Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road

by Neil Peart

  The gravel parking lot in front was lined with cars and sport-utility vehicles bearing licence plates from South Dakota, New York, Washington, Colorado, Texas, Utah, Florida, and Alaska. Between the lodge and the lake a few tiny, weathered log cabins, maybe 12 feet square and 10 feet high, remained from a previous enterprise, and these were offered to pariah smokers like me. “Fabulous,” I wrote in my journal, and began to think seriously of staying another day. I had been afraid to consider staying in one place longer than a night, not wanting to give myself time to think too much, but in the six days since leaving the house on the lake I had covered 5,000 kilometres (3,000 miles), and apart from giving myself a rest at another house on a lake, there were practicalities to consider — I carried only six changes of socks, underwear, and T-shirts. The Northern Rockies Lodge offered guest laundry facilities; there were small motorboats for rent, hiking possibilities, and my little log cabin made an inviting sanctuary to hide away with a measure of The Macallan and a book.

  Still uncertain about the wisdom of this notion, I left the decision to the morning, which was cold (8°C [48°F]) and threatened rain. Not the kind of day that invited travel, so I made up my mind to try staying. Walking up to the lodge for breakfast, I stopped at the desk to book another night.

  The Northern Rockies Lodge was owned by a Swiss pilot named Urs and his wife Marianne, both apparently in their late 40s, and photographs on display indicated that Urs had flown for the oil company AGIP in Libya. Perhaps he had earned enough money there to buy this remote property, build the new lodge, and purchase the two float planes of Liard Air that were tied up at the dock, available for charter to sightseers and sportsmen.

  With my laundry washed and dried and rolled away again, I asked Marianne about a place to hike, and she directed me across the highway to what she called “the wash.” The morning was still cold and overcast, but I was soon warmed by the effort of climbing over the tumbled rocks, stones, and gravel at the bottom of a narrow canyon, like a glacial moraine or scree, where the snowmelt obviously came pouring down in spring. The lower part had been bulldozed into levees to channel the flow, and I scrambled over them and up into the larger boulders, following the banks of a small stream up into the ragged forest.

  A little bird called a dipper, or water ouzel, retreated ahead of me upstream, easily identifiable by its habit of ducking under the water, or “dipping,” to hunt its food of insects and small crustaceans. Seeing a new species like that was always a mild thrill for a longtime bird lover, and later that afternoon when I rented a small motorboat to tour the lake I saw a bald eagle soaring against the dark forest, and another first sighting, an Arctic loon, sleeker and lighter-colored than the common loons that lived on my lake at home. There were also slender mergansers fishing on the lake, and a large flock of small, puffin-like ducks which flew off before I was close enough to identify them.

  A brief rainshower during my boat ride made me grateful for my waterproof jacket and hat, but the clouds finally passed off to the east, leaving a rainbow and bright washes of sunlight on the barren gray peaks above the forest. When I got back to the lodge I said to Marianne at the front desk, “A place like this is supposed to be relaxing, but I’m exhausted; so much to do!”

  Exhausted I may have been, but I was also relaxed; my first day staying in one place had turned out pretty well. As always, the main thing was to keep moving; keep active, take that little baby soul for a ride. It just took will, and I knew I was always just barely hanging on to that necessary resolve. I was still overcome by tears and abject sorrow several times a day, but I tried to let those spells pass, and to avoid the hopeless tailspin of spiralling down into the abyss of memories.

  Those memories were always with me, of course, and it seemed that part of what Freud called “grief work” involved calling up and processing every memory I had of the lost ones. Every shared laugh and every harsh word had to be recalled and assigned a new, final judgement, something I could eventually feel good about, maybe, or something I would have to keep replaying in my mind, like my mental video-loop of Selena’s accident or the memory of Jackie’s last breath, until I could lay it to rest in a peaceful garden of memory.

  For some reason, as part of that grief work it also seemed necessary for me to replay every single incident of my own life, and once when I was awake in the middle of the night in a motel, stewing over these things, I tried to write it down.

  Notice in these “watches of the night,” or while riding (or anytime), pattern of torment (tormente, Spanish for storm). Not only have to relive and examine every episode of life with Jackie and Selena, but every single episode of my own life. Every embarrassment, act of foolishness, wrong-headedness, error, idiocy etc. going back to childhood and all the way forward to now.

  I physically flinch, say “ow” out loud, or “fuck,” as the case may be, and can hardly bear it. Such stupid things sometimes, but it seems my confidence, or belief in myself, or something, is so shaken, so undermined, so tenuous, that I have no tolerance, no understanding, no forgiveness: for myself or anyone else.

  No forgiveness . . .

  Without knowing it, I had identified a subtle but important part of the healing process. There would be no peace for me, no life for me, until I learned to forgive life for what it had done to me, forgive others for still being alive, and eventually, forgive myself for being alive.

  With such currents in the existential sea to swim through, a day spent in motion helped keep me afloat, forcing me to be moderately curious about my surroundings, and to concentrate on what I was doing, especially when I was riding the motorcycle and dealing with the balancing act, literally and figuratively, of its operation, the road, the weather, other traffic, the background of inspiring scenery, and the occasional glimpses of birds and animals.

  Landscapes, highways, and wildlife — my new holy trinity. From those simple elements it did seem I was finding enough to get moderately excited about, and each of those moments of Truth and Beauty was an important baby step along the Healing Road, and other strands to weave into the day’s fabric of grief and despair.

  Just as when I was alone at the house on the lake, I never felt consciously lonely, for I had always enjoyed my own company, and reading had always served as a diversion, escape, and solace for me. I did notice that I was doing a lot of journal writing, which made for a kind of companion during solitary meals, and I had also been uncharacteristically active on the telephone, calling two or three friends or family members every day, and that was very unlike me.

  Or at least, it was very unlike the fool I used to be.

  “Mr. Gregarious,” I laughed at myself in my journal.

  Probably good for me, though. I do find I’m talking to myself fairly often, which makes me laugh (crazy old coot). But that’s okay. Just watch it!

  Fortune is random — fate shoots from the hip

  I know you get crazy, but try not to lose your grip

  NEUROTICA, 1991

  Chapter 3

  NORTH TO INUVIK

  The point of the journey

  Is not to arrive —

  Anything can happen

  PRIME MOVER, 1987

  Parking my motorcycle in front of a motel at the end of a long day on the road could certainly be sweet, like finally exhaling after holding my breath all day, but best of all was setting out in the morning. Whatever torments the night had brought; whatever weather the new day threw at me, when I loaded up the bike and swung my leg over the saddle, my whole perspective changed. Focus tightened into the mechanics and mentality of operating the machine, and awareness contracted to that demanding paradigm. As I let in the clutch and turned the throttle, my world-view expanded as I moved into a whole new paradigm of landscapes, highways, and wildlife. Infinite possibilities.

  Travel writers often feel compelled to try to explain and justify the difference between being a tourist and being a traveller. They cite the etymology of “travel” in the French word travail, labor, and poin
t out that any independent journey outside the well-worn tourist routes requires extreme will and endurance simply to keep moving forward. One of the most indefatigable of serious travellers, Paul Theroux, explains that after one of his journeys, he hasn’t had a vacation; he needs a vacation. But for most of his readers, the “armchair travellers,” it’s only the vicarious, pristine experience they want to share, not the unhygienic, exhausting reality.

  The solitary traveller is frequently invested by others with an aura of romance, myth, and desire. So many people feel trapped in the workaday predictability of their lives, and their frustrations and dissatisfactions can be simultaneously stimulated and soothed by a non-specific fantasy of “getting away.” But like all fantasies, this dream vision remained free of consequences, and that alone was the deep, cold distinction between fantasy and reality: No consequences.

  Watching a movie or reading a novel might make you feel sad, or frightened, or inspired, but at the end of that experience, nothing has actually happened in your life. The experiences of real life were not like that, as I had certainly come to know. The fantasy image of a free spirit drifting without care or effort through some IMAX movie of breathtaking scenery not only ignored the darker possibilities (breakdown, accident, injury, death), it also omitted the simple joy-killers of bad weather, indigestion, toothache, or diesel in your fuel tank. Anything can happen, and scenery is never “neutral.”

  So if I always felt a quiet thrill as I set off into the mysteries of a new day, it was often tempered by such realities, both potential and immediate. Leaving Muncho Lake before 6:00 on a chilly, overcast morning, for example, the danger was potential, but the cold was immediate. I wore my full foul-weather outfit of long underwear under the armored leather suit, heated vest and handgrips on full, thin balaclava under my full-face helmet, and the plastic rainsuit over it all to help shield me from the cruel wind.

  A different journey was beginning as I left behind the relatively secure environment of highways and cities and struck off into remote areas of rough roads and widely scattered little settlements. From that day on, I felt less like a traveller and more like an adventurer (or misadventurer), for I was very much aware that out here the consequences of “pilot error” or accident were increasingly severe. Fear was my co-pilot, and there was much to worry about now, in both imagination and reality.

  Highway construction, or rather deconstruction, was the day’s first obstacle. When I saw the pavement ending at a long stretch of soft-looking dirt, I held myself tense and breathless as my wheels plowed into the deep, heavy morass of ruts that could so easily knock me down. For several miles my eyes were fixed on nothing but the brown dirt approaching my wheels, steering toward the more packed-down areas as smoothly as I could, easy on the brakes, easy on the gas, balance, balance, balance.

  Then came the day’s first reward. As I crossed a bridge high above the wide Liard River, I glanced down and saw something large and dark in the middle of the water. It seemed to be swimming across, trailing a vee-shaped wake of silver, so I slowed down for a better look. At first it resembled a cow, but that seemed unlikely, so I decided it was probably a moose, and I slowed even more, then put my feet down and stopped to watch. As the dark mass reached the far shore and climbed up on the bank, my eyes widened as I saw that it was a huge black bear, shaking itself and lumbering off into the forest.

  The characteristic birds of the far north were the ravens flapping heavily across the gray sky, and occasionally a spruce grouse standing dumbly at the roadside. The morning seemed gradually to brighten a little, and I began to hope that some solar warmth might ease my shivering, but the day remained bitter.

  I stopped at a roadside clearing for a break, and as I stood looking over the expansive view of the river and its banks of green and yellow forest, a big RV pulled in behind me. Its driver, a friendly older man, came over to look at my bike, and told me he had owned a BMW in 1960, and now rode a Honda Gold Wing back home in southern Illinois. As we discussed our travels, I learned that he and his wife were on their way home from Alaska, and when I told him I was thinking of heading off the highway that day to some gravel roads, he hooked a thumb back toward the RV and said with a rueful smile, “She won’t let me leave the highway!”

  The destination I had in mind was Telegraph Creek, because . . . well, because I liked the name. I first heard of it in an article in Equinox (“The Magazine of Canadian Discovery,” now defunct, unfortunately) in which the writer had pointed out that map-makers seemed to like Telegraph Creek because it gave them a name to put on an otherwise empty region, where northern British Columbia met the Alaska Panhandle.

  The settlement had flourished briefly twice, first during the Klondike gold rush when it was the head of navigation for steamboats carrying hopeful prospectors up the Stikine River. From there, they could travel overland to the Yukon goldfields on what came to be known as “The Bughouse Trail,” its history replete with Jack London-style tales of starvation, scurvy, frostbite, and madness. The town’s second life, and the source of its name, came from an American scheme to run a telegraph cable overland through Alaska, under the Bering Strait, and across Russia to connect with Europe, but shortly after the surveying was completed the project was rendered pointless by the laying of the transatlantic cable. Telegraph Creek once again lapsed into a virtual ghost town, and the only present-day visitors seemed to be attracted by boat, raft, and kayaking expeditions on the Stikine River. Or by the name.

  Another siren-call for me was the romantic lure of an isolated, storied destination which lay “at the end of the road.” Telegraph Creek was a dot on the map at the end of a long unpaved road, far from anywhere, the kind of place Brutus and I used to dream about exploring (in fact, it was Brutus, in a recent telephone conversation, who had urged me to go there). The guidebooks disagreed on whether I would have to navigate 74 miles or 74 kilometres of that road, but they agreed that it was “rough” and “often treacherous.” In fact it turned out to be 112 kilometres (near enough 74 miles) of dirt and gravel winding through deep forest and steep switchbacks up and down the walls of “The Grand Canyon of the Stikine.” In some places, the sheer cliffs of eroded, multi-layered rock did resemble a modest version of that famed stretch of the Colorado River, and sometimes the road was a mere ledge perched on those vertical walls, dropping off into a frightening abyss.

  My journal described it as a “scary, scary road,” and I was fairly rattled when I pulled up in front of the Stikine Riversong café, general store, lodge, and boat-tour headquarters. All this was housed in one large white frame building facing the swift-moving river, and I learned later that it had been the original Hudson’s Bay Company trading post, situated just downriver, and had been moved piece by piece to Telegraph Creek. A few other abandoned-looking houses and a small church clustered on the river bank, but only the Riversong showed any signs of life.

  The guidebooks said that a few rooms were available there, but if they happened to be filled it would be a long way back to any other lodgings. The cold, gloomy weather made the idea of camping uninviting, but once again I was glad to be carrying my little tent and sleeping bag, especially when the owner told me he was closing for the weekend and taking the staff upriver in his tour boat to celebrate the end of their season. Then, after a moment’s thought, he said that I was welcome to rent one of the rooms and stay there on my own. That was thoughtful, hospitable, and trusting of him, and I only asked what I might do for food. He told me there was a kitchen upstairs where I could prepare my own meals, so I bought a few provisions in the general store in the back of the building, including some fresh salmon from the river, and carried my bags to a small bedroom upstairs.

  I watched through the café window as the owner and his three employees loaded their camping gear into the motor boat, and my only regret was missing the opportunity for a tour of the river myself. I stood on the riverbank and watched the boat speed away upriver against the strong current, and felt a little excited, and
a little fearful.

  Apparently the only other enterprise, Trina Anne Excursions, was also abandoned for the weekend, so the only living souls in town were the Mountie and his wife at the RCMP post at the other end of town. (Because the Stikine River flowed down to the Alaskan town of Wrangell, Telegraph Creek was a kind of frontier outpost between the two countries.) I was virtually alone in my own private ghost town, watching the river flow.

  Upstairs in the empty old building the silence seemed almost oppressive, and only accentuated by the amazingly creaky floors as I walked around between my small bedroom at the front, the shared bathroom, and the common area of kitchen and sitting room. On the payphone I called my friend and colleague, Alex, on his birthday, and he was pleased to hear from me, though a little bemused by my tale of where I was calling from. The delay on the line made me feel even more like a voice from the wilderness. Vox clamatis in deserto.

  As I wrote in my journal, “Well, I’ve fetched up in some strange places in my travels, and some places that were a serious adventure to get to, but this . . . this is one of them.”

  I slept soundly with my window open to the cool, fresh air and the murmuring of the river, and took a walk before breakfast on another chilly, overcast morning. Past ruined cabins and abandoned, moss-covered cars and pickups from the 1950s, a narrow path led up a high, lava-rock cliff above a steep scree to an old graveyard overlooking the town. As I walked among the stones reading the inscriptions, the bare facts of names and dates had a whole new resonance for me, for I felt them as part of a story like mine, a story of love and loss. I thought about “Honey Joe,” who had died at the age of 105 and was buried beside “Mrs. Joe,” who he had outlived by 40 years. Then there were all the babies, children, teenagers, and young men and women, and I found myself weeping for all the lost ones, theirs and mine. Ghost town indeed.