Four Quarters of Light

by Brian Keenan

  ‘What’s a bobtail?’ I asked.

  Tex smiled benignly at my ignorance. ‘A bobtail is this truck cab without its trailer. Most other people in the trucking business might call them simply semis.’

  I tried to make up for my tenderfoot innocence by cracking a joke: ‘I suppose you have to be semi-crazy to do this job!’ I thought the subtlety of the remark might have been lost on him and was about to say something banal to cover up the silence between us when I noticed a slow smile spreading across Tex’s face as he negotiated the traffic out of the city.

  ‘Semi-crazy! You’re downright committable!’

  By 6.30 there was little traffic in Fairbanks, and soon we were clear of the city. But just beyond the small community of Fox, Tex pulled in to fill his plastic water container from a spring. He had been doing it every day since he’d started trapping in the hills. After another half an hour we pulled in at a petrol station, which would be our last before reaching Coldfoot, a truck stop just under halfway to Deadhorse.

  ‘How much will this beast take?’ I queried.

  ‘A hundred and fifty gallons should take you to Coldfoot, then we’ll top up again for the rest of the trip.’

  Tex was obviously a familiar face, and soon he and his friends were huddled together, exchanging conversation. They were momentarily curious about the stranger in his cab, and once he’d explained who I was they were keen to say hello. One of them joked, ‘Best be careful with this man. He’s not called Killer O’Neill for nothing you know, and it’s not just because of the wildcats he snares up in the Brooks Range.’ Tex climbed into the cab and made some remark back, which was totally lost on me but had the group of men smiling and laughing.

  ‘I told the guys what an Irish writer had said about being semi-crazy to do this job,’ Tex said. ‘They all said you were very perceptive and wanted a copy of your book so’s they could read just how crazy I was!’

  The inside of Tex’s cab was as comfortable as it was confined. The driver’s seat was state-of-the-art design in armchair comfort, and the double passenger seat was more like a living-room couch. For trucks that rarely carried passengers, this was luxury. But Tex was quick to let me know that the combined passenger and driver seat doubled up as a kind of day-bed. The windows all had roller blinds and blackout curtains – a must during the summer months with round-the-clock daylight.

  Driving the Dalton was as demanding psychologically as it was physically. The constant attention to road and weather conditions and the ever-changing calculations about breaking speeds up and down the steepest inclines in the world balanced against weight distribution, which would change as materials were unloaded en route, created a fatigue that could creep up on the inexperienced driver suddenly and with devastating results. As Tex put it, ‘Twenty minutes’ shut-eye every two or three hours could save you and your cargo or someone else out there travelling in the other direction.’ In my own mind I could see why having a stranger ‘riding shotgun’ was not encouraged. After all, I was sitting on his bed, in his private quarters. I recalled him explaining how the road had moods and you had to become familiar with them and fit in accordingly. What relationship he had established with the road, his responses to it and the demands of his body all had to be revised to accommodate me. For a moment I thought Tex would be more comfortable if I was back in the trailer, just another piece of cargo.

  There was something reassuring about the man and his machine. It smelled of old leather, strong black coffee and Old Spice cologne. Behind us were the sleeping quarters with an immaculately made-up bed, cooking facilities including a microwave oven and coffee percolator, a small colour TV and sophisticated mini hi-fi equipment. A double bookshelf above the bedhead complete with reading lamp disclosed an assortment of books and magazines. The former were American masterpieces by authors ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain to Saul Bellow and John Updike; the latter were principally about hunting and fishing.

  ‘I thought you might have been a Hemingway man,’ I suggested.

  ‘Yeah, I got some of that guy as well. Pull out that small compartment under the bed,’ he instructed.

  I did as I was told and discovered another neatly kept library of books on tape. Histories, mysteries and westerns were there, as well as heavyweight stuff such as The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, presidential biographies and some classics of English literature. Some years ago he had joined an audio books club and had become an enthusiastic customer.

  When Tex was a younger man he used to pick up songbooks with sheet music and lyrics, attempt to learn them, then belt them out as he hurtled or crawled along the highway. I asked if he was a good singer, to which he replied, ‘Hell no, can’t sing a note to save myself, but there ain’t an audience out here to be bothered one way or another. So I just tell myself move over there Pavarotti, Elvis or whoever it is and let rip.’ He paused for a moment and I was about to laugh when he explained that not only was it good for the soul but it eased accumulating stress levels when you were fighting the elements to get to a safe resting place. Though their modes of transport were a million miles apart, Dan the dog musher and Tex the long-haul driver had a lot in common.

  So engaged was I in the cockpit of our cab that I had missed the straight run up to the Elliot highway. We were now on the haul road proper and making our first uphill climb. Within seconds the speed of the huge tractor-trailer plunged and the engine began grumbling under the load. Flicking a switch on the console to the right of him, Tex locked the drive axles and differentials to increase traction. His progression down through eighteen forward gears syncopated the droning rhythm. It was like a move up the music scale by a colicky bass soloist. Do, ray, me, fa, so, la, ti, do – each note followed by hesitation then acceleration as the rig rumbled upwards. Whatever throaty crescendo the big five-hundred-horsepower engine was giving off, Tex’s finger moved through the gearbox with all the grace of a concert pianist until we crawled over the crest of the hill, at which point he immediately released the locked axles and the undercarriage began hissing and exploding like small-arms fire. As the truck gathered speed on our descent, Tex shifted the gears up through their sequence with the same dexterity as before. This time the engine hummed like a svelte baritone.

  Sitting some ten feet off the road you get a false impression of distance in front of you. The endless monotony of the road soon corrects your perspective. From my crow’s-nest position I watched giant cow parsley, wild rhubarb and goat’s beard waving their white heads. They were far below me, but had I been standing beside them they would have been up to my shoulder. The tree line was becoming sparse, and those that remained were stunted, with girths not much bigger than garden bamboos. The further north we motored the more the land in front of us turned to shrub and grassland, patches of bent grass, sweet grass and hair grass mixed with sedges and red fescues. The panorama spreading out around us was like a watercolour wash of silvery green impregnated with a purply-red cast. And when we rumbled across the Yukon River Bridge, 2,300 feet of wooden planking, I really felt we had somehow crossed the edge and were bulldozing into the beyond.

  ‘What happens if you break down or get snowed up somewhere?’ I asked as the weight of the emptiness pressed in on our truck.

  Tex explained that no-one is ever stranded for very long. ‘It may be a bitch of a road at the best of times but twenty or thirty trucks use it every day. With your CB, a back-up generator and enough food for at least three days you can survive easily.’

  ‘But,’ I insisted, ‘what if all that fails?’

  ‘Well, that’s where patience comes in. You’ve got to have patience, and one of those.’ Tex jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the bed. ‘See that sleeping bag? I don’t go anywhere in this truck without it. It cost me near on a thousand dollars, and worth every cent. It’ll keep the cold away from you long enough for someone to come find you. And this makes sure,’ he added, pointing at a piece of equipment on the truck’s elaborate dashboard, which looked more l
ike the flightdeck of an aircraft. ‘Most trucks are fitted with a recorder box that stores data about every stop, start, gear shift, brake and acceleration, like the black box in an aircraft. It’s also tuned to a global positioning satellite that allows a computer in Fairbanks to display the exact location of any truck at any given time.’

  ‘A bit like Big Brother,’ I suggested.

  ‘A bit,’ he replied. ‘But only a bit. There are still lots of blank spaces out there, and when real mean weather sets in it snows up the airwaves so bad it’s like looking for a tiny needle in the proverbial haystack – only the haystack is half the size of the state of Texas!’

  I looked out of the window, not wanting to admit to myself that I was becoming bored with the incomprehensible and unending vacuousness of the landscape. Perhaps that was why every fifty miles or so there were turn-offs with display maps and information about the particular area we were travelling through. When we crossed the line that marked the Arctic Circle there was a huge display unit with a brightly coloured circumpolar map illustrating the imaginary demarcation line and loaded with information about extremes of seasonal change and how they affect the flora and fauna. It was interesting, but I thought that Tex, like Hemingway’s ‘Old Man’, was a more interesting, living testimony to the experience of this blasted wilderness.

  The road line towards Coldfoot crossed several rivers and streams and bypassed small lakes. Tex informed me that if his load was light and he was making good time he stopped to fish here. ‘Best grayling fishing in Alaska,’ he commented. He always carried a big ice box to keep his catch fresh until he got home, although on more occasions than he could count he shared his fish with other truckers at Coldfoot. Being an old hand on the road he often had the fish cooked for him at the truckers’ restaurant, but only if he had enough left to sell on to hungry drivers.

  He spoke in a matter-of-fact way about his experience over thirty years. That time had given him a mastery of his gigantic truck that allowed him to work through all the technical nuances as if they were simply second nature to him. Like some ancient sage he could feel the density or danger of the shoulder’s soft edge through the throttle and the response of the steering wheel. He could navigate ground blizzards without anxiety and ‘feather’ through his triple braking system as easy as sliding a full wine glass across a polished table – no mean feat when you have to brake down a twelve-in-one ice-encrusted incline while maintaining enough speed and forward thrust to pull you out of the dip and up the next hill. But such acquired skill is never enough in itself. Though his truck was modified for extreme conditions – diesel heated and circulated in the tank, alcohol in the pressurized air brakes, special filters and equally specialized heavy-duty tyres the cost of which would put a family saloon on the road – he still carried a rigorously maintained spares box of tools, hoses, fuel lines and filters. ‘There ain’t no repair shop out here. Once you hit the haul road, you’re on your own!’ It could take another nine hours to reach Coldfoot at this time of the year, and in the winter you could possibly double that. Understanding this kind of time schedule, I began to realize why preparation and patience were essential to travel in the Arctic wilderness.

  I questioned Tex about how he dealt with the monotony I was already experiencing. Tex seemed startled by the request, as if he had not really thought about it before. Sometimes he counted the number of white winter hares that shot across his headlamp track, he said, comparing it with the number he counted on the return journey. On one outbound trip he stopped counting after 570. Alternatively he listened to a selection of his twelve-hour book tapes, wryly commenting that you could acquire a doctorate from the gravel under his wheels. But best of all he liked to sit and check his trap lines with the powerful spotlights mounted on his cab. However, he reminded me that whatever else he looked out at, he had always to be mindful of the condition of the road in front of him. Sometimes the surface was streaked with shiny stripes where inexperienced drivers had ridden too hard on the brakes, especially on steep descents. These froze over in an instant and created ultra slick patches that were a curse for other drivers. To emphasize this he pointed out several almost perfectly rectangular gaps in the tree and bush cover that clearly denoted where a previous rig had left the road. It only takes a momentary lack of attention or slight miscalculation to ‘spill your coffee’ – the trucker term when your rig runs off the road.

  I was beginning to feel incredibly tired and put it down to slowmotion fatigue and the now comforting growl of the engine, I excused myself, saying I needed some shut-eye. Tex was unbothered. ‘Sure,’ he said. I leaned my head back and with my eyes already closed murmured to Tex to be careful not to ‘spill the coffee’. He drawled laconically, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be the first to feel the splash.’ I fell asleep, thinking about how the landscape wearies you by its sheer volume. You keep making unconscious calculations to attempt to put dimensions on it, but you can’t. It’s that old Sisyphean task that saps you into sleep.

  Coldfoot lies about 180 miles from Fairbanks, but in a sixtythousand-pound truck and trailer travelling on a road whose surface is little more than compacted rock and full of more holes than a chef’s colander, it seems longer. Moreover, with gradients that make you believe you’ll either never make it to the top or that the engine’s going to explode before you reach the bottom, you begin to understand why it took us some seven hours to reach this curiously named truck stop. Originally named Slate Creek, it inherited its pseudonym in 1898 after a group of miners got ‘cold feet’ at the idea of having to spend winter in the place. They left and headed south, but the name stuck.

  There wasn’t much to the place – a visitors’ centre dispensing information for real hardy outback types, a services centre selling petrol, tyres, oil and spares, a repair shop, a launderette with showers and a saloon cum restaurant built by the truckers themselves with the lumber they hauled, sometimes at their own expense. It proudly boasted the legend ‘the furthest north saloon in North America, open 24 hrs’. A meal here was expensive in surroundings that can only be described as ‘basic with a table cloth’; anything else would be a travesty. As the hotel in Talkeetna, the walls were lined with framed photos of overturned trucks and pictures of drivers who had lost their lives, but not many. ‘It’s usually the rookies that don’t make it, and they haven’t been driving the road long enough for anyone to get to know them real well,’ Tex explained. ‘But the coffee is good and the pie is the best you’ll get anywhere.’ There obviously wasn’t much point in dwelling on the dead, then. He was right about the food and drink, though, and the pie serving was appropriately large for men who drove gigantic vehicles.

  Coldfoot didn’t really have to provide much to make itself welcoming. The atmosphere everywhere in the tiny settlement was one of easy camaraderie, full of sly innuendo and banter. I expected it to be boisterous and noisy, full of truckers letting off steam and boozing too much, but that wasn’t the case. The atmosphere was more akin to a church social, and when the drivers weren’t bantering, conversations tended to be quiet and thoughtful. Tex unloaded some mail and supplies he had to deliver and went off to get some sleep in his cab before the long haul north. I remained behind to catch up on some reading and note-taking. Tex nodded, but suggested that if I changed my mind I could ‘slide over onto the shotgun seat until we were ready to roll’. I didn’t take him up on the offer and over the next few hours I scanned my map and read up on the forward journey.

  Tex seemed hardly to have gone when I heard his southern accent softly declaring that it was time to ‘get the big girl back on the road and earn us a few more dollars’. As we drove out of Coldfoot I thought that the truck stop offered little to encourage you to remain. I reckoned I would have had cold feet too at the thought of having to remain there all winter in freezing temperatures. But to Tex, the ‘fall’ along this stretch of the road from Coldfoot up into the Brooks Range was incomparable to anywhere on earth. ‘The rivers are as good as McKay’s apple and blueber
ry pie for canoeing and fishing,’ he said. ‘There are more species of bird life than there are leaves on the trees, and if you like to hunt there’s more bear, moose, caribou, ducks and geese than you could fill the trailer with.’

  ‘What about in winter time?’ I asked.

  Tex rolled his eyes as if the question didn’t really need answering. ‘Most creatures out there find it hard to survive winter out on the Brooks. Most of them don’t even attempt to. They hibernate, migrate or move as far south as they can get. For human beings to consider spending the winter out there they need to do two things before anything else: one, make sure they have arranged for someone to come and rescue them, because no-one else will; and two, post your suicide note before you leave!’ Tex’s tone of voice, soft but deliberate and unhurried, struck me. He wasn’t being smart or even trying to make an impression. Instantly I thought of Chris McCandless and his last words, desperately scribbled before he died.

  Tex had spent his early years hunting and trapping in the wilderness a few hundred miles from here and had been driving through this particularly impressive stretch of remote landscape for thirty years, so I was a little embarrassed by my next question. I stared straight out of the window and asked, ‘Are you afraid of it out there?’

  The answer was an excruciatingly long time coming, and I could hardly bear the silence. I turned around to crack a joke and relieve the atmosphere, but something stopped me. I felt that some throwaway remark would have been offensive, no matter how unintentional. Tex was unmoved, and I was sure he was not simply contemplating the question and framing a reply; I was convinced that he was scanning his memory and locating specific experiences for an answer rather than reasoning one out. Finally, he spoke.

  ‘It’s very, very frightening out here. Too many things are waiting to happen. You can’t really prepare for the unexpected. If you could, nothing would really be unexpected. The unexpected wouldn’t exist. You’re a writer, you should know that!’