While the others turned their attention to Cracker, a small bunny a young woman had taken to church and brought into the house wrapped in a blanket, Reakoff began to tell me about the decimation of Alaska’s caribou through overhunting. He blamed Fish and Game’s policies.
“They took the Mulchatna herd in southwest Alaska from two hundred thousand animals in 1995 to twenty-eight thousand in twelve years,” he said with barely suppressed outrage. “Trophy hunting wiped out the bulls. They let the hunters annihilate the herd.”
“This is important,” his mother interrupted, looking at me. “You should record this.”
Everyone fell silent. I took my digital recorder out of my pocket. The device spooked Reakoff’s wife, sitting across the room. She stiffened and said, “I wish you wouldn’t.”
I glanced at Reakoff, who motioned for me to go ahead, and I turned the recorder on. Journalists aren’t the nicest people in the world.
Now, he continued, the central arctic caribou herd in his part of Alaska—sixty-seven thousand animals—was about to get whacked. Fish and Game had extended the hunting season, upped the bag limit to five animals per hunter, and permitted shooting cows as well as bulls.
And why was this happening? Despite the billions Alaska took in from oil revenues, its Fish and Game budget—about thirty million dollars—was funded from the sale of hunting and fishing licenses. The more out-of-state licenses it issued, the more money it took in. The irony was hardly subtle: generating income for wildlife conservation depended on destroying wildlife.
“In fifteen or twenty years there won’t be any wildlife resources left in Alaska.”
I said that it sounded like the Great Plains buffalo all over again.
Reakoff nodded. Exactly what he’d called it many times: “The bison syndrome.” He was growing more heated, and his wife more upset, pursing her lips, frowning. When he described certain Fish and Game officials as “absolutely bloodthirsty,” she snapped, “Jack! Stop talking!” and stung me with a look that said, “And you stop recording him.”
Of course, I should have shut the recorder off right then, but June looked on serenely and Reakoff wasn’t in the least fazed by his wife’s anger. She stomped out, and he resumed his jeremiad, prophesying an Alaska in whose forests no wolves would howl, nor bears prowl, nor caribou migrate in their thousands.
“It won’t get any better. The outlook is a black cloud on the horizon. It won’t get any better until Alaska stops being a cheapskate state. We’ve constantly got our hands out to the federal government. Oh, we hate the feds. You hear nothing but that the state of Alaska hates the feds, the feds, the feds. But we’ve got our hand out at every turn for federal funding for wildlife management, federal funding for road maintenance. I was born in the territory of Alaska! I’ve got the full right to tell you for a fact that we’ve got the biggest bunch of hypocrites you’ve ever seen in your life in Alaska! We’re banking money and killing our resources. We’re killing your resources off, too, as Americans. Two-thirds of Alaska is federally owned. This is your land, your resources that are being wiped out as a funding source for the state of Alaska.”
After we left, I was feeling depressed about the coming slaughter and guilty about contributing to marital discord.
“Couldn’t you tell that she didn’t want you to record him?” Leslie said.
“Of course I could. I’m not that stupid.”
“Then why did you?”
“Because his mother was right. What he had to say was important. It’s like we haven’t learned anything in this country in a hundred and fifty years.”
“He’s going to go home right into an argument.”
“Let’s us not have one, okay?”
“Okay.”
37.
The propane alarm wailed us awake at seven in the morning, prompting Leslie to cover her ears and me to silence it in the usual manner—by turning off the battery power. Heeding the warning not to take Ethel over the Atigun, we were leaving her behind. She looked rather forlorn, all by herself in the wild woods. But we were relieved that we wouldn’t have to deal with her issues for the next two or three days.
We swung south to Coldfoot, which had the nearest functioning phone, and tried to reserve a room at one of the hotels in Deadhorse. All were full up, mostly with oil field workers. We left regardless. If we had to, we’d roll out our sleeping bags and snuggle up with the dogs in the truck.
Past the marblelike spires of Sukapak Mountain, which by tradition marks the boundary between Eskimo and Athabascan Indian territories,1 the boreal forests grew thinner. The trees, pruned by cold winds and starved for sunlight half the year, were seldom taller than fifteen feet, though some were a few hundred years old. At Milepost 235, indicated by a sign, stood the FARTHEST NORTH SPRUCE. Vandals had hacked into it with axes, killing it, but nature had triumphed over human idiots: a new tree sprouted a few yards to the north.
Now the tundra reigned—lichens, berry bushes, shrublike willows. The mile-wide Chandalar Shelf stretched before us, split by the Chandalar River; on its far side, the rise of the Brooks Range, the northernmost mountain chain in the United States, looked as abrupt as the rise of Manhattan’s skyscrapers from the Hudson. In the mid-1800s, those far-ranging, ubiquitous French fur trappers had penetrated this far north and called the Gwich’in Indians inhabiting the region gens de large, meaning “nomadic people.” Over time, the word was anglicized into chandalar. I had hiked there years ago and vividly remembered the silence, far off the highway. It was dense, primeval, older than history, a silence never broken by traffic or airplanes or chain saws or by any human sound save the yells of Gwich’in hunters driving their dogsleds.
When we began to climb the pass, my GPS measured our altitude at twenty-seven hundred feet, and Fred’s thermometer read forty-two degrees. The road was as rough and slippery as advertised. The few guardrails had been mangled by rock slides and avalanches. We went on up, the temperature falling, and we were soon driving in wind-whipped flurries. A flock of Dall sheep, white enough to be mistaken for patches of snow, clung to a ledge on the west side of the road. The gorge opposite plunged two or three hundred feet straight down. I was the soul of both-hands-on-the-wheel, both-eyes-on-the-road concentration when a southbound flatbed rounded a curve ahead. If it was a bit nerve-wracking, it was also exhilarating. The pass topped out at forty-eight hundred feet, and there the snow thickened, the falling flakes mingling with the vaporous sheets scooped from the cirques by the wind and flung across the road.
We pulled into a wide turnout and got out and stood looking down at the silver braids of the Atigun River. The wind blew hard and tore the clouds apart for a while, and a rainbow, like a fallen arch, appeared to be lying flat on a bare mountainside.
“There’s a land where the mountains are nameless,” wrote Robert Service. “And the rivers all run God knows where.” Though we know now to where the rivers run—the Brooks Range forms the northern continental divide, and they run to the Arctic Ocean from its north side, south to the Yukon drainage from the opposite side, thence west into the Bering Sea—almost all its peaks remain nameless. They’re runts compared with the summits in the Wrangells and the Rockies—the highest reaches barely over nine thousand feet—but, except for the Dalton and the pipeline, they’re as wild and unpeopled as when the first fur-clad migrants crossed the Bering land bridge into North America twelve thousand years ago. Their glacial valleys and shrouded crags lure the traveler to come, come and find what you’re looking for—gold or beauty or a world with the dew still on it—at the same time that their shale slopes and fearsome gorges repel, shouting to the stranger, “Keep out! You don’t belong here!”
I shifted to low gear, and we began the descent. Leslie was delighted; crossing this divide provided the drama she’d missed on the western divide in Montana. Down, down, the road wringing itself around the mountainside, down into the Atigun River valley. Groups of caribou trotted in the distance, stalked by camouflaged bowhunters,
whose tents filled every turnout and campsite. For obvious reasons, rifle hunting is prohibited within five miles of the highway and pipeline. Stopping at an overlook above the Atigun River Gorge, we watched an archer sneaking through a creek bed toward a bull caribou with a rack so tall and wide we wondered how he could hold his head up. Three other hunters advanced down a hillside in full view of the bull, trying to push him to within range of their companion. I looked around for TV cameras; it was as if we’d stumbled into an episode of a show on the Outdoor Channel.
“That’s a beautiful animal,” Leslie said. She must have been thinking about Jack Reakoff’s forecast of the coming caribou holocaust. “If that guy tries to kill it, I’m going to be really tempted to jump out and wave my arms and scare it away.”
I told her to resist the temptation; she might get shot herself.
The bull proved it didn’t need her help. He lifted his nose, didn’t like what he smelled, and loped onto the road, where he posed for a few seconds, his antlers like branched lightning, his cape showing dull white in the sun. Then, startled by an oncoming truck, he leaped down the embankment on the opposite side and ran full tilt over a hill.
We drove on, were held up for twenty minutes by a road repair crew, and then blew a tire, the first in all the miles we’d covered. The left rear was pancaked. Changing a tire on the Dalton, with truck traffic and two lanes and ten-foot dropoffs on both sides, can be hair-raising, but Fred chose a spot near a pull-off. Forty-five minutes later, we were on our way again. Score one for the anal-retentive guy who’d brought two spare tires.
Past Galbraith Lake, the road made a gradual descent onto the coastal plain, the very definition of desolation. It’s actually a desert, annual precipitation of less than eight inches, a desert that rests upon an immense bed of subterranean ice two thousand feet deep in places. The coastal plain is called the “North Slope,” though there is no slope anywhere. The utterly treeless, shrubless flatness stretched out to infinity, fractured into a mosaic of irregular squares and rectangles and wedges by seasonal freezes and thaws. The only relief from the horizontal was cone-shaped hills called pingos, spaced miles apart, and the occasional low, ice-cored mounds pushed to the surface by permafrost. Here and there, thaw lakes glittered like shards of broken glass.
Always there was the pipeline, snaking over the tundra on its vertical supports, sometimes vanishing underground. Curiously, it did not mar the natural landscape but somehow seemed to be part of it.2 Even the warehouse-like pump stations blended in; the sheer scale of Arctic Alaska dwarfed anything humans could build.
Off to our right, parallel to the road, the Sagavanirktok River rushed toward Prudhoe Bay, its glaciated waters the color of liquid cement. The river is commonly called “the Sag,” as its full name (an Eskimo word meaning “strong current”) trips up the most agile tongue. The Franklin Bluffs, a sandstone escarpment resembling the Dakota Badlands, walled the Sag’s eastern bank. Peregrine falcons nest in the bluffs. We saw a northern goshawk gliding over the tundra, but no falcons. Not that we looked all that hard. We were bone-tired after nearly ten hours on the Dalton. At last we came to the end of it, the end of all roads in America, Milepost 414, and entered Deadhorse. We’d made it from Key West in seventy-nine days. The reading on Fred’s trip odometer: 8,314.
* * *
Deadhorse is the strangest and ugliest town in the country, so unabashedly, unapologetically ugly that it’s fascinating. It’s not really a town at all. It has its own post office and zip code, but there is no municipal government, no fire department or police department, no houses, parks, sidewalks, churches, schools, cemeteries, or bars, and no citizens, unless you count the four people listed as permanent residents. The rest of the population, which averages six thousand, is temporary, rotating in and out on two- to three-week stints. All are employed by the oil companies or any one of the two hundred contractors operating in the Prudhoe Bay field—engineers and technicians, fire-control experts, mechanics, welders, electricians, roughnecks, pipe fitters, truck drivers, heavy equipment operators, pilots, cooks, dishwashers—and they live in sprawling dormitories or in hotels that look no more like hotels than Deadhorse looks like a town.
There isn’t a structure or an object made of anything but metal: steel-sided warehouses and welding shops, nests and stacks of drill pipes, yards filled with shipping containers. In place of, say, cathedral spires, drill rigs dominate the skyline. As for vegetation, you’re as likely to find a blade of grass on the moon as in Deadhorse, where the word plant is used only in its industrial context: the manifold plant, the compressor plant, the seawater treatment plant, the seawater injection plant. Such is the unsightliness of the architecture that one hotel attempts to make a virtue of it: “Overnight in camp-style rooms consistent with the industrial heritage of the region,” reads its ad in The Milepost. Translation: your room looks like a dumpster with a window.
But even a dumpster was preferable to spending a cold, miserable night in the truck. We drove around, looking for a place to stay. It was hard to see anything. A thick fog billowed in from off the bay. Like gigantic torches, tall stacks burned off waste gases from the wells, the orange flares eerie in the gloom. I felt as if we were on the set of a sci-fi movie, an outpost on some forsaken planet, Deep Space Station Nine.
We couldn’t find a room, not at Deadhorse Camp or Sourdough Camp or the Arctic Caribou Inn. The clerk at the last place suggested we try a new hotel, the Aurora.
This massive building—it had 378 rooms—stood on the bleak shore of a thaw lake, Lake Colleen. In keeping with the prevailing aesthetic, it looked as if it had been constructed of about a thousand semitrailers stacked three stories high; but its yellow paint was cheerful, in comparison with everything else. Dozens of grimy pickups lined the parking lot, nose to nose at rails with electrical hookups to keep engines from freezing in the winter.
The Aurora had a room! With free laundry and three squares a day, it would cost us $275. After crossing the Atigun Pass and blowing a tire and five days without a shower, we would have shelled out twice that. And we did, booking two nights. (There was another reason for the extravagance. For security reasons, access to the Arctic Ocean—our ultimate goal—was restricted to commercial tours, and we’d reserved two seats on one leaving the next day.)
Because the Aurora was not a pet-friendly establishment, the dogs couldn’t share in our happiness with staying there. They seemed a little bewildered as I walked them along the sooty, gravelly shore of Lake Colleen. Noses to the ground, they tried to pick up a recognizable scent and failed. Nor could they see much in the fog, and what they could see was unfamiliar to their field-dog eyes. Sage squatted, peed, and looked at me as if to ask, “What is this place you’ve brought us to?”
“Hey! Are those English setters?”
The voice belonged to a young, dark-haired guy at the wheel of a pickup, with British Petroleum’s sunburst logo on its door panel. I confirmed the accuracy of his identification.
“We don’t see many dogs up here.”
“And I can see why. Not a dog-friendly kind of place.”
“Not real people-friendly, either. But I like it well enough. Two weeks on, two off. Leaves me a lot of time to hunt and fish. You hunt those setters?”
I said that I did, and we talked bird dogs for a while.
“So what do you do for BP?”
“Dusty,” he said, giving me his name. “I’m an AFG technician. Automated Fire and Gas. Systems that monitor natural gas migrating into a wellhead and shut everything down. Otherwise, you get a catastrophic explosion.”
“You mean like what happened to that Deep Water Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico?”
“Yeah. Like that. We’re upgrading the systems right now.”
“Sounds like a good idea.”
“Oh, yeah. Good lookin’ dogs you’ve got. Don’t let ’em off lead around here.”
“Don’t intend to. All these trucks and machinery.”
“Bears. I was thin
king about the bears. We get grizzlies walk right through camp like they own the place. Maybe they do. They were here before us, anyway.”
I thanked Dusty for the tip and, keeping my eyes peeled for a hulking quadruped in the fog, took Sage and Sky to the truck. I gave them each a good-night treat, then went up to our room, where Leslie had been helping plan a report on mislabeled fish and doing laundry. Clean clothes. Clean, crisp, white sheets. A hot shower.
* * *
On a perfect summer’s morning in Deadhorse—cold and dismal like the day before—we breakfasted in the Aurora’s cavernous dining hall. It was packed with workers in the standard uniform: coveralls, work boots, baseball caps. Leslie liked Deadhorse, the organized busyness of it, people focused entirely on their jobs. The atmosphere, she said, reminded her of a big general hospital on one of those TV medical dramas, which I found an odd comparison. “Maybe I’ll stay here, find a job.”
“You don’t know anything about the oil business,” I said, sensibly. “What could you do?”
She surveyed the tables, filled with men.
“Prostitution,” she said.
I was going to suggest that at fifty-seven, even a well-preserved fifty-seven, she might have trouble finding a clientele, but thought better of it.
“Uh, maybe you’d do better as a madam?”
“Okay. Madam sounds good.”
“I’ll recruit the girls,” I said. “And I’ll want fifty percent of what you take in.”
She forked her scrambled eggs, thinking things over. “Oh, no. You’re not going to be my john.”
“Sweetie, I think you mean pimp. A john is the customer.”
She laughed. “Guess I’d better get the terminology down right. Maybe I could wash dishes.”
The issue of her future employment settled, we drove to the offices of Tatgaani Tours in the Arctic Caribou Inn. There, we and a handful of other pilgrims were held captive in a small room, required to watch a twenty-minute propaganda film produced by British Petroleum. We were model prisoners. No one remarked that after the Deep Water Horizon disaster it would take more than a movie to get BP off the log upon which it was a four-letter word beginning with s. After serving our sentence, Branden Goulet, our guide and minder, herded us outside and into a minibus for the trip to the Arctic Ocean.
The Longest Road Page 32
