The Longest Road

by Philip Caputo

  I had to wonder if Dan himself might be in the gimme class. As a retired law enforcement officer, he must be earning a generous public-employee pension; as a veteran, he was eligible for free medical care through the VA. I didn’t get a chance to ask; Dan rolled on farther and farther from supporting the troops, hitting more Tea Party talking points. Illegal immigration, the housing bubble, bailouts … He was getting pretty worked up, and Leslie felt obliged to join the fray. Allow me to note here that she does not relish confrontation.

  “You don’t think that the big corporations might be a bit of a problem, maybe?” she asked. “The big banks, the mortgage companies, and…”

  “No!” said Dan. “I blame the government. It’s cut and dried. The banks said, These people can’t afford a house. We’re not going to lend money to people in this area. What did the government say? Oh, no. If you redline, you can’t borrow overnight funds from the Fed. What is that? Extortion.”

  Well, I thought, holding up powerhouses like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs as spotless lambs, docilely led by reckless politicians, requires a willing suspension of disbelief that some might be unwilling to make. But I didn’t argue. I wasn’t there to argue.

  The demonstrators on all four corners were folding their flags and taking down their signs. I would have liked a word with the Left Wing Socialist Celebration congregants, to find out what was the question to which war wasn’t the answer. But the Sunday ritual had come to a close.

  “Well, we finally found them,” Leslie said as we drove on. “Angry Americans. And right here in little Anacortes. Who would’ve thought?”

  * * *

  Ethel finally underwent toilet valve replacement surgery. The procedure cost only eighty-three dollars. She recovered nicely, and we were getting ready to leave for Canada when Rose, a Samish woman, asked us to the canoe gathering and the salmon feast that would follow in the evening. Best smoked salmon anywhere, she promised, and then moved on to invite other campground visitors.

  Almost all of our popular mythology about the West features the mounted tribes of the plains, deserts, and mountains. As far as I know, no one has ever written a Zane Grey novel or made a John Ford western about the Indians of the Pacific coasts. It may be that so many of their tribal names turn the tongue into rotini. Whole cities and counties have been named for the Sioux and Cheyenne; the U.S. Army named a fearsome attack helicopter for the Apache, but could there ever be a city called Nuxálk? How about Wuikinuxv County? Could the army dub an attack helicopter a Kwakwaka’wakw? The only pronounceable eponym I can think of is a species of salmon, the Chinook.

  These Indians of the western shores were skilled mariners, traveling, trading, and going to war in canoes hewn from the red cedar, small ones that served the same purpose as a family car does today and seagoing freight canoes as long as seventy feet. There are legends that some voyaged as far as the Hawaiian Islands. Their way of life, their whole way of being, was lost to European conquest. In more recent times, the multiple contagions of heart disease, diabetes, alcoholism, and drug addiction have swept through their reservations.

  The great canoe journey began when the Suquamish tribe of Washington organized a “paddle to Seattle” in 1989. Since then it’s spread to other bands, as many as ninety, up and down the coast from Oregon to northern British Columbia. Like the Sacred Hoop Run we’d seen in South Dakota, it’s an invented tradition, and its purpose is the same: to gain a better future by reconnecting to the past.

  The first canoe crossed Fidalgo Bay at 3 p.m. Long, black, and high prowed, it was paddled by eight young men and women wearing shorts and tank tops and the straw hats traditional among the coastal tribes. An older steersman sat in the stern, using his paddle as a rudder. A Canadian ensign flew from a stern post. Larry Thomas, watching alongside me, said that the crew were Saanich, from Vancouver Island. Ashore, a Samish delegation waited to welcome them. The Samish wore identical headgear. Very practical, Thomas told me. It shielded its wearer from the sun; the cone-shaped peak allowed rain to run off, and if you doffed it and turned it upside down, you had a basket in which to carry whatever needed carrying. He offered further ethnological information when I observed that the vessel, with its upturned prow and carvings of fierce animals, resembled South Sea islander canoes.

  “Yup. It’s been shown that we’re closer in our blood to Hawaiians and Polynesians than we are to inland tribes.”

  He didn’t say how this genetic link had been made, or who’d made it, but it was intriguing to imagine Hawaiian pilgrims planting a colony on the western edge of America thousands of years before Jamestown.

  At a command from the steersman, the canoeists circled offshore, banging the paddle handles on the gunwales to time their strokes, then made for the beach and stood their paddles on end while the steersman, holding a feathered staff called a talking stick, rose and made a speech, first in Salish—the principal language among the coastal Indians—and then in English. He announced where the vessel was from, and that it had come in peace, and requested permission to land.

  A Samish woman ashore, garbed in a black cloth dress embroidered in red, raised her arms and welcomed the visitors in both languages. “My dear people, I’m so happy to see you here in our territory. Please come ashore. Eat. Drink. Dance with us. I baked brownies for you.”

  That drew a cheer, and drums beat and the crew thumped the thwarts with the ends of their paddles.

  This ritual, Thomas explained, was known as “the protocol” and had its origins in the time before European contact. Arriving canoeists had to declare their peaceful intentions before they could be allowed to land. Not that there was any chance a war party would storm the beach; the ceremony was purely symbolic.

  Far out on the bay, ten or twelve more canoes were making for Fidalgo Island, the paddle blades flashing silver as they were drawn out of the water. As they came closer, we heard the rhythmic thump … thump … thump of the handles beating against the gunwales in between the strokes. Minutes later, they were all lined up side by side and made quite a sight: the upturned paddles with their diamond-shaped blades, the stern flags, the feathered talking sticks held high, the bowsprits carved into the shapes of fish and wolves, the canoeists in bright, themed T-shirts.

  Each one followed the protocol punctiliously, and their Samish hosts invited each to land, the woman in the black dress alternating with a man attired like a backyard suburbanite in sneakers and shorts with cargo pockets.

  “We are glad you came through the islands,” he called. “Too many of us were pushed off those islands, forced onto reservations inland, away from the things we knew and loved.” Thump, thump, thump went the paddles. “We are here to show the government that we’re still here, and we’re here to stay!” Louder thumps, cheers. “They can’t take our land from us anymore. They can’t take our culture, our language … The ancestors watching and listening are happy to hear the languages being spoken.” More thumps. “It warms my spirits to see so many youths here. That’s what this is all about, to bring back our culture to our youth. Welcome to our shores. We have food. We have clean toilets. We have showers.”

  And that drew the most vigorous thumps of all.

  “Makes you think, doesn’t it?” said a white guy next to me. “We took a lot from these people.”

  Yes, we had. Yet because the plagues of body and spirit continue unabated in Indian country, you have to question if the attempts at cultural revival, all these sun dances and Sacred Hoop Runs and canoe journeys and powwows, are an effective cure. Maybe, as natural immunities are built up to certain diseases, it’s a process that will take not years but generations.

  After the last canoes had landed, the feast began. We joined the crews and filed past steam tables laden with smoked salmon (it lived up to Rose’s promises) and meat loaf and king crab, with rice, potatoes, green beans, and fry bread. Singing and dancing followed. To drumbeats, men droned the songs peculiar to their tribes, some dirgelike, some with a melodious lilt remarkably
like sea chanteys. Women and girls, traditional robes thrown over their street clothes, danced barefoot. It was very moving, and a little odd, watching and listening to those ancient ceremonies while just a mile away tankers lay docked at the refinery, its tangled geometry of pipes and stacks and girders lit up like a city, and the smoke obscuring Mount Baker’s moon-plated slopes.

  * * *

  Leslie was staging another work stoppage as dog wrangler. A couple of days earlier, Sage and Sky had chased a campground rabbit and, once again, nearly had her airborne. She tied them up, thereby forcing them to watch “bunny TV,” slavering over rabbits they couldn’t reach ten yards away.

  About an hour after dawn, I walked them past the canoeists’ encampment, where bell-tents made a nylon village and the canoes were drawn up on a pebbly beach. The crews were taking part in a ritual cleansing. They stood in a line, stepping up one by one to a woman who held a wooden bowl of smoldering sage in one hand, an eagle feather in the other. Each paddler would dip his or her hands in the smoke, then symbolically bathe hands, feet, and arms in it. That done, the woman would waft the smoke over the back and back legs with the feather, completing the rite by tapping the right shoulder to indicate that the person’s spirit had been washed of any evil spirits and thoughts that might have entered the soul during the night.

  This ceremony was explained to me by two men standing nearby. Just then, a young eagle with a fish clutched in its talons flew low overhead, screaming as it was pursued by ravens. “Wow! Look at that!” one of the men said. “I’ve never seen an eagle with a fish!” I motioned at a line of fir trees in the distance and told him that a pair of eagles were nested there. “Don’t point!” he said, shocked. “You should never point at an eagle with your finger. An Indian would point like this”—he cocked his head upward—“with his nose.” He didn’t explain the reason for this prohibition.

  “I was pointing at the trees, not the eagle,” I said.

  He looked relieved. “Okay.”

  32.

  We reached the border crossing at Sumas, Washington, about half past ten that morning.

  The reader will recall that I had a .357 magnum revolver to protect me and mine from robbers, psychopaths, rapists, and dognappers, a precaution that had proven totally unnecessary. Carry permits from three law-enforcement agencies, valid in thirty-six states, were in my wallet, but I did not have a permit to pack concealed heat in Canada. Or unconcealed for that matter. The Canadians have strict gun laws. Get caught with an unauthorized, unlicensed pistol and you will go to jail. The question was, What to do with the revolver? On the drive up from Anacortes, I phoned Canadian customs and asked if I could store it with them until I returned. No, a woman answered, and referred me to the Sumas police department.

  “Well?” Leslie asked when I got off the phone. She thought my taking a gun on the trip had been overkill, so to speak, and was taking some satisfaction in my dilemma.

  “I can keep the gun at a supermarket. Bromley’s Market.”

  “You mean supermarket as in grocery store?”

  “That’s what the cops said. Bromley’s holds guns for safekeeping for U.S. citizens going through Canada.”

  In Bromley’s parking lot, I pulled the holstered weapon out from the front door map compartment, unloaded it, and, not wishing to alarm customers and checkout clerks, jammed it into my waistband and covered it with my shirt. Making my way down the cereal aisle and through a double door to the back, I found the store manager in a cramped office, up a flight of dark, creaky wooden stairs. It all had a Dashiell Hammett feel. I’m goin’ inta Canada till things cool off, Max. Keep this for me till I get back. The manager had me sign a couple of forms, collected ten dollars, put the gun and the bullets in a freezer bag, then stashed the bag in a safe. He said that if I did not retrieve it within a year, the store would dispose of it.

  And so, disarmed, we crossed the border and passed through Canadian customs without a hitch. Fred’s trip odometer read 5,360.4 miles.

  * * *

  The Alaska Highway, formerly known by its military acronym, ALCAN, for Alaska-Canada Highway, owes its existence to the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy. An overland route to link the Lower 48 with Alaska through Canada was first proposed in the late twenties by the director of the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, one Thomas MacDonald. The idea caught the fancy of an Alaskan sourdough and fur trapper named Clyde “Slim” Williams. In the winter of 1933, to demonstrate that such a road was feasible, he traveled the route by dogsled. When the spring thaws made sledding impossible, he fixed Model T wheels to his sled and mushed his team of half-wolf huskies on to the continental United States.

  For this feat of endurance and guts, Slim Williams became a minor celebrity, but his and MacDonald’s dream didn’t come close to realization. It required the support of the Canadian government, which saw no point in spending millions for a road that would go from noplace to nowhere. Then Japan’s navy bombed Pearl Harbor, its army threatened to seize the Aleutian Islands, and suddenly a highway to Alaska seemed like a good idea to both the United States and Canada.

  In February 1942, U.S. Army captain Alfred Eschbad, commanding a company in the 648th Topographic Battalion, received a telegram at his headquarters in Louisiana. It was from Brigadier General Clarence Sturdevant, deputy chief of the Army Corps of Engineers, and it said: YOU WILL TAKE ONE COMPANY OF MEN AND PROCEED TO DAWSON CREEK, BRITISH COLUMBIA, AND THENCE IN A NORTHWESTERLY DIRECTION TO FAIRBANKS, ALASKA, LOCATING A ROUTE FOR A MILITARY ROAD. YOU WILL HAVE THIRTY DAYS TO PREPARE FOR DEPARTURE.

  Eschbad and his surveyors got up there in less time than that and began to blaze a trail. They were followed by ten thousand civilian contractors and soldiers, one third from African American construction battalions. Starting on March 9, 1942, they worked seven days a week, sixteen hours a day, bulldozing through endless forests, bridging rivers, skirting swamps and muskeg bogs. They endured winter temperatures of forty below and springtime floods and summer swarms of blackflies and mosquitoes so thick they could actually drive a man insane. More crews were meanwhile proceeding southeastward from Fairbanks. The two parties met up at Kluane Lake, in the Yukon Territory, on October 25, 1942. In less than nine months, they’d built seventeen hundred miles of road through what was—and largely still is—one of the last great wildernesses on Earth.

  A two-and-a-half-day drive from the border got us to Dawson Creek and the beginning of the highway. We had passed through the Fraser River canyon, a region that called for a thesaurus of breathless adjectives. Stupendous. Spectacular. Magnificent. Majestic. Awesome. Mountains like half a dozen Gibraltars stacked one atop the other, ribboned with rock veins, rose almost sheer on both sides of the canyon, through which the swollen Fraser surged with incalculable power. Cataracts crashed in the narrows; back eddies whipped around the bends with such speed it looked as if two rivers were flowing side by side in opposite directions.

  In Dawson Creek, at a roundabout near the Alaska Hotel and Café, stood a whitewashed concrete post about ten feet high. MILE “0” ALASKA HI-WAY, it said. From the Mile Zero marker on U.S. 1 at Key West, we had put on a little over six thousand miles, and I felt a certain shrinking of the traveler’s spirit when I looked at the plaque atop the monument. FT. NELSON—300. WHITEHORSE—918. DELTA JUNCTION—1398. FAIRBANKS—1523. Were our ultimate destination on the list, it would have read: DEADHORSE—2018.

  We set off on the fabled highway. In her lap, Leslie held our copy of The Milepost, a guidebook that is the bible for north country travelers, and at nearly eight hundred pages half as long as the Bible. This publication presents a dizzying amount of information about virtually every mile of the twenty-four highways in British Columbia, the Yukon Territory, and Alaska.

  “For many people, the Alaska Highway is a great adventure. For others, it’s a long drive,” read The Milepost’s introduction to the AH.

  We found it a little bit of both. Driving it used to be nothing but an adventure; it was all gravel when it
opened to the public in 1948, and not until 1992 was the last segment of the original road laid under asphalt.

  But paving hadn’t turned it into an anodyne interstate, either.

  “Road conditions on the Alaska Highway are not unlike road conditions on many secondary roads in the Lower 48,” the guidebook went on. “It is the tremendous length of the highway, combined with its remoteness and the extremes of the Northern climate, that often result in surprises.”

  Among those surprises were the gravel breaks that appeared without warning. We’d be sailing along on a smooth surface at fifty-five or sixty miles an hour and suddenly hit a patch of dirt, anywhere from a few yards to half a mile long, pocked with chuckholes. Slamming on the brakes wasn’t an option, not with a trailer in tow. Until I could slow down to a reasonable thirty-five or so, Ethel banged and bounced and rocked. When we stopped to refuel in Fort St. John, I looked inside and found the minifridge door flung open, likewise the cabinets and drawers, and tin cans, cereal boxes, and bottles strewn all over. I also discovered that the valve to her main propane tank was frozen shut. Nothing I could do with a pipe wrench and channel locks would break it loose. The gas station mechanic gave it a try, got the same result, and directed me to a propane gas company up the street.

  “Never had this happen before,” said the service manager there, after he failed to open the valve.

  “She’s a special trailer. Pretty but temperamental.”

  “Lotta pretty things are like that,” he said. “Gotta take the tank into the shop, pull that old valve off, install a new one.”

  Fifty dollars and about two hours later, we pushed on three hundred miles to Fort Nelson, a frontier settlement sans power, sans phones, sans running water as recently as the fifties, now with all of the above plus Wi-Fi, a working town that services shale oil fields. Huge trucks, dirt-caked pickups, and earth-moving machinery were everywhere.