Looking for Alaska

by Peter Jenkins

  “Well, the freight truck won’t haul the dogs, only the dog food. We will have to fit the dogs in the vehicles somehow. Plus, I’m going with you to mush the dogs the sixty miles from Coldfoot, where we’ll leave the cars to head to their place.”

  Hugh walked over and opened the door to our four-wheel-drive Explorer and looked inside. We had brought enough equipment, survival gear, cameras, you name it, to fill the entire back.

  “You think we could fit a couple of my dogs in with you?”

  Right then the side door to the house opened and a young, blond teenage girl walked out. Even she wore just a light coat. She walked toward us, although she looked away, down the street, anywhere but at us. This must be Eric’s daughter, Elizabeth, who was twelve.

  Hugh spoke again. “I think Elizabeth is riding with you also.”

  I looked around to see what kind of vehicle Eric owned. Surely, being a vet and making this brutal round-trip from Coldfoot to Fairbanks all the time and traveling around this part of Alaska to do his clinics, he had an outfitted four-wheel drive or a Suburban or something large. Maybe they could fit all Hugh’s dogs in with them if we didn’t have any room. They would have to have something supertough, even if it was really used; all metal, big enough to sleep in if you ran off the road in winter when someone might not come by all night. But in the driveway sat a tiny red Dodge Neon. I wouldn’t drive that thing around Anchorage. I’d be afraid taking it on a snow, ice, and rock-and-gravel road like the Haul Road, which would rattle and shake it to death. Almost every animal that you might hit would seem bigger than it. Surely this wasn’t all they had. Eric was probably out doing some last-minute shopping. Being disorganized and living where they lived would be life-threatening. You can’t run out from the wilderness and buy that flour you forgot or ran out of. It might take a week to get out and back.

  The teenage girl walked to within thirty feet of all of us and stopped. When I looked at her, she looked down at the ground as if she’d never looked into a stranger’s eyes before. Then the door opened again and out walked Eric and a slim, brown-haired woman. She looked put together, wearing warm snow pants and matching coat and wool hat. She walked slightly behind Eric as if he were a shield.

  “Hi,” he said, walking toward us. Eric seemed to be an up person, always optimistic, energetic, smart, and a bit scatterbrained.

  I introduced him to Rita and Julianne. He introduced us to Vicky, his wife, and Elizabeth, his daughter, who still stood off in her own sphere.

  “Do you guys have any extra room in your car for a dog or two?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Hugh told us about having to transport them.”

  “I guess I should have checked the freight company a few days ago,” Eric said.

  I opened the back of the Explorer and some snowshoes, felt-lined boots, and other things fell out, like a gear avalanche.

  “My dogs have never ridden in a closed-up car very far. They may get sick on the way,” Hugh said.

  “I’ll give them a shot, tranquilize them, that’ll be better,” Eric offered.

  I unpacked all our stuff, laid it on the ground, and, surprise, fit a dog cage in the back. Eric picked out two of the smallest dogs, tranquilized them, and put them in it. The other four would ride with them, in the Dodge Neon, with Hugh. Elizabeth would ride with us.

  They had almost no luggage, just a few small bags. Although Hugh was from Chicago, he looked as if he’d lived all his life two hundred miles from anything or anyone, as if he could burrow down into a huskies’ den and live underground with them. Yet Hugh was engaging, and he had a plan. He wanted to be a big-time musher, and knowing Eric, a vet, could be a large assist, because vet bills can mount fast. Hugh had angles and was always working on selling them. He was a bush-dwelling Alaskan player. He did have a newsletter and I think he said he even had a Web site. He pulled a newsletter out of his pocket and gave it to me to read. It emphasized the romance of the wilderness, dog mushing, and the people who sponsored him. He said he was always looking for sponsors.

  Eric would drive the Dodge Neon; Vicky would sit in the front seat, with one dog on her lap. Hugh would sit in back with the three largest dogs draped all over him. What little luggage they had could be crammed in any available space. I still could not believe they’d be driving a Dodge Neon up the Haul Road, built in the 1970s when the Alaska Pipeline was constructed.

  Eric read my perplexed, concerned looks well. Right before giving me last-minute instructions to follow him, that we’d stop at the last truck stop to fuel up and use the bathroom, he tried to calm the deep doubt freezing my face:

  “You know, we had an almost new Suburban but we loaned it to these two German students, these attractive young women we ran into at the truck stop at Coldfoot. They told us they needed to get to Fairbanks fast. Turns out they lied, went north the few hundred miles to the North Slope and the Arctic Ocean. They about trashed the thing, then totaled it rushing back to Fairbanks to catch their plane.

  “I guess we should have known better. They almost got killed, rolled the thing down a steep embankment. They just left it there and hitched in to the airport.” Eric laughed his slightly-out-of-control, just-a-bit-hysterical laugh, like “Yeah, I can’t believe we got into that one.” Turns out the women split the country and the scene of the accident, and there were all kinds of problems with the insurance coverage, so the Dodge Neon would have to do.

  We drove up into some hills on the way out of Fairbanks. Some of the finest homes in the area were in these hills, where it could be twenty degrees warmer in winter, since “heat” rises and the difference between minus twenty and zero degrees is great. After a few miles, on a hilltop, there was the truck stop. Once we left it behind, there would be basically nothing all the way to Coldfoot, so it was important to fill the gas tank until it overflowed. Eric had told me this twice.

  After we gassed up, we all got something to eat; this was the last hot food and coffee for a long, long time. I still wondered if my instincts about the charismatic Eric and his family were correct. We could still turn around, make some excuse. My darkest doubts could build him into a Charles Manson–type leader, with Vicky and Hugh his followers. Elizabeth looked nothing like him; she must look like her mother. I tried to speak with her, joke around, to bring out whatever was behind her discomfort. Nothing came out to play. Vicky was quiet, yet assured. Hugh was the faithful attack-dog type; he would obey blindly and do whatever Eric wished. Peter, shut off that imagination.

  “Eric,” I asked over my second coffee refill, “who’s taking care of your sons?” There were three of them out at the cabin by themselves now, their eighteen-year-old, fifteen-year-old, and nine-year-old.

  “We have a young man who lives with us. He was kind of a street person in Fairbanks when I met him, but he’s from a real good family back East. He’s meeting us in Coldfoot, if we get there when we’re supposed to. He’s taking a break; it’s tough staying out at the cabin and being in charge.” Eric laughed.

  The young man, Tyler, would snow-machine to Coldfoot and hitch a ride with truckers headed to Fairbanks from Prudhoe Bay and be gone while we were there.

  “How do the boys get along by themselves like that in the wilderness? Don’t you worry about them?” Rita wondered.

  I was surprised Rita asked this pointed of a question. She doesn’t ask people personal questions even when they’re best friends. She is a listener, a feeler. Was this an indication of her level of concern? Normally she is fearless.

  “Oh, they do great,” Eric answered quickly.

  “Remember that time you had to rush back because Pete accidentally cut Mike with his knife, really deep into his leg?” Vicky asked.

  “Yes. I had to charter a plane in and sew Mike up,” Eric said, remembering. “I had to sew up the muscle first, then the skin. It was a bad wound. It took several stitches. Pete’s always sharpening this big knife of his. I guess Mike walked into it somehow.”

  Everyone climbed into the Neon afte
r they rearranged the sedated dogs. Ours seemed more sedated than theirs. I couldn’t even hear ours breathing. They pulled to the edge of the parking lot and their brake lights went on while they waited for us. If we followed them, we’d be heading into a frozen, lonesome, huge land where we would have no choice but to rely on them.

  The coffee I’d just swallowed turned to acid. After hearing about the stab wound, or “accidental” knife cut, I wondered again why I was taking my youngest child and wife into the deepest, whitest wilderness homestead in America with these people whom I didn’t know. Was Vicky trying to warn us? Come on, Peter, anyone can cut his brother accidentally with a really sharp knife. But if anyone could, why hadn’t I ever cut one of my brothers or sisters? We certainly fought enough. I’d only met Eric at the library speaking event. For all I knew he wasn’t even a vet, Vicky wasn’t his wife, and Hugh was heaven knows who.…

  MY TRUST IN STRANGERS

  I’d been putting my faith in strangers rather blindly my whole traveling life. After all, everyone I know now was once a stranger. There is nothing devious about Eric’s intentions, they just want us to visit, I kept telling myself. Eric feels that he knows me from reading my books. I had no problem taking substantial risks, trusting my intuitive instincts—when it was just me. It was Rita’s and Julianne’s trust in me that had me building up bad outcomes out of anything that didn’t make sense.

  I got out of the car and washed the windshield, again, to buy some time. Julianne had been and now was even more excited about this adventure, just the three of us. She wasn’t saying anything, but she is so trusting. Finally finished with the windshield, I got in and followed them north. About five miles down the road the dog, or dogs, farted or, worse, had diarrhea. It was too cold to air the vehicle out for long. Juge had offered Elizabeth her Game Boy to play with, and Elizabeth took it, shyly, and played a game, maybe two, before telling Juge that she got really, really carsick, that she’d have to stop playing.

  I asked Elizabeth what she did during the winter. She said she did schoolwork, that she helped Vicky quite a lot. I asked her if Vicky was her stepmother. She said she was. We passed the only possible turnoff, a road that went to Minto. Minto Flats, the gigantic wetlands and hot springs, was nearby. Wolverine Mountain was to our west. With all the ponds and creeks and marshes, it became obvious why Alaskans did their land travel in the winter when the ground was frozen and coated with snow and traveled on the water during the short season when water became liquid.

  Maybe fifty miles out of town, Eric pulled over, steam flowing from under his hood. He popped the hood; something was wrong with the car. He said the car had been overheating lately. Hugh and the three dogs were wrapped up together in the backseat in a maze of sleep. It was probably the warmest sleep Hugh had had in months. Eric said he thought the mechanic was supposed to have fixed the car. He pulled out a gallon jug of water, poured it into the radiator. I fast-forward to our possible situation: the engine block cracks, the car’s done. We have to go back to Fairbanks, adding Eric, Vicky, Hugh and the four huskies, that would be six huskies and seven people in the Explorer. How vulnerable we were on this winter road. But after ten minutes or so we began the trek again.

  Julianne kept trying to talk to Elizabeth, but she said few words and her face was clearly strained by the strangers who surrounded her. I wondered when was the last time she had been in a tight place like our car with no way out, where there were only unknown humans. No matter how friendly we were, she did not seem able to relax.

  “Elizabeth,” I asked, “what’s the ride like on the snow machines into your house?”

  “It’s long.”

  “Is it cold?”

  “Usually.”

  “How cold?” Julianne asked.

  “It can be forty-something below, but twenty-something below is more normal this time of year.” That was better. She seemed intelligent. Even at home, being the only girl with three brothers, she probably didn’t talk much.

  “Is that cold?” Julianne wondered.

  “Not really if you’re dressed for it,” Elizabeth said.

  I wondered where these winter clothes were because Eric, Vicky, and Elizabeth were now dressed like friends of mine would dress on a “cool” December day in south Texas. What if we were stranded or broke down on this road? Since we’d left the truck stop, we’d only seen a few double semis. But I had to assume they knew what they were doing. Everyone, including lifelong Alaskans, told us not to even consider leaving Fairbanks in winter headed north without a full gas tank, extra gas if you could haul it; sleeping bags; some water; food; and if possible a satellite phone. Our friend Pat Ivey, who works at the University of Alaska, ordered me, and she is not the ordering kind, to call her when we got back to Coldfoot. She told me that if she didn’t hear from us in a week, she would call out the state troopers. She’d been in Fairbanks for decades and had read too many stories about what can happen to stranded people around here.

  The frozen world we were driving through in our rubber-tired, metal, plastic, and glass bubble appeared lifeless. I knew in my mind that somewhere out there, warm-blooded creatures struggled to survive. I looked for tracks in the perpetual snow and saw almost none crossing the thin line of gravel that gave us access. The road was surprisingly smooth at times, though sometimes the potholes, hidden by blowing snow, jolted us. The worst were the washboardlike ridges in the road that we hit, shaking our brains and making the car want to fishtail.

  We were between Troublesome Creek and the Yukon River when steam started to pour out of the tiny red car again. We were so alone and the outside was so tough that I did feel as if we were on another planet. Their Dodge Neon and Eric’s happy-go-lucky temperament made me think of a cartoon I hadn’t thought of in years, The Jetsons—Eric was George Jetson, the Dodge his little spacecraft.

  We stopped and Eric emptied the last of his water into the radiator; he held the plastic milk jug straight up to drain out the last drops. Where would we find more? Eric hadn’t planned on the car overheating this much. I had some Power Aid; could you pour a sports drink into a radiator?

  “Eric,” I asked, “what if something goes wrong with the engine, who would you call to come get you?”

  “We’re so far from anything, if I couldn’t fix it, I don’t know, we’d have to flag down one of these trucks, leave the car, and get a ride back into town. I didn’t plan to have to haul all these dogs, so I don’t really have many tools.” He scratched his head. “This satellite phone we’ve got—the company is Iridium—they’ve told us they’re shutting down, they’ve gone bankrupt. It hasn’t worked lately.”

  I didn’t respond, just felt another porcupine quill stuck into my growing mass of worry. Now, overheated somewhere on the Haul Road, I find out there may not be any way to reach anyone once we get to their place.

  We took off again quickly to cross the Yukon River; we could hear some large semis coming from far off. The Yukon is wide and is the second-longest river in the United States. In the summer it’s a liquid passageway, but now it was a frozen highway. This bridge was one of only two across the Yukon. Eric and his children’s first experience with Alaska was floating six weeks down the Yukon all the way to Mountain Village by the sea, shortly after his wife, their mother, had died. The river, the isolation, the constant danger, and the kindnesses of the Native peoples along the way had offered some relief from what must have been intense grief and sadness. They all learned that there was no escaping the gray pain, even in Alaska, though it was as far away as they could get and still be in their own country.

  Just after we crossed the Arctic Circle, the Neon began overheating again. There was no way we could thaw some snow, we had no metal pot. Eric found a little road and turned off. Where was he going now? After driving through some woods we came into a man-made clearing with a metal garage and a trailer where someone lived. It was a pipeline maintenance place. Eric knocked on some doors, tried opening a few, nothing. It seemed no one was around and eve
rything was locked up. Then he walked around the side of the metal building and came out with his jug filled with water, followed by a medium-built man in clean overalls. They both looked under the hood, then the man went in and brought out another plastic jug of water. I stayed in my car the whole time, and as we got ready to go, the man looked hard at us. I wasn’t sure if he shook his head or not.

  Slightly past where the winter road turns off to go to the native community of Stevens Village, the Neon overheated again. We only had about fifty more miles to Coldfoot. Eric added more water. By now I was glad to step out just to stretch into the freezer that covered this whole topside of the world. This cold, an invisible aggressor, penetrated and stiffened almost every bit of me, yet the fantastically fresh air made me more alert.

  Julianne was now telling Elizabeth a story about how our cows back in Tennessee were able to fend off aggressive coyotes that wanted to eat their calves. She told her that we’d lost two dogs to coyote attacks, one her Kenai, a wire-haired fox terrier. Elizabeth mentioned this summer they’d seen two possibly rabid wolves on the rocky beach of the lake just below their house. I was relieved that she and Julianne seemed to be getting acquainted.

  Coldfoot, Alaska (pop. 13), was named by early gold miners, some of Alaska’s most aggressive and fearless pioneers. Most had to walk here from Fairbanks, and by the time they got to the Coldfoot area, they had gotten cold feet, literally, and were overwhelmed by the inhospitable climate and mountainous, desolate conditions that seemed endless. Today, Coldfoot is a lonesome truck stop built with prefabricated buildings and its own power generators. A state trooper and his wife live here, over by the airstrip. There is one motel, which looks like a long, long trailer; they used these structures to build the pipeline in the 1970s. People say that during the pipeline-building days, Coldfoot was like a combination of the Wild West and a space colony built inside a freezer. Eric mentioned as we walked into its only restaurant that he hoped the place didn’t close. Coldfoot was where they could get fuel, catch rides, keep their car, get work done on broken-down snow machines, and stay over before making the trip to the homestead. It was basically impossible to drive in from Fairbanks and then take the big risk of running the last sixty miles on the winter trail to their homestead all in one day. Too much could happen on the trail, like getting stuck in the dark. There were winter bears, such as the one that had attacked Eric’s friend Bernie and his dog team out of Wiseman last winter, and there was the dreaded overflow. I didn’t know what a winter bear was, and I didn’t know much about overflow, but right then I didn’t want to.