by Neil Peart
High on the other side of the main road was a Native settlement of prefab houses, and the map showed a road leading from there another 15 miles downriver to the ruins of a town called Glenora, where the Hudson’s Bay Company post, now the Riversong, had originally been located. In the afternoon I suited up and took a ride out that way, to see if there was anything to see, but as I picked my way along the narrow dirt road, rain began to fall, turning the surface under my wheels to mud. Where the road ended I found only a couple of pickup trucks and boat trailers, and I straddled the bike and tried to turn it around. The tires slid in the mud and I lost my footing, then leapt aside as the motorcycle fell over, leaving us both laying in the mud. Even with all the bags removed the bike still weighed about 600 pounds, and it took all my strength, slipping around in my muddy boots, to haul it upright. One mirror was broken and hanging loose, but there didn’t seem to be any other damage, and I slithered my way back to the Riversong through the steady rain.
I hunted up a piece of scrap wood to put under the centerstand, to prevent the bike from sinking into the liquefying surface and falling over again, tried unsuccessfully to fix the mirror, then had a closer look for other damage. Nothing was apparent, but I did notice the brake pads were looking a little thin, and it was possible that all the wet, gritty riding I’d been doing had worn them more quickly than usual. It was hard to tell with everything gummed up with mud, and there was nothing I could do about it anyway, but it was something else to worry about.
And still the rain kept falling, hour after hour, and I began to fear the ride out of there the following day. If that 70-mile dirt road had been treacherous and scary when it was dry, what would it be like as a slippery mire clinging to a precipice? I didn’t like to think about it; but I did.
From the payphone at the Riversong I finally got a call through to Ray to find out what was going on with the sale of the Toronto house. Apparently the day before, while I had been hiding out there in the wilderness, unconcerned with any news from the outside world, the stock market had taken its own tumble into the mud, the Canadian dollar had plummeted again, and the formerly committed buyer had found an excuse to back out of the deal at the last minute. Just when I had grown used to the idea of saying goodbye to that “haunted house,” with all its years of family memories, it was back on the market, and back on my mind.
Just what I needed. It’s hard not to feel like Mr. All-Time Loser sometimes. Rain and despair, bad combination. Have the feeling of being “driven to the edge of a deep, dark hole,” so to speak. Very aware of backing away: “Don’t go there.”
After a troubled night, I was up at 5:00, nervous and edgy, fixing a quick breakfast of orange juice, cereal, and strong coffee. It was still dark as I carried my bags out to the bike, and though the ground was sodden, I was glad to see the rain had stopped, and looked up to a clear patch of sky with stars and a planet.
As I walked back to the door after the first load, I was stopped in my tracks at the sight of a fox, small and brown with a white-tipped tail, standing by the door and watching me calmly. At first I was thrilled to see this elusive wild animal up close, but I realized this was unnatural behavior, and it made me uneasy. The fox might have been rabid, or it might have been tamed by someone from the staff feeding it; I couldn’t know. When I came out with the second load it was still sitting there, just looking at me. I worried about it sneaking inside in search of food, so I kicked the door closed behind me. Just as the latch clicked shut I felt a start of fear and cringed, remembering the door was self-locking, and that I had left the key on the kitchen table.
Oh man. It was 5:30 in the morning; no one from the Riversong was expected back until later that day, and short of breaking something, my only hope of getting the door unlocked was the Mountie, and I couldn’t very well go knocking on his door at this hour.
I remembered seeing a ladder nailed to the front of the building, plank rungs leading up to the second floor — a primitive fire escape. My bedroom window was still cracked open, maybe I could raise it all the way from outside. Wearing all my riding gear except the helmet (at least I’d be armored if I fell!), I climbed up the side of the building, squeezed through the window, and rescued myself.
In the gloomy twilight the bike’s headlight glittered on the puddles and dripping vegetation as I threaded slowly and nervously through the soggy gravel and mud of the Stikine Valley. Higher up, the road seemed as dry as it had been on the way in, and I made my careful way out to the main road at Dease Lake. The morning was windy and cold, but I was glad to be back on pavement as I sped north once more, toward breakfast in Watson Lake, just over the border in the Yukon.
Back on the Alaska Highway, I stopped to marvel at the famed “Sign Forest,” where more than 30,000 town signs from all over the world were displayed in a vast open area, a custom apparently inspired by a single sign posted by a homesick G.I. during the construction of what had originally been called the Alcan Highway, during World War II.
Continuing westward, bursts of yellow aspen dotted the dark green forest, and above the low treeline, the higher elevations of the rounded mountains were dusted with snow. Occasional lakes gleamed in the dull light, and once I saw a bald eagle swooping over the turquoise shallows. A few motorcycles passed me in the other direction, including three BMW GSes like mine, and we exchanged big waves of recognition.
My own GS, apart from being muddy and missing a mirror, needed a new indicator bulb and another oil change, which I tried to do every 3,000 kilometres, so I decided to go without lunch and get to Whitehorse early enough in the day for that operation. By early afternoon I had covered the 858 kilometres (536 miles) and circled the wide, neat streets of downtown Whitehorse in search of the necessary facilities. I carried tools and a spare filter to do the oil change myself, but I needed a place to buy some oil and drain the old stuff. At the Canadian Tire store I found the bulb I needed, but the mechanics were off on Saturday and no one else seemed to know where I could empty my old oil. They sent me to the “Enviro-Lube” shop, who said they didn’t “do” motorcycles (even if I “did” it myself), and they sent me to the Honda dealer, which was closed. I surrendered to fate, and went in search of lodging.
The Westmark Hotel made for a sharp contrast with my previous two nights in Telegraph Creek, for the busy high-rise was filled with people on bus tours, and my room had a view across an airshaft to the blank windows of other rooms. The restaurant was also put to shame by the previous night’s meal (the fresh local salmon prepared by moi, Chef Ellwood), and my own service had been a lot better too, for this waitress was inattentive, forgetful, and unaware of her own ineptitude. In my journal-writing during dinner I toyed with the crazy idea of actually telling her the truth, “You know, you’re a lousy waitress.”
But, I noted, “Like so many other truths, pointless.”
However, the music that was playing in the restaurant caught my ear. In previous years I had always kept abreast of new music, not so much professionally but as a music lover, but in the wake of my tragedies I had left all that behind too. After being outside the pop-culture loop for over a year, I was just starting to hear some of what I had missed.
Surprisingly decent music — unfamiliar, countryish, but kind of, um, “smart.” Heartfelt too. Different artists and singers, male and female, intriguing lyrics, interesting arrangements. Most unusual and unexpected, here in Whitehorse. With everything else going on within and without, it has a surreal effect somehow.
Is all this the pop music I’ve missed in the past year? If so, I’m pleasantly surprised.
Next morning the Weather Network showed -3° [28°F] and there was frost on my saddle, so I decided to stay around for awhile, have breakfast, and call my Mom on her birthday. No one answered the phone at my parents’ house that morning, and after a couple of hours of sitting around, I was restless and anxious to get moving. As I set off on the Klondike Highway toward Dawson, passing many ravens and a couple of coyotes, the weather had not warmed
up much, but at least it was bright and sunny.
At the Braeburn Lodge, one of those “everything” places that dot the far north (café, gas station, general store, humble-looking motel rooms, road-maintenance depot, and shortwave radio station), the owner sold me some oil and gave me a bucket to drain mine into. I spread my blue plastic ground sheet on the gravel lot to lay upon, peeled off some of my overclothes, and completed a successful oil and filter change in about 20 minutes.
Reloaded and resuited, I rode off feeling the small satisfaction of having looked after the motorcycle’s needs. I crossed the Yukon River at Carmack, and now I was out of the mountains again, for the low forest stretched to the horizon in every direction, the deciduous trees in full autumn color already, at the end of August. Stopping at a roadside stand called “Penny’s Place,” I sat on a picnic bench and enjoyed an excellent burger, the best lunch of the journey so far. While discussing the weather with Penny, she told me that up there, spring and fall each lasted about a week.
Three other motorcyclists pulled in behind me on heavily-loaded Kawasaki dual-sport bikes (like my GS, designed with high clearance, long-travel suspension, and stout wheels to handle heavy baggage and bad roads). We shared some of our travel stories, and I learned that they were a father and his two sons from southern British Columbia on their way to Alaska, where they were planning to ride to the Arctic Circle on the Dalton Highway, the service road which followed the Alaska Pipeline up to Prudhoe Bay (not a “highway” at all, of course, but a gravel haul road for the oil company’s vehicles). I told them I had my eye on the Dempster Highway, the equally misnamed dirt road on the Canadian side, which also crossed the Arctic Circle on its way to Inuvik, in the Northwest Territories. As I prepared to ride away, we wished each other good riding. “Keep the shiny side up and the rubber side down.”
More snow-dusted mountains came into view as I approached Dawson, at the end of a relatively easy day’s ride on a dry, paved highway under sunny skies. It was still early in the afternoon, and I’d only covered 565 kilometres (350 miles) that day, but Dawson was the starting point for the Dempster Highway, and I needed to make some decisions, and maybe some preparations. In any case, it was pleasant having an early end to a day that wasn’t quite so “epic,” and I was glad to check into another Westmark Hotel (also filled with bus tours, probably the same group), do some laundry, and walk around the town.
Except for Front Street, the main road in, all the streets were unpaved and lined with boardwalks, otherwise the permafrost would heave the paving up every year like a wrinkled carpet. The boardwalk helped to give the place a real frontier town feel, along with a couple of genuine older buildings like the court house and the bank. Although the main part of town was a little tarted up for tourists, with “Klondike Days” saloons and such, behind the facades Dawson had the rugged, weather-beaten look of any small town in the far north. Several camper trucks were parked along the levees beside the Yukon River, among them a few VW microbuses with British Columbia and California plates, one with a “smiley-face” tire cover. Neo-hippies.
Another attraction in Dawson was the Jack London Centre, which commemorated the writer’s time in the area as a young prospector during the Klondike gold rush, in 1897. The stories and novels inspired by that part of his life, including The Call of the Wild and White Fang, had brought him his first success and fame. By chance I had recently come across a Jack London story in an anthology called The Very Richness of That Past, a collection of writing about Canada by “visitors.” (The title came from a story by another American writer, Wallace Stegner, whose writing I would also come to love after that first taste of his work.) The opening of London’s story, “In a Far Country,” had relevance to my present journey both literally and metaphorically:When a man journeys into a far country, he must be prepared to forget many of the things he has learned, and to acquire such customs as are inherent with existence in the new land; he must abandon the old ideals and the old gods, and oftentimes he must reverse the very codes by which his conduct has hitherto been shaped. To those who have the protean faculty of adaptability, the novelty of such change may even be a source of pleasure; but to those who happen to be hardened to the ruts in which they were created, the pressure of the altered environment is unbearable, and they chafe in body and in spirit under the new restrictions which they do not understand. This chafing is bound to act and react, producing diverse evils and leading to various misfortunes. It were better for the man who cannot fit himself to the new groove to return to his own country; if he delay too long, he will surely die.
The lady curator was just getting ready to close the museum for the day, but she talked with me for a few minutes about London’s life and writing, and dismissed the biography I’d read as “sensationalized.” She recommended a couple of others, and when I named the few books of his that I had read so far, she said I was in for a treat when I got to his master-works, like The Sea Wolf and Martin Eden.
Outside the museum was a replica of the small log cabin in which London was said to have waited out his long, dark winter in the bush farther up the Yukon River. The ruins had been identified by a carved inscription, “Jack London, Writer and Miner,” he had allegedly left on a board inside it, and two copies of the cabin had been assembled from the original pieces, one in Dawson, and one in London’s home town of Oakland, California.
Back in the hotel parking lot I talked to a man who had just come back from the Dempster Highway in his Jeep, and he shook his head as he told me it had been a rough journey, and he had barely made it even in his four-wheeler. Five hundred miles of dirt road each way, he said, with only one gas station in the middle, and there had been some muddy construction zones where he had seen a few other motorcyclists having a hard time, falling down and pushing each other through the muck.
That night, I finally reached my mother on the phone and wished her a happy birthday, and she sounded worried when I told her my plans. After Selena’s death I had leaned on my Mom the most, not surprisingly, and my Dad had been there for me too, giving strength and help and comfort when he could. (I would never forget that first night back in Toronto, standing in the front hall in my father’s arms and sobbing, “It’s so bad!”)
Even after Jackie and I went to London I had called my mother every day, just needing the refuge of her voice, and recently, when I had apologized for not calling so often, she had said, “That’s okay — when I don’t hear from you I know you’re all right!” She and Dad had come to London to help us through that first awful Christmas, and later visited us in Barbados, not long before Jackie’s passing. Earlier that August, when I hadn’t felt up to facing the anniversary of Selena’s death by myself, I had ridden my motorcycle across Ontario to Mom and Dad’s house to spend the night with them.
On the telephone in Dawson, partly to calm her, and partly to calm myself, I made the decision out loud that I would go for the Arctic Circle at least (just over halfway), and turn around the first time I fell down. Neither of us was much comforted by that idea, but at least I had committed myself to a plan.
At 9:30 at night the sun was still hitting the hilltop behind the town, even that late in the summer (August 30th), and at 10:15, when I was still trying to catch up with my journal-writing, I noted that it was still fairly light outside.
Still hard to keep up with this trip, journalizing-wise, even when I think I’m taking it easy. Too much happens in a day, that’s all, as Selena once observed.
In late June of 1997, toward the end of the Test For Echo tour, Selena joined Brutus and me in our “Scooter Trash” gang for a few days, sleeping on the bus, travelling by motorcycle to the shows, then getting herself all dolled up for “show time.”
At the end of a show at Greatwoods Amphitheater, near Boston, I ran straight off the stage and into the “Scooter Trash” bus. Brutus and Selena were already aboard, and our driver, Dave, set off across New England while I dried off and changed, then sat in the front lounge talking and listenin
g to music. Brutus and I raised a glass of The Macallan and Selena sipped a beer.
Soon we melted off to our bunks (Selena claimed her favorite place to sleep was in the bunk of a moving bus) and jostled through the night in the classic rest of the touring musician. Brutus had chosen a “staging area” for the next morning’s ride in a corner of Maine, and Dave drove to a rest area nearby, where we could enjoy some motionless sleep for another few hours.
At daylight, I roused the sleepy Selena, and we all crowded into the narrow lounge and struggled into our riding gear. Brutus and I backed the bikes off the trailer, Selena climbed on behind me, and we rode into the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where Brutus had arranged a rendezvous with a helicopter pilot and a videographer.
For the next six hours Selena traded her uncomfortable seat behind me on the motorcycle for an uncomfortable seat beside the helicopter pilot, while he performed all kinds of aerobatics for the videographer and Andrew, the still photographer (who didn’t much enjoy hanging out the side of the helicopter to shoot pictures of Brutus and me riding together).
After that ordeal, poor Selena climbed on the back of the motorcycle again, and we rode another six hours to the Wheatcroft Inn, in Lenox, Massachusetts. It was way, way too long of a day for her, and she was sore and tired and miserable; we all were. However, in one of her greatest moments, within three minutes my little girl had changed from her leather riding suit into a pretty green dress, given her hair a quick “up-do,” and was transformed into her elegant-lady persona. “Selena the Warrior Princess,” we called her.
