Road Fever

by Tim Cahill

  * * *

  THE YUKON RIVER flowed below steep banks, and it was not yet completely frozen over. Blocks of water-driven ice piled up on the sandbars and sparkled under the sun. There was a large hangar-sized building fronting a trailer-park hotel. Garry got diesel and I went into the hangar, which was a café, and ordered some food to go.

  There was a radiophone on my table. A sign said it would cost $3 to call Fairbanks and $2 a minute after that. Another sign above the phone cautioned me not to bring any fox carcasses back from above the Arctic Circle due to a rabies scare. I picked up a newspaper, which was, I saw, published by and for Christian truck drivers. There was a picture of a bunch of Christian truck drivers dedicating an orphanage somewhere in Oklahoma.

  My bill for two turkey sandwiches, four Pepsis, and a thermos full of coffee was $22. The waitress, I saw, was reading a book about missionaries in Bolivia. The book was in Spanish and entitled Commandos for Christ.

  The bridge across the Yukon was a sturdy wooden affair, nearly half a mile long. It had been built in 1975. Before that, Hovercraft had been used to ferry goods across the river.

  The road began to rise up along shallow slopes and drop into huge and entirely unpopulated valleys, filled with snow. The slopes were labeled for the truckers: Sand Hill, Roller Coaster, Gobblers Knob. Occasionally, we would pull over for another one of the highballing trucks. Some of them were doing eighty over the smooth hard-packed snow.

  A hundred miles north of the Yukon, we crossed the Arctic Circle and felt that we had truly come up in the world. The trees were gnomish and twisted. The pipeline, a huge metal monstrosity balanced on six-foot-high metal sawhorse stilts, ran along the right side of the road. From the higher points, I could see it rolling over lower snowy ridges, headed north.

  Then, perhaps forty miles later, we had our first views of the Brooks Range. The mountains were shrouded in swirling silver clouds and looked darkly ominous. This range is a northern extension of the Rockies, the last major mountains in the United States to be mapped and explored.

  It was four-thirty, and we had been driving with our lights on all day, because that is the law, but now we needed them. The sun, which had not risen very high in the sky anyway, was rolling south along the horizon. In another month, this land north of the Arctic Circle would undergo several weeks of twilight, and then the sun would finally set and darkness would own the land.

  A light snow began to fall. The mountains to our right were great stone monoliths, so steep that the snow did not cling to their sheer slopes. The road was white, the land was white, the falling snow was white. Everything was white except for the sheerest rock slopes, which seemed to hover over the road, as if rock could float.

  “We are,” Garry said, “about halfway to Prudhoe.”

  We thought about that. It had been a halfway trip. Lima is halfway through South America. Managua is halfway through the total drive. Edmonton is halfway from Dallas to Prudhoe Bay.

  “Another hundred miles,” Garry pointed out, “and we’ll be halfway through this last half.”

  We passed Disaster Creek and there seemed to be no check station. We were driving through a forest of small, stunted spruce trees. The branches on these trees were short and stubby, so that they looked like bottle washers. And then the forest gave up and we passed the last tree, the most northerly spruce on the Dalton Highway.

  It was five o’clock, but the sun was still hovering slightly above the horizon and sometimes I could see it through the lightly falling snow: a dim silvery ball balanced on a snowy ridgetop.

  We were making good time, running between two ranges of mountains, and then the road began its long convoluted climb into the Brooks Range. The snowpack was heavily sanded and we didn’t need four-wheel drive.

  The never-ending twilight was an alabaster glow to the south. Snow, dry and powdery, had been falling for hours, but here, in the mountains, wind sent it howling across the road so that it seemed to be falling horizontally. The peaks above us were white and rolling and rounded: the polar version of desert sand dunes.

  There was a danger of vertigo because it was difficult to distinguish the white snow-packed road from the falling snow or the alabaster sky; it was hard to distinguish the mountains above from the drop-offs below. We were closed in on all sides by variations in white. There was a bluish tinge to the snow-sculpted peaks, and a chalky, mother-of-pearl quality to the sky. The world was all a permutation of ice.

  There was a check station at the summit of what seemed to be the continental divide. We stopped and a man checked the permit, listened to our story, and came out of the building to take a photograph of the filthy truck parked in the cold silver Arctic twilight.

  And then we were plunging down the north slope of the Brooks Range, running slowly in first gear, past signs that read, unnecessarily I thought, ICY.

  IT WAS NEARLY SEVEN and not completely dark. The great plain ahead sloped down toward the frozen sea. The snow was only a foot deep, so that tufts of brown grasses and hummocky red tussocks punctuated the plain. There were no trees at all.

  The snowpack had given way to gravel and we could make good time. Even so, every once in a while, a kamikaze trucker blew by us, and the pebbles he threw off pitted our windshield with half a dozen stars.

  The mountains formed a vast horseshoe around the plain. We followed the course of the Sagavanirktok River as it fell toward the Beaufort Sea. The road was not nearly so flat as it had looked from the mountains. The land rose and fell like ocean swells.

  The snow had ceased to fall, the sky had cleared, but now a heavy wind out of the east sent a low ground blizzard swirling across the Dalton Highway. At seven-forty there was a final streak of light, far to the south, and then it was dark. Directly ahead, to the north, hanging above the highway, a star appeared. I looked up and there were stars all over the sky. They seemed to pulsate with a kind of swirling crystalline clarity that I imagined was unique to the Arctic.

  But no, it was fatigue and eyestrain. Every object I looked at—the illuminated compass on the dashboard, the notepad on the sucker-board, everything—seemed to have a small haloed aura around it. In my eyes, the polar night was alive with van Gogh stars.

  WE WERE HALFWAY THROUGH the last half of the drive, about one hundred miles from Prudhoe Bay. It was time for a coffee party. I poured us both a cup from the thermos full of Yukon River coffee, then doctored it with an appropriate amount of South American instant. Roto coffee.

  “Oh man,” Garry said. “The beginning and the end were spectacular.”

  “Those mountains out of Ushuaia.”

  “And now that pass over the Brooks Range,” Garry said. “What’s it called?”

  “Atigun Pass.”

  “That’s the most spectacular thing I ever saw in my life.”

  At 8:06 in the evening of our twenty-third night, a thin pillar of pale green light, like the beam of a colossal spotlight, shot up through the van Gogh stars. It faded, then two more rays fanned out from the north and east. The northern lights—the Inuit people call them Spirit Lights—moved across the sky like luminous smoke.

  There was a faint ruby tinge at the periphery of the major displays. Ahead, there was another faint glow on the horizon: the lights of Prudhoe Bay, forty miles in the distance.

  “This is nice,” Garry said.

  “More fun than that fog in southern Peru.”

  “More fun than a pit search.”

  We were going to come in, in under twenty-four days. In our minds, we were already there, and we found ourselves throwing out references, words, and names that wouldn’t mean much to anyone else in the world at that moment. We owned these words, these images:

  Zippy.

  Pedro.

  The Atacama.

  Santiago and Luis.

  The dune buggy from hell.

  The Mountain of Death.

  Igor and the Cyclops.

  Atigun Pass.

  Spirit Lights over the Arctic plain.


  AND THEY ARCHED OVER US like a benediction, the Spirit Lights.

  The first building we saw was a guard station that led into Standard’s oil fields. It was a small building with windows on all sides because the road ran around it in two lanes. There were four security guards inside. They wore blue pants, bluejackets, light-blue shirts, and blue ties.

  We parked off the road and I checked my watch and calendar. We had driven from Dallas to Prudhoe Bay in a little under eighty-five hours. Three and a half days. We jogged stiffly over to the shack. The night was bitterly cold and we were wearing the clothes we had put on for the press conference in Dallas. Over those we wore our filthy diesel-soaked jackets that were sick of talking with Korean tires.

  Everything we wore needed to be burned. We probably did not look like good security risks. The guards regarded us with some suspicion until we asked them to, please, sign our logbook.

  “Hey,” one of the men asked, “are you the guys trying to set that record?”

  We admitted that we were.

  “There’s a guy from Popular Mechanics looking for you,” the man said. “He flew in yesterday with a photographer. There’s a film crew here, too.”

  “Could you, uh, please sign the logbook?” Garry asked. “Please put the time and date in there. The, uh, the clock is still running.”

  The guards conferred among themselves and decided that it was precisely 10:13 on the night of October 22. All four signed our logbook.

  And the clock stopped.

  Factoring in the five-hour time change from our starting point in Ushuaia, it had taken us twenty-three days, twenty-two hours, and forty-three minutes to drive from the tip of South America to the edge of the frozen Beaufort Sea in Alaska.

  Garry caught my eye. “Another victory,” we said in ragged tandem, “for man and machine against time and the elements.”

  The men in the blue jackets seemed to be amused by our condition.

  “So,” one of the guards said, “you guys think you got this record?”

  We said that we did.

  “Where did you start?”

  “Tierra del Fuego, at the tip of South America.”

  “How many countries did you go through?”

  “Thirteen,” I said.

  “How many miles?”

  We hadn’t figured it out, but it was somewhere near fifteen thousand.

  “And how long,” one of the guards asked, “did all that take you?”

  “It took,” Garry replied (and I could tell that he just purely loved saying these numbers), “twenty-three days, twenty-two hours, and forty-three minutes.”

  The guard stared at us, as if amazed. “What’d you guys do,” he asked, “walk?”

  AFTERWORD

  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

  JERZY ADAMUSZEK failed to answer any letters and we were never able to locate him. He may have dropped off the face of the earth.

  The 1988 Guinness Book of World Records accepted Prince Pierre D’ Arenberg’s documentation. He held the record, fifty-six days, for the drive Garry Sowerby and I made in well under half that time.

  The book, however, had gone to press while we were on the road. In 1989, the editors awarded a distinguished international team of endurance drivers that record. There was even a picture of the distinguished team in the 1989 edition: two men in dirty clothes standing by their vehicle and looking, I suppose, reasonably heroic. The caption under the photo was extremely poetic. It read:

  “Longest drive south to north: Garry Sowerby and Tim Cahill drove this car from the southern tip of South America to the northern edge of Alaska (with one detour by water) in less than twenty-four days, Sept. 29 to Oct. 22, 1987.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Tim Cahill is the author of six previous books, including A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, and Pass the Butterworms. He is an editor at large for Outside magazine, and his work appears in National Geographic Adventure, The New York Times Book Review, and other national publications. He lives in Montana.

  AVAILABLE FROM VINTAGE BOOKS

  PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS

  by Tim Cahill

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  Roaming the Underground Wilderness

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