by Cahill, Tim
Dawson Creek is about four thousand miles from Dallas and about two thousand miles from Prudhoe Bay. It is also "mile one" of the
ALCAN or Alaska Highway. During the Second World War, the Japanese attacked Alaska and occupied two islands in the Aleutians, the archipelago that stretches south and west of the mainland.
The ALCAN Highway, a military supply route to Alaska for U.S. forces, was built to defend the mainland, and it was completed in November of 1942. The Canadian portion of the highway was turned over to Canada at the end of the war. The Alaska-Canadian Military Highway was opened to the public in 1948.
Driving the road used to be a survival trip. These days, the road is asphalt all the way to Fairbanks.
I took the wheel out of Fort Nelson and pushed the truck through Stone Mountain Provincial Park. It was the kind of mountain road automobile enthusiasts dream about: moderately challenging, with nicely banked turns winding through staggering scenery. It was, incidentally, entirely free of police. I took the corners hard, listening to the tires scream on the asphalt, and thought that I had never enjoyed driving more.
The sun dropped low in the sky, gathered itself, thought better of setting just yet, made a southward detour, and began to roll along the horizon. A black bear sow and two cubs were wrestling around in the stubbly grass on the shore of a lake. I saw two other black bear on the drive. There was a moose in a small pond, standing belly-deep in the water, grazing on aquatic plants. The slanting light was golden.
It was dark and our shifts at the wheel now lasted only three or four hours. I was driving and we were somewhere north of Whitehorse, in the Yukon Territory. There was a dream I wanted to have and it was waiting for me every time I closed my eyes. I thought: you should close your eyes. Your eyes hurt and they need rest.
When I blinked for more than a fraction of a second, the dream was there, playing on the inside of my eyelids. I was in an antiseptic room wearing a white coat. I was a doctor or perhaps a scientist.
The road ahead ran straight and there were no lights anywhere.
"Close your eyes. There's no traffic. It's safe now. Close your eyes. It's good to rest your eyes. Close your eyes and see what happens."
I shook my head and a dull ache became a sharp pain.
"Close your eyes and it won't hurt anymore. You'll drive better if your head doesn't hurt. Just close your eyes."
I noticed that I had pencils and pens in the pocket of my white coat. There was someone at the door of the antiseptic room and I didn't know
who it was, but I knew for certain that something good was going to happen.
There was a sound that I knew was our engine and another sound that was the hum of our tires on the road. These sounds bothered me. I wanted to open my eyes.
"It's only a short blink. Don't worry. Things happen fast in dreams . . ."
I stopped hard in the middle of the empty road and woke Garry.
"I think I'm tired," I said.
The days and nights began to run together: the beating of a great black wing. At six-fifteen that morning we passed into Alaska at the Tok border station. A few hours later, the morning sky was a light robin's-egg blue, but the sun wasn't up yet. There were some puffy clouds in the east, and the sun, which was still somewhere below the curve of the horizon, lit these clouds from below. There was no red in the light at all. The clouds were a bright golden color, spiritual in aspect, as if they had been sanctified by the light. I studied the clouds for half an hour, and then the sun finally appeared in a sky that had been pale blue for over an hour. It hung on the horizon, in the manner of a harvest moon.
The sky turned a deeper blue but the sun's rays only touched the tops of the fir trees and the uppermost branches of bare aspens and birches. We drove down a shadowed corridor, between the trees, with the golden sunlight trapped in the branches above.
There was a thin cover of snow on the land. We were driving along the banks of the Tanana River, about fifty miles out of Fairbanks. The river was low, not yet completely frozen over, and there were places where great blocks of ice, driven by moving water, had humped up at some obstruction. These great hummocks caught the light of the sun, which was now higher in the sky, and the ice was so bright that looking at it hurt my eyes.
Where there was running water, it flowed in twisted braids through an immense valley. The water was warmer than the air so that a low, thick fog rose off its surface. These narrow banks of fog wound through the valley ahead and they, too, were golden. Everything seemed golden in what we thought would be the final sunrise of the drive.
By ten-thirty that morning, we were in Fairbanks, at a GM dealership called Aurora Motors. It had taken exactly half an hour less than
three days to drive from Dallas to Fairbanks, even counting the four short press conferences we had done along the way. The GM dealer, Jim Messer, had promised to help us with one last document. We needed a permit to drive the old North Slope Haul Road to Prudhoe Bay.
The 416-mile road, now called the Dalton Highway, was built in 1974 to service the Alaska oil pipeline. The road is about thirty feet wide and took twenty-five million cubic yards of gravel to surface. The gravel insulates the permanently frozen ground. If the permafrost was allowed to melt, the road would deteriorate rapidly. In some spots, the gravel is six feet deep.
In 1978, the road was turned over to the state of Alaska and the first fifty-six miles was opened to the public. In 1981, after a bitter debate in the state legislature, public access was extended another 155 miles, to Disaster Creek.
Disaster Creek is still about 206 miles short of Prudhoe Bay, which is really an oil field, a conglomeration of drilling rigs and pumping stations. Men and women go there to work, to produce oil, and the haul road is Prudhoe's main supply line.
Permits to drive beyond the public portion of the road are issued by the Department of Transportation and are granted for commercial and industrial use only. The haul road is patrolled by a state trooper and the checkpoint, where permits must be shown, operates day and night.
So we needed a permit to complete the last few hours of the drive. The Department of Transportation, when Garry contacted them, had seen no reason to be helpful. There was no appeal.
That left us two choices. We could attempt to run the checkpoint, get arrested, never reach Prudhoe Bay, and watch the days tick by in a jail cell. This choice was unacceptable: I had gotten to the point where the clock inside my head would not stop, not until we completed the race.
The other way was to drive the road legally, on a bona fide commercial or industrial mission. This was not an insoluble problem for experienced documenteros.
Jim Messer, the GM dealer at Aurora Motors, bought our truck on the spot, loaned it back, and hired us to deliver a load of spare parts to a garage in Prudhoe Bay. It took an hour to fill out the proper papers, to remove our plates, and to put the temporary plates on the truck. Aurora Motors now owned the Sierra, and we had a valid permit to drive the Dalton Highway all the way to Prudhoe Bay.
It's about seventy-five miles from Fairbanks to the start of the Dalton Highway. The first half of that is paved, and the pavement was covered over in glare ice so slick that, when we stopped, it was literally impossible to walk on the road. I drove along at a maddening fifteen miles an hour. Near a mountain called Wickersham Dome, the pavement ended, but the gravel was packed over with snow, and a hard layer of ice covered that. I still couldn't take it any faster than fifteen miles an hour.
We were very conscious of the hours ticking by. It was now the twenty-third day and the twelfth hour of the drive. We had about 450 miles to go. At fifteen miles an hour, it would take another day and then some to reach the end of the road. We hadn't taken that long to drive from the tip of Texas to the Canadian border.
The Dalton Highway starts just past Livengood, and, after fifteen more miles and another hour, Garry took over. He drove the ice at nearly thirty-five, feathering off on the throttle rather than braking for curves or for oncoming traffic. Garry's theory
regarding glare ice was that you should drive it as if you have no brakes.
"Because," he explained, "you don't."
The ice stretched on for a hundred miles out of Fairbanks, but then it gave way, reluctantly and by degrees, to packed snow. Garry cranked it up to forty-five, the legal limit. He experimented once or twice with the brakes, saw that we had some friction, and pushed the Sierra to sixty.
We came over a steep sanded hill, perhaps two thousand feet high, and found ourselves in a thin winter mist that hunkered over this low summit. The mist was freezing on the branches of stunted fir trees, some of them only six feet high. As we drove down ofTthe summit and out of the cloud, the trees became somewhat more robust but their branches were covered in thick layers of ice. The sky was bright blue and these ice trees glittered in the mid-afternoon sun.
Garry caught sight of a truck in the side mirror. He pulled over and stopped. It was the etiquette of the haul road. The Dalton Highway belongs to the trucks, especially those that are fully loaded, headed north. They take the center of the road and drive with the throttle to the floor. A heavily loaded truck has a lot of purchase on snowpack, and this one blew by us at seventy-five miles an hour. There was a valley below and a steep pitch after that. The trucker was working up speed to attack the next hill.
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 cafe, and ordered some food to go.
There was a radiophone on my table. A sign said it would cost S3 to call Fairbanks and S2 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."
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.