Mile Zero

Toting our little black bag out to the parking lot and into the Sue, it felt tremendous to be home again. Back in our New York driveway, when we first were fixing up the RV, every time I’d go inside I was a little bit disappointed that it never smelled like home, not like our home smell, whatever that is. Now she did have a homey aroma. At least one of the components of that smell was salami—strong, spicy, garlicky Winterpeg salami. Every time the fridge opened, a cascade of eau de salami poured out. Just to make sure we didn’t run out, we hit a supersaver store on our way out of Edmonton.

* * *

CONFESSIONS OF A PROVINCIAL NEW YORKER

I was convinced that no one outside of New York—and possibly a few other urban areas, but I wasn’t counting on them—knew anything about food. The Vietnamese meal in Saskatoon was an omen that I was wrong, but I assumed it was an exception. My mistaken assumption prompted us to pack, along with the bread machine and the sourdough starter, sun-dried tomatoes, lots of fresh garlic, dried porcini mushrooms, a little leftover white truffle oil, arborio rice for risotto, anchovy paste and Parmesan cheese for Caesar salad, chili paste, sesame oil, curry powder, frozen New York bagels (H&H sourdough, the best), and a dozen other essentials we feared we would never find “out there.” It went right past me that, except perhaps for the bagels, none of these things actually came from New York in the first place, but I was a rube in reverse. What did I know.

* * *

Major comeuppance: The supermarket in Edmonton was fabulous—especially the produce. Everything from duck eggs (sold singly) to bok choy and large hands of ginger, to tropical fruits and a range of berries rarely seen anywhere: gooseberries, red and black currants, black and red raspberries, strawberries, and those lovely Saskatoon berries, cousins to our blueberries. The quality and variety of products amazed me. I had expected New York to have the best of everything. The world was full of surprises. We had lots of different salamis to choose from. And ah, that simple Canadian packaging. Why did the Philly cream cheese 125-gram box look so sweet, so innocent, and our eight-ouncer so crapped up? We’d also noticed how Canadian food packaging was blissfully free of what sometimes seems to be excessive, mind-numbing labeling. I know it has its place. I can hear Susan Powter screaming at me now, but surely no one really needs to be told that butter is fattening or oil is grease. Since we had warned and labeled and identified food in America, we had become fatter as a nation. The only assumption I could make was that we were now doing it on purpose! In Canada, Sandy and I could still eat with the ignorance of children, having determined through trial and error and rigorous intellectual pursuit that lettuce was probably better for us than lard, and that fruit was a healthier dessert than cookies. Imagine, all that thinking for ourselves! And along with road French, we were able to add a few words of food French to our vocabulary. My favorite was guimauve, a much classier way to say “marshmallow,” non?

Meanwhile the Sue had her innards lubed and her fluids checked. As New Yorkers, we were always expecting the worst kind of punishment simply for having a car. That’s how it was at home in Manhattan, where you had to beg someone to change your oil and let you pay them sixty dollars. I’ll bet they wouldn’t touch an RV for any money. So before we left home, we’d called ahead to make an appointment for this check-up through the concierge at the hotel. Both the concierge and the nice man at Mr. Lube must have thought we were nuts making an appointment weeks in advance. As it turned out, we were a day late for our date, and when we did show up, they were so efficient, we barely had time to shop for groceries down the road before the Sue was all set to go. Paranoid citiots. (That’s short for city-idiots, as a someone I know once referred to the summer people in his beach community.) We had been concerned about finding places to camp—but this was where people camped all the time. Campgrounds were as common as subway stations. If we were in Queens, we’d have had to worry, but not out here in this part of the world!

Back at home, on the road, I put on my favorite garment. I’d always wanted one of those safari-photographer-pockets-every-where vests. It proved to be an incredibly handy way to carry water, tissues, lip balm, the camera, and extra film. The little tortoise pin on it, a gift from our friends Liv and Willie, was supposed to remind us to take life more slowly. But after three weeks of traveling, counting miles and making time, moving had become our natural state. The stasis in Edmonton bothered both of us. It took some effort to remind each other that this was not a two-week holiday to be devoured but a new way of life to be etched. I hoped we would be able to enjoy each day as we went along and not always be on the lookout for that next place or next adventure.

Passing a golf course/RV park, I chuckled at the combo. More to the point, it was totally flat out there. People I knew would say this wasn’t golf, it was bowling. Along the road the trees had all been planted, mostly evergreens, giving a little bit of a Christmas-tree-farm feeling. Noting odd town names was a good way to amuse ourselves since I refused to play Sandy’s counting-cows game. On the map I noticed Humptulips, Washington, and Mouth of Wilson, Virginia. Sandy especially liked Sexsmith, Alberta, and said what a good trade that would be. I didn’t get it, thinking of trade as in swap. But I should have been quicker—he meant it as in a profession. My husband wanted to be a sexsmithy. I reassured him he already was.

* * *

Just beyond fifty-five degrees north latitude, the scenery began to get a little hilly and natural, as apparently unplanted trees appeared. After a thousand miles of totally open vistas, our vision was abruptly narrowed to a tunnel of blacktop surrounded by green soldiers standing at attention. It must have been very disorienting for a Plains Indian to come into a forest for the first time. How claustrophobic the sudden limited vision would have been. How strange not to be able to see that straight horizon line that had always separated heaven and earth. It must have been something akin to how we were feeling about our new possibilities. Ahead of us the land spread out again, and I felt relieved, as if the open space had become my familiar too. The dirt was black, and the fields glowed. It seemed as if someone had turned on the sunshine at the edge of the canola fields. Every once in a while an oil well would pop up in the midst of the crops. As we drove toward Peace River, the earth suddenly fell away, and we realized we had been on the high plains, a giant mesa. Below us were three rivers: the Peace, the Heart, and the Smoky. The Beaver and the Cree once made peace at their confluence. Now there was a tea room for tourists in a greenhouse. Across the way the vertically undulating hills gave the impression that if you could rub your hand across them, they would feel like the felt of a pool table, with ridges.

Radio reception, something we’d always taken for granted, was now an increasingly rare treat. When we were able to pick up a signal, it usually didn’t last past the town limits. One day the lead story on the news was that the city council approved a new “Welcome to Fairview” sign. I paid close attention to the death notices. It struck me that these deaths had much more immediate impact on the daily lives of the listeners than the obituaries I read in the Times. These were neighbors and friends who had died, not cultural icons at some remove. As we traveled, the newspapers, magazines, and radio and television reports I used to gobble up regularly became increasingly irrelevant. At first I’d suffered some withdrawal when we couldn’t find The New York Times for several days running, especially on a Wednesday. I loved the Living section. I also missed the ritual of reading the Sunday Times. But did I miss the news itself? It was the first time I noticed a difference between the two. Information still filtered through to us. It was impossible to escape knowing the large strokes: Bosnia was still in crisis, O.J. on trial, baseball on strike. If something major happened, I figured we would know.

We spent a night in a woodsy lakeside site in a provincial park. Although it was midsummer, it was also midweek and there were few other campers. It was a great relief to be on our own again. After laying in a supply of firewood, kindly provided by British Columbia, Sandy heated up the grill. I nuked an acorn squash (available everywhere, they kept unrefrigerated forever, it seemed) and steamed some rice in an onion soup broth, and when the pork chops were done, I tossed a salad in our homemade garlic dressing. We dined at a picnic table set aside for our campsite under a canopy of trees. After a short bike ride to watch the birds fish in the water, we went back to light the campfire and toasted a few guimauves. Now this was real romantic.

* * *

Dawson Creek in British Columbia was notable for being mile zero of the famous (it said so on the sign) Alaska Highway. In preparation for the journey we tanked up. Gas by the liter ran anywhere from 45 to 69 cents, or about $2.30 a gallon. (If you think those numbers are strange, try asking for your cold cuts in grams. I thought only drugs came that way. Or try driving a monster truck at sixty miles per hour—excuse me, ninety clicks per hour—toward an overpass with a sign that says, in English and in French, “Maximum headroom 4.2 meters.”)

At the gas station I got out to wash the windows—a very funny sight, I’m sure: a 62-inch woman hanging by one arm on a 137-inch-high truck with a squeegee in the other hand and filthy window water running into her armpit. I noticed the fellow at the next pump also had New York plates—the first we had seen in days. This was exciting. I hadn’t sensed any homesickness at all, but there in Dawson Creek I felt an instant kinship, an intimate connection with a guy I had never seen before because of a license plate. His vehicle and ours shared, with only eleven million others, the same kind of tag. Oh, the camaraderie! He nodded toward us and was clearly happy to see a couple of folks from back home too. My blood flowed warmly toward him. Who says New Yorkers aren’t friendly?

We immediately struck up a conversation. We were on our way north, I told him, having a great time. He was on his way south and eager to warn us how awful the road conditions were. He couldn’t wait to get back home to Manhattan as fast as he could. I withered with disappointment. My soulmate turned out to be a party pooper. After Sandy took out a second mortgage to pay for the gas, I slunk back into the Sue and wondered how I could have so misjudged my fellow New Yorker. As we pulled out of the station, I heard him yelling at us and thought perhaps we’d left something behind. I turned and saw him waving frantically while videotaping our departure. We waved. Maybe he wanted evidence to take to the Mounties when we were reported missing.

The Alaska Highway is the only year-round overland route into the state. Built by the army during World War II to enable troop access to the North Pacific, it is at best a two-lane black-topped road. Often it’s dirt and a single lane. From this point until we got to and through Alaska, all the roads were to be referred to by name rather than number. Taking the Richardson? Heading up on George Parks? It sounded much better than taking I-95 to 287 and 87. The roads also had mile markers placed religiously along the way, making it easy to know your exact location, even if you were thousands of miles from anywhere. Our bible in this part of the world was a book called The Milepost. It listed every identifiable inch of road, by the garbage barrel here to frost heave there to landmark hotel not to be missed. We knew we were 3,351 miles from home, 1,488 miles from Fairbanks. It was still wild territory here, with very few other roads and fewer towns. We were warned never to lose sight of how much gas we had and how far away the next station was. As we drove, seventy-foot double-length trucks whizzed by us, bringing supplies to the North. Neither of us had ever experienced remoteness before. It was simultaneously calming and thrilling. At Mile Marker 370 we saw our first bear, a little black cub scooting out from a landfill.

I had always thought of roads as sturdy, permanent. When a highway opened, it was forever. Even roads built in ancient Rome, England, and Israel were still intact. The road to Alaska was different. It was always shifting and movable. People and the planet battled constantly about whether that black strip would stay put. Pavement was turf in the war between ice and earth. In a good year a road could go bad in no time. In a bad year forget it. It was a constant process of give and take: People gave it their best shot, and nature took it all back. As we drove farther north, the road seemed insignificant compared with truly permanent mountains and rivers. They were the real bosses of the road crews here. A turquoise river, the Toad, followed along our side for a while, backed up by the stone-faced mountains. The little strip of road was clearly here by their permission. The mountain could eat it for breakfast any day now and wash it down with a gulp of Toad.

We had no radio reception at all, signaling to me that we were as remote as we’d ever been. When we pressed scan, the numbers on the display flashed at us and never stopped. No station featured traffic and weather together on the eights, twos, or any other time up here. When work was being done on the road, however, we had the scoop. The Long Island Expressway or the five in L.A. are not known to get personalized, individual road status reports. Up north, when vehicles have to wait while dirt is being moved, flattened, or graded, each driver hears the whole story and dimension of the work in an up-close-and-personal kind of way. Signs warned us well in advance of a slowdown. We learned to time lunch, soda retrieval, driver switches, and bathroom breaks according to road conditions.

The first time we were approached by a member of a crew, I thought some major calamity must have occurred ahead. Was a bridge washed out? A truck overturned? Were they looking for escaped convicts? Just the road news, ma’am. Friendly (generally also young, blond, and female) road workers would come up to the driver’s window and chat. How were we today? How far were we going? Then we would get a description of the project, how long we could expect to wait today, how far this particular job stretched, and where the next bit of work was. Pretty civilized up here in the outback. It helped keep the blood pressure down—a good thing in a place where everyone carried a gun, I guess.

At the edge of a milky emerald lake we stopped for the night. The opacity of the waters in this part of the world was a result of glacial flour—runoff that hauled with it aeons of finely ground rock. It created beautifully colored waters, terrible for fishing. We sidled up to the shore and rolled out our awning. The sky was still threatening, so we decided to go for a hike right away. Wearing our Gore-Tex just in case, we scrambled up the side of the mountain until we had an overview of the campground. The water changed color with the mood of the sky: gray, green, turquoise, black. We watched while a tour bus pulled in, relieving itself of passengers, who relieved themselves in the latrines and reboarded. From our lofty position it was like watching the Keystone Kops moving jerkily back and forth. By the time we got back, we had neighbors. A young couple and their small daughter were pitching a tent. They were on their way home to Whitehorse, they explained. As the rain began in earnest, I was glad not to be in a tent.

* * *

In places the road became very primitive. Pilot cars led caravans of cars, trucks, and RVs through muddy pathways around equipment. Often we wondered whether we were on an old road, a future road, a shoulder, or just something to get us out of the way of the workers. I thought about our usual anxiety in traffic jams, how tense we became. Here it rolled off our backs. We had no appointments, no reservations to keep. Any personal need could be taken care of easily since we were already home. I felt like a pioneer on a wagon train. At night I imagined it was like “the old days.” We sat around a campfire and shared stories with those coming the other way: How was the road? How was your weather? See any animals? Conditions varied from smooth and amply shouldered blacktop to dirt and rutted and barely big enough for two cars to pass. Skies changed hourly, and the sunny weather of the plains disappeared. For the most part the clouds were benign. Then one would roll over the mountain behind us and open the floodgates. There was a sense of discovery along the highway. One night we camped next to Judy and Ken, young retirees from Oakville, Ontario, on their way down from Alaska. They were bubbling over with enthusiasm about the Great Land, its beauty and ruggedness. Eagerly they described their trip up the Dempster Highway, a faint dotted line on our map, from Dawson City, in the Yukon, to Inuvik. They also were the first of many people we met who encouraged us to go north from Whitehorse to Dawson in order to take the Top of the World Highway into Alaska. They explained their various routes to us, which glaciers they liked best, and how they had come to love dry camping, being completely self-sufficient. They seemed like sensible adventurers. Taking advice from total strangers seemed as reasonable to us as following a guidebook. A new laissez-faire attitude had kicked in. We were still dubious about the Dempster but leaning toward the Top of the World.

The road was our shepherd.