Jim Christy - Rough Road to the North: A Vagabond on the Great Northern Highway

Rough Road to the North: A Vagabond on the Great Northern Highway

Jim Christy

All Rights Reserved

Rough Road to the North: A Vagabond on the Great Northern Highway is part of the Tramp Lit Series for Feral House.

For further information about these titles, see www.feralhouse.com

Front cover top photo: The Alcan Highway from the United States National Archives.

Front cover bottom photo: First truck to go over the rough road along the Alcan Highway, 1942. From the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division

Back cover map: Ernie Carter Photographs, 2004-68-54, Alaska and Polar Region Archives, Elmer E. Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Feral House 1240 W Sims Way #124 Port Townsend WA 98368

Designed by Jacob Covey

ISBN: 9781627310826

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ROUGH ROAD TO THE NORTH

A Vagabond on the Great Northern Highway

CONTENTS

A Vagabond on the Great Northern Highway

the frontier is the wavethe outer edge between savagery and civilization

Frederick Jackson Turner

W HAT IS THE lure of this great land, this ultimate Northwest, Ultima Thule? Something other than the sum of its natural wonder and the drama of its history. There is no other place on earth like it, not even remotely, and if you have spent considerable time here, as have I, it keeps tugging at you when you are gone. It offers, as few other places do, the promise of flat-out old-fashioned adventure. It is inhabited by a kind of people who just do not exist anywhere else. Furthermore, it is heartbreakingly beautiful. It has had its bards but never the epic poet it deserves because before its grandeur and its ferocity one can only be overwhelmed, humbled, silenced. You can live there even now and be a true pioneer, but that will not be true for very much longerand it is this knowledge too that draws one back, for over this land hangs a vague but palpable melancholy. And through it all winds one road, a lifeline, an achievement of heroic proportions that opened up unlimited potential, brought the world to a few thousand people and revealed a land that since time immemorial had existed in its grandeur and its permanence. The road brought the world, the road brought riches, and the road inevitably cannot but fail to bring the end to a way of life we will never see again.

I have made numerous trips up this Alaska Highway, known also as the Alcan, formerly called the Road to Tokyo. I have even labored on the road, maintaining it around Whitehorse in the Yukon. So I have lived and worked up here and truly know it well, yet when I am away and begin to think of the land it stirs in me a wanderlust that some might describeand some do!as youthful or nave, but I am a youth no longer. Nave, yes, in the sense of a wonder one cannot help but feel in the presence of nature. In the sense of the road and its myriad possibilities. The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose, as Whitman wrote.

I just get to thinking about it. About the cabin I used to have, alone, the only person on Fox Lake in the Yukon and of the lake trout and grayling that were almost too easy to catch. I think of Jesse Starnes, the old prospector in the Peace country. I picture everyone coming in from the bus to spend their dough on a Second Avenue Fairbanks Saturday night. And I think of that Far North road just snaking through the tall trees and bending around the vast cold lakes. And I know I will have to pack up and take off, have to find some excuse to get there; it may be tomorrow or two months from the first time the feeling hits me but I will get there even though it may, and usually does, wreak havoc with any schedule Ive set for myself, any projects that have to be completed; even though it might be against good sense, it is unavoidable. The call of the wild.

The feel of that land is always there no matter in what part of the world I might find myself. And it is the part of North America people seem to be most curious about in other countries. The Northwest, Alaska, the Klondike. Not long ago in the airport in Salisbury, Rhodesia, I met a geologist who had just been evacuated from a war-ravaged section of the country near Victoria Falls and he told me his dream was to go hunting for Dalls sheep in the Yukon. I began to talk about the Yukon. How he would have to fly into Whitehorse, hook up with a guide and an outfitter, and charter a bush plane back into the mountains, maybe on the Northwest Territories border near Keele Lake where flying over during hunting season you can see the sheep clinging to the patches of ice on top of the gunmetal-gray mountains. I thought out loud about waking up on those hunting mornings, drinking coffee around the campfire while the wrangler gathers the horses, and then setting off through broad meadows of yellow tundra rose to the foot of high cliffs. I talked about it and he listened and we both dreamed of being there while in the suburbs near the airport the mines of war were exploding. He said he would just have to go and I realized that yet again I would also have to make the long trip. Well, it took me a while to get started but I made it and I hope he did too.

My excuse this time was snow, the cold and the snow. I had never made the entire trip along the Alaska Highway, done all 1,523 miles, when the land, every bit of it, was covered with snow. There would be no tourists, no recreational vehicles raising dust and throwing rocks, the fireplace would be roaring in the 98 Saloon in Whitehorse, the old-timers would be gathered around their barrel stoves spinning yarns and telling lies. It was all the excuse I needed.

I was in the city, Toronto, and the first snow had fallen, the temperature had risen, and it had all turned into slush on the streets and wet dirty drifts at the curb. The city was nearly paralyzed by the paltry snow and people grumbled and complained on the corners and their boots dripped puddles on the dingy subway floor. I told friends I was going up the Alcan and they told me that I was crazy. If these conditions were so miserable, why would anyone knowingly venture farther north, where there was more cold and more snow? Of course none of them had ever been. It is different, I said.

I set about gathering my gear with enthusiasm worthy of ones first big trip away from home. I remembered sneaking out of the house when I was thirteen years old to go off riding freight trains. I remembered that first trip to the Yukon several years before and recalled the nascence of the idea. I was in Toronto then, too, and there was a knock on the door of my room. There was my friend Erling Friis-Baastad and in his hand he held a newspaper clipping. It was about the Yukon, about how the modern world had established itself, yet the people contained within themselves all the spirit of their pioneer heritage. Erling didnt say anything, just held the clipping out to me. I read it and looked at him and he grinned. Okay, I said, when do we leave?