n January of 1989, the temperature got down to sixty degrees below zero in Fairbanks, Alaska, and stayed there for three weeks. Furnaces burned through heating oil at a serious rate, and parking lots slowly filled with cars that wouldn't start anymore, even with the engine block heaters that everyone up there has. Every year in the dead of winter, usually the Japanese imports were the last cars left on the road, but in 1989, even some of the Toyotas had given up. In that kind of weather, automatic doors would freeze open or closed, so they'd have to be disabled. The people working the drive-thru window at McDonald's wore their parkas while they stood at their posts, because it was impossible to stay warm with the cold air blasting in with every transaction. And there were lots of them: in the winter of '89; almost no one actually got out of their cars and walked anywhere if they didn't have to, including me and my friend Lori, whose Datsun 200sx held up nicely during that particularly long cold snap. Lori and I were in high school, and we thought that it would be hilariously funny to go through the drive-thru at McDonald's and order ice cream. We got a lot of mileage out of it: our satisfied giggling when the person taking the order paused and said, "You want what?" and then the spectacle we made of ourselves back at school after racing through the ice fog (when water particles in the air literally freeze solid, thick as any fog that rolls off the ocean). We danced around amidst the cacophony of slamming lockers and yelled conversations, waving the tall soft-serve cones over our heads, the hallways glowing orange in the early-afternoon setting sun, so close to the Arctic Circle. Besides that visit for ice cream, I didn't otherwise go to McDonald's. Its parking lot was where kids met up on weekend nights to figure out where the party was ("party" meaning, usually, a pallet fire, a keg of the cheapest beer possible, and Def Leppard blasting from a boom box). The restaurant was, to me, tainted by its association with people who didn't have anywhere else to go. At 18 years old I was tired of the scene, eager to get out and away from what I saw as small town small-mindedness. I was ready for more. But it hadn't always been that way with McDonald's and me. Until I was six, my family lived in a rural part of the state, in the remote Alaska Native village of Fort Yukon, about 140 air miles from the nearest McDonald's, down in Fairbanks. Fort Yukon is a predominantly Gwich'in Athabascan community of about 600 people. My family is white — my parents were there as missionaries, my father a bush pilot and the priest-in-charge at the log church down by the river. We didn't have running water in Fort Yukon, but we had a TV, and during the time we lived up there, The Wizard of Oz was broadcast once a year. My parents would let me stay up and watch it, tucking me into a sleeping bag on the couch. I was transfixed by the movie, by this little girl's ability to travel from her dull, rural home to a shining, magical kingdom filled with wonders. I could relate to Dorothy, had even once flown over a rainbow on the way into Fairbanks, and to me, Oz perfectly illustrated the world beyond our tiny town, what it was, what it meant. It made perfect sense to me that Dorothy and her companions would get shined and made pretty in the Emerald City; after all, that was what people did in the real world. Not like in Fort Yukon, where we went to the bathroom in a pail or an outhouse, where the snow never melted by the door in winter. Besides The Wizard of Oz, the other thing that taught me about the real world outside Fort Yukon was McDonald's. I would nearly press my nose to the screen whenever a McDonald's commercial came on. I'd stare as Ronald McDonald — in his yellow jumpsuit with the strangely wide hips — honked the horn as he rode his bicycle, handed out balloons to children, saved the fries the Fry Guys stole, or sang a song about feeding the wastebaskets because "they're hungry, too!" Even though our TV set was black and white, I could tell there were brilliant colors. I would scan the commercials for every tiny detail about what life was like when you lived somewhere where there was a McDonald's: sunshine, happy music, food wrapped up like presents in special papers and boxes, cups that came with lids and straws. Straws! People in the real world ate food in brightly colored packages and lived in houses with sidewalks and lawns. Nothing bad ever happened there. No one was cold, no one got hurt, no one died. They had flush toilets and hot water, and they had McDonald's, and they were happy all the time because of it. We went into Fairbanks a few times each year; whenever we flew in a visit to McDonald's was almost guaranteed. Everyone from the villages went to McDonald's if they could: eating there meant participating in a world we, kids from "the bush" (a general way of referring to rural Alaska), didn't feel like we had access to, but could only admire from afar. Going into Fairbanks and eating at McDonald's conferred status. My standard order was a hamburger, fries, and a strawberry shake. I almost never took more than a bite or two of the hamburger, and I couldn't eat all my fries before they got cold, but I always finished my shake, which tasted the way the strawberry in one of my scratch 'n sniff books smelled. I would always ask my dad to "start" my shake for me, because the first pull up through the straw was hard, and I was impatient.
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