Taking the Long Way Home

There is a lot to be said about the journey, but sometimes it is only a prelude to the rest of the story. The beauty of an expedition is that, unlike the journey through life, we know where it begins, which direction it will take us, and, most importantly, where it ends. That sense of certainty allows us the luxury of having time to smell the roses. Conversely, our lack of that knowledge is what makes it so difficult to do so in life.

The road from Fort Nelson, British Columbia, to Edmonton, Alberta, passes through the heart of Canadian oil country. It is a pleasant enough path, if you don’t mind the constant reminders. As I was being conveyed across two thousand miles by an internal combustion engine, I wasn’t about to point any accusatory fingers at the oil pump jacks, natural gas wells, pipelines, or refineries. And though not particularly attractive, it was actually a pretty awesome sight.

I took a break in Fort Nelson and had a real sit down meal at the Fort Nelson Hotel. The café offered free internet access, so I surfed around a bit, wrote Brandi, and updated my status on Facebook. After lunch I strolled down to the office of the local telecom provider. When I asked if he had any insight as to why my phone didn’t work, a young man there informed me that I would have to wait until I got a bit closer to the States. Although frustrating at the time, this was a good thing I later learned upon receiving my bill.

There were “Caution: Bear in Area” signs posted throughout the campground at Charlie Lake where we stopped for the night. I weaved the dogs’ leashes into a makeshift gangline and walked the nature trail down to the lake. I soon discovered three dog power is quite a bit more than one human power. When we twice encountered other dogs along the path, it was all I could do to hold the huskies back. Being isolated in the truck canopy had taken its toll on them, and they were anxious for interaction. Tensaw showed particularly poor form, tangling himself in the leads while performing howling backflips.

Having backpacked solo for years, I don’t own a tent, preferring the weight savings of a space blanket bivy. Made nervous by the bear signs, I had arranged my sleeping gear directly behind the truck and left the canopy door open while I slept, thinking that the dogs would warn me of any animal’s approach. I realized my error when I awoke in a terror, mindlessly leaping to my feet after feeling a paw upon my back. The dogs were tearing through the underbrush. It took a few seconds before I understood they weren’t after a bear, and that what I had felt was one of them landing on me as they launched themselves after some rodent. I collected my wits along with the dogs and shuttered them inside the truck before drifting off to sleep once more.

The following morning I drove the short distance into Fort St. John. Finally having found its voice, my cell phone made quite racket as it was inundated by a deluge of pending messages. I phoned Brandi and reveled in the fact that I could once again contact her at my leisure.

My next stop was the end of the line, sort of. Officially, the Alaska Highway has its beginnings in Dawson Creek, BC. I stopped there for some time, taking pictures of the dogs at the welcome sign like a true tourist. I talked to Brandi through her lunch break and felt my feelings about the journey pass through a metamorphosis. I wasn’t driving the Alaska Highway anymore. I was driving home.

Long periods behind the wheel were beginning to wear me down, so the dogs and I took every opportunity to stretch our legs. They were beginning to lose interest in obeying my commands; at a park outside of Grande Prairie, they assaulted a group of picnicking locals. A stop at Williamson Provincial Park was assured, but Blue lost her privilege to walk off leash almost immediately. As the day wore on, I looked more and more fondly upon the prospect of halting travel for the day.

The map showed numerous campgrounds on the road between Valleyview and Whitecourt, but somehow I missed them all. Panicking slightly, I turned south on a minor route and drove to a campground on the McLeod River. A sign at the entrance informed me that it was full. Distraught, I again checked my map. The nearest campground was another thirty kilometers away.

A call from Brandi helped check my disappointment and I wandered down a rural route towards Pembina River Provincial Park. It was nearly full as well, and I was extremely fortunate to find a campsite. The dogs had finally lost it and threw themselves against their tieouts as I tried to feed them. Exhausted, I threw myself on the ground and slept hard.

It was early when I pulled into Edmonton the next morning. I knew the West Edmonton Mall would be closed at this hour but I wanted to witness it anyway. From the outside, it was less impressive than I imagined. I bought a cup of coffee at Starbucks to help ease myself back into civilization before braving the four lane south.

Mapquest told me the quickest path to Hamilton was down I-15 through Helena. By the time I made Calgary, I was beginning to have my doubts about the route. The wind was howling off the east slope of the Rockies, and I swear my hand was bruised from gripping the steering wheel against the gale. When I stopped for fuel in Nanton, I’d had enough. I turned the truck west into the mountains.

I had been eyeing Fernie since the beginning of the trip. For some reason, I knew I was going there all along. My plan was to call my buddy JP when I arrived; if I reached him, I would push on to Eureka. If not, I would get a room in Fernie and clean up some before setting out on the final leg.

One nice thing about being an American traveling in Canada is that all the distances along the roadside are displayed in kilometers, and our minds think in miles. The klicks ticked by much quicker than miles did. I was in Fernie before I knew it, with the added benefit that the drive over Crowsnest Pass was much prettier than the plains had been.

Johnny Paul didn’t answer at first, but he soon called me back. After the vast distance I’d already traveled, the hop, skip, and jump to the port at Roosville was over in a flash. The jackbooted customs agent tried his best to be antagonistic, but his heart wasn’t in it. He fondled my passport for a while before glumly waving me through.

Although not quite home, I was back in Montana, and on the Kootenai no less. The night spent with Des and JP made for a good transition, and we spent it in our typical fashion, ranting about the Forest Service while my huskies jousted with his retrievers. When I left there in the morning I got a bit off track and wound up following a logging road the back way to Trego. This unplanned side trip timed my arrival in Whitefish perfectly.

Brandi was at Flathead Lake, camped on Wild Horse Island doing field research. We made plans to meet at Big Arm State Park where her boat would land. I stopped at Elmo and let the dogs have a good long run, preparing myself for the reunion with her.

Her boat was late, which was good, because it gave the butterflies in my stomach a chance to calm down some. Brandi always gives me butterflies. These ones were in a particular frenzy after two thousand miles, but when she leapt from the boat and tore up the dock to greet me, they completely disappeared.

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.

Searching for Montana in the heart of Alaska

Nothing in life is the way you think it will be. No matter how diligently you strive to draft a perfect blueprint in your mind, the truth of the matter is rarely an exact replica of what you had envisioned. Seldom do even our best estimations ever amount to anything more than a close approximation.

Sometimes our imaginations lead us to be disappointed by reality, sometimes it comes as a pleasant surprise. Though it can often be frustrating, that is actually one of the beauties in life. Mystery is inherent to the human experience. How much fun would life really be if we already knew what was waiting for us around every corner, or could see what our gift was without first having to unwrap it?

I had always held a romantic view of Alaska. Like many, I was of the opinion that if things ever became exceedingly hectic in the Lower 48, there was always Alaska to run to. I imagined this incredible wilderness where a person could go and still find room to carve out an existence with little more than two hands. I maintained a belief that Alaska was the last bastion of pioneer spirit, the culmination of America's great trail of westward expansion, and in many ways it is.

All idealistic illusions aside, one thing is certain: Alaska is the end of the road, and that road is the Alaska Highway. Commissioned by the United States Army during the early part of World War Two, it continues to be the most amazing feat of highway construction ever accomplished. Its tales could fill volumes, and already have.

Officially, the ALCAN spans one thousand three hundred ninety miles from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to Delta Junction, Alaska. In reality, it extends the length of Interstate 15 clear on to Fairbanks, passing through the Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, and the Yukon Territory along the way. It is one of the world’s most magnificent drives, and the road trip of a lifetime for many an intrepid adventurer.

Tok is the first American town on the Alaska Highway, and the road is the community's lifeline. A desolate ghost town when I arrived in February, Tok was a bustle of activity by mid-May. Fast Eddy’s was swamped. A literal army of tourists swarmed the cluster of gas pumps, RV parks, and motels that comprise the city center. They streamed along the Alaska Highway like a string of marching ants.

My original itinerary for the trip south called for another sailing on the Alaska Marine Highway ferry system, from the port of Whittier on the Kenai Peninsula near Anchorage back to Bellingham, WA. The “trifecta”, as Brandi calls it, of minor offenses I have acquired over the years effectively makes me criminally inadmissible to Canada, if you read the literature, which is in part why I chose to ride the ferry north in the first place. Still, passage during the peak of summer tourist season is expensive, and the sailing was scheduled to last ten long days. With that in mind, the ribbon of pavement extending southeast from Tok towards Montana had begun to appear terribly inviting, even after having factored in the poor exchange rate and the high cost of Canadian petrol. The border crossing was only ninety miles away. The worst that could happen was that I would get turned around and be forced to drive back to Tok. If that indeed was the case, I could still catch the ferry as planned, so there was no way I could lose, really. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I woke up early on Father’s Day. After a final sweep of the cabin to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything, I loaded up the huskies and said my goodbyes. Leaving any place always contains its share of sorrow, especially if the experience was meaningful. Never would I forget this place or the things that I went through here. In my heart, I wanted to be back in Montana more than anything and I knew there was no way I was going to stay. Still, I couldn’t help but notice the subtle sense of mourning that settled over me as I closed the cabin door and drove down the drive.

Alaska was everything I thought it could be, and a million other things besides. Turns out, however, that I am not who I thought I was. Places, experiences, relationships; they all reveal things about ourselves we never would have realized otherwise. I didn’t go to Alaska to learn anything about Alaska. Seems I went to Alaska to find out that what I came looking for was back home in Montana.