The Longest Road

by Philip Caputo

  In the far northern reaches of the Canadian Rockies, the highway became more like the original pioneer road, narrowing as it climbed through limestone gorges. Guardrails disappeared; more gravel breaks appeared. Black bears ambled at the roadside. Two Stone sheep rams escorted ewes and kids down from an outcrop onto the road. I eased out of the truck to photograph them, and they were so innocent of people they practically brushed me.

  At Summit Pass, the highest point on the highway (4,250 feet), we stopped at a gravel turnout to take in the view. If my driving glasses had been as powerful as astronomical binoculars, I would have seen no end to the white spruce forests, reaching unbroken across wide basins, climbing over ridgelines, and so dense it looked as though you could walk across the treetops as easily as you could across a meadow. Bare, rocky peaks thrust up above the timberline, every one snow-covered.

  “Okay, this is stupid,” Leslie said, “but have you noticed how many trees there are in North America?”

  “Back in Nebraska, you wondered where they were. Here they are.”

  “Sometimes I feel like we’re in one of those old movies, driving by a fake backdrop that just keeps repeating itself.”

  An ancestor of Fred’s, a blue, twenty-year-old Toyota truck that looked like it had done a couple of tours in Afghanistan, pulled in next to us. It had Virginia plates. Two unshaven guys were inside. The driver was about thirty, the passenger fifty or so.

  “That Airstream is really cool,” the younger one said, and asked permission to take pictures of Ethel.

  “No problem. She’ll be flattered.”

  “Where you headed?”

  “Prudhoe.”

  “Hey, us, too. So where’ve you come from?”

  “Key West. Been on the road nearly ten weeks. We’re going from the southernmost point to the northernmost.”

  “Man, that is so cool.”

  Feeling pretty damn cool, I asked what was taking them to Prudhoe.

  “Just for the helluva it,” said the passenger. “Maybe we’ll see you up there.”

  Maybe in italics. When the younger man got back in the truck, it wouldn’t start. While his friend took the wheel, he climbed out to push. I gave him a hand. We rolled that aging Toyota about fifty feet before the engine caught. The two men were off again, and so were we, Whitman wishing us well:

  I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like, and whoever beholds me shall like me, I think whoever I see must be happy.

  We followed the Liard River toward the Yukon border. A moose calf browsed in the willows on a gravel bar. Farther up, we saw what we thought was its mother, grazing in the grassy verge between the road and the forest. It turned out to be a woods bison. Another knelt on all fours a few hundred yards on, and then we spotted two more. The woods bison, a subspecies of the American bison, is the largest land mammal in North America, with males weighing in at over a ton—five hundred pounds more than a typical Great Plains bull. These grand beasts once roamed the subarctic forests by the tens of thousands, but there seems to be something about buffalo that excites human blood lust. Like the plains bison, they were hunted to the edge of extinction. Only a few hundred were left in 1900. They have since made a slow, halting recovery; around three thousand can be found in the wild, all in northern British Columbia and the Yukon. To see four in just a few minutes was thrilling. But that was nothing. Half an hour later, after topping a low rise, we came upon a herd of almost a hundred blocking the road: cows, calves, and young bulls overseen by the herd bull, the Boss, standing on an embankment above the highway.

  I pulled over at a safe distance, slowly opened the door, and crouched behind it, resting Leslie’s camera on the lowered window. A small SUV drew alongside, two toddlers buckled into infant seats in the back, a young woman at the wheel. She also stopped to snap a few pictures, then started off again, a little too quickly for the Boss’s liking. He kicked up dust, charged down the embankment, and came straight at her—a Humvee equipped with horns and malicious intent. I couldn’t get over how big he was; his hump would have scraped the top of a garage door. I leaped into the truck. The SUV’s brakes squealed, and it reversed direction at about twenty miles an hour. Satisfied with the retreat, the Boss turned and plodded back up the embankment.

  “Did you see him charge me?” The woman sounded more indignant than shocked, as if the bull had committed a traffic violation.

  “Couldn’t have missed it. You went too fast. He probably thought you were a threat. Go ahead, but take it slow.”

  “No, no, uh-uh. I’ve got kids with me, and he’s pissed off.”

  I offered to ride point, figuring that the bull would have second thoughts about colliding with big Fred, all seventy-five hundred pounds of him. While Leslie kept an eye on the Boss and the SUV hugged the Airstream’s rear bumper, I drove up the road at walking speed, behind the confident grin of Fred’s steel moose bar. A tap or two on the horn parted the herd, and after we’d gone through the woman threw me a wave and sped away.

  An adventure is an undertaking involving danger, unknown risks, and hardship. I’d been on enough adventures to know that our journey didn’t meet the criteria. Beyond the chance of being blown off the road by a passing semitrailer, there were no dangers; the risks were predictable; instead of hardships, we experienced mere inconveniences.

  Like the fits Ethel pitched on the Alaska Highway’s rough patches. Vintage Airstreams have a feature, “the door-within-a-door,” which is a small, screened ventilation door set inside the main door. The hinges on ours were worn, and the door flew open when we hit a bump. Next the ceiling hatch locks popped loose and the hatch screen fell out. Without locks, the hatch could be torn off at forty or fifty miles an hour, making the trailer uninhabitable in a rainstorm. I made redneck repairs. Read: duct tape.

  In our night campsite at Watson Lake, in the Yukon Territory, the propane alarm, quiescent for weeks, blared yet again for no discernible reason. This at three in the morning in a downpour. Knowing the false alarms were caused by voltage surges, I went outside and disconnected the 110-volt line; when that failed to silence the thing, I threw the master switch inside, shutting off battery power. Quiet at last. Meanwhile, Fred’s roof rack continued to leak, and for the tenth or twelfth or fifteenth time, the dogs had to be transferred from truck to trailer.

  In Blue Highways, William Least Heat-Moon observes that travel is derived from the same Latin root as travail.

  But, as I’ve said, these were only inconveniences. For sheer misery and self-inflicted torment, no one could surpass the bicyclists of the Alaska Highway. We’d seen them every day since leaving Dawson Creek. Some rode solitary, some in groups of three or four, hunched against rain and wind in foul weather, toiling over mountain passes, their bikes laden with camping gear and bulging saddle bags. No cozy inn awaited them at the end of the day, only a pup tent pitched in a mosquito-plagued wilderness. I admired their grit and fitness, but nowhere near as much as I questioned their sanity.

  It rained off and on for the whole four hundred miles between Watson Lake and Haines Junction. Midway, we stopped in Whitehorse, capital of the Yukon, and with twenty-four thousand people the largest city on the highway. After five days of driving through paleolithic landscapes, it looked as big and sprawly as L.A. Our perishables had spoiled overnight, after I shut off the power to squelch the rebellious alarm. We needed to resupply, and Whitehorse had, yes, a Walmart and supermarkets and other conveniences. The city got its start in the late 1800s, as a mining settlement during the Klondike gold rush. There is a bronze statue downtown of a stampeder holding a shovel, a malamute at his side. Also faux-frontier saloons where dance hall girls in naughty outfits entertain tourists. Jack London, Robert Service, Dangerous Dan McGrew, all that. Like Deadwood, South Dakota, or Tombstone, Arizona, Whitehorse trades on nostalgia for a raucous, romantic past because in its present incarnation it’s as commonplace as anywhere else. And to that we said, “Thank goodness!” Thank goodness for the Walmart with its meat
market and produce shelves.

  Then it was into and over the Cassiar Mountains. Approaching Haines Junction, we were confronted by the formidable bastions of the St. Elias Range. Clouds curled over ridgelines like surf atop waves two miles high. Glaciers swept down the valleys. The icy peaks of Mount Logan, second-tallest mountain in North America (19,520 feet), and of lesser mountains speared the overcast. The Yukon Territory! I had been in it many times before, decades ago, sitting in front of a tall, wooden Philco radio in my grandparents’ bungalow in Berwyn, Illinois. The theme music, strings and wind instruments suggesting windswept spaces, lifted me out of that quotidian setting. Then the announcer’s voice bore me away, into the frozen North: “Sergeant Preston of the Northwest Mounted Police, with Yukon King! Strongest and swiftest lead dog, breaking trail in the relentless pursuit of lawbreakers in the wild days of the Yukon! Brought to you by Quaker Oats…”

  The reality matched my boyhood fantasies, even exceeded them. Really, it’s impossible to convey the scale and wildness of that country. A population density of more than one person per square mile would be regarded as congested. Every 100 or 150 miles, a gas station, a log cabin or two, a general store, and a campground or small motel—that does it for human settlement.

  We left Haines Junction in a miasma of cold rain and fog. The highway skirted Kluane Lake, five miles wide and forty long, long enough that we at first mistook it for a river. The weather broke, and in the bright sunlight the waters were as turquoise as the flats in the Florida Keys. We barely noticed. We were glutted on scenery, dazed by it. Our senses could no longer respond to it. Driving through it is like touring a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; you wander from gallery to gallery until you’re surfeited with genius and you find yourself standing in front of some grand masterpiece with the mindless stare of a retarded marmoset.

  Two roadside signs were displayed at a ramshackle gas station in a place called Burwash Landing. One read NO FUEL NEXT 108 MI.—U.S. BORDER, 128 MI., and the other, in bold, black letters, LONG LIVE THE USA. With Fred’s tank just a quarter full, I pulled in. I was also curious. In my travels abroad, I’d seldom encountered outpourings of affection for the United States. True, it’s sometimes difficult for an American to think of Canada as a foreign land, or, to turn that statement around, not to think of it as a part of the United States that perversely adopted the metric system and eccentric spellings of words like color and honor: colour, honour. Nevertheless, it truly is another country, which led me to inquire of the young attendant, “So who’s the big fan of the U.S.?”

  “The owner. It’s a marketing thing. He figures that sign will pull in Americans.”

  I said that the warning of no fuel for the next 108 miles would be effective all by itself, but I appreciated the owner’s sentiments.

  No fuel, but frost heaves all the way. In subarctic and arctic climes, the freezing and thawing of the soil causes it to lift, which in turn cracks pavement and creates dips and rises in a roadway, like ocean waves. We were practically seasick when, six days after leaving Sumas, we reached the international boundary. Beyond the port of entry, we asked another traveler to photograph us in front of a big wooden sign that said WELCOME TO ALASKA. Seventy-two days ago, we’d had our pictures taken at the Southernmost Point. From there to here, we’d come 7,257 miles. Eight hundred more, give or take, lay between us and Prudhoe Bay, and better than half that would be on the rugged Dalton Highway, or Haul Road. But for the first time I felt confident that we were going to get there.

  33.

  The scenic orgy continued on the road to Tok—pronounced toke. In the blue distance, the Wrangell Mountains blockaded a big slice of the sky, and the clouds swirling among the peaks lent them the mysterious look of some lost Shangri-la. Well, you don’t go to Alaska to look at monuments, cathedrals, or the ruins of vanished civilizations. What little there is of urban development is undistinguished at best.

  This was my fourth visit to the largest state in the union, and I was as awed as I’d been the first time. It shouldn’t be called a state, as if it were in the same league as Montana or Texas; it’s a subcontinent, half the size of India at 572,000 square miles, with fewer inhabitants (686,000) than Detroit, and more bears of all species (135,000) than there are people in Fairbanks. I’m not sure those figures communicate its immensity, so I’ll try something else. If you superimposed Alaska on the continental United States, its northernmost town, Point Barrow, would be in northern Minnesota; its southernmost, Ketchikan, in south Georgia; its eastern boundary would split Indiana down the middle, its western would touch Colorado, while the Kenai Peninsula and Aleutian chain would arc from Oklahoma into California.

  * * *

  In Tok, over the line, we tucked the trailer into a tranquil grove of firs, spruce, and birch. Among Tok’s roadside attractions was a log cabin with a lawn mower on its sod roof. In the morning, we found a trail through the woods surrounding the campground and let slip the dogs. We’d put bell collars on them because we were in grizzly country, and bear warnings were posted at the trailhead. But we saw no sign of Ursus arctos horribilis.

  Then we left for a town called Chicken. Leslie had found a reference to it in The Milepost and recalled that a trucker we’d met in Anacortes told us not to bother going there; the road was in bad shape, and Chicken had burned down in a forest fire. We ignored his travel tip, figuring that since we’d visited Two Egg, Florida, we had to see Chicken, Alaska—if for no other reason than to find out which came first.

  In the 1890s, Klondike prospectors working their way into Alaska from the Yukon set up a mining camp on a tributary of the Fortymile River. They hunted ptarmigan, a subarctic partridge, to sustain themselves, and so decided to call their settlement Ptarmigan; but because no one knew how to spell the word ptarmigan, they chose Chicken instead.

  Chicken was located sixty-seven miles up the Taylor Highway. Our informant was wrong about its condition; it turned out to be in pretty good shape. It climbed and twisted through dispiriting expanses of swamps and black spruce forests. (Not all of nature in Alaska is grand and inspiring.) Even when it looks its best, the black spruce is an ugly tree, scrawny and stunted, and these in their millions did not look their best. Charred by the fires that the trucker said had reduced Chicken to ashes, they were nearly branchless stalks resembling giant pipe cleaners. The pavement gave out; the road turned to mud and gravel and bridged a tannin-browned creek, the Mosquito Forks. Just past the bridge, signs and symbols for food-gas-lodging, identical to those on an interstate, stood at the roadside. One pointed to the right and read: DOWNTOWN CHICKEN. 2/10 MI.

  Nearly out of gas, we turned in that direction and came to what looked like a set for a B-grade western: a row of weathered log and frame storefronts with porches supported by rough-hewn posts: the Chicken Mercantile Emporium; the Chicken Liquor Store; the Chicken Creek Saloon; and the Chicken Creek Café. Near the Mercantile, beside four outhouses, called “the Chicken Poop,” was a single gas pump. We filled up, and having determined that the trucker had been wrong again we had a look around.

  Whether or not it came first, Chicken’s grip on existence is tenuous. Its population, four hundred in its gold-rush heyday, hovers at around fifty in the summer and nine or ten in the winter. It’s still a gold-mining town, mostly recreational panning in the creeks nearby, but its life depends on motorists who come up as we did, or from Dawson City in the Yukon, by way of a tricky mountain road, the Klondike Loop. This is what Chicken has, in addition to the establishments and fuel pumps already mentioned: a post office, two trailer parks, and a resort with cabins, the Chicken Gold Camp and Outpost. This is what it doesn’t have: paved streets, sewers, city water, phones, or electricity (water comes from wells; power from generators). It is a libertarian’s dream come true because it also does not have a mayor or town council, no government whatsoever. Law enforcement is provided by the state police or the fish and game department, whose officers drop in now and then.

  Our se
lf-guided walking tour completed, we retreated to the Chicken Creek Saloon, which had the only liquor license for a radius of eighty miles. That wasn’t too remarkable, as there was nothing around but trees and muskeg for a radius of eighty miles, and they don’t drink. License plates and business cards papered the walls; countless baseball caps, left by travelers, hung from the ceiling, along with shredded ladies panties. When things get to rocking in the saloon, women take off their underwear and ram them into a small salute cannon kept in the bar. The artillery piece is then charged with gunpowder, wheeled outside, and fired, blasting Victoria’s Secrets (and more conventional undergarments) all over the parking lot.

  Things were not rocking when we walked in for a drink with the ruler of the roost in downtown Chicken, Susan Wiren, proprietor of the saloon and the other three businesses. The only patron besides ourselves was Shannon, a Canadian woman of fading good looks. Although she’d started Happy Hour early, Shannon wasn’t near tipsy enough to bombard Chicken with panty shrapnel.

  Meanwhile, we talked with Wiren. She was fifty-six years old and didn’t fit the mold, if there is such a thing, of the pioneer woman. She had a degree in art, an aristocratic look—finely chiseled features, frosty blonde hair, glacial blue eyes—studied French, and pursued upper-class hobbies like tennis, sailing, and riding. If she’d been in a summer dress instead of a fleece vest, denim shorts, and hiking boots, she would have looked right at home at a garden party on the Philadelphia Main Line.

  Her journey to Chicken began not far from there, in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where she was bored to death until she met and married a sailor and adventurer named Greg in 1988.

  “He was an extremely interesting person. If I’d interviewed him properly, we probably would never have gotten married. But there was a lot of chemistry going on. We really loved each other.”