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ground, and as I looked at them their blackness was pleasant enough against the late snow, but nearer the town, where they aged long before their time, they were antagonistically ugly.
    Then again, as we drove around Fairbanks trying to make purchases for our excursion Audrey and I agreed that the town was a contradiction in terms. The word Fairbanks suggests a pleasantly situated environment along the banks of the Chena. But this is far from the truth. The banks of the river are built up with offices and small factories long since closed up with the decline in gold-mining. In the outskirts private homes are built in a variety of styles and materials and many of them have their own private floatplane moored on the water at the end of their wellmanicured lawns.
    Overall, the town would not score any points for architectural or cultural merit. It is constructed on a grid system so typical of Middle America, and such simple expediency does not encourage artistic evolution. But even with this ordered constraint, the town seemed to be thrown together the way boom-and-bust frontier towns of necessity usually are. The charm of Fairbanks has its origins firmly in that era, for Fairbanks is indisputably a blue-collar town. It may be the second city in the state, yet it has the feel of a town. The people here are open and friendly in the extreme. All the airs and graces of a cultured European capital would find no place here.
    The atmosphere of a frontier town still hung in the air. This was a place where people came to work out dreams and found they had to spend nine months of the year simply trying to survive. The winters here favour no one person above another and everybody ultimately depends on everyone else. Just to underline the fact, there were no designer shops of any description. Wind- and weatherproofing are essential elements of clothes design in Fairbanks; colour, texture and cut are onlymeaningful if they enhance these first priorities. Men and women alike dressed like lumberjacks in flannel shirts, workmen’s overalls and sturdy boots. ‘Dressing’ to go anywhere meant no more than exchanging one pair of jeans for another, or a pair of boots that hadn’t been clean for months for clean ones. Still, you knew that nobody would bat an eyelid if you walked into an opera performance at the university in full bush gear, caked with mud, wet with snow, smelling of the great outdoors and perfumed with perspiration, blood and offal from the moose you have just finished skinning.
    In the grey morning light and half light at dusk, Fairbanks looked like an expansive container yard with acre upon acre of rectangular clapboard buildings and square, rough-hewn log cabins. It is down-in-the-mouth stubborn, and persistent. It hangs on like grim death against all the odds. In the afternoon, while walking downtown where every other building was once either a bar, a brothel or a gambling parlour but was now boarded up, empty or demolished, you sensed that the winter winds had blown the place clean of this sordid but ebullient lifestyle. In the daylight the buildings seemed impregnated with amnesia about the past, as if they had forgotten why they were there in the first place. The bars that remained were rank with the smell of stale beer, tobacco and urine. There were a few native people in them too sick to drink any more. Their eyes were full of anger and emptiness. It was not a pretty place, and the reality factor was cauterizing my romantic imagination. The men who stared at us with their ghoulish eyes were indeed ghosts. This was their land, by birthright and inheritance. They were born into it, were taught about it, understood its ways, yet here they were washed up in these soulless back streets existing on a daily round of alcohol, vomit and the sleep of stupor.
    During the day I kept most such thoughts to myself, allowing Alaska to pose its own questions, which I might or might not find the answer for. But it was early