Four Quarters of Light (22 page)

But history in Fairbanks was yesterday, far too recent to bother about. Everyone here was more interested in today and getting ready for tomorrow, and that became my own preoccupation. A couple of days were spent rummaging through car-boot sales. There seemed to be several of them every day in the town. At one of these I procured a small two-man tent for the same amount of dollars. ‘Why spend serious money on expensive equipment that I might use for only a few weeks?' I thought to myself. A few visits to the army surplus stores yielded groundsheets, mosquito netting and a lightweight rucksack; at the Meyers supermarket I
purchased quantum supplies of insect repellent. I borrowed a sleeping bag, water boots, torches and batteries, and I quickly realized the necessity of having friends here. Pat's statement weeks ago that you needed lots of stuff in Alaska was proving true. I carefully ticked things off the list as I acquired them, wondering where I was going to keep it all after returning from my trip. I now had enough baggage for the four of us, and being the inveterate archivist of exotic but utterly useless ephemera that I am, my travels were already threatening to burden me beyond Audrey's endurance. I could hear her voice even now: ‘The reason, Brian, why you can't find anything in this RV is because it is so full of the rubbish you insist on collecting!' I could only agree with her, but little did she or I know what was to come.

Anyone learns within hours of arriving in Fairbanks that there are only two ways to head north: either take the ‘haul road' (the Dalton highway) some four hundred miles to the Prudhoe Bay or fly into any accessible destination in the bush. Driving the haul road in some great behemoth of a multi-ton truck appealed to me the way flying in a tiny two-seater aircraft, exposed to any and every elemental outrage, didn't. But it was impossible to hire any kind of vehicle to make the journey on the Dalton highway. No company, big or small, would permit any of their vehicles to drive on this road, for the term ‘highway' is an exaggeration of gigantic proportions. The surface of the road is guaranteed to strip the tyres of any unsuitable vehicle in less than half an hour; if the razor-sharp shale and rock doesn't get you, then sudden hurricane winds, temperatures ten degrees below freezing or even an oncoming truck out of control because of any of the above will. The journey is more hazardous than anything the
Starship Enterprise
can throw up. The haul road is not a digitally remastered adventure for the imagination, it's for real. Its death toll and the loss and destruction of million-dollar trucks and million-dollar cargoes confirm it. It is unquestionably the world's most extreme highway. One trucker described it as being like ‘riding on a tiger's back, only the tiger ain't got no muzzle on and he doesn't want you there'. I thought such comments were
good-natured bravado, but I was to learn otherwise. Superlatives in Alaska are not just colourful talk; they are colourfully expressive because sometimes it's the only way to accommodate the truth.

I took to hanging around the haulage depots and truckers' cafés and managed to contact a driver named ‘Tex' O'Neill who agreed to take me along with him so I could get a taste of the Arctic wilderness before disappearing into it. Tex's Irish ancestry was a big bonus in convincing him to accommodate me. I had been told that most truckers didn't like carrying passengers, especially strangers. Some drivers are even superstitious about them, regarding them as a ‘Jonah'. The fact that I was researching a book on Alaska also intrigued Tex. He told me he liked books and enjoyed reading as it made his work a lot easier. I wasn't quite sure how reading and driving a sixty-foot truck and fifty-ton trailer on the most hazardous road in the world were compatible, but I was yet to learn just how widely read Tex was.

He was approaching his ‘three score years without the extra ten', as he put it, had been driving the Dalton for almost thirty years and was still enjoying it. But Tex was not the clichéd caricature of a hard-living, hard-driving, hard-drinking, womanizing trucker that so many movies give us. He was a tall, stocky man. The white hair on his temples contrasted with his black baseball cap. He wore the mandatory checked shirt and blue denims with his feet encased in stout working men's boots, which he obviously took some pleasure in polishing. That feature alone marked him out from every other Alaskan male I had seen. He had an air of avuncular quiet about him which matched the slow grace of his movements as he walked or drank coffee. The man exuded deliberation and calmness, which the soft blue of his eyes seemed to emphasize.

He had moved from a small town in Texas with his parents and retinue of half a dozen brothers and sisters more than half a century ago, and though he had spent his early childhood and whole adult life in Alaska he still spoke with a marked southern drawl. He had left school early, like some of his brothers and
sisters, and begun working with his father on the railroad. Even then, with the rail system still under construction, he felt there was little future for the railways. They were never going to open up Alaska the way they had done in the lower 48. ‘Even if the tracks were made of vulcanized rubber you still couldn't bend them across this place,' Tex observed. Like many Alaskans of his age Tex spent his early working life in a series of jobs and seasonal work for the federal government, or on heavy construction sites. He was construction foreman on the road he now drives on. ‘I figured if I built it, I should be able to drive on it better than some of the rig operators who were moving in to snatch up the big bucks the oil boom was paying.' Tex wasn't being boastful or dismissive, he was simply stating a fact, and after almost thirty years of making the thousand-mile round trip from his home to Deadhorse and back few would argue about his guru-like knowledge of this semi-mystical motorway. When Tex wasn't working he supplemented his income and larder by hunting and trapping. The two or three runs a week he made on the road still allowed him time to set traps a few miles from the road in the remotest bush.

We set off from Fairbanks at six p.m. with about sixty thousand pounds of cargo inside a heated fifty-three-foot trailer. There was everything in there from mail, food and drink to tools, spare parts and drums of transmission oil. It made for bulk, but not the kind of weight Tex preferred. ‘It's just fine for this time of year,' he explained, ‘but in the winter, with cross gales and treacherous ice slicks, you need weight to hold you to the road like a bluebottle on flypaper.' When I asked him if he had any preference, he matter-of-factly explained that every load was different and the weather conditions could change dramatically, especially in winter. ‘There are winds that blow through the Atigun Pass that can load a slope with snow in under an hour, and the next thing you know you're driving through a snowstorm like blind Bartimeus, and then bang, you're nailed in your tracks by an avalanche.'

‘What do you do?' I asked, fascinated and excited.

‘Keep the motor running and the heat pumping, light up the cab like it was the fourth of July, boil up some coffee or soup, get out a book and hope some inexperienced young driver doesn't come ploughing into you, panicked by the weather.'

‘Does it happen a lot?'

‘Not much now,' he conceded. ‘Truckers keep in constant communication by CB radio, informing each other of hazards or stalled rigs. But twenty-five years ago, when the boom was at its height and when anyone with two hands and two feet and not much between their ears was trying to strike it rich on the road, the danger of roll-over or collision was always present. Even in the best of times the road is a creature you come to understand but never really know. You can never let your guard down or become lackadaisical. The road has its own moods, and you come to know and accept them. You can't fight against them or you'll end up off the road, maybe for good. You've got to be patient.' Even as he said that, with his easy southern drawl and gentle mannerisms, I knew Tex was the absolute epitome of patience. ‘New drivers push too hard at the wrong times,' he continued. ‘They cut corners on their gear and food. They drive off the shoulders or take the grades too slow or too fast. That impatience thing is what makes some guys drive into areas where the wind has come up, or leave the safety of Coldfoot when they should stay put. This road ain't Daytona. I may have a five-hundredhorsepower Detroit engine under my hood but that counts for diddly shit when the weather gets on a growler. The wind at Atigun could whip a bobtail off the road as easy as it was a spinning top.'

‘What's a bobtail?' I asked.

Tex smiled benignly at my ignorance. ‘A bobtail is this truck cab without its trailer. Most other people in the trucking business might call them simply semis.'

I tried to make up for my tenderfoot innocence by cracking a joke: ‘I suppose you have to be semi-crazy to do this job!' I thought the subtlety of the remark might have been lost on him and was about to say something banal to cover up the silence
between us when I noticed a slow smile spreading across Tex's face as he negotiated the traffic out of the city.

‘Semi-crazy! You're downright committable!'

By 6.30 there was little traffic in Fairbanks, and soon we were clear of the city. But just beyond the small community of Fox, Tex pulled in to fill his plastic water container from a spring. He had been doing it every day since he'd started trapping in the hills. After another half an hour we pulled in at a petrol station, which would be our last before reaching Coldfoot, a truck stop just under halfway to Deadhorse.

‘How much will this beast take?' I queried.

‘A hundred and fifty gallons should take you to Coldfoot, then we'll top up again for the rest of the trip.'

Tex was obviously a familiar face, and soon he and his friends were huddled together, exchanging conversation. They were momentarily curious about the stranger in his cab, and once he'd explained who I was they were keen to say hello. One of them joked, ‘Best be careful with this man. He's not called Killer O'Neill for nothing you know, and it's not just because of the wildcats he snares up in the Brooks Range.' Tex climbed into the cab and made some remark back, which was totally lost on me but had the group of men smiling and laughing.

‘I told the guys what an Irish writer had said about being semi-crazy to do this job,' Tex said. ‘They all said you were very perceptive and wanted a copy of your book so's they could read just how crazy I was!'

The inside of Tex's cab was as comfortable as it was confined. The driver's seat was state-of-the-art design in armchair comfort, and the double passenger seat was more like a living-room couch. For trucks that rarely carried passengers, this was luxury. But Tex was quick to let me know that the combined passenger and driver seat doubled up as a kind of day-bed. The windows all had roller blinds and blackout curtains – a must during the summer months with round-the-clock daylight.

Driving the Dalton was as demanding psychologically as it was physically. The constant attention to road and weather
conditions and the ever-changing calculations about breaking speeds up and down the steepest inclines in the world balanced against weight distribution, which would change as materials were unloaded en route, created a fatigue that could creep up on the inexperienced driver suddenly and with devastating results. As Tex put it, ‘Twenty minutes' shut-eye every two or three hours could save you and your cargo or someone else out there travelling in the other direction.' In my own mind I could see why having a stranger ‘riding shotgun' was not encouraged. After all, I was sitting on his bed, in his private quarters. I recalled him explaining how the road had moods and you had to become familiar with them and fit in accordingly. What relationship he had established with the road, his responses to it and the demands of his body all had to be revised to accommodate me. For a moment I thought Tex would be more comfortable if I was back in the trailer, just another piece of cargo.

There was something reassuring about the man and his machine. It smelled of old leather, strong black coffee and Old Spice cologne. Behind us were the sleeping quarters with an immaculately made-up bed, cooking facilities including a microwave oven and coffee percolator, a small colour TV and sophisticated mini hi-fi equipment. A double bookshelf above the bedhead complete with reading lamp disclosed an assortment of books and magazines. The former were American masterpieces by authors ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain to Saul Bellow and John Updike; the latter were principally about hunting and fishing.

‘I thought you might have been a Hemingway man,' I suggested.

‘Yeah, I got some of that guy as well. Pull out that small compartment under the bed,' he instructed.

I did as I was told and discovered another neatly kept library of books on tape. Histories, mysteries and westerns were there, as well as heavyweight stuff such as
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
, presidential biographies and some classics of English literature. Some years ago he had joined an audio books club and had become an enthusiastic customer.

When Tex was a younger man he used to pick up songbooks with sheet music and lyrics, attempt to learn them, then belt them out as he hurtled or crawled along the highway. I asked if he was a good singer, to which he replied, ‘Hell no, can't sing a note to save myself, but there ain't an audience out here to be bothered one way or another. So I just tell myself move over there Pavarotti, Elvis or whoever it is and let rip.' He paused for a moment and I was about to laugh when he explained that not only was it good for the soul but it eased accumulating stress levels when you were fighting the elements to get to a safe resting place. Though their modes of transport were a million miles apart, Dan the dog musher and Tex the long-haul driver had a lot in common.

So engaged was I in the cockpit of our cab that I had missed the straight run up to the Elliot highway. We were now on the haul road proper and making our first uphill climb. Within seconds the speed of the huge tractor-trailer plunged and the engine began grumbling under the load. Flicking a switch on the console to the right of him, Tex locked the drive axles and differentials to increase traction. His progression down through eighteen forward gears syncopated the droning rhythm. It was like a move up the music scale by a colicky bass soloist. Do, ray, me, fa, so, la, ti, do – each note followed by hesitation then acceleration as the rig rumbled upwards. Whatever throaty crescendo the big five-hundred-horsepower engine was giving off, Tex's finger moved through the gearbox with all the grace of a concert pianist until we crawled over the crest of the hill, at which point he immediately released the locked axles and the undercarriage began hissing and exploding like small-arms fire. As the truck gathered speed on our descent, Tex shifted the gears up through their sequence with the same dexterity as before. This time the engine hummed like a svelte baritone.