The Longest Road

by Philip Caputo

  Enough chemistry that when Greg later took a notion to search for gold in Alaska, Wiren followed him with their two small sons, Max and Wolfgang. They lived in Eagle, which is even more remote than Chicken, a Yukon River town at the end of the Taylor Highway. Wiren found herself looking after two kids in a wilderness cabin without electricity or plumbing, while Greg sought nuggets in the creeks and streams. He didn’t find any, but when he and Wiren learned that four shops in Chicken were in bankruptcy they took a flyer, made a lowball offer, and bought them from the bank.

  “That’s how we got here, and then Greg … Greg has a short attention span,… and left. He ran around on me, and eventually I divorced him. I looked at my life and I thought, This is actually pretty good, and I substitute taught for a while in Fairbanks, and I bought him out.”

  Now, fifteen years later, the businesses were thriving and employed seven people. The mercantile sold clothes and gifts, the café offered salmon burgers, hamburgers, and of course chicken, as well as potato salad and pies Wiren baked herself. She was doing well enough to foot the bills for younger son Max, in med school in France.

  “I never imagined I’d be doing this, but I really love my job and I really like it here. With Max in med school and with cash flow, I’ll probably have to do this for five more years before I can retire.”

  Where would she retire to? Leslie asked. Wiren answered that she’d always imagined buying a houseboat and living in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. Except her boyfriend didn’t like boats. He had a house near Las Vegas, forty minutes from the strip and a ten-minute walk from the desert. That was where Wiren spent her winters, and she loved it, too. Like Alaska, the desert was an extreme, and she was drawn to extremes.

  Shannon spun on her bar stool and jumped into the conversation. “So where am I going to visit you next?”

  “Lake Las Vegas,” Wiren said, her expression and voice going flat. She didn’t like being interrupted. “It’s right by Lake Mead, and it’s beautiful.”

  “So you gonna cook for me there?”

  “Ha! Don’t you wish.”

  “The food here is amazing!” Shannon said.

  Wiren warmed to the endorsement. “We do have awesome food. I make the salmon burgers from scratch. Know what I just learned, studying French on Rosetta Stone? There is honor in every profession. I used to fall into the trap where you have to have a college degree and all that, and we have to do something important. That is bullshit! In Rosetta Stone, the little girls pretending to be waitresses. What’s wrong with that?”

  “I have to laugh,” Shannon said. She’d plunged deeper into Happy Hour. “Because I’ve always worked two or three jobs, right? So I deliver mail during the day, and I clean at a school nights in B.C. I’ve worked in bars on weekends, right? So I bought another house on Vancouver Island, and so I’ve been … I’m like up there in age, right? And so I said, Well I don’t want to do this other second job cleaning the school, so I’m gonna work in a bar. So my friend Pat, she says to me, she goes, ‘Well, aren’t you a little old?’ So I thought, I’m gonna check this out. And you know what? I go to the bars, and I’m tellin’ you, some of the women are grandmas. We’re talkin’ good waitresses. The Dinghy Dock Bar, which is where I would really like to work, was all young people. I’m tellin’ you, and I—tip—good. And you know, the service was so shit, and if they left with a buck … You know what? They were ignorant. They weren’t fun. They weren’t … You know, I was kinda doin’ the, like, you know, the needs. Do you need…”

  I watched Wiren’s face throughout this train wreck of an oration, her brows knit at first in concentration, trying to figure out where Shannon was going, then, upon realizing that she wasn’t going anywhere, putting on a look of pained forbearance that said she didn’t suffer fools gladly but often had to suffer them regardless.

  “I think Susan’s point,” I said, hoping to rescue her as well as ourselves, “is that there’s a dignity in what a lot of people do.”

  “A dignity,” Wiren said. “I never realized that until I started studying Rosetta Stone. I’m much more proud of myself than I ever have been before with the lowly job of baking pies.”

  Wiren had begun to study French because Max spoke French like a Frenchman, and she expected to someday have French grandchildren.

  “I think it’s the self-improvement thing we go through in our fifties.”

  I said, “I’ve got to display my ignorance. You said you’ve been studying French on Rosetta Stone. I don’t know what that is.”

  Wiren twitched, taken aback. “I’m surprised you don’t know that.”

  “I missed out on the self-improvement thing.”

  It was, she informed me, an online language course. The little girls pretending to be waitresses she’d referred to were virtual figures, with whom one practiced ordering meals. Wiren now spoke French fluently enough to carry on conversations with Quebecois who pass through Chicken.

  “But I guess my real gift is merchandising and schmoozing with tourists,” she said. “But I get tired of it.”

  “Of merchandising or schmoozing?”

  “I get tired of the mundanity of humanity sometimes.”

  She was usually out of bed at three in the morning, in the kitchen before four, her hands buried in dough. Pie dough. Cookie dough. And, I was happy to hear, dough for cinnamon buns. She timed the baking so the goods were warm when the first customers came in, and sometimes that produced, she said, stupid questions.

  “They’ll say things like ‘Did you bake these here?’ The stupid, obvious questions, like ‘What do you in the winter?’”

  Her scorn for fatuous interrogators made me cautious about the questions I put to her. I decided to throw out one I hoped would meet her standards, telling her that we’d been traveling the country to find out what held it together, and what were her thoughts about that?

  She pondered for a few seconds, attempted an answer, and gave up. “That’s a difficult question,” she said finally. “I’ve had three glasses of wine, and I’m just a pie baker trying to get a kid through med school.”

  Besides the three glasses of wine, she’d had very little sleep. A bear prowling around her cabin had kept her awake most of the night, and it was a big bear.

  “I brought my seven-millimeter out of the case, and it’s sitting in the bedroom right by the door.”

  This wasn’t a new experience. She remembered one bear that she’d encountered eleven years ago. It, too, had been hanging around the cabin and had frightened the horses Wiren then kept in a corral nearby.

  “My friend Cassie was here. She had Greg’s old thirty-aught-six. So one night it was cold in April, and the kids and I and Cassie were walking up to get some wood. We were thirty, maybe forty feet from the house, and this black bear charged us. Cassie dropped him in one shot, and the bear was grunting in death, and my reaction was ‘Shoot him again!’”

  The two women then dragged the carcass to Wiren’s driveway, rolled it onto a tarp, and skinned it out. The next day, they cooked the meat in red wine, and Cassie kept the hide for a rug.

  Some humble pie baker, I thought. Alaska’s nickname, “the Last Frontier,” has more truth in it than most state nicknames, and Wiren, her merchandising skills and Internet connections aside, saw herself as part of a tradition of frontier women.

  “I actually am an icon,” she said, with a smile to show that she was joking. Well, sort of joking. A few years earlier, two friends of hers had driven up to Chicken on a motorcycle and given her a book about women in Alaska’s early days.

  “It had a terrible ending, but one thing I got out of the book was that in Alaska women have always run these roadhouses. It’s a way to make a living, and I realized right then that I was an archetype. Really. You can make a living. You don’t have to have an education. I happen to have one, but you don’t need one. Know how to bake pies and [serve] cold beer, that’s all you need.”

  Leaving her wineglass half full, she went home to rest up fo
r another day that would begin at three in the morning.

  It was now seven in the evening. We dined in the café, Leslie on the salmon burger, I on barbecued chicken, mostly to prove that there were chickens in Chicken, there having been no eggs in Two Egg, nor any Two Egg.

  34.

  On a fine morning, broiling by Alaskan standards—seventy-two degrees—we arrived in Delta Junction, end of the Alaska Highway. To the southwest, visible at a distance of one hundred and fifty miles, Mount McKinley punched into altitudes where airliners cruised, peaking at 20,320 feet: the roof of the continent, buried in everlasting snows. The Koyukon Indians called the mountain Denali (the Great One); it was renamed in 1896 in honor of President William McKinley; in 1975, the state of Alaska recognized its original name and petitioned the federal government to do likewise but, because nothing can be done in this country without political interference, a senator from Ohio—McKinley’s home state—blocked the move. Personally, I prefer Denali. The mountain is great, awesome, magisterial, qualities that do not describe President McKinley.

  We rolled into Fairbanks, named for another politician, Charles Fairbanks, Theodore Roosevelt’s vice president. A good thing for him, because nobody ever remembers a vice president.

  But for low water and an Italian immigrant and prospector, Felice Pedroni, there probably would be no Fairbanks today. In the summer of 1901, one Captain E. T. Barnette was traveling down the Chena River in a steamboat, with the intention of establishing a trading post on another river, the Tanana. The steamer ran aground, and Barnette and his party were forced to disembark. Pedroni and his partner, Tom Gilmore, prospecting in the hills nearby, spotted the steamer’s smoke and came to the aid of the stranded passengers. They convinced Barnette that he would be better off building his trading post right there, and that’s what he did. Pedroni and Gilmore were his first customers. They bought supplies and headed back into the hills. Less than a year later, Pedroni hit pay dirt near the Chena, and another gold rush was on. A thousand miners flocked to Fairbanks, and by 1908 it was the largest city in Alaska.

  Nowadays, it takes a distant second place to Anchorage. A little over thirty thousand people live inside the city limits, and a little under a hundred thousand in the metropolitan area, Fairbanks North Star Borough.1 Still, stoplights and traffic and urban noise hit us like a zap from a cattle prod. In Pioneer Park, where we picked up city and state road maps, tattooed soldiers from Fort Wainwright, in high and tight haircuts and gray army T-shirts, were tossing a football in the parking lot while a rap about a hot little mama doing a thang with her ass thundered from their car. We could feel the sound waves on our eardrums. And so, after the immense solitudes, after the deep silences of the timeless wilds on the Alaska Highway, we were yanked back into our present century.

  * * *

  Our campground on the Chena, not far downstream from where Barnette’s steamboat hit the rocks, was as crowded as a mall parking lot on a Saturday afternoon, and our site looked as narrow as a mall parking space. My improved backing-up skills were presented with a new challenge. Leslie got out of the truck to direct me. As I turned the wheel and eased into reverse, she yelled, “No! You’re going to hit the tree!”

  It was past ten in the evening, broad daylight that far north, but I saw no tree in the sideview mirror.

  “The tree on the right,” she said.

  “So more left?” I called out the window.

  “Right, I mean, yes, more left.”

  I turned the wheel to the right, which, theoretically, was supposed to make the trailer go left.

  “No! No! Now you’re going to hit the picnic table!”

  “I don’t see the table! Please. Stop pointing out all these terrain features and just tell me right, left, or straight.”

  “Let me try it. I can’t do any worse.”

  We were both tired and hadn’t eaten a thing since breakfast. At this point, a neighbor took pity on us. He was an older gent from Oklahoma, and he used to haul stock trailers for a living. He stepped up to me and said in the quiet voice of command: “You have to start over. Now pull out, turn hard right till you’ve got your truck and trailer in a straight line. Then do exactly what I tell you to do.”

  I followed instructions. With Fred and Ethel lined up, he directed me to go in reverse, swing the trailer slightly to the right, then slightly left, then to pull a little forward.

  “Okay,” said Oklahoma. “Now straight back, slow. If she starts to jackknife, don’t turn the wheel too much, a little at a time is all it takes.”

  And Ethel slipped in, neat as could be. I thanked Oklahoma and gave Leslie a triumphant grin. “See? No trees, no picnic tables. Just right, left, straight.”

  “Next time, let me try it,” she said. “You depend too much on the kindness of strangers.”

  She made cheese sandwiches, we broke out the camp chairs, the scotch and vodka, and under the almost-midnight sun celebrated our arrival in Fairbanks. Why quarrel about backing up a trailer? About anything? We’d made it this far without running into nasty marital weather. Nothing worse than a couple of brief squalls. We were still road buddies, still comfortable in our own company.

  * * *

  We spent the next two days restocking the cupboards and preparing for the final push to the Arctic Ocean.

  A duffel bag stuffed with waders, hip boots, and fishing tackle was hauled off the rooftop carrier and stowed into the truck bed with the dogs’ stuff, a second spare tire for the truck, two spare trailer tires, and a tool bag containing jacks, lug wrenches, emergency flares, and extra lug nuts. Add rain gear, insect repellent, and headnets—the mosquitoes and blackflies in Arctic Alaska are not merely troublesome; they’re savage and as numberless as the stars.

  At the Bureau of Land Management office, a ranger handed us two pamphlets, one titled Driving the Dalton Highway, the other Bear Facts: Essentials for Traveling in Bear Country (the brown bear on the cover was slightly smaller than a dump truck).

  “The highway is narrow with soft shoulders that drop off steeply on either side,” read the first publication. “Hills can be long and in excess of 12% grade … You may encounter slick mud, clouds of dust, or snow and ice—even in summer. Flash floods and uncontrolled wildfires may create extreme hazards.”

  “SERVICES ARE LIMITED,” it warned. “Gas is available at Yukon Crossing (mile 56) in summer, Coldfoot (mile 175), and Deadhorse (mile 414) year-round. There are no medical facilities, grocery stores or banks … There is no cell phone coverage outside of Fairbanks and Deadhorse.”

  A sixteen-point checklist followed: “PREPARE FOR THE LONG HAUL … Inspect all tires and have them properly inflated … Empty your RV holding tank and fill water tank … BRING FOR YOURSELF … First aid kit and necessary medications … Camping gear, including sleeping bag.”

  Cheechako is Alaskan slang for a tenderfoot, and a cheechako is anyone who hasn’t wintered over. In that sense, we were cheechakos, but we weren’t when it came to bears. Leslie had joined me, my son Marc, and two other people for part of my first journey to Alaska in 1995. We had close encounters with fourteen brown bears, only one of which was mildly threatening. Leslie was cooking pancakes and tossing rejects aside—bad idea—when a young male ambled into our camp, wanting a seat at the table. We drove him off by banging pots and pans.

  Having survived that encounter, we were interested in the bear pamphlet’s counsel. Most black bear attacks are predatory, so fight back, it advised; most brown bear attacks are defensive—the animal is protecting a kill or its cubs, so roll onto your stomach, cover the back of your neck with your hands, and play dead. Typically, the bear will stop once it sees you are not a threat. So far, so good. Then came this: “If, however, the brown bear begins to feed on you, fight back vigorously.”

  Leslie chortled. “Oh, sure. He bites off your left arm, so whack him with a right. But what if he’s noshing on your liver?”

  A sporting goods store downtown supplied us with bear spray, ready-to-eat meals,
fishing flies, and licenses. Leslie bought a blue plastic gold pan that could double as a salad bowl if her search for ore didn’t pan out.

  * * *

  Nick Stepovich was putting on a show for his customers in Soapy Smith’s Pioneer Restaurant when we walked in for a lunch. A waiter guided us to a table on a platform in the rear, and from that vantage point we watched Big Nick entertain the crowd. An Alaskan’s Alaskan of Alaskan dimensions—figure six-four and 250 pounds—he was dressed for Florida in a T-shirt, plaid Bermuda shorts, and sandals as he roamed among the tables. In a voice to match his size, he told tales of the gold rush and delivered oral histories of the state and his family’s exploits in it, while flinging his long arms at the walls, nearly every square inch plastered with photographs ancient and recent, wanted posters, gold pans, pickaxes, and framed covers of Time and Life magazines commemorating Alaska’s admission to statehood in 1959.

  We all learned about Soapy Smith himself, the frontier con man and gangster who made a fortune bilking miners during the Klondike gold rush and died in a shoot-out in Juneau. We learned about Nick’s grandfather “Wise Mike” Stepovich, an immigrant from Montenegro who came to California in the 1890s and drove a team of twelve oxen up the West Coast to Alaska and struck gold on Fish Creek, north of Fairbanks.

  “And the oxen all lived!” Nick boomed.

  And so did the five children born to Wise Mike and Olga, a Montenegrin woman he wed in an arranged marriage. She was thirty years his junior. One of those children, also named Mike—Nick’s father—grew up to become a fine minor league baseball player. He was picked up by the Boston Red Sox and would have had a career in the majors if his mother hadn’t intervened.

  “My grandmother told him, ‘You’re not going to be some goofy ball player. You’re going to Notre Dame law school.’”

  And young Mike went off to Notre Dame, returned to Alaska, and forged a career in politics. Along the way, he found time to get married and father thirteen children.

  “He was our territorial governor!” bellowed Nick over the buzz of conversations, the clatter of plates, waiters taking orders. “He lobbied all over the country to get us admitted to statehood.” He strode to a photograph of his father holding a newspaper from 1959. WE’RE IN! the headline shouted. “And that’s my dad right there with President Eisenhower!” Pointing at another photo.