The Consummate Vacation -- Alaska Is The Place For Magnetic Attractions

ALASKA IS WHAT God made as a kid.

That's what it looks like from the air, anyway, and if there are parents hanging out in heaven's kitchen, you'd think Alaska would be fastened to the refrigerator door. The terrain is sealed under a frosty film in designs both ugly and playful, like fingerpainting, while the severity of the cold - 80 percent of the state's ground is permanently frozen - has transformed life beyond Fairbanks into snow-covered, moldlike patterns of ice and brush.

It's a place given to America's superlatives when it comes to natural wonders; it also - this is just a guess now - boasts the greatest number of hairy guys in the world. At the same time, Alaska has the fewest people per square mile, about a half million in all, but they've all known for years that if you really want to see nature preen for the camera, stick around for nightfall.

Thousands of miles away, there is Japan, a country that has shattered any notion of friendly competition with the U.S. by proving it will not be beat when it comes to producing tourists. And so it is that in recent years thousands of Japanese have donned their purses and parkas and come for the sub-zero winters of Alaska.

The attraction is the aurora borealis, the official term for what is more commonly known as "The Best Thing To Happen To Alaska's Winter Tourism In A Spell." Some call it the northern lights, a sight so otherworldly that native folklore regards it as both

awe-inspiring and ominous. Today's urban Alaska folklore, on the other hand, promotes Japanese auroral visits as the consummate vacation. So to speak.

ROUND ONE OF THE meeting of East and West got off to a shaky start, but this winter, according to Alaska State Division of Tourism figures, an estimated 5,000 Japanese visitors will make the trip, up from 4,200 last year and 3,600 before that. It's a tiny fraction of Alaska's $1 billion tourism industry but the bulk of its growing winter business. "I suddenly have a winter trade," says John Davis, who opened the Ah, Rose Marie Bed & Breakfast in Fairbanks nine years ago. "This year it doubled. I got a mention in the Japanese guide book - it translates to `He Who Walks Around The World,' or Globetrotter. If you get a mention in that you've pretty much got it made."

This is a place where residency is measured by the number of cold seasons survived, where mad scientists stay up nights eyeing the natural phenomenon that has tour companies and resort operators stumbling around in the snow trying to capitalize on this new funding source from the East. The Japanese come to the dark Alaskan Interior, where you know what you can do with your taxes, Mr. Senator, and dog mushers have been known to take an ax and hack a stubborn moose out of the way rather than lose the race.

Millions of miles away, storms of considerable volatility - think of Susan Powter and Howard Stern in an elevator - rage on the sun, big gaseous eruptions sending electrically charged particles into solar winds that whip through the solar system. The excited electrons are roped in by Earth's magnetic field near the poles, where they - ohhhh - rub against molecules in the ionosphere, 60 miles up, prompting celestial centerfolds of light.

It is a sight to behold, but there are those who say that simply watching the spectacle is not the only reason Japanese are coming. The tourism industry says only this: Oh yes oh please don't stop.

WITH 31,000 PEOPLE, Fairbanks is Alaska's second-largest city, and it isn't shy about its special relationship with the lights. Flag a taxi at the airport and it might be from Aurora Borealis Cab Co., complete with dreamy green streaks painted on the door. The aurora flashes above the city on the cover of the Fairbanks phone book. Inside are listings for Northern Lights Educare and Northern Lights Porcelain, Northern Lights Driving School and Northern Lights Video and TV Service. There is even a Northern Lights Memorial Park Funeral Home and Crematory.

Away from the high mountains and coastal weather patterns, the Alaskan Interior is one of the best seats on the planet, with an average 240 clear nights a year. In the mid-1980s, Japanese tourism in Alaska (mostly ski trips in the Anchorage area) dwindled to nothing; soon Japanese began trickling into Fairbanks, first by the dozens and now by the thousands, each spending between $1,000 and $3,000 for up to a week's time in Alaska. One transportation service that trundles visitors to remote resorts for aurora-watching began with a few vans; it now operates four motorcoaches.

Forty-five minutes north of the city, where you are more likely to hit a moose than a gas station, is a renovated gold miners' bunkhouse abandoned in 1959 and reopened 18 years later as the Old F.E. Gold Camp, a restaurant and lodge. Trish Kriendler soon sold the 50-acre historic property but a decade later found herself in business again.

This was the first tangled meeting of East and West, a lesson in how not to conduct international trade. Travel agency president Masayoshi Okumura, sensing among Japanese travelers a burgeoning interest in the lights, contacted new Gold Camp managers Pam and Larry McLaughlin a few years ago to propose building an aurora viewing dome at the site. More than $600,000 later, the dome was ready, business was booming, and Okumura discovered that, um, the McLaughlins didn't actually own the property on which the dome was built. Also, they'd gone bankrupt and the camp had been auctioned to its original owners.

Embittered, embarrassed and out a whole bunch of money, Okumura pulled out and had the dome dismantled. All that's left are the pilings.

But his instincts had been correct. The aurora grew in popularity, and with it, the random whispers that the real reason Japanese were flooding the place was that it was good luck to, well - let's try to be sensitive about this - do the wild thing under the lights on their honeymoons.

"The aurora has magical qualities to them," Trish Kriendler says. She swears she has heard this from the Japanese themselves. "They come up here to, um . . . they like to consummate their marriage."

Though the sign out front might say different, Kriendler now calls her place the Chatanika Gold Camp after the name of the town it's in (population: 13). One crisp night in January, a group of 14 Japanese led by Tokyo tour guide Soko Fukushima mill about the rustic wood lodge and bar area, chatting and playing card games at folding tables with plastic tablecloths. The register at the entrance is signed by visitors from Tokyo and Yokohama and by an increasing number of tourists from the U.S. South.

Kriendler mentions a Tokyo couple, guests at the lodge, who went shopping in Fairbanks and returned with many baby garments. "We asked them, `Are you expecting?' And they said, `Not yet . . .' "

"See?" says a woman helping at the camp while her family considers buying the place, now that it's for sale again. "It's true."

Beverly Rickles, a frosty-eyed woman who takes tourists on dog-sled rides for up to $75 hourly, says gleefully: "I haven't had anyone constummate their marriage in the back of a dog sled before . . . but I'm still waiting."

Kriendler's husband, Chris, rumbles in on a cane, the prototypical Interior Alaskan - haggard face buried under nappy patches of beard, opinions on everything and quirks to match. Chris mines gold in the summers; in his bedroom are large guns.

Of the circulating rumor, he says: "The only place - the only place - I ever heard that was on `Northern Exposure.' The most I've ever heard them (Japanese) say is that it's lucky."

But what about the baby clothes? "That was true," he says. "Except that the reason they bought them here is because they're cheaper." He pauses and looks away, toward the bar. "Maybe there is something. But if it's true, they keep it to themselves."

Down the hallway a door opens and someone says something in Japanese. People burst out of their chairs - decorum can be such a silly thing - grab their cameras, pluck their jackets, mittens, scarves from a pile stacked on the pool table - out the door in a stampede of boots on wood - it all happens in less than five seconds.

Trish Kriendler sits nursing a cigarette at the bar.

"Someone must have said `aurora,' " she says.

THE MOON SHINES like a trophy on the horizon, and from it, a glowing green-white stream of light flows above our heads to the other end of the sky.

"Beautiful," says Fukushima, the tour guide. "Cannot see (this) in Japan."

The temperature is 9 degrees. No one cares. They speak to each other in excited bursts, hardly taking their eyes off the sight. Some lie against a snowbank for comfort. A woman practically dances beside her camera tripod, clapping mittened hands and repeating "Thank you, thank you" until the light fades away like smoke trailing a jet.

Aurora was the Roman goddess of the morning, who ushered in the sun and the new day. Aurora borealis means "dawn of the north." The same effect is visible from Earth's southern polar regions and is called aurora australis.

The Inuit people, whose roots in what is now Alaska date back 6,000 years, have attributed both fearful and spiritual qualities to the aurora in their culture. One view holds that the lights bear the souls of those who have died unfortunate deaths; another says the whole thing is a big soccer game in the sky, with a walrus' head as the ball; in another version - parents, take note - the balls are the heads of disobedient children.

There is a belief that says the spirits can be summoned by whistling. University of Alaska-Fairbanks student Joanna Wassillie, a 24-year-old Yupik Inuit raised in a village of 400 along Alaska's southwest coast, remembers boys who'd whistle to frighten the girls. On a frigid New Year's Eve in a Fairbanks club called the Crazy Loon Saloon, she recalls that the spirits could be scared away just as easily - by urinating.

"That's the interesting thing about Yupik culture," she says. "Urine seems to play a big part."

John McWhorter, a friend of Wassillie who reports for the Alaska Public Radio Network, has heard the urban lore of lucky love-making currently in circulation. Maybe it is just rumors, you know - everyone's gotta make a buck.

"You know," he says, "the lights don't ask for anything. They just give, and the only thing they ask in return is patience. All you gotta do is stand out there in the cold and wait."

One by one, the gawkers at Chatanika Gold Camp return inside. Chris Kriendler thumps in with his cane and grins. At one end of the bar counter, Akemi Hama of Tokyo returns to her book and Wild Turkey on the rocks. She finds the notion of aurora as aphrodisiac humorous. She plays along, though, saying that perhaps if she were single she would call on the aurora's mysterious power. "To you, in United States, it means lucky," she says. "In Japan, very rare. Not symbolic, just beautiful."

But she adds: "I tell my friends, I will be Queen of the Aurora and never come back."

At the other end of the room, Japanese writer Noriaki Hirata holds court with a few fellow tourists and a bottle of Jack Daniels. Eventually Trish boots everyone out and off to their rooms upstairs because she can't allow unpurchased liquor in the area. It is nearly one in the morning.

Over the next two hours there are several more aurora alerts, and each time the visitors spill out opposite ends of the lodge, never knowing which show they're going to see. Sometimes the lights glitter briefly in the distance like a mirage and disappear; other times they sweep across the sky, shimmering like a curtain; besides the fact that they're more easily viewed in winter, the northern lights are no more predictable than fire.

THE TOUR GROUP FINDS its way to the Resort at Chena Hot Springs, which, you could say, appears to be doing all it can to please the Japanese tourists who bestow their money upon the state. A highway dead-ends at the resort about 60 miles northeast of Fairbanks, and inside, the dinner menu, offering entrees from $17.95 to $24.95, is reprinted in Japanese. Outside the dining area, a sign reading "Please Wait To Be Seated" also has been translated, and resort brochures, like those at Chatanika, are in Japanese, too.

Chena Hot Springs offers all the comforts of a corporate-style hotel but few of the friendly nuances of the family-owned gold camp. It does, however, stock a healthy selection of beers, including Sapporo, served up by a young and hearty uniformed staff of the type found on cruise ships. You feel as if someone has taken one of those hokey souvenir domes you shake to scatter artificial snow and installed Bellevue.

It is a lively staff of people from everywhere else and eager for news from the outside. They pepper a delivery man with questions; irritated, he becomes surly. This prompts waitress Melissa Stewart, a scruffy North Carolina transplant in her mid-20s, to reply: "Hey, you live in the real world. We live here in Chena."

Stewart, too, insists she has heard the rumors, particularly that a child conceived under the lights will be blessed. Frank Rose, general manager of the state-owned resort, says the idea of promoting a Japanese wedding package has been discussed. "My indication from the Department of Tourism is that that would be a pretty hot deal," he says.

In the lounge, near the fireplace, is a second tour group, this one led by Soichiro Koga, a University of Alaska-Anchorage sociology student. An employee of A&P Tours in Anchorage, he is on loan to the Fairbanks office, assisting with the heavier winter traffic. He says he has heard the rumor as well. "You know," he says apologetically, "when I ask my clients . . . they hear nothing about this."

Nevertheless, he counts among his group newlyweds Tomonori and Maki Hamakoji, who have brought with them their wedding outfits. Later that evening, he brings up the question with them. They seem amused, and Koga issues Tomonori's reply: "They have not heard these stories," he says. "But they will tell people in Japan."

I suggest that maybe someone in Alaska made up the whole thing.

He checks my eyes, then says, "I think that, too," as if he has been waiting to say so all night.

CHENA HOT SPRINGS pounced on the idea whose time had come, building an aurora shelter of its own on a hill overlooking the sprawling steamy complex. To get there one walks a winding path traced by dimly lit lanterns in the snow. Inside a wood-burning stove warms visitors; one wall is a large set of north-facing windows in front of two rows of folding chairs. The only light is a flickering candle on a table laden with packets of mix for cider, hot chocolate and Cup-A-Noodle Soups.

You can wait a long while to see the aurora. Some perfectly clear nights lights won't appear at all. When the appearance is less than spectacular, you are caught between the selfishness of wanting to somehow control the performance and the hope that no amount of knowledge or money be ultimately able to do so. The scientists say the lights are 70 miles above the Earth's surface, but to hear some people describe it, they can in rare instances seem just out of your grasp.

Tonight, just after two in the morning, they begin as a flash to the west of the small mountains bordering the resort. The tour group bustles with excitement; this is their last night in the Interior before returning to Japan. The writer and the Aurora Queen tap paper cups of tequila in a toast to the majestic display of light, and everyone but Hirata, who stumbles from window to window savoring the panorama, scrambles outside, where it is 22 below zero.

The flash spreads across the sky in waves of green, bending and sweeping like fog defrosting on a windshield. Barry Lopez was right; it is like t'ai chi. Patches of light collect in places where for a few magnificent seconds they spin as angry green javelins, flashes of pink appearing at their edges. Patience is all the lights ask, and yeah, a little respect would be nice, too.

The tourists stand in the snow as if waiting to be anointed.

Inside the shelter, just above the flickering candle, a sheet of paper is attached to the wall. It isn't until Fukushima, the tour guide, arrives earlier in the evening to scout out the viewing shelter for her group that we learn that it is a sign listing prices for the tea and cider and other items put out for guests. The information is delivered only in Japanese.

Marc Ramirez is a writer for Pacific. Harley Soltes is Pacific's staff photographer.