Crossing the Line

The border crossing was much less dramatic than I had imagined it to be. I still maintain that gaining entry from the lower 48 would have posed a greater challenge, but that is mere speculation. The customs agent was quintessentially Canadian, aloof and unconcerned. Her only display of emotion occurred while she was registering my hunting rifle, a simple process that amounted to little more than a very cursory inspection and a $25 fee. The rifle, a Ruger Model No. 1, is a rolling block single shot chambered in the ubiquitous .30-06. “Don’t see many like this,” she noted, twice.

My plan was to limit driving to six hours a day. In theory, that would keep me healthy, allow for lots of stops and side trips, and still get me back to Montana in less than a week. It seemed like a good plan. Of course, plans are always subject to change.

A funny quirk about traveling the Alaska Highway is that it seems like no matter whether you drive straight through at ninety miles an hour or lollygag along at a crawl, the trip takes five days. To be certain, that is a gross oversimplification. When Cousin Tyler and I drove the Highway in 2001, we crushed the route in a brutal 72 hour sprint. Some travelers spend a month on the road. Ideally, a trip along the ALCAN would be about the journey, not the destination. Unfortunately, that has yet to be the case for me.

Another interesting attribute of long drives is that the closer we get to our destinations, the stronger their pull. It’s a phenomenon similar to gravity. Obviously, it doesn’t make much sense to start a drive like the Alaska Highway thinking about its end, and for the most part I wasn’t. That first day I was just thankful to be in Canada and finally on my way home.

Canadian customs is actually situated twenty miles southeast of the international border, just outside the tiny community of Beaver Creek, Yukon Territory. It feels immediately different from Alaska. Sure, mileages are displayed in kilometers and gravy is offered with French fries, but it’s more than that. Although we “Americans” are quick to think of Canada as just an extension of the United States, a strange cousin we’re not willing to admit to as family, it is actually a foreign nation and fully a country unto itself.

It always seems odd to find sub-continental Asians living in the far north, but I wasn’t surprised that the man operating the motel slash café slash gas station where I filled up with my first tank of Canadian petrol was Indian. With that in mind, I misread a bumper sticker in the glass cabinet on which his cash register was placed. “There isn’t one single mosque on the Alaska Highway,” was how I read it. That’s odd, I thought. Upon further inspection, mosque was really mosquito.

My next stop was at a road side rest area overlooking a lake. After the other users left, I let the dogs run. There were quite certainly mosquitoes present, not one single one but swarms of them. When there was no more space to feed on my neck, they tried to fly up my nose, in my ears. I kept after the dogs, and not because they were looking to escape. I had to keep moving or be devoured.

The change from Alaska to Canada is abrupt. Immediately, the terrain was different and more to my liking, the valleys narrower and the mountains closer at hand. The sun was bright, the sky brilliant blue. CBC radio was talking about social concerns, rather than economic ones. I felt better than I had in weeks.

I was proud of Canada for having FM radio in the middle of nowhere, but it was a short lived satisfaction. The CD player in the pickup had died during Brandi's visit, and I was soon hurting for audio distraction. I played the few cassette tapes I had, and then occupied myself listening to looped weather reports on XM radio and scanning the broadcast bands every time I saw a microwave tower.

When I had driven the Highway with Cousin Tyler, I had been surprised by the amount of cell coverage along the route, and that in 2001. In Beaver Creek, I had witnessed a motorcyclist talking on his phone at the visitor center. My phone, on the other hand, hadn’t seen a scrap of signal since I left Tok. At the sight of each hulking red and white striped microwave repeater towering over the route, I powered up the device and checked for service. Each time I was greeted with the same result. Nothing.

I made numerous stops at various attractions: Pickhandle Lake, Kulane Lake, Rancheria Falls. I was shooting for a campground near Haines Junction, but when I couldn’t get a signal there even though I was staring at a young Canadian talking on his phone at the gas pump, I knew I was going to push on to Whitehorse. I topped off the pickup’s tank and bought some groceries at the local market before hitting the Highway once again.

Traveling the Alaska Highway is a journey one has to share. It overloads the senses. The more I drove, the more I longed to talk to Brandi. Huskies are great companions but they are poor conversationalists, other than Tensaw, who speaks a language all his own. Besides having become accustomed to speaking with her regularly, I needed Brandi just so I could decompress.

Whitehorse has a Starbucks. A city of twenty odd thousand, it is the territorial capital of the Yukon. Sixty-six percent of the territory’s population lives in Whitehorse, and I was certain AT&T would have coverage there. Even if they did, I didn’t.

I sent Brandi a text via email through a bootleg wifi connection scabbed off one of the local hotels. Ah, the glories of the modern age. She was emphatic that I call her, so I resorted to an ancient technology, the pay phone. It’s amazing how disconnected we have become from what used to be a fixture. I felt almost foolish standing in front of the convenience store chatting with her. Look at this bozo, I imagined the passersby saying. Backwards American doesn’t even own a cell phone.

We made camp at Wolf Creek campground just a few miles outside of town. It was a nice location, with a nature trail only steps from our site. The mosquitoes weren’t too fierce. After taking a lap out to the overlook and back, grabbing a quick bite, and strumming the pups a few tunes on the guitar, I settled into my bivy and enjoyed the fact that it was actually getting dark.