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CHAPTER
FIFTEEN They
have cradled you in custom, they have primed you with their preachings, - Robert Service, from The Call of the Wild Because of the short and savage nature of our defeat two years earlier, this time Justine didn't send me off with just a smile, a kiss and a wave. She had become too aware of the risks of what I was undertaking and, I suspect, too aware of my limited abilities. She said little as I packed up my truck one snowy night in early February, but it was clear by her unusual silence that she wasn't happy. Needing to focus on checking off my lists, I didn't pay much attention. Therefore, as I pulled away from home early the next morning - filled with anticipation and a bit of dread - I was clueless about the depths of her concern. I'd done my best to reassure her over the proceeding months. Despite my brittle spine, this time Taylor and I were far better trained and far better prepared. We were going to enter the mountains in mid-February, when there we could hope for almost eight hours of daylight and even some actual sunlight, rather than mid-January, when there had been little to none of either. This time, I believed, we knew what we were getting into. Taylor hadn't been able to get the time off from work to make the 7,000 mile round-trip drive with me, a drive that takes a minimum of a week in each direction. Instead he would fly to and from Inuvik on a very expensive ticket I bought for him. To avoid having to make the drive solo, I'd enlisted the help of my non-climbing friend Johnny Rico, a soldier recently returned from Afghanistan. I picked Johnny up in an ice-filled alley behind his mother's Denver townhouse. He'd flown in from his new home in London just for this trip. Although he'd traveled all over the world, to every third-world nation I could name, he'd never been to Canada. My primary enticement to him had been the promise of a Sour Toe Cocktail in Dawson City. That was enough for him - single, childless, and nearly a decade younger than I, Johnny was devoting himself to adventure and living in a way that I couldn't help but envy. He had just sold a memoir of his years in the Army to a major publisher and now was working on a new book about international borders. Talking non-stop about book projects, publishing, politics, travel and dreams, we blew out of Denver, crossed the Red Desert on I-25, paused to throw in Taylor's gear in Sheridan, viewed the Indian casino at Little Big Horn (apparently the natives were still scalping tourists at Custer's Last Stand), traversed some Montana mountains in a snowstorm, and spent our first night on the road at a cheap motel in Great Falls. On the way I expounded on my primary theme to a receptive audience. "The world's getting so small. A helicopter recently touched down on the summit of Everest. Another one plucked a solo climber off a virgin Himalayan face from which he was blogging about his imminent death. Ice-breakers are patrolling the Northwest Passage. Sailors and mountaineers now carry Personal Locator Beacons so they can be rescued from anywhere on the planet. Politicians in Oregon are considering requiring climbers to carry them. And more and more dweebs climbing in the Yosemite and the Tetons are using their cell phones to call the rangers and ask if their route should go this way or that." "You want adventure?" Johnny asked. "Try Afghanistan, where people will shoot at you. But you'll still find Burger King and KFC on the base in Kabul." Beers late into the night caused us to start late the next morning for Canada, just two hours away. Despite twenty-four hours totally immersed in each other's company (well past my usual limit), Johnny and I were still talking and laughing when we pulled up to the border. I failed to see how we must look in the Canadian custom agent's eyes: a dirty white truck hauling a lot of weight in its covered bed with two unshaven men inside, both wearing sunglasses and hats pulled low on their foreheads. "Good morning. Your passports, please." We dug them out and I briefly admired Johnny's - it was dog-earred, the pages swollen with foreign sweat. Mine looked embarrassingly sleek and clean. Johnny, who was driving, handed them through the border guard's window, and in doing so exposed a bit of the swirling tattoo that ran all the way down his arm to the wrist. The guard seemed to glance at the tattoo with distaste. "Purpose of your visit?" Johnny looked at me. Leaning over him, I said, "We're writers, working on a book." "Yes?" "Have you ever heard of the Mad Trapper?" The guard was unresponsive, flipping through Johnny's passport. But I knew from my previous trip that all Canucks know and love the story of the Mad Trapper. "I'm writing a book about him. We're going to ski the route he took over the Richardson Mountains. Up by Inuvik and the Beaufort Sea. In winter conditions." The guard stared at me for a long time, then announced, "All right, gentlemen. I'm going to need to hang on to these. Please pull into the lot just ahead and come inside the building. Someone will meet you there." Johnny put the truck in drive and rolled toward the parking lot. I shook my head and said with disgust, "When I came up here with my dad twenty-five years ago, they just waved us through." "9-11," he said. "The world's a different place, man." We parked the truck and marched inside the building to get our passports back. It was modern structure of glass and steel. Security camera tracked our approach to the clean white counter. Another different uniformed customs agent stood behind one of the computer consoles there. He stopped typing and looked up. "Good morning. What is the purpose of your visit to Canada?" I explained while he eyed us, polite but unimpressed. He asked Johnny, "I notice you've been in a lot of Arab countries recently. Could you explain what you were doing there?" "Killing people, sir. Hoo-ah." I laughed, but the customs agent didn't. "Just kidding. I was in the U.S. Army." Johnny explained in a meeker voice. After a few moments he turned to me. "And you used to be a police officer?" "I used to be a deputy district attorney," I said, wondering how he could know that. "What are you doing, checking us out on NCIC?" He acknowledged that indeed he was. How did the Canadians have access to the FBI's National Crime Information Center? The world suddenly seemed even smaller as he asked me to confirm at which of my last three addresses listed I was currently residing. He then turned back to Johnny. "Three years ago you were charged with an assault in Fort Benning, Georgia. Unfortunately, anyone convicted of a crime may not enter Canada for a period of ten years. I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to pull around the building and return to the United States." "It was just a misdemeanor, and a deferred judgment," Johnny explained quickly. "There's not supposed to be any record of it." That, I knew from my days as a DA, was not entirely true. Well-heeled defendants regularly pay their lawyers thousands of dollars to have the records expunged. What they get is an addition to the listing of their misdeeds that simply reads, "Expunged." "I'm sorry," the agent told him. "It's the policy of the Canadian government." "Look, you may not know about deferred judgments," I explained, "But the conviction never formally enters. You plead guilty, but you aren't actually convicted unless you screw up probation or something. So he's never been convicted." "I'm very sorry. You gentlemen need to get back in your vehicle and pull around the building. Here are your passports." Johnny tried explaining that he'd just flown five thousand miles to visit Canada. I offered to vouch for him; C'mon, peace officer to peace officer, just let him in! The agent was efficiently immune to our pleas. "You can apply for a waiver, but it takes eight to twelve weeks. I'm afraid you'll need to re-enter the United States now." We couldn't speak except to mutter obscenities as we climbed back into my truck and made the turn around the building. There we suffered further indignity. Despite the fact that we'd just pulled around from the other side of the building, and the fact that we'd never even entered Canadian soil, the American agent took our passports, forced me to fill out a form about what goods we were bringing back from Canada, interrogated us inside the building, and then searched my truck. I dropped Johnny off at the airport in Great Falls. It looked like I'd be driving to the Arctic alone after all. * * * The lonely highway led north across the plains of Alberta through Calgary and Edmonton, then west and north for hundreds of miles more into the thick forests of northern British Columbia. Surprisingly, there was good cell phone service much of the way. Driving twelve to fourteen hours a day, I had lots of opportunity to talk with Justine. And she finally had my full attention. "Happy Valentine's Day," I said when she called on February 14th. "Clint, the bank just called. We're overdrawn." She was crying. I realized it couldn't be much fun, having been alone for nearly a week with a baby and a rambunctious boy, and with the prospect of many more such weeks to follow. I stabbed off the music that had been playing. "Shit. This is a little sooner than I expected. How'd we go over?" "All your gear for your trip. The new skis and boots. And Taylor's plane ticket. And the fact that you haven't written another book." I protested to her that I was, in fact, working on a book. "This is research, honey. This is work." "No, it isn't. You're just out having fun. Risking your life, but having fun." "I will write a book about this. It will sell," I promised. She reminded me that I'd already tried to sell this story and hadn't gotten anywhere. "I've got to make it over the mountains first," I explained. "And maybe eat Taylor. But it will sell. Especially if I eat Taylor." There no laughter on the other end of the phone. Just a long, profound silence. "Hello? Justine?" "Why are you doing this? Do you realize you might die up there? Do you realize how utterly foolish this whole thing is? How completely selfish?" I was stung into silence. After a long moment I managed a weak response. "This is what I have to do. It's what I've always dreamed about doing." "You have a family now. If you're this irresponsible with your life and our future, if you're willing to throw it all away for some fantasy you had when you were a kid, how can I count on you? How can I trust and rely on you?" I didn't have a winning argument. I felt myself getting angry, the last emotional refuge for someone lacking any defense. I'd never considered how it must be for her, my running off on these adventures, taking joy in the danger I put myself in. Justine had never been anything but supportive, never voiced any objection. I had always taken it for granted that she just wanted me to be happy. And I assumed it applied at any cost. "What do you want me to do? Turn around?" "Yes. Turn around, come back, and grow up." "I'm not going to. I can't." "Then we might not be here when you come back. If you come back." I felt wounded and sick. All of my despairing self-analysis over the last two years, and I'd failed to see what a selfish, self-absorbed bastard I was. My heart had taken a sucker punch, and my pride had been kicked in the balls. I needed to stop - I wanted to vomit in the snow. But I swallowed the bile and kept on driving north. * * * It took me several days of hard solo driving to reach Laird Hot Springs near the Yukon border. On the way I listened to CBC radio and heard constant reports from Inuvik. A big conference was going on there. Politicians and environmentalists and industry representatives had flown into the town from all over Canada to fight about the proposed Mackenzie Valley Pipeline. Its construction, and the massive proliferation of oil and gas wells it would service, was expected to bring unheard of riches to the Delta region. It was the Klondike Stampede all over again, one reporter said. It was predicted that some of the construction camps alone would dwarf any of the existing native communities. The caribou herds might be pushed off their centuries-old migration routes, some protested, but others answered that easements could be made for them. They would build tunnels under the new roads for the caribou to cross. I found myself wishing I could drive faster. It was ten o'clock at night when I approached the turnoff for Laird Hot Springs. My entire body hurt. I'd been on the Alaska Highway for something like sixteen hours, and my back, neck and legs ached from sitting, my eyes felt raw from so many hours of watching nothing but trees, rocks and snow pass by, and my head pounded from having to concentrate so hard on the icy turns, the logging trucks blowing past, and the constant danger of some very big animal - like some of the woodland buffalo I'd passed - stepping on to the road. At the Laird Springs turnoff I hesitated, knowing a lodge was just a few miles up the road, weighing rest and a warm bed against a swim at twenty below zero. You only live once, I told myself. And I swerved off the icy pavement and rolled into rutted snow. Taking a dip in Laird Hot Springs is practically required for all drivers on the Alaska Highway. Particularly for the streams of tourists going north in the summer. In the winter, with all the darkness and the temperature always well-below zero, it's a little more optional. The campground lot and the parking lot were entirely empty, and tonight it was exceedingly dark. As I hoofed down the boardwalk, nose and cheeks and eyes burning from the cold, I was reminded of something I'd heard about the springs. Taylor had told me about a friend - a seasonal fisherman heading home from Alaska after a brutal summer's work - who had made his regular stop at the springs eight years earlier. For hundreds of miles he'd been looking forward to soaking in the hot water, dreaming of washing away the stench of thousands of pounds of salmon with a long, sulfuric soak. But he too had found the parking lot empty, and a chain across the trail reading "Closed." "Screw this," he thought, and ducked under. It was eerie, he told Taylor, because the springs were always packed in the summertime. And it got eerier. As he walked across the marsh on the boardwalk, there were clothes and litter scattered everywhere. He paused to look at a discarded boot and saw that it was covered with blood and flies. Must have been a hell of a party last night, he thought. Just then a female ranger stepped out from behind some trees a short distance away, startling him. She had a rifle in her hands and a pistol on her hip. "The springs are closed!" she shouted at him. "Return to your vehicle immediately!" Taylor's friend later found out, and I'd since confirmed, that earlier that morning a thirty-seven year old woman from Texas and her two sons had been walking on this same boardwalk in midsummer daylight. They surprised a bear that was prowling the berry bushes off to one side. The bear leapt out and knocked down the mother and immediately began feeding on her. Her thirteen year old son, acting with unbelievable courage, grabbed a stick and began swinging it at the bear. A man heard the screams and came running. He, too, grabbed up a log and stuck the bear in the face. When that didn't work, he jumped on the bear's back, trying to wrestle it off the woman. The bear turned on him. With its claws and teeth, the bear tore off his head. Then it began eating him. Other people ran up and fought to try and drag the bear off the headless corpse. They struck it with sticks and threw shoes and water bottles until someone finally sprinted up with a rifle and shot the bear dead. My senses were hyper-tuned as I walked that same lonely path in the dark, my breath forming wreaths of smoke in front of my face. In my pocket I grasped a can of bear repellent and wondered how well it would work in the cold. Bears are not true hibernators - they often come out of their dens in winter, and when they do, they're often grouchy. That was a little bit of knowledge I wished I didn't possess. I was alone. Very, very alone. And suddenly it didn't feel very good. I reached the springs after ten minutes of walking on the planks across the frozen marsh. The pools were smoking furiously, coating the trees around them with an armor of ice crystals that blazed in the beam of my headlamp. Shivering hard as I stripped on the dock, I kept the bear spray close at hand. I wore my headlamp into the water despite the fact that its beam merely reflected off the writhing ghosts formed by the steam. Crouching deep between the scalding currents, I thought about my family. God, I loved them. Their faces intermingled with the ghosts. Was I outrageously selfish to have left them for this quest? The fact seemed indisputable. Should I turn around and go home? That would certainly be wise. But could I live with myself for the next forty or fifty years knowing I'd come so close, only to chicken out again? No, I couldn't. |
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