Tall, hefty, garbed in blue coveralls, Branden was one quarter Inupiat and had another job besides escorting tourists: animal control officer. Animal control in Deadhorse and environs did not involve nabbing rabid raccoons or stray dogs but more challenging work, like shooing caribou off the roads and keeping track of grizzly and polar bears. It was in that capacity that he began the tour with a prohibition: we were not going to be allowed to wade into the Arctic Ocean, as was customary for visitors, because polar bears had been sighted prowling the shore. Branden’s fellow workers were monitoring their movements and would keep him informed by radio. He passed out photocopies of a news story about four people who’d been killed in Norway by a polar bear. I guess he did that to convince those who’d seen cuddly photos of polar bears on Sierra Club calendars that they were dangerous.
“I’ve never lost anybody to a bear,” he said, reassuringly. “I guided twenty-seven hundred and fifty tourists last year, and I brought twenty-seven hundred and thirty-nine back.” A dramatic pause. “The other eleven, five children and six adults, were lost to mosquitoes. They saw the mosquito clouds—I warned them, but they didn’t listen—and they were carried away.”
His delivery was so deadpan that a few passengers didn’t realize he was kidding.
And then he donned a headset and mike, got behind the wheel, and took us through a security checkpoint, designed to keep out civilians and terrorists intent on disrupting America’s oil supply. Branden pointed out the natural and man-made wonders of the oil fields, mostly the latter. He had far less to work with than a tour guide in Rome or Paris. The Manifold Building—surprise, a big steel box—was no Colosseum, the Flow Station no Louvre. Some attractions were impressive, like the drill-rig hauler, an enormous vehicle that ran on tires twelve feet in diameter, each one weighing five hundred pounds (try changing that), but the fog made Branden’s job all the harder. “Over there is Pump Station One,” he said. “You’d see it if it wasn’t so foggy.”
He had an awesome command of oil field operations. Trouble was, his commentaries were incomprehensible to anyone lacking a degree in petroleum engineering, and that described all of us. But he tried his best, lacing his discourses with mind-boggling statistics: twenty-six oil fields extending along 150 miles of shoreline; fourteen hundred wellheads; peak production of 2.1 million barrels a day, providing 10 percent of domestic demand; construction of the pipeline, the road, and support facilities cost eleven billion dollars.
Now and then, he injected some wit into these recitations to hold our attention. When we passed a rank of suspended pipelines, a woman asked, “What are those things hanging from the pipes? Those long, squiggly steel things? They look like giant corkscrews.”
“Wind dampers,” Branden replied, then gave one of his theatrical pauses. “Actually, those are how you distinguish male from female pipes.”
Wildlife, however, was his forte. Driving by a thaw lake, he pointed out white-fronted geese and tundra swans. Pacific loons swam on another lake. Spotting a couple of caribou, he told us that last year one of his tours was held up for twenty minutes when five hundred animals blocked the road. Then he stopped and pointed out the window. “Look, over there. A snowy owl.” A shifting of bodies to the left side of the bus. There it was, roosting on the tundra about fifty yards away, a tiny blob of white in the gray mists. “Saw two of them yesterday, one with a lemming in its mouth.” Farther on, he hit the brakes again. There was the second snowy owl, still as a decoy. Branden opened his window and imitated the whistle of a ground squirrel to get it to fly. The mimic sounded perfect to me, but the owl wasn’t buying it.
After an hour of looking at drill-rig haulers and snowy owls, we crawled up a sandy stretch of road and stopped above a rocky, brownish shoreline, where chunks of bleached driftwood were scattered like bones. The Arctic Ocean, surfless and gray, stretched away into a curtain of fog.
Branden turned to us. “Stay inside, folks. I’m calling my dispatcher to find out where the bears are.”
While we waited for word, he lectured on how polar bears hibernated and stayed warm.
“Polar bears are losing population because of decreasing sea ice,” he said, not mentioning that global warming was shrinking the sea ice, or that global warming was linked to the burning of fossil fuels. “They have to swim up to two hundred miles to get here in the summer. Last year, we saw one, a female, that slept for three days after making that swim.”
The dispatcher called back. Two polar bears and a grizzly were still in the vicinity. Branden scanned the beach with binoculars.
“Don’t see them. I can let you out for five minutes, no more. And please don’t go into the water. You’ll get your certificates anyway.” These documents, attesting to membership in the Polar Bear Dippers Club, were normally awarded only to those who take off their shoes, roll up their pants, and wade out up to their knees. The proximity of bears not being our fault, we were granted an exception.
We filed outside. “If you see a bear, don’t run unless you really want to,” Branden said.
A ruffle of nervous laughter.
The pilgrims beachcombed, picking up souvenir rocks and driftwood. Leslie and I dipped our hands into the water, cold, of course, but not numbingly so, and stood for a moment or two, gazing out across the lead-colored expanse. We’d started seventy miles north of the Tropic of Cancer; we’d finished twelve hundred miles south of the North Pole. I performed my ritual. Disobeying orders somewhat, I waded in up to my ankles, took out the bottle filled with waters from three oceans, dunked it, and added the waters of the Arctic Ocean.
Leslie put her arms around me. “Three yays for us. We got here.”
But it wasn’t getting there that mattered; it was the getting there, what Kerouac called “the purity of movement.” On the road, I liked imagining what I would see at the next turn or over the hill just beyond, whom I would meet in the next town and what they would have to say and what their lives were like. The discovery, once made, did not always meet expectations. It was the unexpected that created the real magic, as when we’d come upon that herd of woods bison in the Yukon, the great shaggy beasts suddenly appearing, like a shaman’s vision come true. Or meeting someone like Ansel Woodenknife, who’d opened up new perceptions, stirred emotions not anticipated. In the end, though, the journey had been the destination. It had never been anything else.
EPILOGUE
Emotionally, it was over for us but, of course, it wasn’t over. Ethel had to be returned to her owner, five thousand road miles away in Texas, and then we had to get home.
In the afternoon, I brought Fred to a garage, where a cheerful repairman named Rick patched the flat tire and hinted that we might want to get a move on.
“Weather changes fast up here. Spring, summer, fall are crammed into about two months. It’ll be snowing in a few days. I’ve seen it snow in July. Winter’s fast here, it comes on real fast.”
The return trip began on August 10, and Rick was right. Autumn arrived overnight, the tundra shrubs and bushes turning burgundy and orange, and we climbed the Atigun Pass into a snowstorm. Arriving back at Marion Creek Camp, we reunited Fred with Ethel, built a fire, and feasted on baked beans and brown bread.
Our breath made plumes inside the trailer in the morning. A north wind pushed clouds and rain squalls down from the Brooks Range, persuading us not to tarry. It took seven or eight hours to reach Fairbanks. The moon rose, and a reasonable facsimile of night fell at around 11 p.m. It was dark enough to see the Northern Lights if they made an appearance. But they stayed offstage, as the Southern Cross had in Key West.
After blasting the filth off the truck and trailer with a high-pressure hose and making minor repairs to Ethel—she’d taken some hard knocks on the Dalton—we got off on the thirteenth. An eagle flew with us across the border into the Yukon, circled, and flew back to his nest in Alaska. He didn’t need a passport or to make any customs declarations. We retraced our route as far as Watson Lake, where, to avoid further backt
racking, we followed the Cassiar and Yellowhead Highways to the Lower 48.
The drive took five days and featured our second, and last, quarrel. As we were passing Kluane Lake, a grizzly crossed the road ten yards in front of the truck. He was a brawny young bear with light brown fur that was almost blond in places. I stopped to photograph him, but by then he’d disappeared into the brush. A Canadian camped close by told us that grizzlies were all over the place, fattening up on the berries growing in profusion on the lakeshore. “Cruise around, you might get a picture of one,” he said.
In cruising, I drove Fred and Ethel down a two-track running along a ten-foot embankment and realized I’d gotten us into a fix. If I kept going and the two-track dead-ended, I’d have no way to turn around. But to get back on the highway, I would have to pilot Fred and Ethel down the bank and at an angle, risking a rollover.
“I’ll scout up ahead to see if this road goes all the way to the highway,” Leslie volunteered.
While she was gone, I managed to ease the rig down the slope and up the other side, my heart flailing my ribs and my fingers frozen to the wheel. Leslie was nowhere to be seen. I headed on down the road, terrified that she’d bumped into a grizzly, and spotted her a few hundred yards away, near the junction of the highway and the two-track. Had I stayed on it, I would have found my way back to pavement and safety with no trouble. She’d walked almost a mile through grizzly country to discover this and was on her way back to report it to me.
She climbed inside, slamming the door, and said nothing. Of course, I was immensely relieved, but I listened to some gremlin in my brain that told me the best defense was a good offense.
“Why the hell did you go so far? You had me worried sick.”
No response.
“I thought you were going just a little way, not all the way down the—”
“Listen,” she interrupted. “I did it because you didn’t think you could get down the embankment without tipping over. Do you know what I was doing? Sweating bricks! I was going, ‘Hey bears. Any bears? I’m coming through.’ Like you’re supposed to so you don’t surprise them. Next time you make a stupid decision, you can figure your own way out of it!”
The gremlin prodded me to remind her that I had figured my own way out of it. This time, I didn’t listen. After fifteen minutes of sullen silence, I spoke the only two words Leslie wanted to hear and thwarted Harry Wade’s forecast once again.
* * *
In Sumas, Washington, I retrieved my revolver from Bromley’s Market. We picked up I-5 to Everett, then went east on U.S. 2, reaching the crest of Stevens Pass in the northern Cascades. Leslie paid homage to her great-great-uncle John Frank Stevens, who, before Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to build the Panama Canal, had served as locating engineer for the Great Northern Railway. In 1890, while surveying its route, he discovered the pass that now bears his name.
U.S. 30 and I-84 covered parts of the Oregon Trail in Oregon’s Blue Mountains. At a place called Deadman’s Pass, a stone marker commemorated the efforts of a pioneer, Ezra Meeker, to save the trail’s route from obscurity. Meeker had first trekked it in a covered wagon in 1852 and lived long enough—he died at ninety-eight—to fly over it in a U.S. Army biplane in 1924.
I’d been reading the “scroll” of On the Road, a much raunchier and more exuberant book than the partly censored version I’d read years before. Kerouac was writing about his travels in 1947–49, almost exactly a century after Francis Parkman published The Oregon Trail. Everything had changed in a mere one hundred years. Kerouac’s America is recognizable to us today: paved highways, towns, cities, gas stations, wild sex, drugs, booze, and jazz (rock ’n’ roll had yet to come). Parkman’s America, with its plainsmen and trappers and Indians hunting buffalo across trackless prairies, seemed as distant as ancient Greece. It was certainly as extinct.
And yet that had been Meeker’s America as well, and he’d gone from the prairie schooner to the airplane in his lifetime. As we sped at seventy miles an hour over the ruts of wagons lucky to have made seventy a week, the chasm between Meeker’s time and mine collapsed down to a ditch. I felt as if I could jump right over it.
* * *
Bruneau Dunes looks like a chunk of Saudi Arabia transplanted to the high desert of Idaho. There, we sat with Lowell Messely outside his trailer and waited for the skies to throw the master switch and turn on the stars.
A short, affable man of seventy-eight, Lowell was a retired psychologist and had arrived at Bruneau Dunes for a forthcoming star party of fellow amateur astronomers.
“I retired in 1995, and was looking for something to do when my wife mentioned a star party. I went and got snake-bit. I bought my first telescope, and I’ve owned half a dozen since.”
His present one, a Dobsonian reflector with a fifteen-inch mirror, was black and shiny and nearly seven feet long.
“I love to show people what’s out there,” he said as nighthawks strafed the desert for insects. “Most people are excited about it, but astronomy scares some people. Religious people mostly. What’s up there contradicts their theology, like the idea that the universe was created in seven days six thousand years ago. With this scope, I can see a galaxy forty million light-years away, and that frightens them. They just walk away.”
At about ten, the Milky Way appeared, the stars so crowded I could not make out some well-known constellations. Lowell cranked his scope straight up, toward the constellation Hercules, and fetched a stepladder—the viewfinder was nearly six feet above. I stood on the first rung. In the eyepiece’s circle was M13, a stunning globular cluster twenty-six thousand light-years away. It looked like a huge chandelier with thousands of glowing bulbs.
Round about midnight, he trained the scope on the constellation Andromeda, hopped up the ladder, and inserted a high-power eyepiece. A few degrees above Andromeda’s third star, a faint white blur appeared: the galaxy he’d spoken of earlier, NGC 202. We gazed at archaic light, light that had begun its journey across the cosmos ages before hunter-gatherers armed with deer femurs walked the earth.
“If you didn’t know what it was, you wouldn’t know what you’re looking at,” Lowell said. “It’s just a smudge. Forty million light-years! If someone in that galaxy is observing ours, they’ll be seeing it as it was forty million years ago.”
Leslie and I had spent the day hiking the dunes in ninety-five-degree heat, and we were flagging. We thanked Lowell for all he’d shown us and said good night.
Just before I turned in, I looked out the window and saw him, still at his scope in the cool desert night, peering out across oceans of time and space. An old man, alone, immersed in the majesty and beauty of creation. Willa Cather said it best: “That is happiness, to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
* * *
We’d become roads scholars and for the next five days attended seminars on desert highways. Idaho 51 morphed into Nevada 225, the blacktop stringing through the Shoshone reservation and the Owyhee Desert into the Independence Mountains, then merging with I-80 at Elko. I-80 carried us to U.S. 93 south across the Great Basin, an ancient ocean that’s now a sea of sand, sage, and brittlebush.
We stopped for the night in Ely, Nevada, and from there followed U.S. 6/50: three hundred miles of next-to-nothing dubbed “the Loneliest Road in America” by Life magazine in 1986. The American Automobile Association warned motorists not to drive it unless they were confident of their survival skills. Feeling confident, I set the truck on cruise control, and with the highway shooting bullet-true ahead, I had the weird feeling that we were standing still and the road was moving, conveying us to wherever it led.
* * *
Roads scholarship would have to include New Mexico 53, which approximates the route of an east-west trail traveled for centuries by Indians, Spanish conquistadores, and Anglo pioneers. It passes a great sandstone promontory called Inscription Rock for the glyphs, names, initials, dates, and fragmentary stories chiseled into its smooth face.
The oldest dated inscription says the following: PASSED BY HERE, THE GOVERNOR DON JUAN DE OÑATE FROM THE DISCOVERY OF THE SEA OF THE SOUTH ON THE 16TH DAY OF APRIL, 1605.
In 1598, on the orders of King Philip of Spain, Oñate led five hundred Spanish settlers north from Mexico and across the Rio Grande into what’s now the United States. He established a colony, which he christened Santa Fé de Nuevo México. The king appointed him its governor. His successor, Governor Don Pedro de Peralta, founded a settlement at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, proclaimed it the provincial capital, and saddled it with the cumbersome name La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asis (the Royal Town of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi). That’s wisely been pared down to Santa Fe.
Our journey would officially end in Breckenridge, Texas, but it seemed fitting to make Santa Fe its ceremonial end. There was a practical reason for this decision: Leslie’s leave of absence would soon expire, she had to get back to her office, and Santa Fe was the nearest town with a major airport.
The other reason lay in the twenty-five words Don Juan de Oñate carved into Inscription Rock. They preface a counternarrative to the Anglo-Saxon story that the American saga unfolded from east to west. For Spanish-speaking peoples, European settlement advanced from south to north. The province of Nuevo Mexico was established nine years before Jamestown and twenty-two years before William Bradford planted his pilgrim foot on Plymouth Rock. And Santa Fe’s founding in 1610 makes it the oldest capital in the modern United States. We couldn’t think of a better place to mark the end of the longest road.
The Longest Road Page 33
