Strange things done under the midnight sun
Or
A Harrowing Tale of PREDATION in the Savage North in Which Sundry Laws of the Jungle are BROKEN, Taboos Willfully PLUNDERED, Fortunes GAMBLED, and Ravishing Maidens Sing Paeans to Our Heroes

Part the First

Wherein your humble scribe is prompted to flee Vancouver, gets caught in a web of conspiracies, experiences depredations hitherto unthinkable to people of gentle breeding, and ends up North of 60

Send me the best of your breeding, lend me your chosen ones;
Them will I take to my bosom, them will I call my sons;
Them will I gild with my treasure, them will I glut with my meat;
-Robert Service, “Law of the Yukon”

Well, I did something spontaneous for the first time in a couple of years and booked passage to Yukon for an elongated weekend trip. I managed to squeeze a flight out of my Air Canada Aeroplan points and suddenly I was bundling myself—with a small hold-all in my left hand and twenty pounds of camera equipment in the other—into a cab on the way to YVR with an old, smelly cabbie who insisted that we should “all live like Arabs, because then we would have cheap gas.”

You know, it doesn’t pay to ask questions of cabbies; just nod wisely and talk about how bad other drivers are, how skirts are too short nowadays, how bad the traffic is, how much worse the traffic is on the DVP, the idiocy of RAV line construction, and the decline of traditional family values. Cab drivers are—with the rare exception of the cabbie who drove me to YVR three years ago while shouting out the window: “I’m going to cut your head off, I’m going to cut your head off!”—notoriously reactionary and like nothing better than to be agreed with. 

My trick is to enthusiastically mirror their prejudices and then tip big. It’s just my thing. 

But, Yukon Ho! Off to moil under the midnight sun on the marge of Lake Leberge with none but White Fang and Dan McGrew for company. Arctic tundra, steaming muskoxen, oil derricks, and women who look like W.C. Fields.  All a short 2 hour plane ride from Vancouver. That’s what I thought I was in for. How wrong I was. 

And here’s YVR, and here’s airport security, and here’s a wizened gnome of a security guard gently cupping my testicles and kneading my buttocks in full public view in the vain hope that he might discover vials of nitro-glycerine tucked up my bottom. 

I’ve written before that air travel became more comfortable when I discovered airport bars. My plane was delayed so I sat and swigged some beer and tried vainly to curb my nervous shaking. Having a (likely diseased) old lecher rub his white-gloved finger along one’s inner thigh like a matron looking for dust does horrible things to a man who has just been picturing himself a tough-as-nails miner kicking the boardwalks of Dawson City to splinters in search of a good time. Modern life, modern travel is designed to make us all feel like moths caught in the killing jar. 

Time to get off the grid, I thought. Enough of this dandified city angst! I poured myself into seat 23C and flipped my way through Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger in a desperate attempt to reclaim some masculine pride. Two and a quarter hours of flight time later my metaphorical tie came unknotted, my feet and hands grew calluses, and my 5 o’clock shadow became 7 o’clock shadow. I was ready to step foot on Yukon soil. And I did. 

Why Yukon? I was up at the invite of my buddy Justin. We used to work together in treaty negotiations writing briefing notes for vaguely insecure middling-level bureaucrats. Then he moved up to Carcross to run the Carcross-Tagish First Nation government. Now he meets with kings, presidents and Mary-Lou Findlay and I write briefing notes for vaguely insecure middling bureaucrats. So it goes. 

Justin’s a mover and shaker in the Yukon. Some of that comes from his car. I stepped out of the airport to breathe some fine northern air and watched a blue 1992 Pontiac Sunbird come belching and farting its way down the road, getting some air on the bumps—air that made the trunk (secured by a bungee cord) gape and snap shut with a sonic boom. Out stepped Justin sporting a sportscoat and thumbing a Blackberry.  The Grizzly-Adams-esque limo driver waiting at the curb looked at him with profound respect. 

We shook hands, I got in and promptly put my camera case down in a pool of stagnant water behind the passenger seat, the car started with a roar (imagine a muscle car with indigestion), and we tore up the road. Destination: world domination. 

“Eaten?” Justin asked. 

“Nope,” I replied.

“Passport?”

“Yup,” 

“We’re going to Skagway.” 

Part the Second

Wherein, having joined forces, the better to conquer the North, our two heroes enlarge their party and strive to reclaim Alaska for the Tlingit or, failing that, the Russians

But the others -- the misfits, the failures -- I trample under my feet.
Dissolute, damned and despairful, crippled and palsied and slain,
Ye would send me the spawn of your gutters -- Go! take back your spawn again.
-Robert Service, “Law of the Yukon”

So Skagway it was. We picked up two more of Yukon’s finest and 1.5 hours after arriving in Yukon I was back in BC, tearing up the road for the US border to get to Skagway before the town shut down. 

Let me apologize in advance:

My memory of that night is blurry. I have to rely on obscure notebook scrawls, blurry photos and a couple of inebriated voice memos I recorded on my cell phone. Transcript of one as follows: 

There is an abso-fucking-brilliant-lutely v-vibe to Skagway at one thirty in the morning on a midnight … um … in Skagway. Edge of the world, no accessibility but via one … one territory, one province, , two countries and you walk the wet streets of Skagway in a mist and there is one bar … Red Onion … 

on a Thursday night with crap pop/rap/electronic dance music for the mid-west American kids who staff the tourist town ear-splitting [unintelligible] hoarse from yelling throats and you move around down the street there is something more bag-pipey folk-ey in another bar and the sense of pioneer false front streets a hundred years ago that would have the same sense of bars bursting, all young people, and dead quiet, dead certainty around you the certainty of the sky, of the excessively … present … mountains, the certainty of isolation from the world down south. That is the feeling of Skagway where the end of the road gas station—the one gas station—closes down at 7 at night: Gas/Diesel 486/gal PetroExpress Fuel & Laundry. And fat ugly girls dancing outside the bar with the clouds hanging down in curtains to touch the streets and its Alaska and you think: yes! Yes! That’s what the whores looked like too and the scruffy tattooed boys sloshed and staggering are inheritors of the miners’ sensi-sensibibility, and God bless it it’s great. An-nd then these girls and boys will head home to Minnesota or Kansas or Kentucky and remember the loving … hostility of the Alaska mountains [unintelligible] in Skagway catering to the obese sandal-and-socks brigades descending from their floating fattening pens to see something that ceased to exist long before they were … even born. But really it’s all the same ‘cause we’ve all … prostituted ourselves at some point in our lives to the manicured and overly-made-up and colourfully dressed Mister and … and Missus Frederick P. Williamson from … Delaware. And that’s Skag-skagway at one-thirty in the morning with the smell of winter coming down from the hills and the creosote railway docks and old rotting ship boats [unintelligible] Yukon boys ready to go. 

Vague memories stretch from eating halibut on the water’s edge to drinking pints of Yukon Gold, Chilkoot Lager, and Yukon Red in the Red Onion. I remember maudlin meanderings down the streets with my camera, attempts to climb the working end of a railway snow plough, a sleepy drive back through the fog-shrouded border, Michael the designated driver asking the border guard for gasoline because we were driving on fumes (110km on fumes …) and inebriated slumber back in Carcross at 4am with the sun already rising. 

And then I woke up.  

Will our redoubtable heroes survive their hangovers? Stay tuned for sullen recoveries, vertically challenged hitchhikers, hurdy-gurdy gamblers, the smuggling of contraband, and 1800 kilometers of road travel in three action-packed days. Or, just mark all this as SPAM.

Part the Third

Wherein, their efforts to precipitate World War thwarted, our heroes imbibe and consume sodium, grease, and weak coffee with too-warm half-and-half, establish the launchpad for ADVENTURE, and embark.

Oh, what a life! we cannot wait,
To be in that arctic land,
Where we'll be masters of our fate,
And lead a life that's grand!

 No more of parental rules!
We're heading for some snow!
Good riddance to those grown-up-ghouls!
We're leaving! Yukon Ho!
-Bill Watterson, Yukon Ho!

Friday dawned cloudy and the aspirin-tinged air felt brisk in my raw lungs. Justin’s “rez house” is full of his photos and carvings, business books, Harvard Business Reviews, and Korean and Japanese DVDs. Out back he’s got a wall tent with a wood stove in which he hosts his Carcross Film Festival. Long extension cords with their joins exposed to the damp snake their way between the house and the tent. With a blarting rumble—deep rumble, the kind you feel watery deep down in your guts—the car started and we sprayed some gravel on the woodpile and fishtailed down the gravel road to the coffee shop for breakfast. 

Breakfast was a salty combination of ham, eggs, hashbrowns, and brown toast smeared thickly with margarine. Coffee brought us back to the point where we could drive into Carcross proper, snap some photos of rotund tourists waiting to board the train the Skagway, and go for a long resuscitory walk along the beach. It’s one of the best beaches in the world (according to Canadian Geographic, whose photographer lives a self-serving few feet from it) and it is splendid. The sand is perfect sand. Not too fine, but not coarse. Animal tracks stretched across it and into the lake. Bleached wood lies on its shores. In the distance the Skagway train smokes across the side of a mountain and disappears into the trees.          

We spent some time in the government offices – real government, the kind where every bureaucrat is called outside to help put up the wall to a pavilion going in on the lakeshore – before packing the car and heading up north. 

I hadn’t expected a road trip. God bless him, Justin knows how to show off his country. 1,842 km of road trip into Yukon and Alaska. Something he said comes to mind: we were in the Red Onion in Skagway and I mentioned that the music was crap. He said “It’s either this or drive an hour and a half back to Carcross and go to sleep.” And therein lies the essential truth about Yukon: It’s big. And you’ve got to find your fun where you are or drive to the end of a long road to find other fun. 

So, suffering cripplingly from a hangover, head bursting with information on aboriginal governance, we picked up a hitchhiker from Carcross who squeezed in behind my broken seat, hit Whitehorse, grabbed a bite to eat and then ventured into the great unknown. 

Part the Fourth

Wherein Silence is Golden

The drive to Dawson City up the centre of the Yukon is painfully slow when driven by two gentlemen suffering from brain fever. The minutes creep by and the landscape, although wild and hauntingly large, is not diverting enough to make life worth living. 

Justin and I painfully avoided all conversation. No tales of Yukon pioneers, no riveting First Nation legends of Coyote wrestling with Wildebeest to form a lake basin, no discussion of political philosophy. I concentrated on maintaining a zen-like state of pure frontal lobe emptiness and Justin concentrated on keeping us alive. 

Sirius Satellite Radio. It comes in handy in areas where people think that AM/FM is a rock band. Sadly, as we discovered, it dies somewhere above 63.5 degree North. We were oppressed by our silence and the echoing emptiness of the road. 

No tundra. No muskoxen. No caribou herds lazily munching on lichen. Just trees. Trees. Who’d have thought that Yukon had so many damn trees? A carpet of trees undulating across the North like a duvet prudishly hiding an orgy from sight. 

Wilderness is a large thing. I used to get into trouble from my New Zealand friends when I spoke about wilderness. Kiwis are obsessive gushers about the “mystical bush.” They get all moist when they describe the trees and the wonder of nature. Well, sure. Easy to get all horny about the primeval joy of being one with nature when you live somewhere where nature DOESN’T WANT TO KILL YOU. 

I come from Canada. In Canada, the “mystical bush” squats malevolently around our cities and towns and offers up angry bears, vicious wolves, and savage little prairie dogs. Ever look into a skunk’s eyes? It can’t really kill you but it desperately wants to. 

In New Zealand I always got the feeling that if I got lost in the bush I’d just have to cross a mountain and I’d come out near civilization. In Yukon I got the feeling that if I crossed a mountain I’d still have three dozen more mountains to cross before I’d come out even farther from civilization. The wilds are just that: wild. Humanity has spent most of its existence trying to keep the wilds at bay. Now, thanks to Little House on the Prairies and the Sound of Music we skip through the fields and sing on the mountain tops … then we get mauled by a cougar and desperately try to impale ourselves on porcupines trying to end the pain. 

So we drove through the Yukon day, getting closer and closer to morning as we went North, with dwindling hope of seeing the night. We crossed rivers and blankly ate up the ribbon of asphalt and went through towns where drug dealers are officially unwelcome and unofficially get rich and we pulled around the curve where the Yukon River meets the Klondike River in a swirling wash of blue and muddy brown and we ended up in Dawson City. 

What a sore disappointment this installment turned out to be. Where's the fun? Why the introspection? Who cares about New Zealand? More to the point, will Dawson devour our dashing heroes or will hurdy-gurdy girls high-kick them into honesty? Will the weather improve and will the US of A open its arms to them? What is it like to drive in a Pontiac Sunbird and where can you find the best beer in Beaver Creek?Stay tuned to have some of these and other questions answered. Or, just mark all this as SPAM.

Part the Fifth

Wherein blackjack dealers attempt to teach our heroes how to improve their game of blackjack, and prostitution is made to seem like a good life choice for young ladies of spunk and vim

Today I dream of how it used to be
Things were different before
The picture shifts to how it's going to be
Balance restored
When you know even for a moment
That it's your time
Then you can walk with the power
Of a thousand generations
-Bruce Cockburn, “A Dream Like Mine”

Dawson is where men came to find their fortune and ended up just south of the Arctic Circle only to find that all the claims were gone and they could either go home or die poor. Typical.        

But a lot of them came. Barkerville, in central BC, claims to have once been the largest city west of Chicago and north of San Francisco. Dawson City claims to have once been the largest city west of Winnipeg and north of Seattle. I suppose Old Crow claims to be the largest city west of Eagle Plains and north of Dawson and south of Maggie’s cabin and east of Fred’s burned out truck. We all like to break records. 

Justin and I fishtailed into town on a light surface of loose gravel, swerved to avoid the last few potholes on that inhospitable stretch of highway, and pulled in at the Downtown Hotel just as the town’s power went out. By the light of the night time sun we got a room on the second floor overlooking the place where one hundred and 20 years ago, Crook-backed Clytemnestra leaned out of her window and bodice both and beckoned Michael “The Memphis Miner” Moore (no relation) to come and part with a few nuggets. Oh, Dawson sure makes it seem FUN to have been a prostitute to a valley full of filthy miners! The whores all had great names: Bombay Peggy, Diamond Tooth Gertie are two. It was like the Starbucks of whoredom – name it right and you can double the price. Names like Rattletrap Suzie, Rickets-leg Lulu, and Y-shaped Yolanda just don’t sell. 

We kicked the road out of our legs and ate some souvlaki at a Greek restaurant. The only certainty in any two-bit town in the world is the presence of a blue and white Greek restaurant. We then dosed ourselves (to cure our tremulous condition) with a little hair of the dog—rum and coke for Justin, rye and soda for me—at Diamond Tooth Gertie’s where we met up with a few friends, watched some hurdy-gurdy action, and sat down to play blackjack. 

The city is full of original decrepitude and authentic reproductions of original decrepitude. Beside me at the blackjack table was an inauthentic reproduction of a prostitute (dental hygiene and Utah naïveté can’t have been that prevalent in late nineteenth century Dawson). Aw, shucks, folks! Everyone was just having a good time in those days! Look at the prozzies! They’re all smiling! Don’t they look happy? And the miners … boy, could they dance a mean jig! 

The gambling is part of the “fun” in Dawson – it doesn’t have the hard impoverishing edge of a Vegas or an Atlantic City—and I won a little, lost a little, won a little and came out $15 down. Strangely, the dealers kept mumbling helpful plays to the gamblers: “dealer often breaks on 6,” “dealer has an ace up her sleeve,” that sort of thing. Very annoying. That type of infantilization just feels wrong. Oh, I suppose The Misses Wilbermont from West Virginia appreciate it and, let’s face it, the casino has the edge so it can afford to look friendly but hell, I think it’s perverse that instead of taking my money quickly they are very kindly taking my money slowly. 

Doesn’t stop some people from going a bit green. Some watermelon-gutted oldster from the Midwest stopped me in the men’s toilet (always something that initially makes me freak out) to tell me that he had lost $400 in twenty minutes and that his ulcers were acting up. Look, never gamble money you can’t shrug off. What a tool. 

But, hell, we had fun. Dawson is so far up the map that there has been no easy transition into schmaltzy costume drama, jewellery stores, and animatronic story tellers. It has a bit of that, but the ‘ghost town’ feel predominates. Skagway looks like Disneyland in comparison. 

We gambled a little, we watched the shows, we laughed at the “talent” on display and we saw the morning light at 12:30am. Barking dogs and the sound of running water. You don’t just feel safe wandering the streets of the Yukon at midnight, you feel invincible. As we wandered back along the false fronts and rusting gas pumps the city felt like it was still managing to hold back the tide. 

We wandered into the hotel lobby, up the switchback wooden staircase under the moth-eaten heads of last century’s suppers (of various species), and along the creaking floorboards. The city hunkered under the looming clouds and we slept the deep sleep of the virtuous, though our dreams may have been of chorus girls.

Part the Sixth

Wherein our doughty adventurers fair bake Alaska, get laid in Chicken, encounter the rough justice of the frontier, and take flight

A clammy sweat was on his brow, and pallid as a sheet:
"I feel I must be going now," he'd plaintively repeat.
Aye, though with drinks and smokes galore, they tempted him to stay,
With sudden bolt he gained the door, and made his get-away.

-Robert Service “The Ballad of the Ice-Worm Cocktail”

Drizzle greeted us in the morning: drizzle, weak coffee, two eggs over, ham, hashbrowns, and brown toast with margarine. We checked out the Tr'ondek Hwech'in First Nation and the Dawson museum, gassed up the car at 175/L, replaced the power steering fluid, replaced the washer fluid and, with a flatulent growl from our Pontiac steed, fishtailed our way down to the little ferry that would take us across the river and onto the Top of the World highway.      

Now, you might be thinking that we did a lot of driving, that we took things at a breakneck speed and didn’t stop to enjoy these locations. There is some truth to that, but what a lot of people don’t realize is that the journey is the thing. Getting there is almost always anticlimactic. The journey affords you time to think, time to daydream. You can dream about the country and enter it through your mind. In order to immerse yourself in a place you can’t really be there, you have to be floating under its surface. In some ways armchair travel works the same way.

I know what I’m talking about. I made a point of moving to different countries and living there to really get to know them; however, what I found out was that I could live there but I couldn’t truly experience the underlying nature of the place, organize my thoughts about it, fall in love with it, unless I was on a bus, or in a car, or on a train, or in an airplane. When you are solidly physically present you have to deal with moving your arms and legs and eating and sleeping and working – you put up bulwarks against a place in order to be at peace with yourself—but when you are drifting through, going from one place to another, your ordinary cares vanish, the bulwarks fall and you absorb a place and feel at peace with it. 

Re-reading that, it comes across as a load of diaper detritus but I stand behind it.       

Anyway, we were in the car and you have to do a lot of driving because everything is far-flung. What amazes me, however, is that no local actually knows how far away anything else is. Take Dawson City, for example. You can get there from Whitehorse up Highway 2 or take Highway 1 (the Alaska Highway) into Alaska and cut back on the number 9. It makes a circle, you see. 

Well, everyone in Dawson knows how long it takes to get to W’horse (or Haines Junction) down the number 2, but just try asking them how long it takes to complete the circuit:

“Well, it’s 2 hours to the border, then maybe six hours to Beaver Creek and then however long it takes from there.”

“Oh, it’s at least 5 hours to Tok, I know that much”

“Don’t even think about it; it’s at least 12 hours to Beaver Creek: 2 hours, 2 and a half to the border, a couple more to Chicken. Then it takes, well, it takes a long time to get down to Beaver Creek.”

“Depends on the road. Maybe a young guy like you could do it faster.” Faster? Faster than what? You’d think that no-one ever wanted to do the circuit. 

I really loved hearing “and then however long it takes from there.” That’s what I was asking, numbnuts!

No one knows the distance to Whitehorse. It takes what it takes. 

So we took the ferry across the river (and I can’t get used to the idea of rivers flowing north. Where does that begin? Where’s the north/south continental divide?) The clouds hung low over the hills and kept our race over the ridgetops of this lonely highway free from any qualms about driving our Frankenstein vehicle into the emptiness of Alaska. 

You need power, performance, fuel efficiency, lots of cargo room
-Advertisement for GMC’s Yukon SUV

A word about the Pontiac Sunbird: it reminds me of the movie “Back to the Future.” The car’s interior is swathed in heavy blue plastic that focuses the energy of the cosmos onto the driver. Enormous box-like modules point at the driver and away from the passenger and the driving cocoon is unambiguously that; everything about that bucket seat screams “central nervous system.” Not a DeLorean, but the next best thing. You could drive a 1992 Pontiac Sunbird to the moon and back. It is made to be driven and Justin drove it hard.      

We made the border stop at Poker Creek (the US of A’s northernmost land border crossing, population 2) in good time and had the pleasure of rumbling up to the border guard with a menacing thumping under the hood. 

The guardian of democracy was a brush-cutted youngster who was determined to keep the Homeland secure. So imagine this young buck putting his hand on his holstered automatic and giving us the greasy eyeball. 1992 Pontiac Sunbird. Blue and brown with mud caking the rear and sides. Windscreen cracked in five different directions, headlights obscured by insect carapaces, bungee cord holding the truck shut. He sees two unshaven, greasy guys blasting their way up to HIS border crossing amidst the RVs and trucks and he knows we are up to no good. 

I was suddenly acutely aware of the four Cuban cigars in the glove compartment. Can’t travel without Cubans … except maybe the United States of America.

This defender of Freedom asked us all sorts of odd questions, took our identification, came back, asked us the same questions all over again, obviously giving us a chance to recant before he searched our car and discovered Pablo Escobar and Osama Bin Laden in the trunk. 

He’s about to loosen his automatic in the holster and ask us to pull over to the side but first he asks a final question: "what do you do for a living?" expecting us to say “we manufacture crack cocaine and sell it to hydroencephalic children, using the profits to buy demented senior citizens from crooked retirement homes and ship them to roadside brothels in North Korea.”  

Instead, I leaned over: "I'm a treaty negotiator for the government of Canada" 

Justin cocked his head to the side: "I run the Carcross-Tagish First Nation government." 

He didn't know what to say for a full 15 seconds; his jaw just worked silently. He handed us our IDs and waved us through: you can't make that kind of crap up. We were too whacked out to be anything other than completely legitimate. 

Justin put the Sunbird into gear, gunned the gas, I could feel the gears catch and we fishtailed our way onto the highway. The clouds cleared up, Alaska bared all, and we entered the Land of the Free. 

Well they say once you've heard those mystic voices
On the silence of the north you can't return
-Stompin’ Tom Connors “ Long Gone to the Yukon”

A brief stop in Chicken, Alaska to get gas and take our pictures behind a cut-out of a cracked egg with “I got laid in Chicken Alaska” emblazoned across the front and we kept burning up the road.      

Wait. Oh yes! Chicken, Alaska. Home to some weird, weird people. The gas pump had a padlock on it. A scruffy looking fellow came out and unlocked it. He was quietly pleasant in the way that hard-core Mormons or Hare Krishnas, or hippies can be. Justin asked him some banal time-passing questions. He looked at Justin with a lazy smile and said … wait for it … “I’m Number Seven.”

Sometimes it doesn’t pay to ask. 

That was Chicken Community. We didn’t drive into the actual center of the town and we both regret that decision. We were in a driving groove and we just kept going, but we both kick ourselves and wonder what Chicken really, really looks like. 

OK. I’ve just gone onto the Internet and here’s what I’ve found out about Chicken:

Due to the prevalence of ptarmigan in the area that name was suggested as the official name for the new community. However, the spelling could not be agreed on and Chicken was used to avoid embarrassment.

As of the census of 2000, there were 17 people, 6 households, and 4 families residing in the CDP. The population density was 0.1 people per square mile (0.1/km_). There were 21 housing units at an average density of 0.2/sq mi (0.1/km_). The racial makeup of the CDP was 100.00% White.

I love it. So we left Ptar-Par-Tar-puhtarm … Chicken and its 17 people behind us as swerved and bounced our way deeper into Alaska. 

Sean Barnes: Look! It wasn't my fault! 
Sergeant Grazer: Son, in Alaska; if it happens to you, it's your fault.
-From the motion picture “Alaska”

Suddenly, in a place that the middle of nowhere would consider to be the middle of nowhere we came across dozens and dozens of trucks and trailers hauling ATVs. Some sort of rally. People in camouflage burning up the tracks. Where did they come from? Why were they there? Don’t ask, don’t tell. This is the Home of the Brave and the meek don’t stop to ask questions. We drove on: off the ridges and down into the valleys. 

Adventure? We had a few, but then again, too few to mention, We did what we had to do and saw it through without exemption. 

The Land of the Free it was, so we decided that passing Mount Freeway was the perfect place to light up a couple of our Cuban cheroots, a couple of Spanish-speaking seegars, and puff away as we drove. For those who might question my politics, I refer you to Kinky Friedman who famously remarked when questioned about his penchant for inhaling Fidel’s fumes: “I’m not supporting their economy, I’m burning their fields.” 

With Sunbird bucking and straining to fly, we chewed and puffed on our vaguely illicit narcotic substances and laughed at the world. We were laughing so hard, in fact, that we didn’t notice the Alaska State Trooper coming towards us until he flashed his lights and swung around. We oh-so-surreptitiously butted out our Cuban cigars on the floormats and assiduously ignored the clouds of smoke that greeted him as he asked: “I clocked you going 64 in a 50 zone. Is there any reason you were going that fast?” 

How do you answer that question? It’s not like Justin could claim I was going into labour. We couldn’t misdirect him with a tale of our fleeing race riots in the town of Chicken. We weren’t furiously trying to deliver a kidney for transplant in Tok. Justin, however, had an answer that will live forever in the annals of highway lore. Oh, he’s a quick one, our Justin. He looked up at the trooper from under his shock of black hair and he said: “Oh. I didn’t notice I was going that fast.”

A dazzler of an answer. The trooper couldn’t be anything but nonplussed after such a brilliant retort. He very kindly took that into consideration. It’s not Justin’s fault that he then proceeded to issue us with a ticket. Oh no. Not after a justification like that. 

With a stentorian eructation, our Pontiac Sunbird fishtailed its way back onto the highway and we very calmly proceeded to speed our way back out of Alaska to the Land of the Cowed and the Home of the Quiet Taxpayer. 

What dizzying adventure! It makes one thirsty. Stay tuned as our adventurers scale further dizzying heights and sink to new depths. Or, just mark all this as SPAM.

Part the Seventh

Wherein Justin gently refuses the tender advances of a lady of leathery years, our heroes attempt to burn down a UNESCO world heritage site mountains get scaled, comestibles get consumed, and geothermal heating provides watery relaxation

The lonely sunsets flame and die; 
The giant valleys gulp the night; 
The monster mountains scrape the sky, 
Where eager stars are diamond-bright. - Robert Service, “The Land God Forgot”

It was a 10-hour travel day but the sun loiters like a sullen teenager up North in early August and we crossed the border at Beaver Crossing, bounced and sprung like the Duke boys down the Canadian highway and ended up in Haines Junction where we landed in a hell of a room in the Kluane park Inn where the local riff-raff drink. Yukon riff-raff are unionized. They feel a great sense of entitlement and they don’t like scab riff-raff coming into town in a decidedly gastrointestinal 1992 Pontiac Sunbird and drinking their beer. 

 Justin procured a room key from a gargantuan barmaid dressed in green who looked suspiciously like Toad of Toad Hall. We unloaded our gear and we sat down for a beer. 

Oh it was a very good beer. Even better was the leathery old town cougar coming over to Justin and offering to massage his shoulders. The pockmarked bar trash glared at us. A grizzled old pool player tapped his warped cue across his thigh. Justin, valorous as ever, declined the tender rewards that chance had thrown in his way and we sat alone, shunned by the locals. 

But that was all right. We had a plan. We grabbed a six-pack from behind the bar and got back into Sunbird. Twenty klicks down the road is Kathleen Lake. For a couple of hours we’d been driving along the valley that curves up on its eastern side into Kluane National Park. Now we were going to enjoy it. 

A midnight fire (lit and coddled by government reports), cold beer, and the last two Cuban cigars. What more need be written? 

The Kluane Park Inn does provide showers; they just don’t drain well. Disconcerting early in the morning. Breakfast was an old, wilted salami sandwich and some nearly unexpired orange juice from the local store. We had a purpose for getting up early: We were going to climb King’s Throne, which is back where we had set an enormous fire to roaring just hours before. 

Now, Kluane National Park is enormous, and forms just one part of a chain of parks stretching from BC into Alaska that compose a UNESCO world heritage site. Aside: The parts COMPOSE the whole; the whole COMPRISES the parts. Remember that. The small part we hiked was to the entire Park as a nervous glance is to the entire variety of sexual possibility. Nevertheless, I can proudly claim to have switchbacked up the King’s Throne trail almost ALMOST to, if not the top, then not really very far at all from the bottom. 

But the air is clear, the sun (being so much lower on the horizon) is almost always at an angle that provides clean colours and lines, and the land stretches out and up and over and down and back and behind you and off into the immensity of the wilds. 

But who needs all that? A very good bakery and quarter-decent coffee awaited back in Haines Junction, so we scrambled back down the scree and trotted out through the woods and soon the Sunbird spewed out some carbon for all those trees to sink, the engine turned over solidly like Mama Cass, and, with a spray of gravel and fishtailing tire tracks we got back to the bakery in Haines Junction where Justin again met someone he knew from the Premier’s office (Yukon is a small place), we demolished our pastries and caffeine, and hightailed it back to Yukon. 

It’s a sad thing to come to the end of a trip, but not quite so sad if you stop off at some hot springs to soak away your twisted knee and swollen ankle. It would be better if there were natural pools a short hike in from a bad road, but beggars can’t be choosers. I was willing to put up with the hairy old man with a breasts and belly like a sackfuls of dead fish hanging over his Speedos, the splashing infant, and the hoots and yells from the Zipline next door. It was a good afternoon to sit where the water bubbles up into the pool and feel its heat dissipate around me. 

--

Doing nothing is very hard to do, you never know when you're finished.
-Leslie Nielsen

So that’s it really. There’s a bit more that took place in Whitehorse where we saw fish swim up a ladder, poked around a used book store while the owner and a friend talked about the best ways to break up with men, visited Justin’s palatial boyhood home and met his family, encouraged his family’s manservant to cook my steak so rare that it would still faintly moo, rocked a wooden suspension bridge, and shared a joke with the “oldest serving politician without a sex scandal in the Yukon.”

Typical fare.        

We brushed off the road dust and had a last beer. Then suddenly the airport loomed, Air Canada beckoned and, with a light snort, I woke up as the airplane bounced down at the YVR aerodrome. 

I was back in Vancouver, 15 degrees of latitude further south and deeper into the stink of 6-some-odd billion people huddling around the equator. 

And that was us and that was Yukon between the 7th of August and the 10th of August in the year of our Lord, 2008: 1873 km, 72.5 hours, 4 cigars, 2 guys, 2 countries, 1 territory, 1 province, 1 state, 1 car, and half an ounce of common sense. 

I recommend it.