Ken Ilgunas - Trespassing Across America: One Man’s Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike Across the Heartland

Escape from Prudhoe Bay

DEADHORSE, ALASKA

Fall 2011

I can say this from experience: Theres nothing like washing spoon after spoon in the middle of the night in a silent kitchen at a working camp three hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle that makes you think about the direction your life is headed in.

A year before I threw on a backpack and set off on a hike across North America, I found myself driving a mud-caked van full of bed linens to a working camp in Alaska called Deadhorse, where I was to assume the position of camp dishwasher.

It was a 250-mile ride up the gravel and dirt Dalton Highway that links the interior of the state to the Prudhoe Bay oil fields along the Arctic Ocean coast. It was late and dark, yet the storm clouds zipping from one end of the sky to the other still held within them a curious pink-red hue. Between the time lapselike passage of the clouds and the deathly still tundra plain (where the wind has no trees to shake or leaves to scatter), I felt as if I were entering some disturbing, unworldly, goat-headed netherworld.

This place is just weird, said Liam, a cook in the passenger seat, looking up at the clouds.

I was thinking the same thing, I said.

Deadhorse houses about three thousand oil-field laborers who live at the work camp for a month at a time before they fly back to wherevers home for a week or two. In Deadhorse, there are no churches, schools, families, or anything that would make it resemble a normal American town. It is a cold, lifeless, cheerless (and nearly femaleless) place where nobody in his right mind would ever want to livean assertion that would insult no one, as it is held most ardently by those who call themselves permanent residents.

I pulled into the Deadhorse Camp parking lot and carefully stepped out into fifty-mile-per-hour winds, placing my feet into the mud-gravel ground with all of my weight for fear that my armful of linens and I would capsize with the next heavy gust.

How I found myself in Deadhorse is worth a story of its own, but suffice it to say, I was desperate and needed money. Id moved up to Alaska with the intention of turning a series of blog essays (from my web site, regrettably named The Spartan Student) into a book about a few years of my life during which I lived in a van so that I could afford grad school. But after a series of disappointments, I had to set my sights on the much more practical task of eking out a living.

D eadhorse Camp is a steely rectangular Halliburton housing unit that runs entirely on diesel fuel. I worked alongside four coworkers all my age, cooking and cleaning for about fifty oil-field workers who stayed at our camp. Oddly enough, three of us had college degrees in Englisha degree that clearly did nothing to prepare us for the duties of succeeding in the professional world but did, however, empower us to have impassioned forty-five-minute conversations about whether the film Scream does or does not fit within the horror genre.

I was given one side of a red-and-white outdoor Travco trailer that was outfitted with giant skis so it could be dragged over the ice in winter. The manager encouragingly referred to it as my writing studio, but the desk, which had been glued to the wall decades before, fell off the moment I placed my laptop on it.

Coworkers shared the communal shower with the tourists and pipeline workers. Because, as we were told, water cost thirty-five cents a gallon, it was no surprise that the water flowed from the shower nozzle at an exasperating dribble. The water pressure being so slight, I had to stand directly beneath it. Whenever I turned to wash a different part of my body, Id accidentally nudge the hot-cold dial, which was hypersensitive, so much so that a millimeter adjustment to the left or right would send either a boiling, skin-melting trickle onto my shoulders or a polar, heart-stopping slush.

I didnt mind my accommodations at all. In fact, I was plenty amused with the novelty of the camp and its eccentric drabness, but the workthe work!was depressing. Id come into the kitchen at six p.m. (the dish shift) and scrub the bottoms of burned soup pots, dip my hand into sink drains to pluck out handfuls of slippery vegetables, and cram heavy black industrial trash bags into polar bearproof Dumpsters. Id set up the salad bar, slice the bread, arrange the dessert rack, fold used cardboard, and clean up the kitchen for the morning cook. There once was a time when I was a student, a park ranger, an adventurer. And now look at me. Dishwasher.

I t sounds like your inner Odysseus is lost at sea, said Liam, Deadhorses thirty-year-old prize chef. Id just let out a sigh for the third time in an hour while trying to use a wire brush to scrub dried specks of mashed potato off the rim of a large metal stirring bowl.

Oh, Liam. How I liked Liam! Every evening wed work alongside each other. Hed cook, Id clean, and wed talk. Our conversations were the only thing I looked forward to. Liam was a few years older than I was. He was extremely well-read and the sort of person who knows all the names of Homers Greek characters and who could apply his erudition to everyday issues, like the way he assigned some of the few female Deadhorse oil-field laborers with personality-revealing names such as Circe and Calypso. Liam was one of those rare people you come across in life who you want to stuff into a sack and carry with you wherever you go.