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Mailer had never experienced Alaska’s ice fog. Such dread winters are unknown in the Lower 48 because ice fog can only form if the temperature remains, for about a week, at or lower than -40°. Such a fog affects Fairbanks about two or three weeks each winter. The longer the -40°, the more massive the fog. Soon, above Alaska’s second-largest city, a cloud would form, filled with carbon monoxide. This, in turn, was caused by an overabundance of autos on Fairbanks’s streets, coughing out warm sooty exhaust fumes quickly freezing into ice crystals. Thus, at ground zero, walking or driving, whether emergency or derring-do, amid all this pea soup toxic fog reminded one of being on an urbanized Moon or Mars.
Mailer had never experienced Alaska’s ice fog. Such dread winters are unknown in the Lower 48 because ice fog can only form if the temperature remains, for about a week, at or lower than -40°. Such a fog affects Fairbanks about two or three weeks each winter. The longer the -40°, the more massive the fog. Soon, above Alaska’s second-largest city, a cloud would form, filled with carbon monoxide. This, in turn, was caused by an overabundance of autos on Fairbanks’s streets, coughing out warm sooty exhaust fumes quickly freezing into ice crystals. Thus, at ground zero, walking or driving, whether emergency or derring-do, amid all this pea soup toxic fog reminded one of being on an urbanized Moon or Mars.


===Citations===
Mailer had never experienced any of this, and it was America’s worst air. Yet Mailer hinted, during the debate, of such adverse local color as ice fog: “You’re not like other states. You don’t have the same psychological security that the other states have. You’re up here alone and cut off from the rest of your identity and because of this you have to learn to live without security.” With such insight into the exceptional nature of Alaska, Mailer had acutely sensed what Alaskans call Storm Fear—or what Mailer might have called “Existential Mother Nature.”
 
Nature in Alaska could be picturesque, mellow, sublime, or just plain deadly. Bush pilots, highly skilled and familiar with jagged mountain wind patterns, sometimes just disappeared. Fairbanks’s finest pilot, Don Jonz, my neighbor and friend took off on a highly publicized political junket, with special passenger Louisiana’s Congressman Boggs plus some Alaskan politicians and the plane disappeared. Machine and passengers remain unaccounted for to this day. Mailer was astounded on seeing so many privately owned aircraft, parked in long rows. Alaskans call such planes Alaskan taxicabs.
 
Mailer, in the Ellison debate, was remarkably prophetic when he warned
the Fairbanks audience: “You could become the very worst; a big Las Vegas
at sixty below. There’s already a priggishness alive in this state, people greedy
to get all the plastic buildings up here just as fast as they can.” If, at the
moment, I could have foreseen Fairbanks’s near future, I would have jotted
and underlined: ''Prudhoe Greed Invasion''.
 
As for Mailer’s ultimate 1965 Alaskan Mystery—either the “best” or the
“worst” state, I can only add a few more words. No doubt there are still small
pockets of individualized common sense, perhaps, some evolutionary mode
of Mailer’s “existential minority.” Otherwise, 1965 Fairbanks is dead and
gone.
 
What remains of the ultimate Mailer American Mystery? I cannot imagine Alaska ever becoming the “worst” state without Mother Nature’s full
cooperation. As for Alaska being the “best,” I can only echo the lament:
“Such hope is ‘all over’ up here.” But I’m glad that Norman Mailer experienced five of its last glory days.
 
What remains to be told of “Mailer in Alaska” is my own memory high
spot—and perhaps also was Mailer’s. This experience was truly an epiphany. It occurred above Mount McKinley, at 20,300 feet the highest point in
North America. On the Mailer itinerary, this epiphany was the first of two,
the latter being the mock fisticuffs during the farewell bash, in the snowy
outdoors, where Mailer neutralized a violently drunk attorney, perhaps with
an Arctic display of Papa Hemingway’s “grace under pressure.” I mention
this because I sensed that “Papa’s spirit” joined Mailer’s “big eyes” over
Mount Denali, the Alaskan Native name for Mount McKinley. This epiphany was purely literary.
 
It was Mailer’s idea, in mid-flight from Anchorage to Fairbanks, not to
bypass, but to say hello to the Big One: Mount Denali. A “hello” from Norman Mailer meant “buzzing the mountain’s top.” When Mailer asked that
this be done, Barney Gottstein’s pilot immediately turned and nodded yes to
Alaska’s guest of honor.
 
Up to that moment, the pilot’s four passengers were in various degrees of
wakefulness. The seating arrangement was: pilot up front, behind him on the
left sat Skellings, behind him, Mailer; and on the right, across from Skellings, I sat and, behind me, sat Tom Bischel, the millionaire hitchhiker. My
vantage point was perfect. I had Mailer in full view all the time. Skellings and
I were dead tired from day and night Anchorage revelry. But Mailer, alone,
seemed primed. The pilot announced that buzzing that high required “sucking oxygen” (mouth-inhalers in small containers). Anyone familiar with the
1960s drug culture knew that this meant “getting high.”
 
Then, another significant Mailer observation. He put on eyeglasses. A
Provincetown legend held that Mailer was vain about his imperfect vision
and that eyeglasses equaled unmanly or, as a takeoff on the (“don’t dance”)
title of Mailer’s later (1984) novel, ''Tough Guys Don’t Wear Glasses''. And, so the
legend went, when Norman Mailer puts on his spectacles, he is expecting
nothing less than an epiphany.
 
For twenty long minutes, Barney’s pilot made low passes around the peak
or higher, and with each pass, buzz, or mind-skimming of Denali’s top, I
looked down and wondered what Mailer was imagining or seeing, as he
sucked oxygen with an extra pair of eyes.
 
During that twenty-minute hello to Denali, I could not foresee Mailer’s
next novel, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967), oddly entitled because the word
“Vietnam” appears but once—in the book’s final phrase, “Vietnam, hot
dam.” Most of the novel’s “hot dams” took place in Alaska and mostly in
remote, stark wilderness—the Brooks Range.
 
There, reincarnations of “Big Oil” and “Big Greed” in the guise of yahoo
Texan hunters (with a zero hunter’s code) visited the Arctic for hi-tech
slaughter of the wildlife. With such “messy” tactics, someone like Papa Hemingway would have “offed” those Texans. Mailer, instead, used literary
ammunition—a novel, a pop culture acerbic comedy of Arctic wilderness
being despoiled by the mechanistic arts of a so-called American Civilization gone berserk.
 
Above Denali, with Mailer just an arm’s length away, I lost myself in
simultaneous images of Papa Hemingway peering down on Kilimanjaro, seeing a frozen leopard, and Mailer (on Alaskan oxygen plus magic) peering
down on Denali, seeing (and believing) what? “Would there have been a
Mailer Vietnam novel without us being here?”
 
Such literary fancy has an afterlife. My belief that twenty minutes over
Denali was the genesis of Mailer’s Vietnam novel causes me to wonder how
Stephen Rojack, the protagonist-narrator of ''An American Dream'' (1965)
would have behaved had Mailer created him after—and not before—his
five-day Alaskan visit.
 
There are ample literary cues. The somewhat tight time line between
the writing and publishing of two key novels (''An American Dream'' and
''Why are We in Vietnam?'') and, at approximate mid-point, the Alaskan
visit. There was also an autobiographical linkage. Rojack, of all the protagonists, remains the most “authorial self,” in J. Michael Lennon’s
phrase. Lennon also refers to Rojack as “Mailer’s fictional cousin”. {{sfn|Lennon|1986|p=9}}
Rojack, pointedly, is Lower 48–rooted, a professor of existential psychology, with a fondness for magic, not Alaska styled. However, with a
five-day booster shot of Alaskan magic inside Mailer the Creator, how
would Rojack have acted and ended? I leave the “acts” for future Mailer
scholars.
 
As for an Alaska-inspired ending of Mailer’s ''An American Dream'', a “new”
Rojack must have a new “post-climax”—or call it epilogue. Let him redo the
Vegas exit. Keep the surreal desert phone booth. But before he dials, imagine that he knows what his fictional cousin now knows—that wilderness cities may come and go, but there’s always authentic wilderness up north in the
Brooks Range.
 
Rojack’s departure time is now, not tomorrow, but his destination is not
foreign jungles but deep inside America, and this time he’s not speechless
when he phones some “wilderness city,” somewhere, to say Hi to Cherry and Marilyn, before exiting due north, direct, to the Brooks Range to say hello
and press the flesh with God.
 
== Notes ==
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== Citations ==
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===Work Cited===
== Work Cited ==
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* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=1986 |title=Critical Essays on Norman Mailer |location=Boston |publisher=G. K. Hall |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=1986 |title=Critical Essays on Norman Mailer |location=Boston |publisher=G. K. Hall |pages=9 |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}
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{{Review}}
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