by Brian Keenan
Valdez is located at the end of the Valdez Arm, a long, narrow, curving fjord that reaches in from Prince William Sound. It reputedly has the most beautiful natural setting of any town in Alaska, mountains curving round it on three sides as if they had just shot up out of the sea. It is affectionately known to some as ‘the Switzerland of Alaska’.
In 1964 a huge earthquake seriously damaged the city of Anchorage over one hundred miles away. The result of this event in Valdez had been more drastic, for the quake was followed by a huge tidal wave that destroyed the town, claiming more than forty lives. It was subsequently rebuilt three miles from its former location. The job had obviously been done in a hurry without any thought for the magnificent scenery in which it sat, for the new Valdez was an unpretty mishmash of prefab homes, acres of trailer parks and the remnants of barracks-style housing erected by the oil-line contractors to house their workers and their families.
Apart from being the terminal port of the oil from Prudhoe Bay, eight hundred miles away on the Beaufort Sea in the extreme north of arctic Alaska, Valdez’s other claim to fame is that in 1889 it was the site of the first hanging ever to take place in Alaska. A prospector named ‘Doc’ Tanner, who murdered his two partners in a drunken brawl, was reported to have declared, with the noose already around his neck, ‘Gentlemen, you are hanging the best man with a six-shooter that ever came to Alaska.’ While driving through the small town in search of the terminal booking office I thought that the planners who designed new Valdez should have suffered the same fate as ‘Doc’ Tanner, for their crime was just as heinous.
There were plenty of fishing boats in the harbour and their multicoloured hulls and superstructures made a picturesque contrast to the backdrop of snow-capped mountains and steely-blue sky. The salmon had not quite started to run yet so, like the town itself, they bobbed idly on the water.
The evening before our ferry departed I called in to some of the bars. They had a smart seventies look about them and had the appearance of a downtown bar in Manhattan. Obviously they were a hangover from the days when Valdez was full of construction and oil executives. But now that the pipeline was complete and the oil flowed into waiting tankers at the rate of a thousand barrels a day, the executives with their need for familiar comforts rarely came here. The bars were mostly empty, a few customers glaring at the three or four TVs that blared out, each of them tuned to a different channel. The noise drove me back out. Kennicott and McCarthy had been empty too, but even though Valdez had a hundred times more people living in it those ghost towns had more sense of life about them than this sterile terminal town.
The last bar I called in to was a bit outside the centre of the town. It was more like a trucker’s café than a bar, and it had a lot more customers. They were all men, and none of them had the appearance or spoke the language of the boardroom. It was easy to start up a conversation. I was an early tourist, and coming from Ireland made me something of a rare bird. When I explained to a few men drinking shots of whiskey with occasional beer chasers that I intended to travel through the state for three or four months they were even more impressed. When I introduced a few more details about my travel plans I found myself amazed at just how little experience they had had of anywhere off the state highway system. Some of them had worked seasonally at Prudhoe Bay; some had been drivers on the five-hundred-mile ‘haul road’ from Fairbanks to Deadhorse in the far north, the supply town to the oilfield at Prudhoe; but the oil industry was no longer the huge employer it had been. With the completion of the pipeline the demand for labour had been vastly reduced. The men were picking up work where they could, mostly in fish processing or timber felling, but such industries were vulnerable to seasonal conditions and a variable economy. There was little indigenous industry to keep any of them employed permanently from year to year. As one of them jokingly remarked, ‘This is the take-out state. Everything Alaska produces is shipped out in its raw state and processors down the line make the big bucks. Oil, gold, fish, copper, timber – it’s all shipped out.’ The man wasn’t angry, he was simply stating the obvious. When I asked him why he didn’t move to the lower 48 for work, he answered in the same tone that life was different here and that there were plenty of compensations. In any case, he had no intention of working 365 days a year somewhere he neither liked nor could afford just to keep the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) in business. All of his friends were of the same opinion, and, I had to admit, so was I.
I told them I had just arrived in town after spending some time up in the mountains at Kennicott. They showed some surprise, but when I informed them that I was leaving my family in Anchorage to travel into the Arctic regions to live with the Athabascans for a week or so, they said I was both very wise and very foolish. It was wise to leave my family as my wife would most certainly have left me after a few days in an Indian village, and foolish because anyone who chose to go and live out in the Arctic wilderness was plainly insane and would probably not return. I laughed along with my new-found friends, hiding some unresolved anxieties about my intentions.
At least these men were open and friendly and there was no sign of any of the hostility I had felt en route to Valdez. I asked one of them who seemed genuinely interested about where I was travelling, and more importantly why, about the burned-out encampment and the unprovoked hostility from the petrol-station attendant. At first he was dismissive, then evasive; he said he had heard something about the camp and that it was probably a forest fire. But I explained that the teepees were erected well away from the tree line and, significantly, they were only partially destroyed. A forest fire would have razed everything to the ground. There had been several items left untouched as well, as if the occupants had left in a hurry and chosen not to return to collect them. He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘It’s bad country out there, and they just don’t like strangers.’
‘Come on,’ I said, letting him know I wasn’t satisfied, ‘they have to not like strangers for a reason.’
One of the other drinkers cut across before his friend could answer. ‘Some people out there just don’t need a reason. They have their own ways of doing things.’ He finished abruptly, and I could see he was serious and was already looking for a way of explaining what he meant.
The man I had first been talking to saved him the effort. ‘A lot of weird people go to live in settlements back off the road. Some of them are the families of homesteaders who might be too poor to be sociable. But there’s a lot of others who come up from the States to make a new life for themselves. The trouble is, most of them have a strange set of beliefs. Have you heard of the expression “the Churchers, the Birchers and the Searchers”?’
I shook my head.
‘There are a lot of cults that arrive in Alaska to set themselves up away from the kind of attention they would get in their own home states. Some of them are religious groups who call themselves Christian but who hold pretty extreme opinions and don’t want any involvement with the world of sinners like you and me. Then there are the Birchers. You ever heard of the John Birch Society?’
I had, and answered, ‘Some kind of extreme-right-wing white supremacist anti-communist organization that wants to create a new republic of America. Something like the lost tribe of Israel, the Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan and the Archangel Gabriel all rolled into one.’ My exaggeration silenced a few of the company. Obviously they weren’t members of the secret society, but I got the feeling that I might just be standing ever so slightly on some-one’s holy cows.
But my friend continued. ‘Then of course you have the freaks and hippies and long-haired weirdos who just want to do their own thing their own way.’ He stopped to think for a moment. ‘If you think about it, that is the strangest bunch of believers to be let loose in the wilderness. Basically, they can’t stand each other. The longer they have been out there the worse their fanaticism gets. There’s real bad blood out there, and some very ugly and very nasty things have happened to some people. The police are never invited in to
investigate, and like your friend in McCarthy told you, they don’t much want to go anyway.’ He turned to me, as if something had just struck him. ‘You know, you were pretty damn lucky at that gas station. There was a time when a black family travelling in an RV like yourselves was refused service. The guy made a bit of a fuss about the matter and the whole thing got so out of hand that state troops had to be brought in. The man should have said nothing and driven on. He was lucky he and his family got away alive. There are more than a few stories of babies being burned in their beds and dead John Does turning up that no-one out there knows anything about – or so they say.’
Had I not driven through that place and seen and experienced the things I did, I would have put the story down to tall tales for the tourist. But I had no cause to disbelieve my companion and lots of circumstantial evidence to back up what he had told me. I took a long sip of my beer, then turned to my informant and remarked, ‘And you think I’m insane for going to live with the Arctic Indians!’
The Haul Road
En route to the Arctic I stayed over in Fairbanks for a few days. I was beginning to think of the place as home. People lived here in this bush town not because it was the last city from here to Siberia but because they chose to. To me it was still a place of choice, whereas Anchorage was a city of settlement. Anchorage functioned in response to everything else and was there because of what happened beyond its precincts; Fairbanks had no precincts, but millions and millions of square acres of unimaginable emptiness, and people chose to live there because of that, regardless of the reasons that had brought them there.
But history in Fairbanks was yesterday, far too recent to bother about. Everyone here was more interested in today and getting ready for tomorrow, and that became my own preoccupation. A couple of days were spent rummaging through car-boot sales. There seemed to be several of them every day in the town. At one of these I procured a small two-man tent for the same amount of dollars. ‘Why spend serious money on expensive equipment that I might use for only a few weeks?’ I thought to myself. A few visits to the army surplus stores yielded groundsheets, mosquito netting and a lightweight rucksack; at the Meyers supermarket I purchased quantum supplies of insect repellent. I borrowed a sleeping bag, water boots, torches and batteries, and I quickly realized the necessity of having friends here. Pat’s statement weeks ago that you needed lots of stuff in Alaska was proving true. I carefully ticked things off the list as I acquired them, wondering where I was going to keep it all after returning from my trip. I now had enough baggage for the four of us, and being the inveterate archivist of exotic but utterly useless ephemera that I am, my travels were already threatening to burden me beyond Audrey’s endurance. I could hear her voice even now: ‘The reason, Brian, why you can’t find anything in this RV is because it is so full of the rubbish you insist on collecting!’ I could only agree with her, but little did she or I know what was to come.
Anyone learns within hours of arriving in Fairbanks that there are only two ways to head north: either take the ‘haul road’ (the Dalton highway) some four hundred miles to the Prudhoe Bay or fly into any accessible destination in the bush. Driving the haul road in some great behemoth of a multi-ton truck appealed to me the way flying in a tiny two-seater aircraft, exposed to any and every elemental outrage, didn’t. But it was impossible to hire any kind of vehicle to make the journey on the Dalton highway. No company, big or small, would permit any of their vehicles to drive on this road, for the term ‘highway’ is an exaggeration of gigantic proportions. The surface of the road is guaranteed to strip the tyres of any unsuitable vehicle in less than half an hour; if the razor-sharp shale and rock doesn’t get you, then sudden hurricane winds, temperatures ten degrees below freezing or even an oncoming truck out of control because of any of the above will. The journey is more hazardous than anything the Starship Enterprise can throw up. The haul road is not a digitally remastered adventure for the imagination, it’s for real. Its death toll and the loss and destruction of million-dollar trucks and million-dollar cargoes confirm it. It is unquestionably the world’s most extreme highway. One trucker described it as being like ‘riding on a tiger’s back, only the tiger ain’t got no muzzle on and he doesn’t want you there’. I thought such comments were good-natured bravado, but I was to learn otherwise. Superlatives in Alaska are not just colourful talk; they are colourfully expressive because sometimes it’s the only way to accommodate the truth.
I took to hanging around the haulage depots and truckers’ cafés and managed to contact a driver named ‘Tex’ O’Neill who agreed to take me along with him so I could get a taste of the Arctic wilderness before disappearing into it. Tex’s Irish ancestry was a big bonus in convincing him to accommodate me. I had been told that most truckers didn’t like carrying passengers, especially strangers. Some drivers are even superstitious about them, regarding them as a ‘Jonah’. The fact that I was researching a book on Alaska also intrigued Tex. He told me he liked books and enjoyed reading as it made his work a lot easier. I wasn’t quite sure how reading and driving a sixty-foot truck and fifty-ton trailer on the most hazardous road in the world were compatible, but I was yet to learn just how widely read Tex was.
He was approaching his ‘three score years without the extra ten’, as he put it, had been driving the Dalton for almost thirty years and was still enjoying it. But Tex was not the clichéd caricature of a hard-living, hard-driving, hard-drinking, womanizing trucker that so many movies give us. He was a tall, stocky man. The white hair on his temples contrasted with his black baseball cap. He wore the mandatory checked shirt and blue denims with his feet encased in stout working men’s boots, which he obviously took some pleasure in polishing. That feature alone marked him out from every other Alaskan male I had seen. He had an air of avuncular quiet about him which matched the slow grace of his movements as he walked or drank coffee. The man exuded deliberation and calmness, which the soft blue of his eyes seemed to emphasize.
He had moved from a small town in Texas with his parents and retinue of half a dozen brothers and sisters more than half a century ago, and though he had spent his early childhood and whole adult life in Alaska he still spoke with a marked southern drawl. He had left school early, like some of his brothers and sisters, and begun working with his father on the railroad. Even then, with the rail system still under construction, he felt there was little future for the railways. They were never going to open up Alaska the way they had done in the lower 48. ‘Even if the tracks were made of vulcanized rubber you still couldn’t bend them across this place,’ Tex observed. Like many Alaskans of his age Tex spent his early working life in a series of jobs and seasonal work for the federal government, or on heavy construction sites. He was construction foreman on the road he now drives on. ‘I figured if I built it, I should be able to drive on it better than some of the rig operators who were moving in to snatch up the big bucks the oil boom was paying.’ Tex wasn’t being boastful or dismissive, he was simply stating a fact, and after almost thirty years of making the thousand-mile round trip from his home to Deadhorse and back few would argue about his guru-like knowledge of this semi-mystical motorway. When Tex wasn’t working he supplemented his income and larder by hunting and trapping. The two or three runs a week he made on the road still allowed him time to set traps a few miles from the road in the remotest bush.
We set off from Fairbanks at six p.m. with about sixty thousand pounds of cargo inside a heated fifty-three-foot trailer. There was everything in there from mail, food and drink to tools, spare parts and drums of transmission oil. It made for bulk, but not the kind of weight Tex preferred. ‘It’s just fine for this time of year,’ he explained, ‘but in the winter, with cross gales and treacherous ice slicks, you need weight to hold you to the road like a bluebottle on flypaper.’ When I asked him if he had any preference, he matter-of-factly explained that every load was different and the weather conditions could change dramatically, especially in winter. ‘There are winds that blow th
rough the Atigun Pass that can load a slope with snow in under an hour, and the next thing you know you’re driving through a snowstorm like blind Bartimeus, and then bang, you’re nailed in your tracks by an avalanche.’
‘What do you do?’ I asked, fascinated and excited.
‘Keep the motor running and the heat pumping, light up the cab like it was the fourth of July, boil up some coffee or soup, get out a book and hope some inexperienced young driver doesn’t come ploughing into you, panicked by the weather.’
‘Does it happen a lot?’
‘Not much now,’ he conceded. ‘Truckers keep in constant communication by CB radio, informing each other of hazards or stalled rigs. But twenty-five years ago, when the boom was at its height and when anyone with two hands and two feet and not much between their ears was trying to strike it rich on the road, the danger of roll-over or collision was always present. Even in the best of times the road is a creature you come to understand but never really know. You can never let your guard down or become lackadaisical. The road has its own moods, and you come to know and accept them. You can’t fight against them or you’ll end up off the road, maybe for good. You’ve got to be patient.’ Even as he said that, with his easy southern drawl and gentle mannerisms, I knew Tex was the absolute epitome of patience. ‘New drivers push too hard at the wrong times,’ he continued. ‘They cut corners on their gear and food. They drive off the shoulders or take the grades too slow or too fast. That impatience thing is what makes some guys drive into areas where the wind has come up, or leave the safety of Coldfoot when they should stay put. This road ain’t Daytona. I may have a five-hundredhorsepower Detroit engine under my hood but that counts for diddly shit when the weather gets on a growler. The wind at Atigun could whip a bobtail off the road as easy as it was a spinning top.’