by Brian Keenan
This time it was my turn to roll my eyes, secretly admitting to myself that at this moment I was a little frightened of the unexpected myself.
‘I have been frightened a few times,’ he continued, ‘so frightened that I can still feel it at times. You know, like soldiers who still feel the pain of a sudden wound thirty or forty years after the event. Ghost bullets coming back at them.’ Then his mood lightened as if the memory had passed. ‘I would be less frightened if the Lord God Almighty came out of the forest with a flaming sword and threatened me with perdition itself! Jesus, you’ve got to be afraid out there or you won’t last five minutes.’
Whatever influence the apocalyptic imagery had on his concluding declaration, his opening statement about being very, very afraid spoke to me more. I felt it would be ignorant and indulgent to pursue the matter, so I sat back in the droning hum of the cab and let myself soak up the vista through my window.
The road in front of us stretched itself out to point zero on our horizon as if a giant ploughshare had turned up this strip of rubble and rock, then poisoned it for eternity. Everywhere along its surface were the carcasses of blown tractor tyres and the bony remains of caribou swarming with flies and being picked over by huge black ravens that looked at you as you passed without budging from their carrion supper. Their great black eyes glinted with dismissal and warning. Once we had passed them I imagined them craning their necks to watch us, their eyes blinking with amused contempt. Maybe it was the manner in which Tex had spoken to me but I believed that a cohort of ravens like ghastly black amoebas were trailing in the sky above us chorusing a dread warning. ‘I will show you something different from either your shadow in the morning striding to meet you, or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.’
As well as tyres and carrion the road was forever throwing up shards of metal and broken glass, number plates and cast-away cans of oil and Coca-Cola and other detritus that clung to the edge of the road. ‘Damn litter louts!’ exclaimed Tex as he watched me making notes. ‘They should never have opened this road to day-trippers and sightseers!’ It was the first time I had heard or seen him angry, but I could understand it. He was an initiate who knew from long experience that the Arctic demanded more respect.
The hours passed, the big diesel groaning and panting up and down impossible gradients like some giant creature giving birth. The view from my seat above the road left me breathless. I was suffocating in superlatives – my very own labour pains, trying to squeeze out the right words. But it was hopeless, or at least I was hopelessly inadequate at describing what I was seeing. Tex was aware of my fascination and smiled at my gasps of wonder and disbelief. ‘Who would want a better job, driving through pretty country like this twice a week!’ I envied Tex his understatement and familiarity. He was so completely at ease with something that I found majestic yet frightening, inspiring and beatific yet repelling. The road was dragging us into this inexplicable landscape, and with every mile we descended more parts of myself were being ripped off me and cast along with the rest of the debris behind us – for the birds to peck at!
After some time I complained to Tex about just how difficult and physically exhausting it was to try to find the words to convey what I was witnessing. Tex spoke like a holy man from the hills, which in his own way he probably was. ‘I guess writing books is a bit like driving this road,’ he observed. ‘You have to have patience and only try to do what the conditions allow you to do. It took more millions of years than you or I could count to create this wilderness so you can’t expect to write it down after a few hours. Anyway, wilderness is a feeling you get more than what you see, and looking out of this tin can of mine gives you one set of pictures but altogether a different feeling. You have to be in it to experience it. I’d rather read a book about what I thought and felt about something rather than what I saw.’
When he’d finished, I thought about how he had confessed his feelings of fear. I looked out again, comforted but still feeling defeated. There were undiscovered places out there where no human foot had trod. There was animal and bird life out there that had neither seen nor smelled humans. Out there was another world that perhaps required another language. One writer attempted to describe the country we were moving through as a ‘fine dream, unattainable as the end of a bright double rainbow’, but I discarded the image as being too clouded with the soft focus of wish fulfilment. There was nothing soft and wistful out there. Even sitting inside the protective skin of our truck cab I could feel it seeping in under the door, like an odour of rejection and dismissal, as if the land itself was whispering a warning and a command. It seemed to be saying, ‘Venture no further, stranger. Get yourself gone from here.’
But if I was experiencing difficulties trying to bring alive the world outside our snug cab, Tex had none. The road, for him, was a book of stories. Here’s a hill where a rookie driver lost control of his truck and went screaming past O’Neill with his brakes burning red-hot flames and his tyres billowing black smoke for nearly five miles. Further along the road, we passed more caribou skeletons. Tex declared that the creatures are ‘plumb dumb’ and haven’t learned any road sense in half a century. ‘One minute there’s a bunch of them way off in the bush and the next the whole lot of them will run straight towards you. It’s like a bowling alley sometimes, and it leaves a big mess and big problems if anyone is coming up close behind. The only thing you can do is keep flashing your lights and blowing your horn and hope they move away from you.’ Later he pointed out some of the spots where he laid his traps. Last year he had caught several dozen lynx and some wolverine. The hides fetched good money, although he admitted he had no need of it. He wouldn’t know what to do with himself without trapping. Besides, it took some of the monotony out of the driving and gave him something to look forward to.
I thought I might revisit the subject of fear with him and asked if he had ever been worried about bears. A dead animal might attract some of the huge grizzlys the Brooks Range was famous for. I reminded him that both the wolverine and the lynx were predators with great spiritual power; to mistreat or dishonour them in any way could bring a lot of bad luck, or worse, to the offender. His answer was not dismissive, but it was hard to argue with. According to Tex, the fact that he caught so many of these creatures showed that he hadn’t broken any rules; and as for the bears, ‘Well,’ he explained, ‘every bear out there needs something like a hundred square miles to sustain itself . . . I didn’t go anywhere near that deep into the forest. In any case, I always carry a .395 Magnum to despatch live animals in the trap. But it ain’t much to deter a bear – unless I can ram it right down the back of its throat before pulling the trigger!’ Tex had answered my question without telling me what I really wanted to know. His way of speaking wasn’t evasion, it was as if he had learned long ago to live with this world and his place in it. I turned once more to my window, and stopped attempting detailed pencil sketches of the view beyond the glass.
For the next few hours we hauled deeper into the Brooks Range. We stopped only a few times, to stretch our legs or just to sleep off fatigue. A miniature excursion into the bush was impossible. The mosquitoes here had the tenacity of piranhas and were as big as bluebottles. I gave up after a few attempts. Even Tex, who was well used to them, remained in his cab during the periodic sleep stops. I tried again to make notes, but soon chose to read instead. I had brought with me several books and was currently immersed in Joe McGinnis’s collection of essays about his travels in Alaska. I marked the part that described how natives in the villages rubbed motor oil into the noses and ears of their dogs to keep the mosquitoes from eating into their heads. I could not imagine which was worse, motor oil or mosquitoes.
Before long I was reading about his experience with some friends while hiking in the Brooks. A character called Ray Bane, their guide and wilderness expert, had been complaining bitterly about people’s lack of understanding of wilderness, or worse still their confusing of wil
derness with beauty and then trying to take possession of this beauty by building cabins in it. His argument was that when humans inhabit wilderness they destructively change the relationship of everything else in a delicately balanced ecosystem. His views were uncompromising: ‘Wilderness is to visit, not to live in. People see a lake and say, oh, what a beautiful place to build a cabin in. I say, what a beautiful place not to build a cabin.’ I could understand the reasoning behind the guide’s zealously held beliefs. But the history of human civilization is marked by mankind’s quest for beauty and his compulsive desire to possess it, to make it part of himself, and thus to reflect something about himself. Reading the book helped me sharpen my thinking. Perhaps Alaska, as the last frontier, is merely a metaphor, meaning last chance. Lose it and we lose part of ourselves.
When reflecting in the nineteenth century on the emergent America and its democratic idealism, Alexis de Tocqueville stated, ‘Democratic Nations will habitually prefer the useful to the beautiful and they will require that the beautiful be useful.’ Nearly 120 years later, in 1950, the Atomic Energy Commission scientist Edward Teller proposed to create a deep-water harbour near Point Hope, on the coast of the Chukchi Sea, with an atomic blast. The detonation would have been incalculably more powerful than those which destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it would also have allowed the scientist and his team to test the effects of atomic fallout on a remote population. Undoubtedly Cold War politics had much to do with this insane project. It was de Tocqueville’s views taken to extremes. Eventually sanity prevailed, but not before the Eskimo people, conservationists and other scientists and religious leaders with more moral and ethical backbone protested publicly.
There are still Alaskans and many other Americans, George W. Bush among them, who believe that hard work is a virtue in itself and that the world is but a blank canvas on which they are destined to write their superior legacy. Their thinking is old and tired, like an ancient circus elephant that has no memory of where it belongs nor of what manner of creature it is. They huddle in their air-conditioned offices and plan a new world order, while out there a unique life system more intricate, fragile and magnificent than the great basilicas of human civilization thrives and looks back at us with curious disdain.
I envied Ray Bane and his ability to communicate that quality of transcendence the wild world embodies in itself. Bane’s writing was close to my own feelings about the wilderness experience as being like some kind of rite of passage. When we enter into this other world it’s both an exorcism and a revelation. It exposes dread and enriches faith. When I encounter mountains like those that bind the landmass of Alaska together, I understand why primitive people believed that God was there.
Tex, beside me, could not have been aware of the nature of my reflections, or perhaps he was, for he remarked to me that even after thirty years the place never failed to amaze him, nor did he ever tire of it. Every time he considered doing some other job he was always lured back to the road. I was grateful for his words, for just before he had spoken them I was seriously beginning to question my sanity. Engaging in semi-mystical contemplations by way of a book, a sixty-foot-long haul truck and a dirt-track road into the Arctic Circle was a heady concoction indeed.
I decided to give up on the long drive across the coastal plane to Deadhorse, for it had not been recommended for its scenic beauty. I intended to sleep through most of it then catch a flight back to Fairbanks. From the Atigun Pass, the highest in Alaska at some 4,800 feet, the road descends and sweeps its way through approximately eighty miles of treeless, wind-blown oblivion. Whether I was too exhausted after the drive through the Brooks Range, or whether my mental energies had been used up trying to find words to convey the terrifying majesty of the place, I couldn’t be sure. One thing I could be sure of was that this endless emptiness now inspired no response but a depressed yawn.
However Deadhorse got its name, it well suited it. It was a hideous boneyard of a place, a huge industrial rubbish tip where the oil industry had dumped all manner of things – pipeline equipment, building materials, prefabricated homes and Nissen huts, the rusting remnants of vehicles and acre upon acre of huge spare parts and cast-off machinery. This was abandonment of incredible proportions. No-one cared as few people lived here all year round and those who did were blind to it. Though thousands of people worked here on rotating shifts, there were no church buildings, schools, movie theatres or any of the trappings of bona fide human community. You would have to leave the human part of yourself behind in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Fort Worth or Dallas to come here.
I thought again of Tex’s reference to perdition. No wonder he was unafraid of it. He had been in and out of it more times than he could count, and now he too was blind to the immense ugliness. For only a brief moment I considered that my reactions were conditioned by the majestic magic of the mountains, but I quickly erased that thought from my head.
‘Jesus, Tex, how do you keep coming to this place week after week for years?’ I asked.
‘I just don’t see it any more,’ he replied, ‘and I never stay long enough to look at it.’
I could completely understand. I have never before experienced such an instinctive need to be gone from anywhere. ‘The sooner I am out of here the better,’ I said, gaping in disgust and disbelief.
My goodbyes to Tex were brief. He had a cargo to unload, and then he had to get himself ‘a shower, a shave, supper and some sleep’, as he put it. I would have welcomed the same, but the option of an early flight was a godsend. Tex had been a great guide and a good companion. I had enjoyed riding shotgun and felt like I was deserting him when he dropped me off at the airfield.
‘Good luck, Tex. We’ll have a beer back in Fairbanks soon, I hope.’
He hardly heard, answering only with his soft smile. Then, in a cacophony of hissing explosions and deep-throated hums, he rumbled off.
Before boarding my fifteen-seater aircraft, I wrote, ‘Leaving Deadhorse, Transit Camp of the Damned. “Look on my work ye mighty and despair”.’ In the men’s washroom I scribbled on the cubicle door ‘Ozymandias was here and got the f*** out as fast as he could!’
Into the Arctic
There are different maps to describe a country. I had been poring over the geographical variety, but I was now at the edge of understanding another map for Alaska’s Northland territory, a cultural map that recognized ownership long before the purchase of the region by the American government in 1876 – the famous $7.2 million dollars, equal to two cents an acre, which was originally howled down in Congress and the Senate and is now equally howled over with scavenging proprietorship. The land I was now intending to travel into was culturally richer than their commercial measure. This was the country of the Athabascans, the original native peoples of interior Alaska and western Canada. Ranged around it were the Inuit, the Yupik and, in the far southwest, the Aleuts.
Arctic Village, where I intended to stay, was located a few hundred miles inside the Arctic Circle and was one of the traditional villages of the Gwich’in people, part of the greater Athabascan nation. I would overnight in Fairbanks, shopping for last-minute supplies, then fly to the village, which was hosting a ‘Gathering’ of all Athabascan peoples and their friends. Its purpose was to celebrate tribal and ethnic identity, and also, more pertinently, to discuss issues of human rights, the development interests of the oil industry, and the future of the Arctic refuge and the Porcupine caribou herd (named after the Porcupine River) with its annual migration of 150,000 beasts. There were also to be talks on nuclear energy, global warming and alternative energies. Between these heavyweight discussions, the programme informed me, ‘We will celebrate by singing, praying, dancing and feasting, gift giving, laughing and visiting with our families and friends.’
With my shopping completed and bags packed I headed in search of a plane and pilot to get me to the village. At the far end of Fairbanks airport, well away from the main terminal for the commercial carriers, there are several small businesses r
unning air-taxi operations. Each of them has up to half a dozen small aircraft with a maximum carrying capacity of ten passengers. Every major airport has them, and without them there would be little point in going to Alaska. The state is the biggest in the USA with the smallest ratio of people per hundreds of square miles, making it one of the least inhabited landmasses on the globe. But there are very few places you can’t get to. All you require are a map to show the pilot where you are going and where you want to be picked up, enough food to maintain you, a tent and sleeping gear, appropriate clothing and sufficient survival knowledge to make sure you make it to the predetermined pick-up spot.
It all seemed routine enough, even mundane, as the assistant at the air-taxi offices weighed my bags then asked me to get up onto the scales. Having noted these details she checked my return date and informed me quite deliberately that I must ensure I was at the pick-up point at least twenty-four hours before my plane was due; furthermore, I should not leave this point for any reason, bar life-threatening danger, until my plane touched down. The manner in which the young woman addressed these instructions to me left me just a little bit uneasy. She explained that weather reports, no matter how authoritative, can never be relied on 100 per cent. Conditions were always subject to sudden, dramatic changes. ‘The pilot will always endeavour to get to you,’ she said, ‘but there might be a few hours’ or a few days’ delay if you are really unlucky. But the thing to do is always stay put, keep your eyes on the skies and listen for the motor.’ She must have noticed the anxiety immediately apparent on my face, for she smiled and her voice softened to a reassuring tone. ‘Don’t worry, at this time of the year there are rarely any real emergency situations.’ She paused for a moment, then cheekily concluded, ‘As long as you don’t allow yourself to become bear bait.’ I tried to return her joke, remarking that I was really more worried about mosquitoes. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, her voice becoming quite serious again, ‘there’s going to be lots and lots of them where you’re going!’ I nodded knowingly. I knew all the advice about bears and how to avoid them, but mosquitoes were a problem that refused to go away, nor could they be avoided. I checked my bags again. Almost a quarter of their bulk was taken up with various repellent sprays, antiseptic creams, sun blocks, after-sun lotions, salt tablets and water purification drops. ‘At least I came prepared,’ I thought to myself, not believing a word of it.
