If I were to describe the glaciers I’ve seen or the sea, the wildlife or the mountains and try to wrap words and grammar around indescribable landscapes, I would do Calliope injustice. More within my lexicon are the words to describe some of the uniquely Alaskan establishments I see, and perhaps the most amazing of all of these is the Alaskan espresso hut.
To the wonderment of a simple minded reporter, the Alaskan coffee industry is perhaps the most prolific business enterprise I have seen in the great north. Picture a building – picture a trailer rather – planted in the middle of a gravelly dusty parking lot that once had other businesses where now all that remains are signs and this hut. Those signs have incomplete prices for cigarettes and 50-cent coke cans that have faded from red to a putrid yellow.
The trailer has weathered latticework hiding its wheels and a long since dead potted plant disguising its hitch. On a simple glance, it doesn’t bite you as anything much, but as you drive by you see in your rearview mirror the most repetitious advertisement on its obverse.
It reads “ESPRESSO: Drive Thru,” and is the fifteenth of its ilk in the last 30 miles. The intentional typo sits squarely next to a window, simple and wood-framed. With a few sketched prices on a dry-erase board, this is a coffee hut.
The drive through coffee hut seems to be a staple of long and short roads alike. I don’t know which came first, a thirst for caffeine or a dearth of utilized parking lots, but on the way to Talkeetna, a 100-mile drive, we passed close to two dozen. Each had its own flavor, not vanilla or mocha in origin, but an aesthetic flavor. Some had polar bears (most had polar bears) painted on signs, drinking coffee, pointing to the window, set on a sign separate from the trailer but certainly waving you in. Others had large plaster ice cream cones signaling a diverse menu.
Others yet had giant yellow coffee cups, a yellow you would see warning you of wet floors or a crime scene. These grab you with their brunt obviousness and hold you with their compelling palette. There was no requirement, or apparent desire, to match the paint – and there were a few that seem to be a patchwork of half-empty paint cans salvaged from basements and garages.
They dot Anchorage, finding themselves in dirty lots next to dirtier car dealerships, and cleaner lots near impending business parks. They accompany gas stations, car dealerships, taxidermists, ATMs and gun shops.
To have stairs, an entry beyond your delivery window sets you above the nearest competitor. To have a seating area seems almost sacrilegious. Seldom a long wait, seldom a line of more than two cars, there seems to be both supply and demand for these forlorn trailers in these abandoned lots.
I theorize, as that is a limitation of my visiting status, that the true nature of the coffee hut might lie in a desired mobility. It would be a far better lot in life to be able to work as long as necessary, to raise enough money, then not work. And if you can balance serving coffee and carbon monoxide for nine months out of the year and then tow your entire business somewhere while you travel, hunt or race the Iditarod, why not?
Of course I do not know the weight this theory carries. I did stop at one drive-through slash restaurant and have a buffalo burger with my father, but the woman was just as anxious to make sure we got our food as she was to check every so often on her children sliding down a precarious ditch in the back.
I suppose it could also have something to do with that entrepreneurial spirit and the ease a trailer and parking lot match up can have. Certainly there is a niche being exploited if there are so many coffee huts in South Central Alaska. And in a state where it seems that industry has its limitations (not a huge need for Bermuda shorts as one example), this coffee hut might be the way to be your own boss.
I think I like resting on my theories. A certain mystique associated with any good coffee emporium is always good. It goes well with the dark brew to have uncertainty in its origin and purpose. And, no offense to any happy drive through attendants, but I would rather drive up to an inviting polar bear and his morning cup of java than an unfriendly sap who would rather do anything but help me with my caffeine jones.
Scott Eldridge II is a Collegian columnist on exchange in Anchorage, Alaska.
