In Dubious Camper or Wearing Hubris Like a Medal (Part 3)

The Big Trip is: in June drive to the top of Alaska, see the Arctic Ocean, explore the Last Frontier, meet its indigenous or transplanted freaks—8000 miles—100,000 words. In print.

The maps come out, the itinerary developed, gear purchased, and the multiple magazine queries mailed. What publication wouldn’t want this story? Adventure non-fiction is on fire!

This is the plan: drive north up the Oregon Coast on Highway 101, cross the once-mighty but now dammed Columbia River, head up the Washington shoreline until the route turns east around the Olympic Mountains, backtrack west to see Neah Bay and the Makah Indian Reservation, probe the untainted Olympic National Park beaches that William O. Douglas helped save from roads and condomania, head east paralleling the Strait of Juan de Fuca and find Raymond Carver’s grave in Port Angeles, cross upper Puget Sound to avoid the disaster of Seattle, go north into Gary Snyder’s Skagit Valley, farther north and east into the North Cascades, the Mt. Baker Wilderness where Kerouac did hard writer’s time as a fire lookout to realize the Dharma Bums, into British Columbia, follow the Fraser River, hook up with the Alaska Highway, over the Canadian Rockies, take it into the Yukon, see the gold fields, party in wild Whitehorse, join the Klondike Highway and conjure Jack London’s spirit, keep venturing north and experience the unbearable summer solstice lightness, scale the Top of the World Highway, descend a circuitous west into Fairbanks, turn north again, brave the haul road past the Brooks Range, to Deadhorse and Prudhoe to see the bitter well-paid dregs facilitate our insane addiction to fossil fuel, wade in the surf of the Arctic Ocean, visit the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge before it gets drilled and pumped like a Las Vegas convention hooker, roar back down south past Denali, get drunk in Anchorage, explore the Kenai Peninsula, rip it back east through the Wrangell Mountains and the Elias Range, turn south on the Cassiar Highway, piss near the Sitkine River, an area Edward Hoagland wrote perfect sentences about, and finally cruise back to the Oregon Coast and probably into the writer/adventurer pantheon.

It will take a month, maybe longer. No one is telling you when to come home. You will need time to talk to the folks, break bread and venison with them, drink their vodka undiluted out of plastic containers. You will spend many days and blackless midnights checking out the backcountry too, its wildlife, surging undammed rivers, and government subsidized natural resource sodomy. All of these images, and countless more you can’t even imagine, will be documented by Walker Evans-style photographs and earthy prose that would make John Steinbeck proud. The rule is: every day, in the camper parked in the woods, at a wayside, near a river or a lake, in the shadow of snowy peaks, or in front of tavern, a minimum of 750 words must be crunched out on the computer. The cheap wine will be lavishly spilled, Ray will chew bones, the Replacements and Crazy Horse will be your backing band, and it should be obvious that once these stories come out, the fig-eating weaklings at the slick magazines will be compelled to travel to the Oregon Coast and write a feature about you!

It’s all flawless. You have conceived the master physics strategy to achieve escape velocity out of the teaching profession and soon will be in orbit around the one planet in the solar system inhabited exclusively by professional writers. Floating high overhead, it’s simply a matter of gravity before you come to land and reside forever on this planet.

During May, before departure, you perform a little needed half-ass surgery on Emotional Rescue: new turnbuckles purchased and secured, new shelving, new parts for the heater, new propane tank, waste water system rerouted. To eliminate swaying in the curves, you cut up a few boards and wedge them between the camper and the truck’s side panels. The Ford also receives attention: new tires, fluid changes, and a mechanical inspection from a professional with a lot of youthful acne. You tell him the rig needs to be “squared away” for a trip on the Alaska Highway and he asks, “Where’s that go?”

Inside the camper you have arranged the means of production for great writing. It will work like this: every night fold out a desk, lift a desktop computer from off a shelf, put it on the desk, plug everything in, boot up the computer…and start cranking out the prose dreams of the golden mountains.

As for other literary accouterments, the list is: two tape recorders, two cameras, two journals, bundles of maps, guidebooks, a bulletin board hung, an eclectic library assembled from the local thrift stores, and postcards of famous drunk writers, none of whom ever wrote in a camper, tacked up in every nook and cranny.

You stock up on simple, hearty food and beer and wine and whiskey. You buy a new toolbox and load it with shiny new Craftsmen tools. You devise a secret compartment for emergency cash and a couple of joints. The wife has baked you cookies. The last purchase is a first aid kit and several flares.

It’s now early June and you go online and learn the snow up north has been cleared and the roads are open. The future is now. You second act is about to begin. You pity the slaves back in the faculty meetings! Real writers don’t go to meetings.

On the morning you leave the Oregon Coast it’s raining and a little gusty. You open the door and Ray jumps in to take up the shotgun position. An owl amulet your wife gave you dangles from the rearview mirror. She kisses you goodbye and you climb in the cab. You have black coffee with just a splash of bourbon in it for writerly effect steaming in the cup holder. The first disc in the CD changer is Exile on Main St. and “Rocks Off” begins as you ease the camper down the driveway.

Five miles later you pull into a gas station to fill both tanks. You get out of the truck and notice three of the four turnbuckles are unattached, hanging down, swinging back and forth, scraping off paint. You refasten them with a hammer and duct tape. You also realize that your support boards are gone. You brought along spares however, wedge them in, and this time nail them to the camper with four-inch nails retrieved from the new toolbox. The attendant pumping your gas doesn’t say a word as he watches all these repairs take place. You pay the gas bill, put the key into the ignition, turn it, receive a substantial electric shock, which happens about once in a hundred cranks with this truck, drive away, steer Emotional Rescue north, into the wind, take a sip of the coffee, and let the tingle dissipate from the right side of your body.

Nine days later you are stopped in the wilderness near Chicken, Alaska, just a few miles west of the Yukon border. You are totally alone in a campground and more physically and emotionally exhausted than any other point in your life. Earlier that day you drove 20 miles per hour for five hours over the Top of the World Highway in fog, wind, snow, rain, and rock shrapnel at 4500 feet on the worst unpaved road on the continent with plummets down either side of the ridge steep enough to cause vertigo just looking at them from the cab. It often made you nauseous. Several times the potholes were so deep and utterly unavoidable, that the impact lifted the camper completely off the truck bed. Each time it made a sound like a juvenile delinquent hitting a metal garbage can with an aluminum bat. Virtually ever minute of this ride you assumed the truck’s rear axle or chassis would crack. You have no cell phone or citizen’s band radio. You had never changed a tire on the truck. Or belts. You didn’t bring any belts. There was no shoulder anyway. You have no tow insurance for the truck onr any insurance at all for the camper. The windshield got pounded into a spider web right outside of Dawson City by a shotgun spread of gravel flown up by an oncoming truck. There was no place to pull out to check the rig or regroup. As you drove, the screaming second-guessing began. You pleaded for fewer potholes. You cursed the frequent sight of the little red flags that marked an especially deep, bottomless depression. You could have murdered the cranked-up, truck drivers barreling down from the other direction. You harangued the Yukon Province’s and then the State of Alaska’s ineptitude at basic road maintenance. You ran your fingers through your hair and came up with a greasy handful. Over and over, “Give me some fucking decent road!” It was a useless request and futile calming mantra. There was no decent road. There never would be. The safety flagger said so. He should know. He’d been flagging the same stretch of road for 14 years. All the while Ray is staring directly at you and it calls to mind a line from Travels with Charley, “I wonder why we think the thoughts and emotions of animals are simple?”

Finally you limped into the campground. You didn’t pay the fee. The spasms in your right arm finally settled. It was sleeting. Poetically it should have been dark too, but the daylight is unremitting, and the sleep deprivation has steadily mounted to POW-interrogation proportions. You headed to the pit toilet, opened the door, took in the smell, went to one knee, braced yourself with your left hand on a piss-soaked wall, and vomited all over the grated floor.

Inside the camper you take stock of the trip. Prior to the Top of the World Highway, which appeared quite benign on the Web, you nearly dumped the camper a dozen times on curves and canyons in the road, and when barely avoiding foxes, lynxes, moose and grizzly cubs. Your support boards flew out in the Fraser River canyon. They easily could have smashed into a vehicle behind you and caused the death of everyone on board. You shoved in more support boards and nailed them down with six-inch nails, but they didn’t hold either, and swung out perpendicular five feet from the camper, metal bristling, looking medieval, ready to impale the hitchhikers and bikers who traveled the Alaska Highway too, and without trying exuded about a thousand times more hardcore ethic than you. There was even a guy in loafers carrying only a briefcase and walking stick, in the middle of the Yukon Territory, in fog, near moose, who had no sane reason to be there except that perhaps he too had literary aspirations.

There were more mishaps, like the leaking propane tank, the flooded icebox, and all your firewood falling out because you forgot to shut the truck’s tailgate. The truly debilitating aspect of this trip, however, is not counting off the numerous fuck-ups, but the crushing fatigue of driving 10-12 hours a day, usually under 40 miles per hour, over road craters that could serve as slit trenches, without ever once letting up on concentration. You can also figure in another two hours every day pumping gas at prices the world is accustomed to, but not an American from the lower 48. A good day nets barely six inches highlighted on your map. The distance to the Arctic Ocean from the Oregon Coast didn’t look so far on the projection you used, but then again, you are one of those idiots who think Greenland is bigger than Australia and North America is at the center of the world.

And there in the campground at the western entrance to the top of the World Highway, map unrolled, legend finally read, the pure geography of it all is fathomed—you aren’t even half way.