History

1:12 a.m. Parked at the far end of the gravel. 1:14. Walking. The sign says TOLVANA BOWL, and under it, OPEN TO 2. The house went up in the summer of 1962, when the freight boom put four hundred trucks a week through Tolvana Crossing and Glacier Amusement & Vending Co. of Fairbanks decided the drivers needed somewhere warm that wasn't a bar. Eight lanes, 96 feet of building, a coffee urn rated for forty cups. The borough permit, No. 62-117, lists the use as 'recreation, all-hours.' Permits didn't say that then and they don't say it now. Somebody argued for it. 1:16. At the door. It is open, like the sign says.

1:18. Inside. Seven lanes to the right of the counter, one to the left, set apart. That one is 13. The flooring sub was Odsather Bros., out of Fairbanks, working the lane beds in December 1961, nineteen hours of dark in every twenty-four. Somebody read the lane diagram from the far end. Seven lanes went down true. The last one went down exactly true, backwards. Sixty feet, foul line to headpin. Thirty-nine boards, counted from the wrong side. Ball return on the left. Arrows mirrored. Nobody caught it until the finish coat, and by then Odsather's quote to tear out and repour was $6,200, which was more than the roof had cost. The house said no. 1:21. Standing on the approach. It is level.

1:24. Reading the frame on the wall by the shoe counter. For five years the backwards lane sat open but unsanctioned, and league bowlers would not score on it. In March 1967 the house committee voted 5-2 to petition the Far North Bowling Congress for a left-hand variance instead of a repour. The Congress sent an inspector from Fairbanks, 58 miles, who measured for two days and issued Certificate of Conforming Play (Left-Hand) No. 1, the only one of its series. The lane was renumbered 13 because the district registry already carried lanes 9 through 12 at the Fairbanks house, and the paperwork wanted a number nobody was using. The two no votes ran the repour side. Their minority report is in the frame too. It is short.

1:31. Talked to the counterman. Recertification comes every October. Fifty-nine certificates so far, consecutive, each one in the frame, each one signed. The left-handed league bowls Tuesdays, nine members, down from twenty-six in 1974, and the house keeps the lane oiled on its own mirrored pattern, out of its own pocket. The house holds the freight trade to 2 a.m. because the drivers get the same thirty minutes I do and there is nowhere else with the lights on. 1:36. Walking the lot. The maple on 13 was laid backwards in the dark by men who never knew it, and it has held level through sixty-four winters of frost heave that has cracked every slab and shifted every footing on this road, which means the mistake was built more carefully than most things built on purpose. 1:42. At the truck. Break over.

Local Legends

Regulars maintain that a second mirror-image lane was poured at a house in Delta Junction the same winter and quietly torn out in 1968, which would make 13 a survivor rather than an accident. No paperwork supports this. The counterman says the drivers who tell it are sincere.

It is widely repeated that the 1967 inspector's chalk marks are still under the finish coat and show through when the oil is fresh, if you crouch at the foul line and look toward the pins. 1:29. Crouched. Looked. It is either chalk or grain.

Some right-handers claim that bowling 13 after midnight reverses your hook for a full day afterward. The league treats this as settled fact and schedules around it.

The Controversy

1:38. One thing on file at the borough. The amusement-device license bills by the lane. The house has eight lanes and a lane numbered 13, and in 1988 an assessor read the overhead numbers, counted to thirteen, and billed accordingly. The appeal took eleven months and produced a two-page opinion holding that a lane is a lane regardless of what it says it is. The house pays for eight now, by agreement, which everyone involved has called fair enough. The bill still says LANES: 8 (SEE FILE).

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