The clinic in Healy, population 487, was on the second floor of the Tri-Valley Community Center, attached to the volunteer fire department. As we climbed the stairs, we could hear that another patient, clearly in more dire straits, had arrived ahead of us. We followed the sound, and a friendly husky greeted us at the clinic door. Inside, a commotion of people darted back and forth to an examination room. The moaning woman quieted down after what I assumed was an injection of some sort. In the corner of the waiting room, an assortment of kids’ toys testified to the fact that the whole community was served here. Though we had only just arrived, a woman who introduced herself as Sue appeared and apologized for keeping us waiting. She asked which of us was the patient and could he please fill in a brief form. Someone would be with us as quickly as possible, she informed us, then left. There was an amazing calm about the place now. We almost forgot why we were there. Sue returned, collected the paperwork, and busied herself at a desk. We read the magazines that were lying about. Most of them had to do with medicine or the outdoors. After twenty minutes or so, she said the doctor was ready for Dad. He winked at us as he followed her to one of the exam rooms. “I really do feel fine now,” he said. Proximity to doctors always had that effect.
Having lost my mother when I was young, in a corner of my brain I always tried to imagine how my father’s death would come about—to steel myself, I suppose, against that pain. Another part of me refused to dwell on the subject, so I’d never let my mind finish working out the possibilities. While I waited at the clinic in Healy, Alaska, flipping nervously through the same magazine several times, I told myself this was not the way. I repeated it like a mantra.
Shortly, a big bearded fellow appeared in the doorway of the examination room. He looked more like a mountain man than a medicine man, but it was a look that inspired confidence nonetheless. In fact, he cheerfully told us, he was a physician’s assistant who lived in Fairbanks and was on call at Healy. In Alaska, given the vast distances and many potential hazards, medical personnel at all levels are trained to perform many on-site emergency procedures. In addition, they write and in many cases fill prescriptions on a limited basis. He marveled at what good shape Dad was in and said he wasn’t worried about his condition. He gave him a bottle of cough medicine and a prescription for antibiotics in case there was any worsening of the cough. We could come back and get the pills here, since there was no drugstore. He gave us his home phone number and said to call anytime, day or night, if we felt Dad wasn’t getting better. At that point we all felt better but decided Dad should be in a hotel room rather than the RV. Good thing too, since the temperature went down to twenty-nine degrees that night.
More than anything, Dad wanted to see a bear. As we drove into Denali, we saw a family of moose feeding by the side of the road. They were huge and beautiful, brown and fuzzy. Up ahead were herds of caribou, majestic and bold. But no bear. Dad’s hotel was on the perimeter of the park, while we were at the Savage River Campground at Mile 13. Unfortunately, private vehicles were allowed to drive along the park road only up to Mile 14.8. The only way to the interior, to the grizzlies, was an eleven-hour jaunt on a rickety schoolbus, which we all deemed inappropriate for campers with coughs. Dad accepted the quarantine gracefully. Sandy and I submitted to the hairy ride and did see grizzlies. In fact, old eagle-eyed Sandy spotted them first, way in the distance. We got a glimpse of the north face of Denali between the clouds—and mighty tired butts from the unkind road.
At our campground that night, a ranger gave a talk around the campfire about talking to grizzlies. First, try to avoid contact. Store food in hard-sided vehicles or bear-safe canisters. Don’t surprise a bear: make noise on the trail, especially if you’re downwind. Stay away from cubs, even if you think they’re alone, since chances are the mother is nearby. If you actually come upon one (or if one comes upon you), the park policy is something like this:
1. Wave your extended arms over your head, increasing your apparent size and letting the animal know you are not part of its usual diet.
2. Reinforce that message by speaking to it in a calm voice. Say, “Hey, bear. Hey, bear.”
3. As you do this, stand still. Do not run. Running will activate the bear’s chase instinct. It may sniff at you.
4. The bear will probably lose interest in you.
5. On the other hand, if it arches its back, paws the ground, and prepares to charge, play dead. Never run.
There was a lively discussion about the last point. Some people had been previously advised to play dead only in the case of brown bears but to fight back if they were pursued by a black bear. I wondered if I could will myself to faint.
We collected Dad in the morning and were cheered to learn he was hungry. Over a bacon-and-egg breakfast, we passed our recently acquired advice on to Pop, who found the idea of talking to bears highly amusing. From then on we gave each other the “Hey, bear” wave regularly. He spent most of the next few days holed up in his hotel while it rained, meeting other tourists. We’d see him between our excursions. The weather hardly mattered to us as we rafted down the Nenana River. (The water temperature had soared up to thirty-six degrees Fahrenheit.) As the day of his departure grew closer, we drove up to Fairbanks. Still not feeling great, he urged us to go off on our own. It was disquieting that he bowed out of the paddle wheel tour, since it involved only sitting. When he begged off dinner, I got really nervous again, though he insisted he was only tired. Seeing him off the next day, I was worried but relieved. He’d soon be home in his own bed, able to see his own doctor and wife. We waved a melancholy “Hey, bear” as he walked toward the plane.
Later that night we called him. He sounded absolutely fine, peppy and excited that he had spent two wonderful weeks with “the kids” in Alaska. Parents. Go figure.
Personal Effects
We were in the Santa World parking lot in North Pole, Alaska. I gazed up at a thirty-foot-high statue of the man himself. Thinking about whether I’d been naughty or nice, I reviewed the past year in my mind. The previous fall I’d been running full steam ahead: appointments from breakfast through dinner, thirty-five phone calls a day, sixty-five hours a week, forty-nine weeks a year. It had now been four and a half months since I told my boss I was quitting, three months since my last day of work. Sandy and I continued to love being together, we had seen incredibly beautiful parts of the natural world, and I felt a certain fluid openness replacing rigid judgments. I still got a tremendous jolt of pleasure when I saw a book I’d been involved with in a store. We had no doubt that we loved books and publishing, but we wondered how to apply what we knew to what we didn’t know. How could we mutate our years of experience and success into a future life that would be as challenging and satisfying as our careers had once been in the past? Did we truly want to get out of the fast lane, or were we aiming to merge onto the info highway from a new location? We’d been having a great time on the road for nearly nine weeks. But this wasn’t a way of life—or was it? We met plenty of people who were “full timers,” having traded their homes with foundations for those with wheels.
I looked up to the jolly man in red for inspiration. I believe Santa smiled. Keep on truckin’, he seemed to say. I had always liked the expression “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” Maybe we could modify it to “When the worker is ready, a business appears.”
I made a mental list of ways I’d changed.
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Once upon a time I used to dash out of the office for twenty minutes or so between meetings to have my nails done. I loved the elegant polished look it brought to my sturdy square hands. I grew my nails as long as humanly possible, and then if tragedy struck and one broke, the professionals would glue, wrap, or otherwise cure it. Keeping all ten the same length was something of a neurotic obsession at nailworld. Though I missed the pleasant Korean manicurists, whose language I did not understand but whose chatter and grace during the minutes of respite I spent with them was a gift, I now mana
ged to keep all twenty toes and fingers neat myself. Clever me.
Instead of torturing myself to get up and go to the gym at six o’clock three days a week, I did a series of stretches and exercises daily, plus whatever outdoor activity was available. My back, which had given me trouble for years, clutched only once: when Dad was sick. Portable stress.
I started drinking coffee again after eight years. One cup in the morning, for warmth. My diet Coke addiction eased up, however, to a couple a day instead of a couple of six-packs.
I traded in my purse for a fanny pack.
Lipstick for Chap Stick.
Perfume for Off!
Pocket change for pocket knife.
Subway map for trail maps.
House keys for Sue keys.
London Fog for Gore-Tex.
Umbrella for hood.
Silk blouses for cotton turtlenecks.
Heels for hiking boots.
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The single most liberating thing I did was to stop carrying. I went from being a record schlepper to the Queen of England. First as a student, then as an editor, I had always carried: backpacks, briefcases, and extra canvas bags on weekends, loaded with books, manuscripts, proposals, and magazines. I would buy pretty little pocketbooks, only to store them on the top shelf of my closet, unused, because they couldn’t hold enough. Now I loved not carrying. The multipocketed vest, and maybe a fanny pack for water, was my limit. My hands were free for snapping photos, holding on to Sandy, or examining the weird rocks I picked up. Plus, I no longer listed to oné side from shoulder bag abuse. I felt incredibly light and free.
Although we had loved having Pop with us, we were also glad to get back to our own syncopated duet rhythms. Sandy still made coffee while I slept, and I tended to push further when we hiked or biked. (I was always positive there was something unutterably fabulous just around the bend.) Yet we balanced each other out. He was more even tempered, though my “moods” were smoothing out too. Perhaps I hadn’t been the sweetest of companions when I was stressed out all the time. He ate more vegetables and “used food,” and I went to bed earlier than at home to keep him company. There were very few sources of conflict: it seemed that life in Alaska was as obvious as the massive mountains around us.
The roads, however, hadn’t gotten any better during our visit. Taking turns at the wheel, we hit some rough stretches. It was 653 miles from Fairbanks to Haines. At least a third of that was driven, by virtue of conditions, at twenty-five miles per hour. We had fun nonetheless. The weather had turned clear again, allowing us to see the beauty all around us, although the thermometer couldn’t seem to rise much past fifty during the day. We considered going up to the Arctic Circle, a couple of hundred miles beyond Fairbanks, for no other reason than to say we’d been there. The Arctic Ocean was only 299 miles beyond that, a tempting siren calling us to meet her. To get there, we learned, we’d have to take the Dalton Highway, originally the North Slope Haul Road, built by and for the oil companies during construction of the pipeline. There were very few service stations—three, to be exact—along the way. They catered to big rigs. Rigs that made Susie look like a VW Bug by comparison. If we blew a tire, say, it might just have to be imported from who knew where. The highway ended at Deadhorse (no doubt the original travelers had arrived in just that condition), two miles shy of the sea. Access roads beyond that, I read, were controlled by the oil companies, permission to use granted at their discretion. Not an inviting policy. Having become accustomed to the regular dirt roads of Alaska, we paid attention when we were told a road was really poor and not recommended for RVs. Only twenty-eight miles north of Fairbanks, it already became gravel. Beyond that, it was anybody’s guess. Taking rental cars that way was discouraged. I regretted that we hadn’t known enough about Alaska in advance to plan to spend time flying into the interior.
Having reached our outer limits, our northernmost point in this adventure was Fairbanks. Just shy of sixty-five degrees north latitude, it lies as far north of New York as Guatemala is south. I was ever more awestruck by the size and scope of the Great Land. At Fairbanks, we were 2,300 miles north of Seattle and still nearly 500 miles south of Prudhoe Bay. Nome, two and a half hours by air, was 500 miles to the west. That’s a rough guess, since no road goes out that way along which to measure. Fairbanks felt like a point of entry into a wilderness within a wilderness. It is Alaska’s second largest city, though with a population of only thirty thousand, a few strip malls, and a fading 1950s downtown, it reminded us of many of the disappearing upstate New York and New England villages.
On our way out of town, we passed an outfitter we had first noticed in Valdez called the Prospector. This time we stopped in. What better place than this gateway to the outback to find a genuine unadulterated original un-yuppified apparel store. Their motto, “Outfitting the Alaskan Lifestyle,” sounded good to me. Their extraheavy flannel shirts felt divine. These were the kind that would keep us warm at ten below, not simply make us look cute sitting around a ski lodge. The store had an authentic warehouse look and feel, not the kind now intentionally reproduced by major chains at malls everywhere. Dozens of varieties of socks, for instance, in several thicknesses and lengths, covered one wall. They were made of materials engineered not only to keep your toes warm and dry but to make sure you came home with all of them. The place offered a fascinating visual display of self-sufficiency, from my favorite garish pink and silver salmon pixie lures, to the portable smokers in which to cure the catch, to the freeze-dried bags of lasagna in the event the fishing was lousy. There was a friendly no-nonsense manner about the people who worked there as well. Sandy wanted a turtleneck to wear under the shirts we were buying, and we found a wide variety, including some that were actually underwear and priced a bit lower. The one he liked, clearly a regular shirt, had no price tag, but since he mentioned how he would wear it, it was priced as underwear. If something was to be worn as underwear, well then, it ought to be priced as underwear. Practical people, those Alaskans.
The journey south began: through North Pole (not the geographic or magnetic North Pole, but a town named by a clever developer with a novel marketing idea) and Delta Junction, on our way to catch a ferry in Haines for the lower forty-eight. On the way we passed through Tok again, but this time it looked familiar. It was the first time in two months we were somewhere we had been before. It felt good to have our bearings: we knew Bob would be at the hardware store and that Cleta and Dave’s restaurant, the Gateway Salmon Bake, was down the road. We were delighted that the bakery that had such good pastries hadn’t yet closed for the season. Even though nothing there had changed, we now saw the town’s charm and felt as if we had absorbed some sense of how Alaskans feel about their home. Some of our New York edge had worn off, and we felt the warmth of this small community. The towns may not have been cute and manicured, but they were comfortable and welcoming. We tried to imagine Tok in winter, when the temperature can reach minus seventy. Last year the first snow fell on September 10 and never left. We eagerly paid another visit to our favorite salmon bake, then headed on.
This part of the Alaska Highway took us back through some very remote stretches of the Yukon. A nasty rainstorm turned the road-in-progress to mud. I anxiously scanned the map and guidebooks for a place to spend the night. We both needed to stop. Three hundred and nineteen miles from Fairbanks, we landed at Beaver Creek, Yukon Territory, population 106. As usual, it was good to be home in the RV. It was an odd place, however. This little hamlet had sprung up like a mushroom out of nowhere. The road bulged a bit, and a Westmark Inn had been planted. Built simply out of wood (though not the log structure one would hope for), it was an ideal stopping point for happy cruisers as they were lugged by bus from the port at Skagway up to Whitehorse or Dawson and beyond. I liked the slogan in their ad: “The highway traveler will find comfort and convenience at our modern rendition of the traditional road-house.” I found Cuervo Gold and nachos and was perfectly thrilled.
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sp; The next day we passed through Burwash Landing, along Kluane Lake. I remembered all the nodding heads when the Kluane First Nation singer had announced this was his hometown, back in Whitehorse. Now we also knew where Burwash was. It felt good to be familiar and think we knew someone here. We fell in line, like the good tourists we were, and bought a cache of Native goods: moccasins for Cindy and Claire, a hat for me, beads for Eva, and booties for the Butler babies, twins who were expected to make their debut in New York after the New Year. Burwash was not much of a town—a museum and a few buildings. But the location was unbeatable: huge peaks of the Kluane and St. Elias ranges poked out between the clouds. As we drove south, hugging Kluane Lake on our left, we passed the site of Destruction Bay, one of the original relay stations for the building of the highway. While the population was under a hundred, they managed to sponsor a fishing derby every July. A modern motel and several RV parks aided and abetted tourists on the make for trout or glacial flightseeing. In Haines Junction we fortified ourselves with several excellent pastries, both savory and sweet, and swung by British Columbia on our way to the Alaskan coast.
The weather brightened again as we headed south, though I was glad to snuggle into my Prospector shirt. Golden leaves highlighted the ever-sharpening image of the sunshine-lit landscape. The blacktop curved, dipping and rising like a band of wet black licorice. We arrived in the harbor town of Haines as the sun was setting and realized an awful truth: Summer was over. It was getting dark early—nine o’clock.
We spent several days exploring the area by bike, on foot, and in the RV, fueled by fine buttermilk sticks from the Chilkat Bakery. It was an exquisite spot for a town, nestled in the fjord with a safe harbor. The saving grace for the town, we thought—though the residents might have preferred otherwise—was that the cruise ships didn’t stop here. Development maintained an organic pace. Up and across the bay at Skagway, we heard it was all for the touristos, a group we indignantly and increasingly separated ourselves from. Haines had a pristine feeling, as if it had grown to its current stature of fifteen hundred souls by its own merits. There were several parks that afforded fine fishing, camping, and opportunities to stare at nature. Totally unimaginable to me several months earlier, I spent one enjoyable lunchtime sitting by the edge of a lake watching for bald eagles. I actually think my jaw dropped when I saw my first one cruise onto the upper reaches of a tall pine. It was like seeing a legend.
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