Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (4 page)

If just for the summer, we thought of ourselves not as poor students but daring adventurers. And when we crossed the Alaskan border and arrived in Coldfoot, all we wanted was to keep going and make our grand entrance into the wild.

But first came a week of cleaning. For eight hours a day we made beds, scrubbed showers, and brushed toilets for $8 an hour. On the summer solstice (June 21), which is more or less an observed holiday in the arctic, we cleaners got together with the rest of the Coldfoot crew—the guides, maintenance workers, cooks, servers, dishwashers—and all got drunk on Miller High Life on the gravel bank of the Koyukuk River. As the midnight sun carouseled around us, I tottered around a bonfire and screamed, at the top of my lungs, “I’M!!! IN!!! ALASKA!!!”

Paul and I were eager to test our “manhood” in the wild, so we decided to climb the biggest mountain within a reasonable distance of the truck stop. Scanning a giant topographic map of the region at a nearby ranger station, we confidently placed our fingers on Blue Cloud, a 5,910-foot peak just inside the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, which would be an off-trail, backcountry hike ten miles each way.

Aside from the stroll we took up a small hill when we drove through Yellowstone National Park, this would quite literally be
the first hike of our lives. Paul and I had grown up in western New York—a topographically challenged plain of flatland, on top of which sat a horrid landscape of subdivisions, chemical plants, and abandoned warehouses. Our suburban neighborhood was called “Country Meadows,” which was mostly rural when we were kids but had been, as we grew up, bulldozed and paved over to make way for new houses and tracts. What adventures we could embark on had to take place in virtual video game worlds on television screens or, at best, within the borders of football fields and hockey rinks. So no opportunity ever called for us to filter water, light a fire, use a compass, or do anything even remotely “manly.”

Paul was a closet metrosexual who wore pink polos (because he got them “on sale”) and insisted—to anyone who inquired—that his arms were, in fact, naturally hairless. I was woefully inept at just about everything, indoors and out. When Paul and I tried to set up our tent on a pre-trip trial run, the finished product looked like a crumpled tissue. We were “cheechakos”—a term the Alaskan natives used during the gold rush that meant, more or less, “the idiots from down south who don’t know what they’re doing.” More precisely, we were suburbanites, only familiar with landscapes of strip malls and sublots, soccer fields and sprawl.

I hoisted onto my shoulders my brand-new backpack, filled with a large camcorder, an aging three-person tent that a friend had lent to us, a cumbersome bear-resistant food container (holding a few peanut butter and jelly sandwiches), and a sleeping bag that I sloppily strapped to the pack’s exterior. The ranger station didn’t have extra topographic maps, so they gave us a faded photocopy of the area on a regular-sized sheet of paper.

Paul and I, already struggling with the heft of our packs, walked along an old Caterpillar mining trail that petered out after a mile, and then ducked and elbowed our way through a dense thicket of alder trees. Upon reaching a clearing, we looked at each other excitedly. Sizing up the landscape that spread
out before us, we could see there weren’t any streets or buildings. We couldn’t hear any hum of traffic or planes screeching through the sky. We’d finally escaped the babble of man and his machine. We’d finally entered the wild.

We stood in the middle of a wide, rolling green valley. The country was grassy and open except for a procession of gnarled spruce and wizened birch that followed a creek. Perhaps tired of the arctic’s fleeting summers and bitterly cold winters, the trees seemed to have embarked on a forlorn exodus out of the valley in search of balmier pastures. Farther back, there were mountains—glorious mountains with seams of shining snow branching down from flint-gray peaks. It was as if we’d walked into a black-framed motivational poster with something like
PERSEVERENCE
printed at the bottom.

The Brooks Range—a seven-hundred-mile east-to-west mountain chain spanning across northern Alaska and Canada—is almost completely uninhabited except for the grizzlies, black bears, caribou, moose, lynx, wolves, and wolverines that call the mountains home. Swarms of summer mosquitoes,—60°F winters, and government ownership of the land have slowed the spread of human settlement and enabled the mountains to maintain a primal “I’ll kill you if you get lost in me” character. And while the Brooks don’t reach the towering heights of the Alaska Range to the south, their desolate nature makes them the sort of mountains that ought to be introduced with the sounding of a Chinese gong and honored with reverent silence.

Paul and I, silent, felt unsettled and invigorated. It was as if we had landed on another planet.

About an hour into our walk, we saw a trail of inch-deep bear tracks next to the creek we were walking along. Paul and I looked into each other’s wide white eyes. We didn’t speak out loud, but it was clear that we were thinking the same thing:
We need to get the fuck out of here right now.

It was almost hard for me to believe the grizzly bear still existed. It was an animal that would seem more at home in the
Pleistocene alongside our other extinct mammalian cousins like the woolly mammoth and saber-toothed tiger. Nevertheless, we were terrified about the prospect of running into one, as we were defenseless except for the ten-inch-long decorative knives that dangled on our belts (which we’d bought at a pawnshop in Fairbanks) and a canister of bear spray, which is high-powered Mace that has shown some effectiveness in repelling charging bears. Fears aside, some part of me harbored hopes of standing face-to-face with one. This is what I came for, after all: an adrenaline overload, a blow, a shock to my system—something that would charge every fiber of my body with screaming life; something that would scare the suburbs right out of me; something that would wake me out of my slumber and make me bellow, once and for all, “Holy shit. This is real!”

From the vantage point of a plane, one might wonder why the verdure of the tundra valley—this fertile plot of grassland—isn’t dotted with thriving agrarian villages and cozy hamlets. From above, the land appears so flat and well trimmed—the sort of well-groomed lawn fit for picnics and pickup football games. Yet it’s not until you’re on the ground that you realize the arctic is carpeted with some of the most unforgiving terrain imaginable.

After spotting the bear tracks, Paul and I escaped the shadowy, tree-canopied creek and made our way toward the grassy hills so we could see all around us. En route, we trudged through mud-bottomed swamps; through dense, junglelike thickets of dwarf willow and alder; across spongy sphagnum moss; and over fields of tussocks, which were easily the worst of our hiking obstacles. Tussocks (or “nature’s herpes,” as I’d come to call them) are round, furry clumps of sedge that look like hairy green basketballs and are almost impossible to walk through without twisting an ankle and cursing maniacally.

Paul was so slowed by the tussocks that he couldn’t keep up with me (not that I was managing them much better). Eventually, we lost sight of each other. “
Paul! Paul!
” I shouted. I didn’t
hear him shout back, so I retraced my steps and found him sitting on the tundra, rubbing his feet and moaning about blisters.

The terrain was unyielding, unmerciful, impossible. My one recurring thought:
People actually do this for fun?
Seeing Paul hurt was actually somewhat relieving because his injury now gave us a good excuse to quit and go home.

This was more or less what I’d expected. I’d figured nature was all about blood, sweat, and tears. It was about the hard lessons its travelers learned, as they did in Jack London novels. While I’d admired the works of the great American nature lover John Muir and, later, Henry David Thoreau, I never really understood their glorification of nature. Thoreau saw the world in the veins of a maple leaf, and Muir, it seemed, could find God in a mouse turd. Nature, to them, was transcendence, beauty, divinity. To me, nature was more like a football field or hockey rink in which games are won and lost. Yet, at the same time, I fantasized about experiencing nature the way they did. Maybe I’d undergo some sort of holy, transcendent awakening out here. Maybe I’d climb Blue Cloud and come back from the hike with a deeper voice and a newfound connection to spiritual realms. Squirrels and ravens would sit on my shoulder. I’d be able to predict weather from a lone gust of wind. I’d become one with my chi.

“So you’re sure you can’t make it?” I asked Paul in a tone of sly entreaty.

“Yeah, I don’t think my feet can take anymore,” said Paul with feigned regret but genuine embarrassment. “I think I gotta head back… What are you gonna do?”

I looked at Blue Cloud. The hills around it were green and bulbous, as staid and solemn as a shrine of plump, cross-legged bronze Buddhas. Behind them rose Blue Cloud. It thrust itself over the hills, puncturing the cloudless blue sky, a warped coal-colored arrowhead with veins of snow bleeding down its rocky grooves. It was miles away.

Unfamiliar with the sensations of determination that were colonizing my chest, the following words stumbled from my
mouth awkwardly, in a half-statement, half-question sort of way, perhaps because I’d never had the chance to say anything cinematic before. “I think I’m gonna keep going? I’m going to climb this mountain.”

Alone in the wild. I had no idea that the departure of a person could make me feel so different. With Paul gone, it was as if someone had suddenly cut the cords of the safety net that, to this point, had been hanging beneath me. I was now at the mercy of unfamiliar and abstract concepts: Nature, Fate, Destiny—it was they, along with my wits and a pair of trembling legs, that would determine whether I’d make it back alive.
This will be my great Alaskan adventure,
I thought. Oh, how I wished to tilt my head back and howl! And that’s just what I did, unleashing a throaty, voice-cracking, off-key barbarian roar to the wild, manless world around me. In mid-roar, I accidentally swallowed a mosquito and coughed, then continued on—now alone—lurching over tussocks and plowing my way through thickets.

The tussocks were everywhere. Every step demanded my full attention because each tussock required that I lift my leg extra high. After nearly twelve hours, the bottoms of my feet throbbed with prickly pain. It felt as if the soles of my boots were lined with thumbtacks. I hankered for a rest, but I was forbidden from slackening my gait because mosquitoes—thousands of them—would cling to my skin in swarms if I paused for even a moment. I began to feel a strange tightness in my chest. I became so sleepy I had to will myself to stay awake. My fatigue probably had something to do with dehydration, for I hadn’t had any water in the last six hours because I feared I’d contract giardia from the creek below, as a ranger back in Coldfoot had warned.

But then I remembered I had iodine tablets in my pack, one of which could purify thirty-two ounces of water. I tore through my pack until I remembered that Paul had them in his pack. He had the matches and the compass, too.

Oh no
…

I’d forgotten to ask Paul to hand over his share of our survival supplies when he’d left. This was the excuse I was looking for. Now I really could turn back and no one at camp would think the less of me. This was the responsible, practical thing to do. It was the right thing to do. Yes, I really must turn back.

But I couldn’t. I wasn’t sure why I cared so much about climbing this mountain, but I felt like something important was at stake. Maybe it was because I’d always felt so average: I was an average student, an average athlete, an average son. I couldn’t have been more average. Climbing this mountain was my chance to start over. While this climb—like any mountain climb—was pointless (and probably of no difficulty to any seasoned outdoorsman), getting to the top of Blue Cloud suddenly took on an importance of mythic proportions to me. I pledged to myself then and there that, unless I thought death was imminent, I would not turn back.

I’d been hiking for nearly sixteen hours straight over a cruel and ruthless terrain, hauling a pack that felt as burdensome yet indispensible as a fallen comrade in battle. Each time I stopped to rest, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to get up, having perhaps depleted the last of my energy reserves. My thighs were wobbly sacks of water and the muscles of my calves felt so tight I worried my skin might split open and expose raw flesh like a pair of unforked hot dogs overheating in the microwave. My feet felt pulpy: I flinched before each step, awaiting the inevitable sting. My voice was hoarse from screaming to make unseen bears aware of my presence, and my shoulders were covered in blood because the mosquitoes would drink from my deltoids where my backpack stretched my sweatshirt tight against my skin. With each slap, I’d kill twenty at a time, smearing their jellied remains into the cotton.

Yet after each rest, I was able to get up and take a few more steps, and a few more after that. At some point, I’d wandered into that strange territory between my perceived limits and my actual limits—that stretch of land called the “unknown,” a territory
as wild and unfamiliar as the Alaskan country before me.

Climbing Blue Cloud was like climbing a hill of pennies. For every two steps up, I slid down one because the loose rocks would move beneath me, jingling down the mountain with each foot placement.

As I neared the top, the rocks got bigger and boulder-like; I could now use my hands to pull my body up. Yet each time I thought I was about to summit, I’d get to the top only to see that I still had more mountain to climb.

Finally, I arrived. I staggered over to a boulder, set down my pack, and spun around. There were mountain peaks and mountain peaks, as far as the eye could see. They were colored with puffy white lichen, neon-green moss, and the tinted leopard prints of cloud shadows. The landscape was a field of soft-edged flames, an armada of shark fins, a geological congregation of serrated ridges, grassy mounds, glacial moraines, and ice-cored pingos. It was so still and quiet and motionless, so unprofitable, so oh-so wild. How could such a landscape be so barren yet so appetizing to the eyes? I would have thought an endless vista of five-thousand-foot rock piles, bearing only the most resilient patches of moss and lichen, would produce sensations of disgust and revulsion. But oh no. The pasture may entice us with its fertility, and the city, its sophistication, but the Brooks’ allure is in its desolation—it’s a beauty that frightens and awes; it sets your imagination astir.