Nick turned to some of the objects in the place. “Look at that!” He gestured at a length of twisted wood five feet long. “Anybody know what that is?” “A big stick,” a customer answered. “No! It’s Paul Bunyan’s toothpick. A diamond willow, actually. Can’t get it anywhere else. You’ll walk a hundred miles through the woods and not find one.” He waltzed back to the center of the room and towered over a table. “Sarah Palin sat right there!” Oohs and ahhs from the customers, mingled with a smattering of derisive hoots. “But you know what they say, Never mix politics with silverware. So let’s talk about religion!” Laughter. Then Nick wound up. “What counts is, you leave here with a little bit of Alaska in you. You’ve been a local all day today. If you can’t come back, spend more! Thank you, very much.” Applause.
There are only 680,000 people in Alaska, and most come from somewhere else and are as shallow-rooted as tundra shrubs—Inupiats, Inuits, and Athabascan-speaking Indians excepted. Third-generation Nick was the equivalent of a Mayflower descendant. I wasn’t likely to meet a more authentic native, so I sat down with him after his performance. A big bundle of nervous energy, he didn’t do much sitting but constantly hopped out of his chair to run into the kitchen or to the register or to give orders to his wait staff.
Restaurateur Nick had mixed politics with silverware when he served as a Republican state representative from 2002 to 2004.
“The funny thing is half the guys on the legislature went to jail,” he said. “That’s why I tell people serving in the legislature is no big deal.”
He didn’t say what had put his fellow representatives behind bars. He might have been referring to the “Corrupt Bastards Club,” a band of Alaskan senators and congressmen who mixed politics with oil by taking bribes from oil company executives, who also went to prison.
On the last frontier, oil and other natural resources are politics. Big Money and Big Government are joined at the hip. The state government runs on its share of revenues from companies like British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell, and pays annual dividends to Alaskan citizens simply because they live there. A ceremony more revered than the Fourth of July occurs each year, when the governor stands before TV cameras to open a gold-colored envelope and reveal the magic number. It can be anywhere between eleven hundred and thirteen hundred dollars for each resident, which doesn’t go far in a state where a gallon of gas costs seven bucks, but is, nevertheless, as close as anyone can come to picking money off a money tree.
To Nick, grandson of a Klondike stampeder, this corporate-subsidized welfare state is a form of socialism that’s sapping Alaskans’ frontier spirit of individualism and self-determination.
“We used to say, ‘Come to Alaska. America’s favorite colony,’” he said. “We’re the freezer for the rest of the country. Put some away, take it out when you need it, and it’s as good as the day when you got it. Our oil, our fisheries, our minerals. Our state constitution calls for the highest possible yield with any resource. Well, is the highest yield what you can sell to a multinational or a conglomerate? Or is it to get the people of Alaska involved where they can double or triple that through the economy and the capital stays here?
“We don’t have libraries and movie stars and beaches and hot weather and opera houses. We have resources. I don’t think everyday individual Alaskans have made out on resources. Look at Fairbanks. We should be looking like the finest neighborhoods in Philadelphia with the wealth that’s come out of here. Eight hundred billion dollars have come off the North Slope, but we’ve never had a J. R. Ewing, a billionaire off oil who lived here.”
Nowhere were Big Government and Big Business partnered as they were in the biggest state. The federal government, he said, was “a security agency for the oil companies.”
But Nick wasn’t going to bite the petroleum hand that fed his state. Right out of high school in 1975, he’d gone to the North Slope as a welder’s helper on the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. He made enough money—forty-five thousand dollars—to pay his way through college in Seattle and later in Oregon.
“And I paid my tuition in cash.” He laughed. “They didn’t know what to make of that.”
Nick fidgeted—even when seated, he was in motion—and his glance flicked to two customers who’d just entered. “You can sit over there,” he said, motioning at an empty table. Then, turning to me: “I’m the host, too. I do a little bit of everything.”
I figured that his brief tenure in the state legislature qualified him as a political figure; and having asked one—Florida Speaker of the House Dean Cannon—my Big Question, I presented it to Nick Stepovich of Alaska.
“I think what holds it together is that there’s enough room for each person to live their life and their dreams, according to the land, not according to man-made things, our government and all that. You want to come up here and gold-mine or build stuff, there’s room for that. An Italian, a Serb, a Russian, a Jewish person, anybody can come up here and make their way. That’s the way this country was built. But I think we’ve lost a lot of that by uniform requirements, uniform regulations, that’s where we have trouble. But give a man his acreage, put land in a man’s hands, doesn’t matter who he is, and he can make it.”
If some of this was familiar—the Gulliver of American enterprise pinned down by the Lilliputians’ regulations—some of it was not. What I found interesting was Nick’s mention of land, of room to realize your dreams. In the rest of the country, the idea that there was a connection between room—not metaphorical room but real, physical space—and the opportunity to build a better life had vanished more than a hundred years earlier. Nick’s language was language only an Alaskan would use; it was the language of the frontier.
But he’d had enough of mixing politics with silverware. He bounded out of his chair to snatch an album of family photographs: his grandmother Olga on the day she arrived in Alaska, wrapped in furs on a dogsled in what looked like ten feet of snow; his father throwing out the first pitch of the season for the Midnight Sun League, which, Nick added, had produced a roster of great major leaguers from Tom Seaver to Darryl Strawberry to Barry Bonds.
Had he played baseball? “No. Basketball,” he said, and continued his boosterism. “The lakes are spring and glacier fed. You can see fish from the deck of your cabin. And we’ve got great skiing. It’s like Peter Pan. The men never grow old.”
I forgot to ask what happened to the women.
35.
In The Oregon Trail, Parkman writes that wagon-train emigrants described departure from the frontier at Fort Leavenworth as “jumping off.” There is a little bit of that feel when you leave Fairbanks for the Dalton Highway. Milepost Zero is where the pavement ends, eighty-four miles north of the city.
Just before reaching that point, we pulled off at the Colorado Creek trailhead to give Sage and Sky a run. They’d been cooped up in Fairbanks, and English setters get a little crazy if they don’t cover, oh, ten or fifteen miles a day.
We set off, ignoring an advisory that it was a winter trail unsuitable for summer travel due to boggy conditions. It was easy going for about half a mile on hard ground. Beyond that, the terrain turned into stinking muck cobbled with tundra tussocks. Walking on them was like walking on bowling balls laid atop a water bed. Four legs better than two, the dogs made out better than we. In a moment, they fell into stalking mode. Bellies low to the ground, necks extended, they crept a few yards, paused, crept a little farther. As always, I was mesmerized by their transformation from pets into predators. I could see the wolf in their movements, in the total concentration in their eyes. A flock of sandhill cranes, scouring the marshes for frogs and insects, had captured their attention. Sensing danger, the cranes scuttled away, uttering their prehistoric, rattling cry, and flew off, slate-colored wings spanning six feet.
Sage bolted after them and once again got herself into trouble. She leaped into a mire, burying herself up to her chest. She tried to paddle her way out, but she might as well have tried to
swim in a tar pit. My mind flashed back to the ducks in that Texas river, and to other fixes she’d gotten into in the past, like the time when she’d jumped into the Delaware River in Pennsylvania and was nearly swept away. Or when she’d ranged too far in the Arizona mountains and got lost for two hours. Hopping from tussock to tussock, I waded into the bog, then reached out, snatched her collar, and hauled her to firm footing. She was now a two-toned dog, white on top, coated in jet-black goo below.
“Bad dog! When the hell are you going to learn that you’re too damned old for these stunts?” I scolded, fixing a lead to her collar.
She gave herself a good shaking and me a look of indifference. We walked her and Sky back to the truck on lead, washed them off in the creek, and headed north on the Dalton. Alongside it snaked the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, the main coronary artery of the Alaskan economy, eight hundred miles of welded steel cylinders, four feet in diameter. Seventy-two days had passed since we’d started up the Overseas Highway, America’s southernmost road; now we were rolling up the northernmost. It was amazing to think that the two were in the same country; as we looked at the boreal forests, the tundra fells sweeping away for as far as the eye could reach, the palm trees and green and azure waters of the Florida Keys seemed impossibly distant.
A flagman stopped us before we’d gone two miles. Road repairs were under way. The Dalton takes a beating from the climate and the twenty-four-seven truck traffic. (That morning, I’d taped cardboard across Ethel’s front window to keep flying rocks from damaging it.) Three bikers, in Darth Vader getups, rumbled up behind us as we waited. One dismounted and tapped on my window. I lowered it while he raised his tinted visor, revealing a stubbled, middle-aged face.
“Hey, where can we get some gas?”
“Yukon Crossing. About fifty-five miles up the road.”
“You mean there’s no gas till then?”
“Nope. None.”
“That’s crazy!”
“Maybe. But that’s how it is.”
“They told us in Fairbanks we could get gas, so we didn’t fill up.”
Seriously dumb, I thought. The greenest cheechako would have known better.
“I’ve got ten gallons up on the roof if you guys really need it.”
Apparently the pilgrim didn’t think they did. He ducked behind the visor and remounted his Harley, and when the flagman waved us on the trio blasted past us.
A little more than an hour later, we bumped across the Yukon River bridge. A humorist had painted a wooden sign to look like one of those electronic readouts that tell you how fast you’re going. YOUR SPEED, it said, 10 MPH. Below, one of the great rivers of the world, two thousand miles long and half a mile wide, glittered like a band of burnished steel. It slipped quietly along toward the western ranges and its mouth in the Bering Sea. At the roadhouse on the west side of the highway I topped off Fred’s tank at the single pump. By the price, you would have thought I’d filled a twin-engine Beechcraft. On my way inside to pay, I saw the three bikes parked in the dusty lot. The pilgrims had made it.
We put up on a swath of bare dirt at Five Mile Camp. Seven hundred and fifty workers had lived there when the pipeline was under construction. Their prefab barracks and Quonset huts were long gone, replaced by a motel built of corrugated steel and a funky little truck stop, the Hot Spot Café, which boasted a best food to join our roster of salmon burgers, grouper sandwiches, cinnamon buns: “best burgers in Alaska.”
Our first night on the Dalton was a wet one (night is merely an expression; the sun set about one in the morning and rose at three), and it was still pouring when we woke up, the campground a slough. Before going to bed, we’d stashed our muddy hiking boots under the trailer to dry, and even there they’d gotten soaked. Likewise Sage and Sky’s bed, likewise Sage and Sky, who shivered in the chill morning wind. We splish-splashed to the Hot Spot for breakfast and information about road conditions. The maker of best burgers told us that when it rains, the calcium chloride maintenance crews lay on the road to keep the dust down forms a slick layer.
“It’s okay if you take it real slow.”
We took it real slow, and sailor-girl Leslie said it was like leaving a safe harbor in bad weather. The Dalton had been all dirt the first time I drove it; now portions had been paved with chip seal, a mixture of crushed stone and bitumen. On those stretches we hit thirty miles an hour; otherwise, twenty. The gumbo caulked the tire treads, and the thin layer of mud, with hard surface underneath, was as treacherous as black ice.
The rain diminished to a drizzle. We parked in a turnout and hiked up a granite tor called Finger Rock because it’s a rock that looks like a giant finger poking out from atop a low, rounded hill. All around, alpine tundra undulated, much like the Great Plains, toward the Endicott and White mountain ranges. Ten thousand years ago, when woolly mammoths and prehistoric bison and saber-toothed cats roamed the land, paleo-Indians had stood where we stood, scouting for game.
At a little past noon on August 5, we reached a significant landmark and asked two BLM rangers, sheltered in a tent at the wayside, to take our picture in front of a signpost that declared: ARCTIC CIRCLE. NORTH LATITUDE 66 DEGREES, 33 MINUTES. We were pretty puffed up, though our egos had taken a hit a few minutes earlier, when we’d seen two mud-slathered riders on a mud-slathered motorcycle with mud-slathered gear piled on its rear fender and a sign bearing a two-word message: BRASIL–ALASKA.
“We’re amateurs,” I said to the ranger.
“It’s an accomplishment to make it this far. Not many people do it,” he said, trying to make us feel better.
And then he tried to make us feel worse, telling us about a Frenchman who’d passed through about a week earlier. This Frenchman had driven to Alaska from Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America; he’d picked up a custom-built sailboat, equipped with retractable skis, towed it up the Dalton, and launched it into Prudhoe Bay. He intended to sail across the Arctic Ocean, and when he reached the polar ice cap, he was going to lower the skis and ice-sail to the North Pole.
Actually, this story did not make us feel worse; we felt superior to the Frenchman. He was obviously insane.
The sun broke through the clouds, and though we’d traveled only sixty miles, we decided to camp at the Arctic Circle campground to dry out our boots and belongings. It was a primitive camp—no water or power—but the aspen and birch and white spruce were pleasing, and the weather was cool enough to keep the mosquitoes and blackflies at bay. I built a fire, and we set our boots next to it, and lay the dog bed in the sun.
In the evening, we broke out waders and fly rods and tried our luck on Fish Creek. It was misnamed.
I’m a good fly fisherman. It was shameful not to catch a fish in Alaska, so, come morning, we tried another river, the Jim. Speaking loudly to avoid alarming any lurking grizzlies, we tramped through the woods and came to a gravel bar jutting into a deep pool below the tail-out of a dancing riffle. The Jim is a beautiful, mostly placid, inconsequential river, but it occupied a dark corner in my memory. Sixteen years earlier, it had almost killed my younger son.
Marc and I, with a photographer named Tony Oswald, had been fishing the Jim from one-man rubber rafts that floated on pontoons. Approaching a sharp bend, Marc got caught in the swiftest part of the current. It carried him into a row of “sweepers”—fallen spruce. The pontoons rammed under a tree, and the raft flipped end over end, throwing Marc into the river. He grabbed the trunk and clung to it. If he hadn’t done that, his heavy rubber waders would have pulled him under, into a web of sunken branches. Although he was a strong, athletic twenty-one-year-old, he couldn’t pull himself out; his waders had filled with water, and it was thirty-eight degrees.
At that temperature, water kills in fifteen to twenty minutes. It took Oswald and me ten minutes to rescue him. With a long rope tied into a loop in my hand, I walked out onto the downed tree like a gymnast on a balance beam, one that swayed and bobbed underfoot. Oswald, on the bank, held the other end of the rop
e. When I got to the end, I saw that Marc’s fingers were blue. His face was turning the same color as blood flowed from his brain into his body’s core. He looked up at me and cried out, “Dad, I can’t feel my hands! I’m going to let go!” And I shouted, “No! You’ll drown!” It hit me then like a punch to the solar plexus: My boy is going to die if we don’t get him right now. Somehow, I got the loop around his chest and under his arms, cinched it, and Oswald and I hauled him ashore.
He was already in second-stage hypothermia: complete numbness in his extremities, uncontrolled shivering, confusion, slurred speech. While Oswald got a fire going, I stripped Marc of his flooded waders and wet shirt, pulled my shirt off, and embraced him, bare torso to bare torso, to transfer my body heat to him. A couple of times, he almost lapsed into unconsciousness. I shook him out of it. Mosquitoes swarmed on us. Much later, I counted the bites on Marc’s back and stopped at sixty. When the fire blazed up, we turned him around and around in its heat, as if we were roasting him for dinner. The shakes diminished, but he was groggy and not out of danger. We had to get him into dry clothes, so we recovered his raft, lashed it behind mine, put him on it, and then rowed to camp.
I don’t recall how long we were on that river. What I do remember was looking over my shoulder every few minutes to make sure Marc was still conscious. I remember the forests sliding by, empty and silent, and a bald eagle on a gravel bar, watching us with an alert serenity as we floated past. And I remember thinking: If my son dies, nothing here will change, nothing here will acknowledge what to me and his mother will be an unbearable loss. The forests’ calm will not be disturbed; the eagle will fly to its nest as if nothing happened. Never before and never since has the otherness of nature, its complete indifference to human fate, been so impressed on me.
The Longest Road Page 30
