For a new series of essays, we have invited some of our contributors to share a story, an episode, an experience that took place at a particular bar–a place that they hold in their memory for one reason or another. We hope you will enjoy reading these stories as they appear each Monday.
by Helene Stapinski
Dexter Roadhouse was a shack of a bar that sat 10 miles outside Nome, Alaska, on the Kougarok Road. On the way, you passed the old mining claims from the Gold Rush era — the scarred, but still immensely beautiful tundra flashing by in red, gold and rusty orange. The Sawtooth Mountains loomed in the distance, like ancient cathedrals waiting for you to stop in to say a prayer.
But you hit Dexter first, to worship at its old wooden bar. When I lived in Nome, it was the great equalizer, where everyone in town came to worship. The judge sat next to the man he just sentenced for DWI who sat next to his next door neighbor and her ex and somebody’s uncle.
It’s rumored that Wyatt Earp once owned Dexter. And that Hoagy Carmichael wrote “Stardust” here. But I never believed anything anyone ever told me in Nome, since most people were drunk when telling it to you.
The first time I visited Dexter was my first night in Nome. I had arrived earlier that day on an Alaska Airlines flight to serve my year with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps at a church-run radio station named KNOM (MONK spelled backwards). Nome was muddy and ugly and smelled bad, at least in our house. One of the former volunteers was cooking moose stew, which gave off a gamey, awful stench.
To get away from the smell, we went drinking at the local bars that night. There were quite a few. And when they closed, there were the after-hours roadhouses on the outskirts of town: Safety, at milepost 22 on the Council Road, and Dexter.
We took a drive out around 2 a.m. in the station vehicle — a blue, beaten Jimmy SUV, which on most nights, beginning in October, would be plugged into the house to keep the engine from freezing up.
But this was August. The sun had just set around midnight, so the last hints of twilight had been blotted out for good. The road to Dexter had no lights. A dark emptiness stretched for hundreds of miles, threatening to swallow us whole for eternity in its vast loneliness.
I wondered that night, from the crowded but silent back seat, why I had come here and thought maybe it was a mistake. Among a few darkened homesteads along the road, and the sleeping, blanketed mountains, Dexter was all there was out in the middle of all that nothingness. You could see it glowing in the dark, like a firefly hovering, warm and pulsing.
There were only a few stools left when we arrived. We climbed onto them, cowboys already weary at the beginning of a long journey, and steadied ourselves. Bill from Iron Creek, a gold miner, was tending bar and welcomed us with his crooked smile. “Welcome to Sin City,” he said.
From Bill, we learned to drink — and later mix — duck farts and BBC cocktails. But that’s not all Bill taught us. As the months unfolded, we would become regulars and then bartenders at Dexter — at least on the nights when the roads weren’t closed because of snow. The loneliness of those dark roads was replaced with a feeling of freedom mixed with a weird sense of community.
Lazy Sundays that following summer were spent not at church, but playing bean bags in the dirt outside the roadhouse, drinking long necked beers and staring at the silhouettes of those cathedrals in the distance, thinking maybe Hoagy really did write those words here:
| And now the purple dusk of twilight time
Steals across the meadows of my heart High up in the sky the little stars climb |
The last time I was in Alaska, July 1996, I tended bar at Dexter with Bill for an overflowing crowd. Beanbags were in full throttle and Nome’s mayor danced around in a tall striped Dr. Seuss hat. Little did I know that it would be my last night inside Dexter, that six years later, the roadhouse would be replaced with a new, improved version, bigger, but not necessarily better.
As I drove away that night, twilight segueing into dawn, pinpricks of stars trying to take hold, I took a longing look at the roadhouse through my rearview mirror and prayed that Dexter would be there when I got back.
Helene Stapinski is the author of the bestselling memoir Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History, and Baby Plays Around: A Love Affair, with Music. She has written articles for The New York Times, New York magazine, Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure and Salon.
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Thanks for that trip inside the dark bar. I’ve enjoyed more than a few bars myself.
PS I was lucky enough to read Five-Finger Discount for a women’s memoir class at Barnard. Loved it.
We’ve come to expect evocative writing and surprising insights from Helene Stapinski since “Five-Finger Discount”, but we’re always happy to read more.
Your guest Mondays are a great idea, and you picked a good person to start them off on the right track.