Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (9 page)

The YRC’s claim to fame came in 2004, when a grizzly broke into the café during the winter (when the camp was closed down) and demolished everything inside. The bear devoured a bag of dried green peas and made a nest out of the T-shirts in the gift shop. In a desperate ploy to pay for the restoration, my boss tried to sell the pile of shredded tees to tourists by advertising them as BEARLY WORN.

Behind the motel were three giant barrels, each six feet tall and four feet wide, where the camp burned all of its trash: cans, food, plastic, everything. Around the rim of each barrel were gaggles of squawking ravens, shuffling their talons, eager for someone to throw away an uneaten hamburger bun.

We were brought in specifically to take care of the camp’s “trash problem.” First, we had to pour oil over the garbage and ignite it in order to reduce its weight and size. Second, we were to scoop the charred remains into black industrial garbage bags that we’d transport to a dump in Fairbanks. As we worked, the ravens, who tore through our garbage bags when we weren’t looking, belligerently laughed at us from afar. We braced ourselves to yell back obscenities, but all that came out were hoarse, bronchial coughs.

The smoke caused an apocalyptic haze that reeked of flaming tires smothered in melting pig fat—the sort of smell that we presumed was shortening our lifespans and giving our sperm second tails. The toxins gave me a throbbing headache, but I wasn’t suffering nearly as much as Josh. As I scooped a jumble of blackened cans into a garbage bag, I heard him wheezing. I looked over and watched him bend over and vomit. He wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve, looked up at me, and smiled—a prideful, pathetic, pitiful smile—the same smile I had on my face. I knew exactly what he was thinking:
At least we have jobs.

After several days of cleaning out the barrels, we spent the next few weeks brushing toilets, washing bed linens, and deep cleaning
the kitchen. We hand-scrubbed the floors, sanitized the dishes, and scooped globs of auburn-colored, molasses-thick grease from every corner and crevice of the grill.

Even with the diesel generator blaring outside, sleep came easily. We knew that, with our hard day’s work and $9 an hour wage, we had cut some meager but meaningful chunk out of our debts. Yet at the same time, the nature of our work made us feel pointless. I spent my working hours dreaming: dreaming of voyages, of the Brooks, of all the lovers I’d yet to meet.

When I was in front of the YRC by the Dalton Highway picking up trash, I looked down the road to the south—back to Fairbanks, to Canada, to the States, to a continent unexplored. Sometimes on the Dalton I’d spot a guy on his motorcycle or bicycle headed down to Tierra del Fuego, off the bottom tip of mainland South America. Some of them would spend years on the road.

Every half an hour, a truck would roll by. I wanted nothing more than to drop my trash bag and stick out my thumb.
I could just go,
I thought. I could leave it all behind: Coldfoot, the YRC, the work, the debt.

I stood there for a moment on the road. I stretched out my hand and extended my thumb, if just to see what it felt like. I looked south, down that quiet gravel path. A truck heading that way came rumbling toward me.
Why not?
I said to myself.
Why don’t I just do it?
But it wasn’t just the debt that kept me on the side of the road. There was something else.

When the truck came within eyeshot, I dropped my hand, picked up my garbage bag, and headed back to work.

.............

Winter 2006–2007—Coldfoot, Alaska

DEBT: $21,000

A
FTER JOSH AND I FINISHED
cleaning up and closing down the Yukon River Camp, we relocated to Coldfoot, where Josh would clean rooms for another month and where I’d be the camp’s night cook for the rest of the year.

On our first fall weekend in Coldfoot, I took him out on what would be the first hike of his life as well as his first walk over elevated terrain. We strapped on a pair of small backpacks and set out to climb Twelvemile Mountain, a relatively short peak a few miles south of Coldfoot.

Once we crossed the river and climbed over the bank, Josh sprinted past me, running up the mountain at full bore, thinking the jaunt would be as easy as a leisurely jog around our suburb. Within seconds he collapsed next to a spruce tree, gasping desperately for air.

As we neared the top, we both—in a moment of juvenile camaraderie—stripped off our shirts and jogged along the hard, stony ridgeline, holding our arms out like airplane wings to keep balance. Josh got to the peak first. He placed his foot on
the topmost boulder and screamed out into the vast panorama of blue-gray peaks.

I’d never seen this side of him. With his reserved disposition and reading glasses, Josh had always looked like your typical grad student. Yet now that he’d unveiled his grotesque shoulder hairs and was screaming at the top of his lungs—a jarring, orgasmic man-scream that echoed against the surrounding hills—I could see that Josh, too, had a wild side buried underneath years of civilization.

In the weeks that followed, Josh started going off on trips of his own. He climbed Blue Cloud and Snowden and Kalhabuk. He walked up Marion Creek, and when he got to a waterfall, he stood beneath it, letting the icy water pound his shoulders. He raised his arms like he’d just been freed from Shawshank, like he’d just been freed of debt.

But when winter came, there were no more rooms to clean, so Josh headed back to his parents’ home in Niagara Falls and I stuck around in Coldfoot to work in the kitchen.

The day Josh left, winter arrived.

In the arctic, the seasons do not melt peaceably into one another as they do in other climes, giving each other handshakes, fond farewells, and see-ya-next-years. In the arctic, winter stands like a barbarian horde on the edge of town one day and ravages it the next. Winter moves in without warning, grabs summer by the belt loops of its cutoffs, and throws it out the door. It hardly gives poor autumn a chance to flutter its golden leaves, now caked in snow. The days rapidly become shorter and darker, and winter freezes, smothers, and colonizes everything with a bone-chilling, frostbiting, “I can’t feel my penis anymore” cold.

From late October through March, the temperature rarely rises above freezing, and most days it stays well below zero. Negative 50°F is considered a cold day, but sometimes it can get much lower. In 1971, at a pipeline pump station south of Coldfoot, the station’s thermometer read–81°F—the lowest temperature ever recorded in Alaska.

The arctic cold does not merely chill; it rips through layers of clothing, slices through skin, and bites into your brain, injecting your head with an ice cream headache that won’t go away. Your nose and ears and cheeks turn pink, then a deadly white. It’s a cold that cannot be warmed away; it’s a cold that stays in your blood, frostily rattling against your bones like cubes of ice.

But it’s not the cold that gets to most people in the arctic; it’s the darkness. The sun rarely shows its face over the horizon, only casting a light glow behind the mountains for a couple of hours a day. From December 2 through January 21, Coldfooters never see the sun.

Five nights a week, I was the camp’s line cook, working the 6
P.M.
to 2:30
A.M.
shift. I would prepare relatively simple meals—burgers, fries, fish sticks—never anything more complicated than an omelet. I’d flip burgers over the hot stove in the kitchen, some days in my parka because the café’s heating system couldn’t keep pace with the cold that would creep through the walls.

At midnight, I’d close the kitchen down by cleaning the grill, mopping the floor, and restocking the fridge. I’d scrub the bottoms of burned soup pots with a wire brush, dip my hand into sink drains to pluck out handfuls of slippery vegetables, and cram heavy black industrial trash bags into the Dumpster outside. Gone were the days when I’d worked seventy hours a week and pulled $100 in tips a day. While I was no longer paying off my debt at that staggering summer pace, I was still able to put my whole $300 weekly paycheck toward my debt. By the end of December, I’d paid off $11,000. I had $21,000 more to go.

Many of my summer and fall coworkers had left camp to head back to school or seek work in pleasanter climes. I’d said good-bye to Jordan, Kerno, Ray, and the rest of the fun-loving, hard-drinking, half-insane crew.

Coldfoot had only twelve winter jobs, but the manager had a hard time finding a winter crew because the camp received
only a handful of résumés from mostly desperate applicants. It’s no secret why so few applied. In the winter, not only is Coldfoot quite literally one of the darkest and coldest places on earth, but to make matters worse, there’s also an almost prisonlike male-to-female ratio. When obese Eskimo women stopped to fill up their gas tanks, the males in camp would eye their robust flanks as if we were a pack of starving wolves. (But it wasn’t any better for Coldfoot’s few female inhabitants. The common Alaskan adage “The odds are good, but the goods are odd” holds true in Coldfoot.)

The new crew arrived at once. They were easily distinguishable from the previous set of workers. These guys were all full-time, middle-aged workers who’d been grotesquely bent by the winds of work. They had beady eyes; sinister, snickering hillbilly laughs; and faces marked with divots, cratered by hard times. They were the sort of men who—deprived of legal female companionship—wore faded briefs that were tiger-striped with skid marks.

There was Hal, a compulsive liar who told me he’d spotted frogs and snakes on his first outdoor arctic excursion. He said that he used to be a corporate trainer for Applebee’s, that he co-owned a trading card company, and that he’d once been shot when on patrol in the army as part of a special forces unit—and while none of these was a particularly outlandish lie, I smelled BS right away. Despite Hal’s many lucrative entrepreneurial engagements, he decided to take work alongside me as a fellow line cook (though, on his Myspace page, he listed his profession as “arctic bush pilot”).

Then there was Walt, a gangly, slack-jawed, quick-talking forty-year-old maintenance grunt. He was a pleasant enough guy, but when Lucy, his hard-drinking Native American girlfriend, showed up, he turned dark and morose. While trying to sleep in my bed—a couple of rooms down from Walt and Lucy’s—I’d hear wild, painful shrieks from their room before being startled by a loud thud against a wall. Perhaps they were the type who lovingly engaged in coitus while suspended from
hooks in the air, but I got the impression that he was beating her up. In the early hours of the morning, Lucy, bedraggled, would knock on my door, waking me up to inquire if I had any beer.

There was Jonathan, a head chef and a cutter who left long red scrapes on the insides of his forearms. Boyd and Benji, a pair of alcoholic carpenters, moved in for a couple of weeks to help out with refurbishing one of the pipeline dormitories. They’d get inebriated after work, beat each other up, and kick each other’s doors in (which, conveniently, they were able to repair).

There were also a few fairly normal people: Tom and Abbey, both college grads paying off their debts; Becca, a cleaner, who was saving up for school; and Jessica, a waitress, who’d just come from teaching English in the Czech Republic. For the most part, though, we were outnumbered by the crazies.

A Mormon punk rocker named Casey was one of our new lodge cleaners. We had a going-away party for Kerno—the affable Bluto look-alike—and afterward, in the middle of the night, Casey, who was upset with Kerno for some reason, came running at him screaming with his skateboard held high, ready to crash it over Kerno’s head. From my room, I heard Casey screeching in pain in the hallway. I got out of bed to see what was going on. Kerno, who’d casually thwarted Casey’s attack, had Casey in a headlock on the ground and was raining one blow after another onto Casey’s screaming face.

“Kerno, what the hell is going on?” I asked, when I walked out into the hallway.

“This motherfucker ran after me with a skateboard!” Kerno screamed.

The only other person in the hall was Avery the pothead, who was taking a drag on his cigarette and watching the scuffle stoically, as if he were viewing something as serene and inconsequential as a family of gray jays enjoying a birdbath.

The fight ended without event, but every few days I’d hear more shrieks, thuds, and villainous cackles coming from the other rooms.

Avery, the 18-year-old waiter from the suburbs of Utah, was one of the few people left in camp who I knew wouldn’t stab me in my neck while I slept. I’d never known anyone so mellow, so kind, so high. He was never not high. Let me rephrase: Avery was
always
high. Yet Avery, in ways, was more straight-edged than he had ever been. Working as a waiter in Coldfoot was apparently a huge step up for him. He started doing drugs as early as middle school, and apparently he could never get a job better than scrubbing down the walls of private viewing booths at a porn shop. While it seemed like many of his travails were self-inflicted, I couldn’t help but feel sympathy when I found out that his father had abandoned him as a child and that his mom had begun having relationships with crazy lesbians. It was downhill from there, and anyone could see that Avery was destined for burned-out hippiedom. But just as he suffered from addictions like nearly everyone else here, he was different. He wanted to use Coldfoot as a place where he could reinvent himself now that he’d quarantined himself from all the bad stuff back home. He started by cutting off his long, greasy black hair and going cold turkey on pot. But between the drug withdrawal and the cabin fever, it wouldn’t be easy for Avery. Once, he came running into the café during my shift, claiming he had a “renal.” He called 911 in Fairbanks and they put him on hold for thirty minutes.

When he came back to the kitchen, where I was cooking, to order a meal, I said, “Hey, man. What can I get ya?”

“A bullet hole. In the head, please,” he said.

“Dude, are you okay?” I asked.

“Good. You got off tomorrow?”