The Longest Road

by Philip Caputo

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  For Livia, Anastasia, Sofia, and Lindsay

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to Aaron Priest, Aaron Schlechter, and Lucy Childs for their suggestions and encouragement; to John Katzenbach, for giving me a much-needed nudge; and above all to Leslie Ware, for reasons that need no explaining.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  Part One: Southern Cross

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Two: In the Heart of the Heartland

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part Three: Ocian in View

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Part Four: Northern Lights

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Postscript

  Also by Philip Caputo

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PREFACE

  The idea hatched on Barter Island, a wind-scoured rock in the Beaufort Sea that was almost not an island; the channel separating it from the Alaskan mainland looked so narrow a center fielder on one side could have thrown to a second baseman on the other. It was as remote and barren a place as I’d ever seen, its surface unblemished by a tree, shrub, or bush. But it wasn’t lifeless. It was in fact peopled by two hundred Inupiat Eskimos and a handful of whites who lived in Kaktovic, the only settlement within 150 miles. Kaktovic had the architectural charm of a New Jersey warehouse district: a dirt airstrip, a hangar, houses like container boxes with doors and windows.

  All in all, the perfect spot to hide from a court summons, although that wasn’t why I was there that afternoon in September 1996. Along with three friends, I was on a layover after a hunting and fishing trip in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; we were waiting for a bush plane to fly us back to Deadhorse, where we’d left our pickup two weeks earlier.

  In the lounge of the Waldo Arms, the island’s one hotel—hotel is an exceedingly generous term for what appeared to be a few double-wides bolted together—we lunched on turkey soup and watched the Dolphins play the Cardinals on satellite TV.

  The thick soup was welcome after two weeks of MREs supplemented by lean, gamy caribou. A change of clothes, a shave, and a hot bath would have been still more welcome, but those luxuries would have to wait. After we landed in Deadhorse (its name is of uncertain origin), we faced an eighteen-hour drive to Fairbanks down the Dalton Highway, almost five hundred miles of potholed dirt and gravel.

  “Keep an eye out for polar bears,” cautioned Walt Audi when, bored with hanging around, I decided to go for a walk. Walt owned the Waldo Arms and Audi Air, the flying service that had brought us to Kaktovic and, we trusted, would soon take us out. Somewhere in his sixties, with a white goatee and white hair foaming out from under a beret, he looked more like a tourist’s picture of a French painter than a bush pilot. He explained that Barter islanders practiced whaling Melville style, putting to sea in small boats armed with harpoons. The dead whales were towed ashore to be butchered, which attracted polar bears. If no blubbery scraps were available, they might settle for a fresh human.

  I thanked him for the warning and went outside, passing a DEW-line radar station, now a Cold War relic. Earlier, Walt had mentioned that he’d come to Kaktovic thirty-four years ago on a contract to refiberglass the dome.

  “And I stayed,” he’d added.

  Naturally, I asked why. He thought for a moment, as if he’d never considered the question, and replied without a hint of irony, “I don’t know.”

  For a while, I strolled along the shore, a strip of dirty sand littered with huge trees washed up from God knew where. A bitter wind blew in from the Arctic Ocean, ice floes sailed by on lead-colored waters cold enough to kill you in just slightly more time than it would take a bullet. Across the channel, the Romanzoff Mountains rose a mile high, snow blanketing the slopes almost all the way down. It was a little past Labor Day and already full winter.

  In my mind I fled to another island, Key West, where I’d lived in the seventies and eighties, indulged in gin and controlled substances, caught a lot of fish, and burned through two marriages before I left to avoid incinerating my third. But instead of thinking of that, I imagined the palm trees, bougainvillea spilling over gingerbread porch rails, dazzling seas under a subtropical sun.

  Not wishing to tempt any beach-combing polar bears, I ambled back into Kaktovic and down an avenue covered in tundra grass. It led to a red, rectangular building raised on piers to keep it from melting the permafrost. An American flag fluttered from a pole slanting from the front wall; beside it, metal letters spelled HAROLD KAVEOLOOK SCHOOL.

  That’s when the idea began to form. My thinking ran something like this: The Inupiat schoolkids here pledge allegiance to the same flag as the children and grandchildren of Cuban immigrants on Key West, six thousand miles away. Native Americans and Cuban Americans on two islands as far apart as New York is from Moscow, yet in the same country. How remarkable.

  I felt then a heightened awareness of America’s vastness and diversity. And a renewed appreciation for its cohesiveness. In an itinerant life, I’d traveled through more than fifty foreign countries. A lot of them, riven by centuries-old hatreds, all too often delaminated into ghastly ethnic and sectarian wars. Lebanon in the seventies. The Balkans in the nineties. Sudan since the dawn of time. What a marvel that the huge United States, peopled by every race on Earth, remained united. What held it together?

  In a little while, I would be in Deadhorse, on Prudhoe Bay. Lying at the end of the Dalton Highway, Deadhorse is as far north as you can go by road in the United States—some 250 miles beyond the Arctic Circle.

  My thoughts flipped back to Key West and a buoy-shaped, concrete monument at the corner of South and Whitehead Streets. It marks the southernmost point in the continental United States: a mere seventy miles north of the Tropic of Cancer.

  With enough time, gas money, and nerve, I could drive from the southernmost point to the northernmost reachable by road. At one end, I would look upon the Gulf Stream and the Southern Cross, and at the other the Arctic Ocean and the Northern Lights. I would leave my country for part of the journey, but not my language or my culture. And possibly I would discover along the way what Inupiat Americans and Cuban Americans and every other kind of American had in common besides a flag.

  I’d driven cross-country more times than I could remember, but it was always east to west, west to east, as most transcontinental travelers have done since the first wagon pulled onto the Oregon Trail. Cert
ainly this drive would be the longest road trip I’d ever attempted.

  The longest road. The idea brought on a rush of restless blood, stirred my imagination … and, cicada-like, went dormant, not to be reawakened for fourteen years.

  PART ONE

  Southern Cross

  The author and his wife, Leslie, at the southernmost point in Key West, Florida.

  1.

  I don’t know why my dream fell into such a long slumber. However, after careful investigation, I can identify what woke it up.

  At the root was a condition I’ve suffered from for most of my life. I trace its origins to my childhood in the forties and fifties, when my father, a traveling machinist for the Continental Can Company, maintained and repaired the machines leased to canning factories in central and northern Wisconsin. He would leave our home in suburban Chicago in the late spring, and when school let out for the summer he returned to fetch my mother, my sister, and me to spend the next three months with him.

  After the suitcases were stowed in the trunk of the company car, always a no-frills Chevrolet, we would head north on U.S. 45 or U.S. 41, then two-lane blacktops. Some kids would have been sad to leave their friends for the summer, but that moment when we swung onto the highway never failed to fill me with a tingling anticipation. We lived in different places over the years—backwoods cabins without indoor plumbing, lakeside cottages, houses in towns with Indian names like Shawano, or French names like Fond du Lac, or plain-vanilla American names like Green Lake—but the destination never excited me as much as the getting there. I loved to feel the wind slapping me through the open windows, and to inhale the strong smells of manure and silage as the Chevy rolled past corn and pea and beet fields speckled with the straw hats of the migrant workers who brought a touch of the exotic to the midwestern countryside—Mexican braceros, tall Jamaicans. I loved watching farmhouses whiz by, barns decorated with faded advertisements for feed companies and chewing tobacco, and the landscape change from field and pasture to somber pine forests jeweled with lakes.

  Long ago, when I was a correspondent in the Middle East, I spent a couple of weeks wandering the Sinai Desert with bedouin tribesmen and an Israeli anthropologist familiar with their culture. He told me that their migrations were not always dictated by the need to find water or better grazing for their herds; sometimes they struck their tents and began to move for no discernible reason. He was forced to conclude that they were animated by an impulse, perhaps lodged in their nomadic genes, to get going, it didn’t matter where.

  I knew the feeling.

  * * *

  My father died on March 2, 2010, at age ninety-four. My wife, Leslie Ware, and I were at our house in Patagonia, a small southern Arizona town where we spend part of each winter, when my sister, Pat, phoned with the news from Scottsdale. My father had gone to live there with her and my brother-in-law after my mother’s death in 2001. His passing, my sister said, had been quick, painless, even serene, so I felt more grateful than mournful as Leslie and I drove to Scottsdale for the memorial service. It was held at a spanking-new, faux-adobe mortuary that could have been mistaken, from the outside, for an upscale desert spa. Before the service began, I spent a few minutes alone with my father in a back room. He hadn’t been dressed yet, and he lay on a steel gurney, a sheet covering him to the neck to hide his nakedness and the embalmer’s incisions. His hair had been combed, a pleasant expression put on his face, makeup applied to restore his complexion to its former ruddiness. The cosmetics were so artful and he’d been around so long that I had a hard time believing he was really, truly gone. It became easier when I laid a hand on his forehead, cold as a rock in winter.

  I spoke to him nonetheless, on the off chance that he could hear me, telling him that I would always remember him, that I would miss him, that although we’d had some sharp differences I’d never stopped loving him. Then I reminisced about the trip we’d made to Wisconsin a year after my mother’s death. We’d gone to Shawano Lake to look for the beach where I’d taken my first steps in 1942. He wanted to see it again. Our only guide was an old photograph showing my mother holding my hand as I toddled uncertainly in the sand. There in the mortuary I reminded him of how amazed we’d been to find that beach, hardly changed in sixty years. As we stood on it, he’d grown nostalgic and talked about his early days on the road, traveling from cannery to cannery with his oak toolbox, its felt-lined drawers crammed with the precision instruments of his trade. “There was nothing like it,” he’d said, wistfully. “To be in a car with everything you need, nothing more, and an open road in front of you.”

  No two people could have been less alike than my father and Jack Kerouac, yet there had been the same spirit in the words he’d spoken as in those Kerouac had written: “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”

  My father’s death plunged me into melancholy reflections on old age and the brevity of life, even one as long as his. In a less-than-celebratory mood, I marked my sixty-ninth birthday later that spring, after Leslie and I were back at our home in Connecticut, where we live most of the year. The milestone of seventy was coming up fast. In this era of longer life spans, you can kid yourself at sixty that you have plenty of time left, but seventy has the unmistakable ring of mortality. You quit cigarettes and hard partying years ago, you eat healthy servings of fruits and vegetables, you take your Lipitor faithfully, you exercise, and still you wake up at the hour of the night when it’s impossible to entertain illusions, and you can almost see him at the foot of your bed, black wings spread as if about to enfold you.

  Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me … Well, a lot of my life was behind me … and ahead?

  As if struck by an electrical charge, the sleeping cicada born on Barter Island cracked its shell, rose in flight, and began to buzz insistently in my ear. By road from the subtropics to the Arctic.

  I went to my laptop, looked up directions from Key West, Florida, to Deadhorse, Alaska. A map of North America flashed on the screen. A blue, diagonal line zigzagged across it, marking the most direct route from the southernmost to the northernmost point—5,475 miles, according to the driving directions. And that was one way, not to mention that I would have to drive from Connecticut to Key West—1,486 miles—just to get to the starting point. Then, of course, I would have to return to Connecticut from Deadhorse—4,780 miles. The total distance—11,741 miles—gave me sticker shock. Round it up to twelve thousand. Almost halfway around the world! It seemed slightly mad, but then it might do me good. To make such an epic road trip, discovering places I’d never been, rediscovering others, never knowing what I’d find beyond the next curve or hill, would be to recapture the enchantment of youth, a sense of promise and possibility.

  The cicada chirped incessantly in my head. I clicked back to the first map. Looking at it brought on a mixture of eagerness and reluctance. The buzzing grew more shrill. If you don’t go now, geezer, you never will. I listened to my inner cicada, and the uneasiness subsided. If I’d learned anything, it was that the things you do never cause as much regret as the things you don’t.

  But I didn’t decide to go purely for the adventure. Fourteen years earlier, standing in front of the Harold Kaveolook School, I’d asked, What held the nation together? What made the pluribus unum?

  Now I revised that question—would it continue to hold together?—because the America of 2010 wasn’t the America of 1996. I’d been living in it the whole time but in some ways did not recognize it.

  The worst economic calamity since the Great Depression. Foreclosures, bankruptcies, millions of homes under water, and millions of people out of work. The wages of the employed stagnant, except for CEOs, investment bankers, and the practitioners of casino capitalism on Wall Street, all of whom were making more money than ever. People were angry. In Texas, crowds at a political event had called on their governor to secede from the union. In Nevada, a candidate for a U.S. Senate seat had suggested that if conservatives like herself didn’t get
their way they might resort to armed insurrection. Strangely enough, much of this fury wasn’t directed at the financial mandarins who had brought the nation to the edge of the abyss; no, it fell on citizens like the aging engineer who, afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, was mocked and abused at a Tea Party rally in Ohio because he supported health-care reform. That was the America I didn’t recognize—spiteful and cruel.

  In geology, a rift is a long, narrow zone where stresses in the earth’s crust are causing it to rupture. In North America, one such formation is the Rio Grande Rift, which is pulling apart at the rate of two millimeters a year. You might say, with considerable license, that it’s very slowly tearing the continent in half. I couldn’t help but see it as a metaphor for the stresses that seemed to be ripping our political and social fabric. But was the country really as fractured as it appeared in the media? As bitter and venomous? It wasn’t my intention to take the pulse of the nation; the United States is too big, too complicated a mosaic of races and nationalities and walks of life to have a single pulse or even two or three. But I thought I’d ask people, when possible, the question I’d put to myself: what holds us together?

  2.

  I planned to go it alone because I’d fallen in love with the image of myself as a solitary knight-errant of the road. My sole companions would be my two English setters, twelve-year-old Sage and her much younger cousin Sky.

  Leslie was supportive. Her only objection was that I would make the trip without her. Seeking a little more support, I consulted other family members. Reached by phone in Tampa, elder son Geoff said, “Cool,” but had some qualms about my traveling alone.

  From his home in Tallahassee, younger son Marc expressed no reservations. “I think you’re fucking nuts,” he said.

  From the start, my heart was set on an Airstream, as American as the prairie schooner, its bright aluminum body and rounded lines reminiscent of early racing airplanes, which is no accident; the first Airstream to roll off the assembly line, in 1936, was called the Clipper and was modeled on a design created by Hawley Bowlus, designer of Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis.