A remote Alaskan road trip provides a framework for a beautiful meditation on driving, travel, and companionship.
North of the Brooks Range beyond Atigun Pass, the land folds open in ridges and vales east to west, treeless but not barren, empty of animals. We had come up from the south on Alaska’s Dalton Highway across the Yukon River through miles of boreal forest, stands of black spruce, balsam fir, and jack pine running roadside and up into the low hills. The Brooks Range cuts across the state, a rampart beyond which the trees do not pass. It is a threshold dividing one world from another and we had just driven through it.
Not to have met a big transport truck through that cold, narrow pass was a relief, but one was coming toward us now and another coming up from behind, pushing hard to meet a schedule, hauling god knows what. A voice on the shortwave broke through the squelch: “I’m comin’ around,” and the big truck behind came around, throwing rock and dust and mud up over the little car, moving across then in front as the oncoming truck now burst through. What quiet fell then, the dust and gravels and settling air.
The Dalton Highway, also called the Haul Road, is 414 miles from Livengood, Alaska north to Deadhorse and the Prudhoe Bay oilfields. Constructed in the 1970s alongside the Alaska Pipeline, the road serviced the pipeline and oilfields alone until 1994 when it opened to the public. The Dalton is one of only two roads in North America running all the way north to the Arctic Ocean (the other is the Dempster Highway on the Canadian side) through one of the final great tracts of wild land anywhere in the world. Much of the road is still gravel, and then in places, a little blacktop, but that blacktop is often broken and pot-holed, great gaping chasms in just the place your tires want to go. The gravel sections can be rough too, but a good rain and a team of graders make smooth what was rutted and torn. The road is good only after it has been bad. It’s the one thing and then the other, changing its mind and its mood seasonally and incidentally, storm by storm, and by the force of the rain and the push of the sun, a live thing, a wild thing, an animal.
I am traveling with a woman drawn to water, and when she told me she wanted to step into the Arctic Ocean, I told her, let’s go. We drove my diesel truck with its Alaskan Camper from where I live and she was born in oil rich Texas to where I was born and she had never been in oil rich Alaska. In Fairbanks, we rented a Ford Escape equipped for the Dalton: two spare tires, good stiff fenders around all four wheels, a first aid kit, a box of tools, and a CB radio. Light and nimble, the car is surprisingly suited to this road compared to my eleven-thousand-pound truck. Our itinerary from Fairbanks was one day of driving to Coldfoot, then to Deadhorse and Prudhoe Bay the next day. From there, we would take a bus a few miles over oil company land to dip our feet in the ocean. Then we would drive south again, spend another night in Coldfoot and return to Fairbanks the following day. Four days of continuous driving in endless summer light.
The space between driver and passenger is a borderline that cannot be crossed. Not with conversation or navigation or playing the alphabet game or any other amusement or distraction. Driver and passenger are seated next to each other, but they live in separate worlds. Driving, you always have something to do, something that asks for your attention, something that focuses and concentrates your mind. It is not unlike meditation, the physical act of quieting the mind to make way for a continuous and dynamic river of thought and feeling and information. It all comes in as fast as it goes out. It feels good to drive, and it feels good to drive slowly because driving slowly you feel the surface of Earth through your hands on the wheel, you feel the curves and turns, and the dips and bumps in the road, you feel the engine in its purr, the drive shaft turning the wheels, the air, which you cannot feel, moving sharply over the nose of your conveyance and funneling along the hood and up over the windshield, shielding you. You are beautifully occupied in your effortless power. To drive is to take on a new skin, a new body, to re-imagine space and alter the spill of time.
For the passenger, driving is not a meditation; it’s survival. The passenger suffers the long monotony of the road, enduring a continual anxiety washing over the body’s need to do something. While the passenger is free to move about, to shift positions, to take off her shoes and take up her legs, to adjust the seat belt, to look about without heed for the road, such lack of restraint wearies the senses and fatigues the body curved unnaturally in the seat. As much as each mile of road is distinct, they are also the same. One curve is like another, one bend, one turn, one long straightaway, one little side road running out into the bush or off the highway to a service station or a little town no different from another little town. (There are forty-one towns in the United States named Springfield.) The passenger will try at amusing herself by reading, first aloud and then to herself, by fiddling with the radio, or playing music from a playlist, searching for a podcast, pulling out the snacks, striking up conversation emanating from wild thoughts once tethered but now completely unmoored. The passenger may try to sleep or doze lightly and waking from such a sleepless sleep, she can only hope that she has come a very long way and now has but a few minutes to put on her shoes, have a drink of water, and check herself in the visor mirror before arriving. But she discovers only ten miles are newly behind her. She still has a very long way to go.
Off Atigun Pass now and into the open tundra, we drove north with nothing but the road running on ahead and the tundra in its summer splendor, these wraiths of cloud to filter the sky. Moving as slowly as we were, I still felt apart from the place, as if the place felt apart from me. I wanted an anchor point to moor my eyes, to give me a fix on the land so that I could better understand what it wanted, but it went on endlessly in every direction wanting nothing from me and maybe wanting nothing at all. And what did I want? Why was I here, but for a quirk of my curiosity or to satisfy hers? Perhaps I wanted nothing too, if nothing was a thing acceptable to want. Was it enough, that like the wolf, I wanted simply to roam?
A dark figure appeared on the road that became a man holding a sign where a bright sun now fell over him. “Stop,” the sign told us, so we did.
Wearing a yellow hard hat and bright flagging vest, skinny, an unkempt beard, this fellow walked right up to my window.
“You got nine miles of construction ahead of you,” he said. “And the pilot car will be here in about twenty minutes.”
“All right,” I said.
“And then we got something real special for you,” he offered. “We got fifty-two miles of beautiful black pavement for you with a yellow line right down the center all the way to Deadhorse.”
“Really?” I said.
“Really,” he said. “It’s the best road in Alaska. That’s the big joke around here. The best road in Alaska is the most remote road in Alaska. It was a COVID project to get people working again, and it sure has sped up the trip down to Fairbanks.”
“Is that so,” I said.
“It is so,” he said. “I been workin’ as a flagger for awhile now,” he told us without a prompter. “I got my certification online in three hours, and I make thirty-two dollars an hour. I used to stay over there in Coldfoot, you know, and I really liked that. But most of the guys on the crew now stay at the RV park at Dietrich. They got power and water and Wi-Fi over there. But I liked staying in Coldfoot. A guy could get a beer in Coldfoot. Hell, they could pay me in beer,” he said.
A column of dust came at us on the road.
“That’s the pilot car,” he said, and he waved us on.
Just as we were told, our front wheels came up onto the blackest, smoothest pavement you ever saw, and the car took on an ambient hum. I felt like we had been riding horses through mud and thick brush all day, getting scratched and beat up, and now we had broken free onto an open plain to gallop, the wind in our hair. That thought brought me to another thought. A Wyoming rancher once told me that a horse has two sides. If you train a horse to accept a rider mounting on the left side, that does not mean the horse will accept a rider mounting on the right side. You have to train the right side also. And a horse that walks easily by a barking dog on the right, might shy and frighten if a dog is barking on its left. The two sides of a horse are hardly connected. It seemed to me that a road is that way too. And the space between driver and passenger. And maybe the space between lovers.
A golden eagle perched on a delineator post came in and went out of view, remarkable because we had hardly seen anything alive all day except each other. And then, she—dressed all in black as was her fashion, with her hair all blonde and sunny—reached across the divide between us and put her hand on mine, and just like that, we came to Deadhorse.
I didn’t know why, but I thought about Texas and it made me sad. I did not want to be in Texas. I wanted to be here, with her. I wanted to be where I was and when I was, and yet this feeling came over me, and I felt it. When I set Deadhorse Camp as our destination, it was so far north, I think I thought we would never arrive. Now that we had, the only way to go on was to go back, and then it would be over. We each worked for universities in different states, and as the summer ended and we returned to those jobs, the space between us would get bigger. What I wanted was a future out in front of us, a new destination and a new road to follow, for traveling was the way we came together.
*
So many of us are looking for something but do not know what it is. You feel the pull of it and sometimes mistake it for regret. It grows over time and seats itself in your heart so indelibly you wonder if it is gone; it is not gone. It aches and rises, a fountain inside that leaves you dry and thirsting. You must learn as you go, each lesson building on the wreckage of the one before, and each demanding that you remember, but we so easily forget. You are driven, sometimes in circles, sometimes in long, straight lines, in search of absolution. You want to be cleansed. Somewhere in my travels, I came to understand that I would have to write about a place to know the place I had been.
*
At the long table in the narrow dinning room at Deadhorse Camp, we kept watch out the window for a grizzly sow and her two cubs that had been hanging around for the past several days. A couple from Idaho and a small party with a guide who wore a big cowboy hat came through the buffet line, then compartmentalized, defining a permeable boundary through which small talk might pass. Nothing moved outside the window but tundra grass, arctic willow, Labrador tea.
In our room, she and I poured two glasses of dry red wine. She raised hers to make a gesture to the day, and like a prophet come down from the mountain, she said, “Wine tastes better when there’s hope.”
We closed the heavy curtains to make an artificial dark. I lay thinking of the traveler we had encountered at Yukon River Camp the day before who was walking around the world. Headed south, he pulled a cart from his waist loaded with gear. His journey had just begun.
*
In the morning, a rainbow drew an arc over a Quonset hut in the western sky. We took the bus to the shore of the Arctic Ocean. The beach was strewn with driftwood and brown algae pushed up by the tides into several wrack lines that followed the curved shape of the land. The breeze was hardly a breeze at all, and the mosquitoes came in against us. Two in our party stripped and dove into that brackish water, while she and I pulled up our pant-legs to wade in to our knees. The ocean reached out into a skyshine that ran all the way to the horizon.
*
Back on the road, our long journey half-way over, a truck came around us and vanished into tomorrow. I pointed out a dark shape moving along the road, then slowed and pulled over, rolled down the window. A bull muskox. His long, opulent hair looked clean and healthy built up over the hump of his shoulders to the perfect curve of his horns off the horn boss which wandered back and forth with his head in his swagger. He seemed to have some place to go as he did not stop or hesitate or even look up to see us looking at him. So at ease on his feet, I thought then that he was not following our road, but we were following his, even a road that had come up out of the last ice age coterminous with industrialization and the oil boom. This was his place, all of it in every direction, and the Dalton Highway cut through to give us a way in and a way out. There in our little car, the moment seemed to spill over the brim of the world as into a great basin of space and time and we were all in it together, traveling south.
