Peenie Wallie

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August 7, 2014

Day 19 - Fairbanks, AK to Beaver Creek, Yukon Territory, Canada (Wed 8/6/14)

Above: Sunset at Pickhandle Lake, Yukon Territory, Canada.

Additional photos in the Extended Entry.

(Wed 8/6/14)

Update: I am alive and well and resting peacefully in a cool little commune called Discovery Yukon Lodging just south of Beaver Creek in the Yukon Territory of Canada, at MilePost 1133.5 on the Alaska (ALCAN) Highway.

Starting Odometer: 20,931
Ending Odometer: 21,370
Miles Driven Today: 439
Miles Driven This Trip: 6,717

Here's a map of roughly where I drove today.

Deb's Cafe - Fairbanks, AK

Herrre Kom Ze Traks!!!!

Every night, I wake up in a cold sweat. Always, Remus is telling me we have to get moving. The trucks are coming. I'm stopping, taking pictures, and these insane trucks are barreling down on us. If it's dry, they're bringing in their wake great clouds of dust that blot out the sun. When they blow past, enormous fields of rocks shower the hapless cyclists. Shattering headlights, visors, and raining painful missiles into the motorists' clothing.

A truck tosses a rock into my my left arm up near the shoulder. It feels like I've been shot.

"I'm hit! I'm hit! I scream out at Remus. But he can't hear me. Only he's battling his own demons on his rented BMW GS1200R.

But then, I wake up, and I'm not on the Dalton Highway any more. That time is gone. That's behind us now. It's all just PTSD in the rear-view mirror now. The Dalton is gone. Remus is gone. Everything's gone.

Only I'm awake in a tent in a hostel in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Waves of mosquitos threaten to lift the tent off the ground. I'm covered in Deet. Deep Woods Off is only 30% Deet. They eat that stuff for breakfast. Up here in Alaska, they sure pure Deet. It's the only place in the country you can get it. They sell it in 55 gallon drums and apply it with a drive-through car wash when you cross the border from Canada.

But the Deet doesn't help that much. Only I swat at the mozzies like a lunatic. You think about the people that came before you. Why would people live here? When man first crossed the land bridge from Europe, he probably needed transfusions to feed the swarms. It's hard to imagine people migrating here and thinking, "This....this is where we'll live."

But this is where we are. And I came here. For reasons that we struggle with, obviously.

There was a man up in Deadhorse, AK that wondered aloud why we'd come up this way. He picks us up in our little modular housing unit in Deadhorse, Alaska. (When man colonizes Mars, it will look exactly like the camps at Deadhorse, Alaska.)

He picks us up in front of the colony and drive us in a shuttle, past the BP Terrorists into their Death Kamp at Prudhoe Bay. We stop for a photo-op at the Prudhoe Bay National Forest.

"Where did you come from on your little scooter?" he asks.

"Denver, Colorado,"

"Why would you come up here on that motorcycle," he wants to know.

"Because I can," I reply.

Like, first of all, you don't need to be getting down on me and my scooter when you're driving a shuttle across the turndra at the North Pole. You're about 36 months away from being replaced by a self-driving shuttle. So, it's not like you've got the world by the tail, necessarily.

But, I think his question is a fairly common one. People do wonder why, if one could travel, one might end up here, at barren tundra fields of Deadhorse, Alaska.

So, I think that I'll try to answer this question, to the best of my ability, for the sake of posterity, if nothing else.

And, to be somewhat circumspect, I'll answer as a guy from Hamtramck told it to me this morning in a little commune

The waitress just said "I'm from Georgia, and we used to kill hogs, and we can tell the difference." So, I'm not clear what this was in response to. It's hard to imagine what would lead to this response.

So, there's a guy that I slept in a tent with last night. He's from Hamtramck, Michigan, a miserable little enclave in the heart of Detroit so desperately poor there just aren't words. I lived there for a year one weekend, and when I left, I swore I'd never return, not even to fly through that miserable city of Detroit. And I've kept my promise for 19 years and counting. But this guy...this gentleman...is, as I said, sleeping in what they generouse describe as a "cabin". Basically, a large tent, with 6 beds inside and precious little else.

"I've been on the road for 2 months now. How could I go back. I mean....after you've seen the Brooks Range, how could I go back to Hamtramck and sit behind my fence at my little house in Hamtramck....how could you go back to that?" He asks. It's a fair question. It's a very deep question. A debilitating pontification that can not easily be dismissed.

"I could never go back to Hamtramck," I offered. Not that it helped. Not that it mattered. Only that it filled the gaps in the diatribe. In the sort of rehtorical soliloquy that one gets drawn into in the communes of the Pacific Northwest.

"Where did you work in Hamtramck?" He asks.

"American Axle and Manufacturing," I offer. As if that even makes any sense. It's true, in a sense. I did technically work at that organization, a spin-off of GM.

"They tore it down last year," he offers, without remorse or empathy. Just sort of matter-of-fact like.

"Oh," I reply. Like, it's really weird to learn that a place you used to work has been reduced to dust. Erased from the surface of the planet. Scraped off lthe earth's back like a dried scab. When I left American Axle, I remember when the same thing happened to Total Petroleum. I worked there for a year immediately after I left Detroit, and they shut that place down as soon as I left. Total Petroleum did this trick where, they used to hedge their oil prices. Basically, the bean counters placed bets on the price of petroleum so that they weren't gambling on the price of gas. Basically, their hedge guaranteed them a price that they could sell their gas for on the open market. But the price of gas kept going up. So, their hedge was basicaly a wasted cost, in the eyes of the CEO. So, they scrapped the hedge. They quit hedging their bets, and as soon as they did, the market went the other way, they were bankrupt in 6 months. And they got bought out and ripped out all the work I'd done for the last year.

So, you do sort of get this feeling of "what and I doing here" and "what difference does it make" and "what's it all for anyway." One certainly does has these feelings. It's not unusual, I think.

But I am deeping/truly surprised the extent of the wandering that I've tapped into. I think that most people spend their lives in their living rooms, around the dining room table, and in the basement shaving their cats or strangling their neighbors over friendly games of croquet and boccee ball. But then, you sort of drop out, tune in, and turn on, you realize that there's this whole wandering community of restless nomads out there, drifting through life, like Saragasso weed on the tide.

Everyone has their own idea about what to do, of course. But a lot of things you see in common...the desire to get on the open road....to throw caution to the wind....to sever the ties that bind, to break free from the known, and cross over into the unknown because, it's got to be better than this. Anything but this.

"I was living in Florida, and it was too hot. I was like, 'fuck this'. I sold everything I owned and bought a one way ticket to Anchorage."

That's what this guy tells me in the commune.

Another guy has a KLR650 with a sidecar the size of a long-haul trailer. It's easily the largest sidecar I've ever seen in my life. Imagine a motorcycle with a sidecar the size of a commercial freezer rolling down the tundra with a little wheel on it the size of a Western Flyer Christmas morning bicycle.

Lunacy, of course. But beautiful also. This is his dream. His idea of escape. Your idea doesn't have to agree with/meld with his ideas. We all have suffered through different experiences to get here. Everyone comes here from a different place for their own reasons. But they all come here. They all wander up to the campfire, and start swapping stories.

Around the campfires, the stories meld and fuse and bifurcate over drunk, stoned hippie kids, disillusioned truck drivers, and farmers who lost the call to farm. The left green fields of winter wheat to go and find something else. Something different.

I have seen pictures of a guy that came up from Mexico on a 50cc Honda Rukus. I met people that traveled from Washington State to Rocky Mountain National Park on 70cc Honda Passport and a 90cc Honda Trail 90. I've met people that drove or flew here from Florida.

Now, it's not like there's necessarily anything grand to discover here. It is beautiful, no doubt about that. We can't dismiss that. Alaska is stunningly beautiful. And I say that as someone that might know beauty. Allow me to point out that I've just travled through Rocky Mountain National Park, Yellowstone, Glacier, Kootenay, Banff, Yoho, Jasper, Denali, the Brooks Range, etc. I've been to Yosemite, Moab, Arches, Badlands, Flaming Gorge, Smoky Mountains, the Catskills. And this place is nice. Insanely nice. There's plenty to fall in love with about Alaska, at least in the summer anyway.

I think that I could never stay in a regular motel again beacuse it isolates you from the community that is on the road. It's sort of like the suburbs for travelers. Like...imagine putting up a wall between everyone sitting around a campfire. And then dousing the campfire. That's what staying in a hotel is like. it sort of isolates people into their individual cells, stifling the communication, so that your ideas are neither shared no improved or honed. Only you practice your mind-soliloquy to an audience of no one. Like babbling before a mirror to feel the vibes of your own ideas bouncing back in you like that child's echo chamber in the public park in boulder.

After you've been on the road for some time, the question comes and eats at you from the inside. The wound that won't heal. Should I turn back? Can I go back? Is there anything worth going back to?

And, it's not that Alaska is so unique. I'm sure that this is going on all over the planet. Only I'm more in tune to it now than I've ever been before. And, I take that back...it's much more common here than in other places I've been. It certainly wasn't like this in Central America. There were 0 people doing this in Central America. On bikes anyway. I'd have seen them. I saw the one guy at the old Tocumen Cargo Airport in Panama City, but other than that, I might have seen 1 person a day where I looked at them closely and thought "Is that guy a local, or is he wandering like me?"

Plenty of people never go back. They sort of wander out here and just stay. The sever whatever ties might have bound them at some point in time. But now, like seeds into the wind, they've scattered irretrievably so that no one might ever know how to get them all back to where they came from.

When we were pheastant hunting in Pierre, South Dakota, we spied a trail of seeds down the road - illegal food to attract the pheasants. You put out seed for the pheasants?" I asked innocently. Like...wow...that's patently illegal.

"No...what happened was...I was pulling a wagon of seed and didn't realize that I had a hole in my trailer. I got all the way down here, and realized it had a hole in it, and then turned around and drove back."

And that's how these people are scattered, I think. Like seeds across the planet.

Now...I'm eating a scrambled Alaskan breakfast with reindeer sausage, and two other road warriors wander into the restaurant. They've got on riding gear, and I start drowning myself in coffee. Like...Lord God this is fun. I'm like adrenaline junkie.

They drove up from Kodiak, an island south of Anchorage on a ferry. Like...I just can't help myself, right?

"Where you guys headed?"

"We're riding up to Deadhorse..."

This is the best. Right, the absolute fucking best. I get to regale them with all of the dangers of the Dalton Highway. You try to paint the fucking fear of God into them so that they won't get up there unprepared. Like, I'm going to send them up there, but I'm going to warn them of all the dangers so that they'll know they're not walking into a little sunday afternoon jaunt.

One dude's on a CRF230. The other guy is on another dirt bike. Yamaha XT250.

CT90's in anchorage. Been around the world. Now doing it in reverse. he saw them in anchorage.
Guy on a 49cc Rukus came up from key west.

So, you hear these stories over the campfires and over the greasy diner tables.

"If you're down there in Anchorage again, you have to do Hatcher's pass," he says.

This is what we live for. These little gems shared between travelers. These pearls of wisdom dispense eagerly over campfires and greasy sinder tables. This is where we are. What drives us.

"We're going to head back over to the KTM dealership," he offers.

"Yes. I'll see you over there. If you leave before I get there, keep the dirty side down. Watch out for those truckers, they'll crush you and your XT and never stop. They drive these massive dual trailers...a "fifty three - fifty threes" and they kill people for a living. They keep an Ace of Spades clipped ot their sun visor and every time they run a bike off the road, they mark it with a sharpie. Their cards are all black after their first summer on the road. Then, they compare cards at the truck stops and laugh about how many biker's they've run off of road at Adigan Pass."

I've scared them sufficiently that they'll be careful on the road. That's the goal, I think. A lot of these kids are on their first big ride. The first time they've ever been 3,000 miles away from home on a little dirt bike. Just feeling the pull of the open road. Slipping into the bottomless pit of freedom and yearning for the world out there. SOmething beyond the island they live on. You can see it in their eyes. Shiny black marbles staring into the face of strangers.

Who knows what they'll run into out here. This vast wandering planet of crazy mixed up nightamres. A cocktail of gasoline, hostels, tents, campfires. Insane stories of adventure, travel, and failure.

Now, I'll head back over to check on the bike. It's almost noon and I've not heard anything from the cycle shop except that my rear brakes were gone also.

Part of me wants the adventure to be over. Part of me wants it to never end. But i have to go back. Always, we know that we have to go back, as sure as the tide pulls the oceans back from the beaches. Some people won't return to where they came from, but I suspect most will Most will retreat to the suburbs, warm cozy couches and around the fireplace this winter, they'll regale their friends and neighbors about the road....Deadhorse Alaska, The Tope of the World Road, the Sea to SKy Highway, Vancouver, Tok, and Hatcher's Pass.

Hit the Road

About noon, I wander over to the KTM dealership. They have the bike all ready to go. Apparently they just rolled it out. They did the following - new air filter, new rear brake pads, changed the oil/oil-filter, and replaced the chain and both sprockets.

Now, my bike is ready to roll.

So I say goodbye to my 3 buddies at the dealership, and head out of town. Plan is to try to make some distance down the Alaska Highway. The cutoff for B.C. 37 (Dease Lake Road aka Stewart Cassiar Highway). I try to text Ben a few times to see where he is. I believe he's in Canada somewhere, but cell phone coverage is sketchy.

I didn't realize how far it was to the cutoff for Stewart Cassiar Highway, but it's east of Whitehorse, apparently. Just before Matson Lake. So, maybe I'll meet up with Ben along the way tomorrow. Having a hard time getting text messages through.

I got about 30 miles south of here tonight and ran into a big storm. It was heading east, but very slowly, so eventually, I just turned about and backtracked about 30 miles to his little commune.

Cool little place. It's really the only way that I can do the trip for $100 a day...by staying in hostels. Which I don't mind, really. Keeps costs down...lets me stay on the road longer...meet more people. It's all good.

I think that I could never stay in a real hotel again. You sort of tune into these wandering lost people, and what's odd is how many people are out there doing this. Like, probably you don't realize what's going on, maybe. Maybe you're not in a place where you'd see these people. But there are countless souls out there wandering the globe in perpetuity.

Here's some shots from today. Really, the Yukon is just staggeringly beautiful.

Photos in the Extended Entry.

Posted by Rob Kiser on August 7, 2014 at 12:25 AM

Comments

Posted by: sl on August 7, 2014 at 7:34 AM

Posted by: dnp on August 7, 2014 at 5:26 PM

Posted by: Rob Kiser on August 9, 2014 at 12:19 AM

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