After a bad road accident in Alaska, a railroad worker must travel through backcountry mining towns to find safety and recover her van. She relies on the help of strangers, with whom she shares life stories and wonders whether a tragically killed friend had somehow kept her safe.
“Whatever you do, do not unbuckle your seatbelt.”
I remember hearing that phrase from some distant conversation in my past, as I faded back into my current situation. I was dangling from my seat sideways, looking at a view that had been perpendicular just a minute ago.
The last two hours I had spent driving in the rain down a desolate dirt road to McCarthy, Alaska. I was trying to see through the downpour when I took a curve too close to the edge, and the road gave way. My arms and legs hung sideways toward my empty passenger seat, which now had foliage poking through what was once a closed window.
The last check on the GPS showed it was still over 15 miles to the remote town. No one would be coming to help—not out here—so I needed to get out of the van quickly and start walking. I spun my body around in the seat and pushed off whatever foothold I could get from the busted dashboard before releasing my seatbelt. I shoved upward in hopes of opening the driver’s side door. But being a van from the late ’90s, it wasn’t going to be easy. Finally, on the third try, the door forced open enough to climb out.
Sitting atop the sideways van, checking myself over, I heard someone running toward me. I had been so focused on escaping that I hadn’t noticed the worried faces in the pickup truck that had passed. A stranger’s footsteps approached, and that’s when I realized the van had landed downhill from the road. I turned around and saw that the only reason I didn’t continue rolling was that two trees had caught me.
Like a true gentleman, the man held open my door as I crawled back inside to grab a pair of shoes, my phone, wallet, and a raincoat.
Turns out I was only thirteen miles away from the backcountry community of McCarthy. The old mining town is cut off from civilization by the Copper River. Across the river, you’ll find buildings that have survived time and been revived by tourism. The only way to town is a walking bridge from a parking area that also serves as a campground.
I caught a ride into town with the mother-and-son duo who had stopped to help. They’d been coming to McCarthy since the man—now grown—was in the Boy Scouts. It had become a tradition: trips to McCarthy, now every couple of years.
I had just finished calling for a tow truck when McCarthy lost cell and internet service. The driver said he’d be at milepost 13 in six hours, and if I wanted a ride back with him, I had to be there. Since there was now no way for him to contact me, I had to show up on time.
Later that afternoon, I was a little worried about finding a ride back to the van. Most people had already left that morning, so traffic out of town was next to none. After an hour of wondering if I was just going to have to start a new life in McCarthy, a small pickup with an ATV in the bed pulled up. A younger guy with dirty blonde hair leaned out and said he was heading to Valdez and could give me a lift. Relief washed over me as I accepted and climbed in.
On our slow drive out of town, I told him I was working for the railroad as a conductor, but that I had spent several summers in Alaska after college to earn money for traveling in the winters. He asked what made me come back to work for the railroad—and at that point, I had a hard time summarizing it.
To those who think train conductors are just guys in suits who yell “All aboard” and punch tickets—you’re as naive as I was. My first shift was twelve hours of shoveling out switch after switch with a pickaxe, while snow kept piling up around us. There were freight runs where the conductor’s job was to hang out on the nose of the locomotive and shoot flares at moose that used the tracks as a break from shoulder-deep snow. The ones that went under the train—you just hoped they didn’t kick any air hoses loose, and that their death was quick. Otherwise, it was the conductor’s job to dispatch the moose to end their suffering.
Most of the time, you’re in the yard, walking around with pages full of numbers, each assigned to different cars, trying to solve the puzzle of digging them out of multiple tracks—while also being aware of other crews doing the same thing. You come to realize how huge a train car is when you’re the one hanging off one, using one hand to call out distances to your engineer 40 cars back, doing their best to keep everything under control. It becomes second nature. And when you drink the Kool-Aid enough, it’s actually enjoyable—especially when you finish a shift clean and don’t have to pass off work to the next crew.
My ride didn’t have much to say to that, so I turned the conversation back to him. He said his name was Corey and that he worked as a hunting guide out of Girdwood. He’d spent the last few days scouting for an upcoming grizzly hunt. When he said he lived in Girdwood, I asked if he knew my friend Kristal. He nodded and asked how I knew her.
Kristal was my first friend and roommate in Alaska, back in the summer of 2015. We spent our time hiking, camping, glacier climbing, kayaking, and chasing the northern lights. She had the travel bug and spent her life in beautiful places doing amazing things. I got to meet up with her in New Zealand a few years back, and we picked up right where we left off—only this time on the other side of the world. I had given up the dream of seasonal work not long after that, settling into a “real” job. But seeing her again reminded me there was still life left to live, and I wanted to give that dream another shot.
One night, I was on a northbound freight to Fairbanks from Anchorage. I had one good eye—having given myself a black eye the night before by catching my fall with my face down the stairs of the locomotive. When we landed the freight, my two male coworkers got side-eyes from staff at the rail office. On our return trip north, around 4 am, we started seeing a spectacular display of northern lights. It wasn’t your typical full-sky glow—this was a string of light twisting into what looked like an infinity symbol. The spiral shifted from blue to green, then pink, then purple. The engineer, a Fairbanks native, wanted to stop for a “restroom break” just to watch it—he’d never seen anything like it. I popped out onto the nose of the train and watched the lights dance as dawn began to fade them away.
That memory brought me back to earlier that day, before we left for Fairbanks. The rail office had been somber. A pedestrian had been hit and killed by our southbound freight near Bird Point. The managers were working with the FRA on the investigation as we gathered our paperwork. All we knew was that the victim was a woman in her 30s. That afternoon, after waking up from a deep sleep, I got a call from my friend Kelly. Her voice was quiet and serious. She told me the pedestrian was our friend Kristal.
As we rounded the corner, we saw the underbelly of my van, still resting exactly where I had left it. Corey looked at it and said, “Kristal was really looking out for you. If you went off any other part of this road, you’d be a missing person.”
The weight of the day finally hit me. I remembered passing cliffs not far from where I rolled—at least a 100-foot drop into the Copper River. I felt a twinge in my heart, realizing that even though I had been alone in the van, I had a guardian angel watching over me. That’s when I remembered the northern lights I saw that night on the freight—their surreal colors, that perfect spiral. Looking back now, I know that was Kristal. She made it where she was going—and she’s still here in the beauty we see every day.
Corey slowed the truck to a stop. Rain had started falling again. We both stared at the van. He turned to me and said, “You know, the last couple days I’ve seen tracks out here that tell me what’s in these woods. I could give you one of my guns to have on you, just in case.”
I laughed at the kind offer and replied, “Thanks, but I’m a lousy shot.”
