The Longest Road

by Philip Caputo

  Now, as I waded out into the river with Leslie, those memories made my skin crawl. I tried to evict them, focusing on the task at hand. Tying a gold-ribbed hare’s ear to her line, I gave a little lecture on nymph fishing. Cast upstream at a forty-five-degree angle, mend the line, drift the fly downstream till the line begins to straighten, give the rod a couple of twitches to simulate a nymph struggling to the surface, then retrieve and cast again. The tutorial was followed by a demonstration, and on my first cast I caught a fifteen-inch grayling. I released it, certain we would reel in enough for dinner. We didn’t. Working upstream and down for the next two hours, we failed to stick another fish. My shame was complete.

  “Enough of this,” Leslie said. “Let’s see if we can find gold.”

  We drove fifteen miles to the South Fork of the Koyukuk, which, a booklet promised, had “high potential placer gold values,” meaning an average of twelve dollars per cubic yard. We trekked some distance up that river, Leslie stopping every few minutes to dip the pan into the sand and gravel, swish out the water, remove the large stones, and then sift through the remains for color. Two hours of this produced as much gold as two hours of fishing had produced fish.

  “It’s this cheesy-looking plastic pan that’s doing it,” she said. “We should have gotten a metal one.” She paused to reconsider. “I guess it’s just been a day to adjust our expectations.”

  36.

  In the summer of 1900, a wave of stampeders working their way up the Middle Fork of the Koyukuk reached a mining camp at the mouth of a tributary, Slate Creek. The green prospectors took one look around, got cold feet, and turned back. From then on, the camp was called Coldfoot. So reported Robert Marshall, explorer, forester, and naturalist, in his 1933 book Arctic Village. By 1902, Coldfoot had grown big enough, with a gambling den, two roadhouses, two stores, and seven saloons, to rate a post office. It closed ten years later, as the gold rush receded into history. The settlement was virtually abandoned, not to be revived until the discovery of black gold in Prudhoe Bay. It boomed as a construction camp for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in the midseventies and is today a stop for the Dalton Highway’s long-haul truckers, as well as travelers like us. With a permanent population of exactly ten, it consists of the following: a post office (recommissioned in 1984), a diner and saloon, a BLM visitor’s center and ranger station, an airstrip, and the Slate Creek Inn, which, like all the hostelries in the far North, looks like a giant shipping container.

  It was early evening when we pulled in, filled Ethel’s water tank and Fred’s gas tank, then checked in at the BLM office to ask about conditions in the Atigun Pass. That is the most dangerous stretch on the Dalton: a long, winding climb up into the Brooks Range, followed by an equally long, winding drop to the Arctic coastal plain. A gradient of 6 to 8 percent is considered steep on most highways; in the Atigun Pass, it’s 12 percent, meaning that for every one hundred feet of run, the road gains twelve feet in altitude. A ranger advised us not to tow our trailer over the pass. There were no guardrails up there, it was snowing, and we could expect ice and mud. It was for professionals only, he said, making it plain that he knew we weren’t.

  Outside, in the parking lot, we spotted a familiar, battered blue Toyota truck and the two men we met in British Columbia nearly two weeks before.

  “Hey,” I called. “So did you guys make it to Prudhoe?”

  “Not yet,” answered the younger man, Levi Mason, the one who’d admired Ethel. They’d been to Denali, where they’d hiked for five days. Levi was from West Virginia and married to his buddy’s niece. His buddy was Don Golliday—the name at first sounded to me like Doc Holliday—and he was a commercial roofer. He and Levi were dedicated backpackers. Together they’d tramped the Appalachian Trail and the mountains of Colorado and Utah. For twenty years, Don had dreamed of putting his boots down in Alaska.

  “What made you decide to make the drive? You could’ve flown here.”

  “I wanted the experience,” Don drawled. “I wanted to see the whole territory, all the way across. It’s all about the experience for me. Canada was absolutely wonderful.”

  “Wasn’t that something?” I said.

  They broke into grins. “I had no concept until we drove across it. Every day, I thought, Well, it’s over, we’re right there, and then we got to British Columbia and Yukon, and I thought, Oh, my God! Fell in love with the place. We kept using the same words over and over. It’s awesome, it’s magnificent, mind-boggling.”

  “So what was it like on Denali,” I asked Don, “trying to keep up with a younger man?”

  “He put me through the ringer up in the high country. But I got through with my own pack.”

  “He’s a tough, tough man.” Levi took out his camera and clicked on a shot of Don humping a pack across a glacier. “We made over thirty miles in five days. Went over several passes, six thousand feet, seventy-eight hundred, right across the top of a glacier. Don just kept chuggin’ along. He’s unbelievable for fifty-six.”

  “Fifty-five,” Don corrected.

  Levi was going to fly home when they returned to Fairbanks—“I made a wrong turn and acquired a mortgage, a wife, and a job,” he said—but Don planned to meet up with his brother, who would be coming in by plane, and wander Alaska for another two months.

  “Did you retire to get all this time off?”

  He shook his head. “I got a story. You wanna hear the story?”

  “Sure.”

  “In 1974 I bought a 1970 Mach One, and I’ve had it ever since. I blew up the engine and had it in storage for ten years at my daughter’s. I sold that Mustang to my other daughter. She and her man are gonna restore it. That’s how I got the money for this trip. I had to do it. It was the time. I’m at the age where I needed to go. I’m still in good shape for my age, and I decided this was the year, chips fall where they may.”

  “You mean you quit?”

  “Well, sort of,” he answered. He’d told his boss he was going no matter what. Maybe he’d have a job when he returned, maybe not. Meanwhile, he got another offer for a supervisory position with a roofing company based in North Carolina. Don told the firm he was interested but that he was bound for Alaska and wasn’t going to back out. If the job was still available in October, he’d be home by then. The company didn’t go for that. Don hit the road. When he and Levi got to Edmonton, Alberta, he was surprised to receive a call from North Carolina. The company still wanted to hire him. An employee would interview him later over the phone.

  “He actually blew off the interview because we didn’t have cell service,” Levi interjected, in tones of admiration. “We had a choice to hang around in Edmonton or go on, and we went on.”

  “We went right through B.C. and didn’t have no coverage for two days. So when I called the guy”—a low laugh trickled into Don’s voice—“I think that was the end of it.”

  “Ballsy,” I said. “We’re in a recessed economy, everybody crying for a job.”

  “Oh, I’ve gone for a long time with no job. I’ve lived on lean means. Yes, I have. I know what it’s like.”

  “And you still said the hell with it.”

  “I did. I did,” he said, and with no remorse.

  I’d liked them when I met them. I liked them even more now. I’ve always had a weakness for people who refuse to do the sensible thing, or what the world considers sensible, and follow the wisdom of their own hearts.

  As Golliday climbed back into the unreliable Toyota, I could hear Dylan’s raspy-voiced “Let Me Die in My Footsteps.” And I could hear lines from Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road”:

  You but arrive at the city to which you are destined, you hardly settle yourself to satisfaction before you are call’d by an irresistible call to depart …

  You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reach’d hands toward you.

  * * *

  We pressed on to Marion Creek, about four miles up the road. Apparently the highway sign outside Coldfoot—NO SERVICES NEXT
240 MI.—affected travelers in the same way Coldfoot affected the prospectors whose timorousness inspired the name. We had the campground all to ourselves.

  Cold was the operative word, cold for August anyway, temperatures in the low forties. With no heat in the trailer (the wood-chip stove had been removed to make room for a dresser), I’d borrowed a small space heater and an inverter to run it, and had discovered, too late, that it drew more power than the inverter could supply. Along with no heat, we had no hot water. The propane water heater wouldn’t light; dust had clogged the valves. I’d tried bleeding the system, to no avail. We hadn’t bathed in four days.

  A night on the town was called for. We had a drink in the Coldfoot bar—a beer set me back five and half dollars—followed by dinner in the roadhouse. One room with a satellite TV and a long table was reserved for truckers. They’d been granted dispensation from the no-smoking ban because they were the folk heroes now, as the trappers and prospectors had been a century ago, and they were watching their fellow folk heroes on the TV. It was showing—I’m not making this up—an episode of Ice Road Truckers.

  So how real was the reality show? Out on the back deck of the Coldfoot roadhouse, we spoke with Keith Mitchell, an ice-road trucker’s trucker. He was fifty-eight years old and had been hauling freight on the Dalton for thirty years, almost as long as there had been a road. The TV show, he said, accurately portrayed the hazards drivers faced, but their conflicts and arguments were exaggerations, ginned up to make the series a kind of transportation soap opera.

  “I think if they want drama, they’re gonna have drama,” he said, flashing a toothpaste-commercial smile.

  Mitchell, a Flathead Indian from Montana (although with his fair complexion and light brown hair he looked less Indian than I did), remembered the days when the highway was much narrower, paved with river rock that made the five-hundred-mile trip a jolting, teeth-rattling ordeal that took twenty-four hours. The average running time is more like fifteen hours today, twelve in the winter, when snowpack acts as nature’s road-repair crew, filling in ruts and potholes. Mitchell drove for an outfit that delivered all sorts of cargo.

  “You name it, we haul it,” he said in a cowboy drawl.

  This trip it had been diesel. He pointed at his rig, a tanker parked among flatbeds and tractor-trailers in a muddy lot big as a baseball field and cratered with pond-size chuckholes. He’d picked up the fuel at a refinery near Fairbanks, offloaded in Deadhorse, and now he was heading back empty. He made the run twice a week all year round.

  Talking to Mitchell was a little like talking to a fighter pilot. He was all “right-stuff” laconic, playing down the dangers. Still, the Dalton was more stimulating to the adrenal glands than the highways in the Lower 48. He’d tried hauling freight out of Seattle and got so bored that he was back on the North Slope within six months. He preferred driving in the winter, despite cold that seemed to belong to interstellar space.1

  “You get better traction on the snowpack, except when it warms up to thirty degrees and your tires overheat and melt the snow. It’s better truckin’ when it’s ten below.”

  “Have you ever almost fallen asleep?” Leslie asked.

  “Oh, yeah. You get used to the route. Same old rock, same old tree. But the Atigun Pass has a way of wakin’ you up. Gets your heart rate goin’. It’s a long way to the bottom. The pass can get pretty gnarly. Makes its own weather up there. You’ve got snow, wind, rock slides, avalanches.”

  The worst hazards were the winter storms and whiteouts on the coastal plain.

  “If it’s blowin’, you can stay out there for three days. And you’re alone, and it’s pretty stressful. You’re constantly thinkin’: Do I have enough food? Do I have enough water? Do I have enough clothes? Cuz nobody’s gonna come out and get you.”

  The Dalton had been an industrial, trucker’s road until 1994, when it was opened to ordinary motorists. Mitchell’s dismay with what he termed civilian traffic came as no surprise.

  “Too many people with too little common sense, riskin’ their lives. They don’t know what they’re gettin’ into up here. You’re completely on your own.” (We hoped he didn’t mean us, but he might have.) “Take these motorcyclists. One of ’em died just two days ago. Fishtailed in the mud south of Yukon Crossing, and that was that.”

  And then there were the amateur truckers who thought they were pros. Like the one he’d rescued during a whiteout near the Franklin Bluffs south of Deadhorse.

  “I had to stop. I couldn’t see the reflectors at the side of the road. Saw another trucker who stopped and asked what was up ahead. I said, ‘I can’t go any farther.’ He said he was going to chain up and go on. So he did that, and all he’s got on are lightweight clothes. Didn’t put on his arctic gear, so when he got back into his truck, he had wet clothes. And all he had was a nylon sleeping bag, and that had got wet, too. So he passed me and went on up the road. But then he stopped. Plowed right into a snowdrift. He radioed me and said his engine had sucked in snow. His truck was dying, and he asked me, ‘Can you help?’

  “And I said, ‘I don’t know where you are.’ I had no idea how much farther he’d gotten. But I got on my arctic gear—it took about twenty minutes—and I got out and tied my air hose to a hammer and wrapped it around my front bumper for a lifeline. Got to the end of it and still couldn’t see him. I went another twenty feet and reached his back bumper and got him out and into my truck. We spent three days in there. He knew better. He quit haulin’ after that.”

  * * *

  “Let’s go to church,” Leslie said.

  This was an unusual summons from my lady, who is more likely to worship in the temple of Voltaire and Richard Dawkins. I wondered if the prospect of crossing the treacherous Atigun Pass had put the fear of God into her. Actually, she was just curious. She’d picked up a flyer in Coldfoot inviting travelers to attend Sunday services in the Kalhabuk Prayer Chapel in the town of Wiseman.

  I was all for the religious exercise. By the doctrines of the Catholic Church, I’d sunk deep into mortal sin on the trip, having missed Mass for eleven Sundays in a row. The service was advertised as “nondenominational Christian,” which wouldn’t qualify as a Mass in the Vatican’s eyes. Still, I reasoned that attendance might win me some points and a reduced sentence should I plunge off the Atigun Pass, say a long term in Purgatory.

  We crawled out of our warm sleeping bags into the shivers of a rainy morning and tried to make ourselves presentable. I shaved in cold water. We took icy sponge baths, combed our hair, put on our cleanest dirty clothes, and drove to Wiseman, three miles off the Dalton down a miry road running through soggy woods. I doubted it had changed since it was established in 1907. The Milepost described it as picturesque: unpaved lanes, a trading post, a lodge, a few log cabins scattered helter-skelter in the woods. Whitened antlers hung above doorways, smoke drifted from stovepipes poking through the rooftops; sled dogs barked in their kennels.

  A town map with some curious landmarks—“Public Outhouse,” “Moose horn pole”—guided us to the Kalhabuk chapel, a tin-roofed log shack no bigger than an average bedroom.

  Inside, we were welcomed by the warmth of a wood-burning stove and by the minister, a small, white-haired woman named June Reakoff. Her congregation consisted of Wiseman’s entire population, eight people, and three of those were her son, her daughter-in-law, and her grandson.

  The service was the soul of simplicity and informality, the diametric opposite of a rococo high Latin Mass. I imagined it was like a gathering of believers in the early years of Christianity, before bishops and priests laid down the law: let’s have some structure to our assemblies; let’s have some ceremony and gold chalices and candles and bells and incense. June led us in hymns for about half an hour. She had a good voice; so did a BLM ranger, Greg Robbe. I can carry a tune fairly well if the only voice I hear is my own; in groups, I am consistently off-key and wander at random from note to note. In big cathedrals the voices of hundreds drown out my squawks, but I c
ouldn’t get away with it in that tiny room. I lip-synched.

  Seated at the front of the room, June opened her sermon with a long, homey tale about a rusty kettle she’d found and how she’d restored it by heating it in the coals of a woodstove, scrubbing it inside and out with a wire brush, and polishing it with vegetable oil. After five minutes, she appeared to sense that we were wondering where she was going with this household parable.

  “This must seem like a shaggy dog story to you,” she said, and then came to the lesson. “It took the fire, and it took abrasive brushing, and it took oil to make the kettle clean. We can equate that spiritually in our lives, too … God has to pour out the oil of the Holy Spirit to bring out the luster in our lives … Thinking about the rusty kettle, I thought of how God designed us in a certain way for a certain purpose, but things happen in our lives and we become dirty and unusable for the master’s use. But [she fell into a near whisper] we have someone who can clean us up.”

  Catholic guilt is different from Jewish guilt, but they bear this similarity: they are woven into the bearer’s DNA. Nonetheless, June’s homily perked me up. A Catholic priest would have stressed God’s judgment. She emphasized his mercy and forgiveness. When we came to the recessional hymn, I belted it out without caring if I sounded like a seal with a sore throat.

  After dismissal, June invited us to her house for coffee and hot chocolate, and there I committed … let’s call it a secular transgression. I happened to sit next to June’s son, Jack Reakoff, a wiry man with a movie star’s bone structure, deep-set, penetrating eyes, and a quiet intensity. The buzz of small talk filled the room, but he wasn’t a small-talk kind of guy. Born and bred in the Alaskan bush, he had a passion for wildlife conservation. He chaired a commission that advised on the management of subsistence hunting and fishing on federal lands and was vice chairman of an advisory board to the state Department of Fish and Game.