In Alaska: Where the Chili Is Chilly

By Gregory Jaynes

In the fall of 1978, Fran Tate had the notion to open a Mexican restaurant in Barrow, Alaska. She had canvassed the town--there are, if you count the transients, roughly 3,000 people there, 80% of them Eskimos--and Mexican food is what they said they favored, overwhelmingly. The more she thought about it, the more she liked the idea, and one day, in a fit of enterprise, she seized a board, a piece of two-by-four, it being the nearest thing at hand, and drew her plans on it--the kitchen, the dining room seating arrangement, all that. Fran recalls, "I thought, 'Boy, that's a hot idea,' and I threw that sucker in my suitcase and flew to Anchorage and went to the bank."

A certain Mr. Peterson at the bank asked, "How much do you want?" Fran said, "Eighty-seven thousand dollars."

Peterson: "Lady, I can't go in and ask my directors for $87,000 with a board, just a board, to show them. I need blueprints."

Fran got blueprints. The bank still turned her down. Then ten other banks turned her down. Barrow, dark 24 hours a day in the winter, light 24 hours a day in the summer, treeless, ice-ridden Barrow, lusted for a Mexican restaurant, Fran claims. "So I just overdrew my checking account by $11,000, wrote a hot check, let a couple of big bills slide and opened Pepe's North of the Border."

Outside, Pepe's is not much to look at; inside, you could be in Nuevo Laredo: serapes, sombreros, paintings of matadors, Mexican waiters. Open 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., it has three dining rooms, 234 seats, and it is usually jammed. Fran plans to expand.

Yankee ingenuity is not new to this forbidding part of the world. In the last winter of the 19th century, for example, a prospector named Ed Jesson heard that gold had been found on the beach at Nome.

Trouble was, Jesson was over in the Klondike region of Canada, hundreds of miles removed from the strike. He cast about for transportation, found sled dogs in scarce supply and finally bought a bicycle. He made it to Nome in a month, along the way passing an astonished Indian, who, never having encountered a bike, exclaimed, "White man, he set down, walk like hell!"

Fran Tate is cut of similar cloth. Beside her yearbook picture from her high school in Auburn, Wash., where she held down a newspaper route and set pins in a bowling alley, was written, "By the work one knows the workman." Fran thought this sketch of her character "was awful. Everyone else's said, 'To the best-looking girl in school,' that sort of thing. I thought what a dud I was." Today she owns a sewage-disposal service in Barrow, as well as a water-delivery service, as well as Pepe's.

On paper, she is a millionaire. Five Fourth of Julys running, she has won, for her age group, an annual Barrow foot race. She is 54. She has a 24-year-old husband. His name is Juan Ramirez, but everyone calls him Chico. "This is the best of my four marriages," she says. She has a 30-year-old son in Anchorage--"He's a narc"--and a 29-year-old son in Barrow, a driver for one of her firms. "They think Chico's a neat guy."

"Since I was a kid I have liked old persons," says Chico, who works in Pepe's. When he was a teenager, a day laborer in San Diego, his love interest was a woman of 42. "Actually, there's nothing better than old persons. They know how to be human beings. So I talked to her sons, and they said, 'Hey, it's your life. If you like her, why not?' I never been so happy since I came to the U.S. in 1974."

"Chico loves children," Fran volunteers. "I had mine 29 and 30 years ago. But I gave him three grandchildren. I made him a grandfather. Sometimes I think of Chico outliving me. I bought a four-bedroom house in Anchorage. That's his security. After I'm gone, he can raise as many little Mexicans as he wants."

Other Mexicans have been a problem for the restaurateur. The Immigration and Naturalization Service has raided her a couple of times and taken away illegal aliens. One day, during a busy lunch at Christmastime, agents escorted ten employees away in handcuffs. "How am I to know?" the proprietor asks. "They change names on you. They have other people's green cards. I think I'm pretty clean right now, except for one, [she gives a name]. He's working for me for the second time.

The first time he came to work for me he was [she gives another name]." She pays $9.15 an hour to start.

"I'm here for the money," says one of her cooks, who deplores his surroundings.

"It's an ice desert, man."

That it is, and a bizarre one at that.

Barrow is the seat of the North Slope borough (called a county elsewhere, except Louisiana, where it is a parish), 88,000 sq. mi. that lie between the Brooks Range and the Arctic Ocean, which is frozen tight even now in June. Prudhoe Bay, full of oil, is 200 miles away. Money makes up for the bleakness. The town just built a $73 million school, Grades 7 through 12, with a swimming pool that leaks. The pool holds 160,000 gallons of water. Fran, who furnishes water at 160 a gallon, for a net profit of three-fourths of a cent a gallon, has filled it several times. Twenty-eight seniors graduated from the school this year. The building, approaching gluttony in design--it has a photography laboratory rivaled only by Eastman Kodak--is a reflection of local wealth. The town possesses 21 miles of unpaved roads; public transportation is one Mercedes-Benz bus, four Orions; they circle in the midnight sun.

And at times it seems everyone is soused. "People come up here and make money and destroy themselves," says Fran, who practices moderation. "They either drink or drug it all away." Two airlines service Barrow. Their cargo bays are filled with booze. The town is dry--it used to be wet, with a package store that deposited $4,000 a day in earnings in the Alaska National Bank of the North, the only bank in town, but people were getting drunk, staggering off on the tundra and freezing to death, so it was voted dry. Now the only way to get a drink is to order spirits in from outside. People call liquor stores that service the bush from Anchorage or Fairbanks, ask for E.S.P. (expedited small package) rate, and pay $36.75 freight for 50 lbs. of goods. Regular rate from Anchorage is $46.45 for twice as many pounds; double the jolt, slower to arrive. Perry Daniels, who drives for Fran, had ten cases of Budweiser coming in the other day.

"You see people stumbling along the roads," says Perry. "Hell, I've done it myself." Negotiating a trying intersection in his sewage truck, three-wheeled motorcycles coming at him like torpedoes, Perry recalls that Barrow put up some traffic signs about three years ago. "People just ran over them. Some of us try to remember what the laws used to be." Today there are no stop lights, no signs.

Last year one of Fran's trucks was bashed three times in two weeks by drunken drivers. "There is nothing you can do," she says. "Nobody has any insurance. But I love the place. Nowhere in the Lower 48 do you have this much opportunity."

She first pitched up here twelve years ago, drafting for a gas-drilling company. "I was knocked out by the potential.

I'm a gutsy nut, more guts than brains, some say. But there were so many things that were not here, and what was here was a monopoly and crummy. There still is no Laundromat, no bowling alley, no skating rink." A skating rink in Alaska?

Fran Tate sells ice cubes to Eskimos for $3 a bag and sells out frequently. If she has her way, one day there will be a skating rink in Barrow. For now, Pepe's thrives. (Mervin Setoyant, for instance, eats there four times a week. "It's something different," he says with a bored shrug, contemplating his usual order:

No. 1 Jose's Plate--one taco, one cheese enchilada, one beef-bean burrito, Mexican rice, frijoles, salad, $15.75.) But thriving exacts some cost in the Arctic Circle. "It's tough up here," says Fran, who lived in a garage on a dirt floor in 1977--she, two dachshunds and an electric heater. The inside temperature was 31DEGF below zero. She ran an outfit called Speedy Secretary then, but an IBM salesman blew through town, sold everybody a copier and put her out of business. "You can't run across the street to the hardware store for a fuse or anything. Nine times out often you have to send away for it."

Fran orders from Anchorage. One thousand and eighty dozen corn tortillas cost her $504. To ship them costs $443 more. Ten cases of takeout trays cost $265. The freight is $337. A rib-eye steak at Pepe's costs $23.75. A gallon of milk at the Staukpot (Big Store) costs $5.99; butter is $3.59 a pound. At Fran's next enterprise, Fran's Burger Barn, across from the $73 million school, home of the Barrow Whalers, all 260 of them, with a 21-inch color Sony television set in every classroom, a burger will cost $4.50, "fully decked, with french fries." After that, a jazz supper club. Her husband Chico, looking to put down roots, has joined the volunteer fire department and the Lions Club. --Gregory Jaynes