I must because my mother and grandmother will it so, and because both of my grandparents are steadily deteriorating. So, I'm trying to get all of the negativity and crankiness out of my system before I go, in order to be the pleasant daughter.
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herself_nyc is currently touring the wilds of the PacNorthwest, and had this to say about a stop she made:
That neatly sums up a persistent feeling I have had about my childhood home in specific and much of the West in general. Which is not to say the Midwest is a pinnacle of harmony between landscape and structure. When you're in the prairie, there's not much you can do to make the buildings flow into the landscape. The most you can hope for is to build it warm and tight, and pray that a tornado doesn't take it. Or, you can live in a city along the river, and let it flow from there.
However, the Midwest does not have the Rockies and the acres of forest/taiga/tundra that the West and Alaska does. There's something mildly oppressing about being among such majestic scenery, a feeling of never being able to measure up. Whenever I see Fairbanks, I get the sense that the miners and the Pipeline workers also felt that way, and so chose to go the other way, to make the town as squat and as ugly as possible. I know this is wrong, that the overriding concern was survival, which does not make for soaring architecture. There are grace notes, but the grace notes are back in the woods, set away from civilization, where people took the times to make their dwellings blend into the landscape. The town as whole is still the squat little mining camp it always has been, with a Sears and a Fred Meyers thrown in for good measure.
It really doesn't help that I am a city person through and through. I love being in the middle of tall buildings, of people walking around, of the bustle that makes up a city. I realize my city is small compared to some, but it's still a busy one. It's a lot of fun for me to just be in, to wander around and see what's going on, what's new. Too long in Fairbanks, and I start to feel stifled and stir-crazy. There's no anonymity, especially for me. Also, the main history of the town revolves around the bars downtown and a bunch of cabins that got moved over to a theme park formerly known as Alaskaland, now known as Pioneer Park. Good times.
Mind you, not all of Alaska is like this. Sitka is one of the most charming towns you'll ever see. Valdez is a fishing town, and has its own style. But a lot of Alaska is like that, where it's cheaper (and often safer) to build out instead of up. I wonder how much of that "style" is influenced by the tendency of rural Midwesterners to migrate up to Alaska. Hmmmm. Or is it just the survival mentality that is always there under the surface? As always, the answer is probably "both".
(edit: not knocking rural Midwesterners. At all. Promise. I discuss what I know.)
herself_nyc is currently touring the wilds of the PacNorthwest, and had this to say about a stop she made:Pretty much everything man-made around here is ugly. It's very frustrating. There's almost no feel for making structures fit into the majesty of their environment, and the environment is just incredibly fine.
That neatly sums up a persistent feeling I have had about my childhood home in specific and much of the West in general. Which is not to say the Midwest is a pinnacle of harmony between landscape and structure. When you're in the prairie, there's not much you can do to make the buildings flow into the landscape. The most you can hope for is to build it warm and tight, and pray that a tornado doesn't take it. Or, you can live in a city along the river, and let it flow from there.
However, the Midwest does not have the Rockies and the acres of forest/taiga/tundra that the West and Alaska does. There's something mildly oppressing about being among such majestic scenery, a feeling of never being able to measure up. Whenever I see Fairbanks, I get the sense that the miners and the Pipeline workers also felt that way, and so chose to go the other way, to make the town as squat and as ugly as possible. I know this is wrong, that the overriding concern was survival, which does not make for soaring architecture. There are grace notes, but the grace notes are back in the woods, set away from civilization, where people took the times to make their dwellings blend into the landscape. The town as whole is still the squat little mining camp it always has been, with a Sears and a Fred Meyers thrown in for good measure.
It really doesn't help that I am a city person through and through. I love being in the middle of tall buildings, of people walking around, of the bustle that makes up a city. I realize my city is small compared to some, but it's still a busy one. It's a lot of fun for me to just be in, to wander around and see what's going on, what's new. Too long in Fairbanks, and I start to feel stifled and stir-crazy. There's no anonymity, especially for me. Also, the main history of the town revolves around the bars downtown and a bunch of cabins that got moved over to a theme park formerly known as Alaskaland, now known as Pioneer Park. Good times.
Mind you, not all of Alaska is like this. Sitka is one of the most charming towns you'll ever see. Valdez is a fishing town, and has its own style. But a lot of Alaska is like that, where it's cheaper (and often safer) to build out instead of up. I wonder how much of that "style" is influenced by the tendency of rural Midwesterners to migrate up to Alaska. Hmmmm. Or is it just the survival mentality that is always there under the surface? As always, the answer is probably "both".
(edit: not knocking rural Midwesterners. At all. Promise. I discuss what I know.)
