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Dreams are the bright creatures of poem and legend, who sport on earth in the night season, and melt away in the first beam of the sun, which lights grim care and stern reality on their daily pilgrimage through the world. ~ Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby February
20, 2006 I'm mugged by the wind the moment I step out of the tent and into the blizzard. It heaves me into the air, body-slams me back down onto the snow, then squats on my back as it steals my breath. A few inches from my face the cheap thermometer clipped to my sled whips around and around like a pinwheel. Snatching it with a mitten, I aim the beam of my headlamp. The mercury is curled in a ball at the bottom, cowering beneath the last mark at forty degrees below zero. I don't have to check the tiny windchill chart printed on the back to know the temperature will add up to something around negative one hundred degrees or more. Chunks of ice pelt my backside and the wind knifes right through me despite layers of Polarguard and Gore-Tex. I'm shivering so hard it seems like I might shake apart. Not just from the cold, but also from an emotion that is rapidly approaching terror. I can't feel my hands or feet as I struggle up to grasp my little avalanche shovel and chop at the snow. The blade will barely pierce the snow's wind-packed surface, robbing me any hope of digging a cave. I stomp on the shovel with a neoprene-wrapped plastic boot and manage to pry up a piece of hard crust. This I lay against the side of the tent, which is quaking and bending and moaning right along with me. There is an expanding rip that must be covered or else the whole thing will soon blast off like a rocket. If it does, I'll be more than just cold and scared. I'll be dead. I hammer the shovel back into the snow, careless of shattering the aluminum blade. Another block of sastruga gets pried up and laid over the first. My breath comes in shallow gasps that burn my throat going in, then freeze to my face coming out. Even my eyeballs are icing up within their sockets. What am I doing here? I half-sob to myself as the shovel bites again into the unyielding snow. And then the gale eases for a few seconds. The ground blizzard suddenly drops away. Icy peaks lit by starlight swim into view. And there, in the black sky above, almost close enough to reach up and caress, is a neon-green aurora flapping across the heavens. It's so outrageously beautiful that I start to cry. The tears burn my cheeks as they freeze to my skin. The storm returns with a low roar that accelerates to a shriek. The glorious vision is blasted away and I'm thrown down onto the snow again. I crawl on hands and knees for the tent's door, peel up the zipper a few inches, and slither in. The blackness inside is filled with a dense fog of crystallized steam that sparkles in my headlamp's beam. The one stove we've managed to light is howling in chorus with the reinvigorated wind, a pot of snow smoking above the blue flames. My friend Taylor is hunched over the other stove, trying to ignite a burner full of slushy white gas with a butane lighter he's carried in his crotch all day. "I think I've covered the rip," I yell at him. "Good," Taylor shouts back, politely declining to add, How did I let you talk me into this? To the stove he mutters, "Come on, you bastard. Light. Light!" We need water and we need it badly. The snow we'd melted in the morning was either drunk or had frozen solid hours ago and miles behind us. Already our tongues are swelling within our mouths and the blood in our veins flows ever more sluggishly, unable to warm our limbs. Next to the cold, I suppose dehydration is our biggest threat. Or maybe it's frostbite, or avalanches, or starvation, or broken bindings or bears. There are so many ways to die up here. I've lost track of all the risks. We've been kicking our skis and dragging our sleds for just four days and forty miles and already my mind has been stripped of all but the most immediate danger. The others lurk in the shadows, howling and gibbering and waiting to pounce. "What else can we do?" I shout. Taylor's headlamp flashes at me through the sparkling black fog. "Pray. I just spoke to God for the first time in my life." Maybe I should give prayer a try. Isn't he supposed to have mercy on sinners and fools? But it seems disrespectful, suddenly begging for mercy and intervention after a lifetime of religious disavowal. But that doesn't stop me from silently beseeching the spirit of Morgan, my brother who left the world fourteen years ago. If there is such a thing as a guardian angel, he would be it. Bro, I screwed up again. What a surprise - I know. Any chance you can bail me out one more time? "I guess this trip wasn't such a good idea. If we get blown off this mountain … well, I'm sorry, Taylor." His reply is lost as a gust nearly flattens the tent. It is the middle of winter, and we are camped on the northern edge of the world. There are few places as hostile or remote. We're clinging to a high col between the Yukon and Northwest Territories, about a hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle and a vertical mile above the Beaufort Sea. It's a place among these peaks where, it is said, only one human being has ever ventured before in winter. And he had been a killer whose feats of violence and endurance once made headlines around the world. Clearly, this is no place for a pair of dissatisfied lawyers and weekend mountaineers with a well-established tendency to reach higher than they can climb. So, what the hell are we doing here? Taylor is here because he needed a great adventure in his life - he'd lived for thirty-five years and yet seldom journeyed outside the mountains and plains of Wyoming. And he knew that if he didn't come, I might have been foolish enough to try this alone. I'm here because of adolescent fantasies that have pursued me into adulthood. I'd wanted to see if the romantic Arctic of countless books and my imagination still exists, and I'd dreamed for decades about joining a legendary chase - the greatest the North has ever known. At the moment, though, none of it seems worth dying for. Not adventure, friendship or dreams. "Be careful with your fingers," I warn Taylor. He'd been flicking the lighter bare-handed for half a minute, desperately trying to fire the second stove. We've both read To Build A Fire a dozen times or more, horribly entranced by the sequence of mishaps leading to the death of the protagonist. We can both imagine how easily it can happen to us right now. And if one of us gets disabled by frostbite, we're both dead. Taylor shoves the lighter down his pants and yelps as it burns some very tender flesh. Yanking on his mittens, he starts frantically swinging his arms. For me, this dream - if I can still call it that - began when I was ten. That was 1979, the year my father took a rare vacation from his job as a corporate lawyer in Los Angeles and bought a pickup truck mounted with a camper shell, grew a beard, and took my brothers and me on a road trip to Alaska. As we'd rattled north on the then-still unpaved Al-Can Highway, he would read to us at night from Robert Service's The Spell of the Yukon over the hiss of a Coleman lantern. The higher the latitude, the farther the forest stretched between towns, and the more enchanted I'd become. Near Sam McGee's famous "marge of Lake Labarge" we met a pilot who flew us to a fishing camp more than a hundred miles from any road. It was there, at Wolf Lake, across a blazing campfire under the Midnight Sun, that I first heard a story that seemed like magic at the time but now, as I debate a trench conversion, feels like a curse. * * * In the winter of 1932, one of the most sensational and mystifying manhunts in history took place in the Richardson Mountains, where the great Rocky Mountain Range plunges into the polar sea. Here a lone man challenged the Royal Canadian Mounted Police by shooting down a constable in the "bush." During the seven-week chase that followed, the supposed madman outran dogsled teams that can travel one hundred miles a day and outfought vastly superior numbers of sharpshooters, trappers and native trackers. Despite temperatures that averaged forty degrees below zero, he had somehow forsaken the established mountain passes and made it across these mile-high peaks - a crossing that was believed to be impossible at the time. In the end it had taken what would be the first use of radios and an airplane in a North American manhunt to finally bring him down. The fugitive's motives, and even his real name, remain uncertain. But he was called the Mad Trapper. For me, a wide-eyed kid from the big city, weaned on stories of unspoiled lands, elusive villains, unconquered mountains, and the tales of the Malamute Kid, this wilderness epic was irresistible. It had everything a boy could want: adventure, gold, gunfights, murder, and the challenge of the impossible. Even better, every word of it was true. That night, and for years afterward, I snuggled down in my warm California bed while studying my battered copy of Dick North's The Mad Trapper of Rat River and endlessly fantasized about the Arctic and joining the hunt. In my dreams I was the resolute Mountie who "always got his man" no matter the suffering or the danger it entailed. I drove a team of snarling huskies and cracked a whip above their heads. I traveled with Indian trappers and Inuit seal hunters and dispensed mail, medicine and justice in far-flung villages. I crossed impossible mountains on the heels of a superhuman killer and finally brought him down. It all became so real that it seemed like something I might actually do, someone I might actually be, if only I could hurry up and grow older. Questions about the hunt for the Mad Trapper obsessed me. And not just the obvious ones, like Who was he? and Why did he do it? Instead I spent countless hours pondering how had he run for seven weeks of Arctic night, crossing mountains believed impassible, without ropes or axes or even modern camping gear. And I wondered about the limits of the human body, how far intellect and emotion can push those limits, and how dreams of gold and adventure can twist them. But the most important question of all was always about myself. Could I take the Mad Trapper? That was the subject that invaded my dreams and occasionally changed them into nightmares. Twenty-five years later all those dreams had failed to become memories. All my questions remained unanswered. I found myself to be a writer and lawyer approaching middle age who had never ventured out on a epic journey, never truly challenged himself in the wilderness. With a family to provide for and a damaged spine that was already making me feel old and infirm, I had to wonder what the little boy who was once me would have thought if he had known the truth - he would never do any of those things he fantasized about. Would it have broken his fervent little heart? Even worse than that betrayal, I began to realize that I no longer dreamed much any more. Age and responsibility, it seemed, had been robbing me of my imagination and my passion. I felt victimized. It seemed so unfair. But then as a prosecutor I had learned that there isn't much justice in this world, and then as a writer of popular fiction, I'd learned that the most satisfying justice is that which you grab for yourself. So I began to fantasize about stealing back my youth and my dreams. With age comes a bit of wisdom - this time I wouldn't just dream. I started to plot and train for a belated trip north. I would finally join the hunt for the Mad Trapper - albeit seventy-two years behind the men who had fought him across an arctic wilderness in the dead of winter. I would track him down and kill him. The anticipation, for a time, was wildly liberating. But that was before Taylor and I had arrived in the villages of the Mackenzie River during a crack-fueled murder spree, before my boots had shattered and my courage failed on our previous attempt to get over the high peaks, and before my marriage and my writing career had faltered upon my return. And it was before I'd discovered that oil and gas development, rapid climate change, and instant communications have all but destroyed this legendary last great frontier. And that was before we'd reached this mountaintop - dehydrated, exhausted and frozen - to be blasted by this monstrous wind. It is nothing like my worst nightmares had ever conjured. Imagining the Mad Trapper up here, without fire or food or even a tent and yet still defiant, I now have to face up to the fact that the man I've become can't take him. Right now I am more than willing to admit defeat. But there is no place and no one to whom I can offer up my surrender. Taylor lifts up his sleeping bag - the entire six-and-a-half foot ice-sodden length of it rising from one hand - and yells, "What are we going to do about this?" Focusing the beam of my headlamp, I see that the zipper has come apart. There's no chance of making a delicate repair in this cold. We are so fucked, I think to myself. But I shout back, "Well, partner, I guess it's Brokeback Mountain time." Taylor laughs. His freckled face, smeared with ice, frozen mucous and frost blisters, cracks open with a grin and he lets out a guffaw. I have to laugh, too, at the hubris that had gotten us into this pathetic state. One stove won't light, his sleeping bag is all but useless, mine's rapidly become a solid sheet of ice, and our tattered tent may achieve lift-off at any moment. We don't even know if - in the event we do somehow live through the night - we'll find an avalanche-free and cliff-free route over the last peaks and down into the Yukon. And worse, in a burst of reckless optimism, I had cancelled the ski-plane pick-up on the other side of the mountains. When we'd flown in four days ago to the foot of the mountains, it had been only ten degrees below zero. That was record-breaking warmth for mid-winter in the Arctic. I figured we could save some of my dwindling funds by skiing an extra sixty or seventy miles over the Yukon plateau to the Dempster Highway, then hole up in a maintenance shed until a snowplow crew came along. Plainly put, that was idiotic. Maybe this entire quest of mine was stupidity magnified by a mid-life crisis or some kind of Peter Pan complex. You can't dream when you're dead, Clinton. Soon you'll be nothing but a meat Popsicle awaiting the summer thaw and the licks of a hungry bear. More painful still, I'm aware that I'm taking my best friend down with me - a friend too true to let me pursue my tragic Quixotic journey alone. I have to force away images of our soon-to-be-fatherless sons, and the voice of my wife someday explaining, Well, son, your dad sure loved you, but the man was starry-eyed, a little reckless, and, quite frankly, not all that bright. But at least I've finally found the wilderness. I can take a little pride in that. Despite highways bulldozed through the forest and over the tundra, despite snow machines and ski planes and satellite phones and satellite imagery, not to mention global warming (which, at the moment, is really letting us down), there are still places you can go where there is no rescue, and where the arctic cold can still crush your soul just as it had done to so many explorers, recluses, adventurers and fools. Yes, I am a fool. But self-recrimination and renouncing my fantasies won't make me safe and warm or get us over these goddamn mountains. I don't have a choice anymore. I'm either going to hunt down my dreams or die trying. CHAPTER 1 LINK BELOW |
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