Plus this thing must weigh 700 lbs. all loaded up like this.
Around slow elephantine campers and past adventure bicyclists all loaded up with
gear I go rocketing westward. My short-lived joy ride in rudely interrupted
though.
I roll through Destruction Bay, which got its name from a
storm that leveled many of the buildings when it was just a relay station.
During the building of the highway, every 100 miles or so, relay stations were
built to allow a place for truck drivers to rest and repair their vehicles.
After the storm, the name Destruction Bay stuck. Today less than 100 people live
there. It lies on the shore in the middle of the lake and the view is amazing.
To my dismay, just outside of town, the construction begins.
It stretches for as far as the eye can see. The pavement ends and gravel it is.
Huge dump trucks with tires taller than I, even with arms
outstretched above me, rumble by along side the road. Some are full, some are
empty. The empty ones travel in one direction one after the other. They fly by
moving even faster than the flow of traffic. The huge trucks rumble and bounce
down the side of the road belching black diesel smoke and tons of dust. The
loaded ones come back the other way, filled with house size loads of dirt.
Dust fills the air making it hard to see. It begins to coat
everything. Clouds bellow from beneath the huge dump trucks each time they drive
by robbing me the ability to see anything until they pass by. Then another one
approaches and overtakes traffic.
The windshield is soon coated in a thick layer of dust. I sit
up high in the seat peering over the top edge of the windshield. Cars, trucks,
campers drive the other way on the other side of the makeshift road kicking up
even more dust. Each vehicle I come to kicks up a cloud of dust so thick, I can
barely see around it. When the coast is clear and it is safe, I slowly pull out
and pass by the RV's.
I steer around rocks, potholes, even a little boulder once in
a while that must have fell out of a truck or something. How did a 6-inch stone
get into the middle of the road I have to wonder? I ride up on a group of
campers lumbering along. I cannot stay back here. I wait until there is room to
pass. Riding behind these campers is worse than the cars. Occasionally, I even
come up on one of those super luxo motorhomes, the Greyhound bus chassis
converted to a camper. They pull boats, pickups, ATV's on trailers, the
kitchen sink. They even travel in packs and form a sort of luxo-camper caravan.
The road becomes wet as the water truck passes by. Now added
to the dust is a coating of gray film that quickly changes the color of my
chaps, boots, and face shield. It coats every surface of the motorcycle. The
vehicles in front of me are kicking up a soup of wet gravel. Then the water
truck runs out of water and pulls around into the returning dump truck path the
other way. The road turns back to clouds of dust now crusting the wet film. It's
calm for a short time, not too much dust, and then a group of huge dump trucks roar by kicking up clouds.
The bike shakes and shimmies, the plastic protests, and every
bolt is slowly coming loose. I hit a couple potholes bottoming out the front
fork. Each time it feels as though the motorcycle is going to split in half. The
crunch is so extreme and so sudden; it makes it feel as if I'm the one taking
the punishment, not just the bike. Each one hurts more than the last.
Normally, the bike is so quiet that on a normal road, I can't
even hear the motor over the wind noise, here the very sound of the creaking is
like fingernails on chalkboard. At times, the road changes to hardpack and
traffic speeds up some. I see our caravan from space as this swath cut through
the forests is being recut and the relentless onslaught of tourists making their
way to Alaska. We are all very close.
I pull over at the Donjek River to rest a moment from this
madness. A sign there reads Glacial rivers, like the Donjek, posed a unique
problem for the builders of the Alaska Highway. These braided mountain streams
would flood after a heavy rainfall or rapid glacial melt, altering the waters'
course and often leaving bridges crossing dry ground.
From here to the Alaskan border the terrain evolves to a less
mountainous one. In 1943 when Alaska Highway workers came to this section of
construction, not only did they face problems with the rivers, but also the
ground was swampy. The softness of the surface was underlain with permafrost.
Permafrost is that stuff that never unfreezes. Something we Californians don't
think much about. This thick insulating ground cover also made the road very
difficult to build. I wish those workers could see this scene. I don't think
these guys are having any problems rebuilding this road. The construction seems
endless and on a massive scale. Another sign proclaims this being a joint
American and Canadian project. Now I know where my taxes are going.
I stop at Pine Valley Motel and Café to gas up. The radio
quit working a while back, I think I busted a speaker or something, or jarred a
wire loose. I don't want to know what's going to stop working next. I pull
into the parking lot and fiddle with it. Whatever I do gets it working again. I
must have jiggled it the opposite way.
As I pull up to the pump and tug off my helmet, I can hear
the people conversing. Everyone seems to be talking about the wild road
conditions. I have never driven or ridden over anything this bad before.
Everybody has come up on a construction site before but I doubt they've ever
encountered one that lasts for tens of miles. It's 200 miles between
Destruction Bay and Tok and the majority of the road so far has been no road.
Just a rutted gravel path westward.
All the vehicles around me and those pulling in from both
directions are coated in the gray film. For me, it's not just the motorcycle
but I'm also coated in this stuff. My leather chaps have turned gray, and my
white helmet is no longer white. I can't see out the visor when it is down and
the fine grit has soaked into the skin on my face.
The guy next to me looks over as he holds the gas nozzle into
his truck, sees the haggard look on my face and says kind of laughing,
"Pretty rough ride, eh?"
I count 76 more miles to the border.
The road changes to rocky gravel. It's like riding on ice.
The tires skit and skate over the little pebbles, forever onward screams my
mind. My body uses every riding skill and sense to keep the bike balanced. For
some strange reason it reminds of me of an anatomy lecture about the ear. It
actually has three planes, just like in 3-D drafting and that xyz stuff. They're
called the semicircular canals. Sometimes riding all day and sitting here, your
mind wanders and you think of the strangest things. Sometimes you think nothing.
Other times I feel as though I could be teaching a lecture on the Theory of
Relativity.
I come upon another group of campers and wait until it is
safe to pass; meanwhile, I can't see anything except this huge white square
with a window in the middle. Three bicycles are lashed to the back and coolers
sit atop the luggage rack. They're all covered in the gritty dust.
Out of nowhere it hits me, blindsiding me. A pothole so big,
it swallows the motorcycle up in a single gulp. The whole bike just falls out
from beneath me as if there were no longer any ground. Sudden screams of alarm
reverberate in my mind, as all I can think is to save the bike. Scenes from Das
Boat go running rampant across my mind where the guy goes, ".Alarm!
Alarm!." in that German accent of his as the depth charges rain down
upon them.
The pothole ends as quickly as it begins and the motorcycle
goes shooting up into the air. The back tire loses contact with the ground and
goes spinning into the air just hanging there. I was looking at the back of a
camper and now I am staring at the ground in front of me. I hold on for dear
life and balance as best I can as my 700-pound motorcycle shoots into the air.
With a sound I don't want to remember, the motorcycle slams into the ground.
Then I slam down onto the bike. I struggle to keep balance and keep the bike
upright. My semicircular canals are really getting a workout. Every bolt loosens
a little more. The tires slide and skit across the gravel but continue rolling.
I am gasping for breath. I think I got the wind knocked out
of me. I am so shaken by the experience I pull over to the side of the road to
access the damage. Make sure I didn't break the axle or break the bike in
half, something like that. Everything appears to be all right except my
altimeter broke off. Oh nuts. I really liked that thing.
This alarming sequence happens two more times. Each time I
survive. No broken axles, semicircular canals intact. Thank you Yamaha, thank
you God.
Sometime later I finally come to the Alaskan border at Beaver
Creek and the border guard asks me where I am headed. Uh, Alaska. Where did I come
from? Uh, Canada. What is your occupation? I have the fleeting thought to say 'US Marine', but settle on keeping it simple. When I say student, he motions me into my own country.
"Have a good trip," he says waving.
Alaska!! I made it, I'm here!
At the border there is a turnout that I pull into for a map
change in the zip-loc bag on the tank. Don't have enough money to buy a
tankbag so instead I went to the grocery store, bought a box of Zip-Loc bags and
a roll of scotch tape. I fold up the map, stick it in the bag, and scotch tape
it to the tank. So far it's worked great. I ought to write this poor man's
fix in to Motorcyclist magazine. They have this section in the back where
everyone writes in their cheapo home fixes. I'm rather proud of this one.
I am a bit surprised to see a narrow clearing that is
supposed to denote the border of two countries. It is a part of a 20-foot wide
swath created between 1904 and 1920 along the 141st meridian. It
starts way to the north at the Arctic Ocean and goes for 600 miles southward to
Mount St. Elias in the Wrangell Mountains. Even when Alaska heads southeast
along the Pacific at Mount Augusta, the swath is there too. The sign says that
the swath is cut and maintained by the International Boundary Commission. And
you thought lines in the sand don't exist.
The road changes to flat and straight, fortunately paved
though, across green scrub forests. No mountains, just flat greenness as far as
the eye can see. The road can be rough at times. Frost heaves are a new
experience for me and I have to dwell on that for awhile as I ride. The ground
beneath me never really unfreezes. But like ice, it expands and contracts.
Imagine laying a ribbon of pavement across an ice field. The frost heaves are
like big bumps in the road. Sometimes I see them coming, other times I don't.
Sometimes the entire road is buckled, a huge crack right across the road. I am
just thankful that it is paved.
In some places, the road is buckled clear across. No one ever
showed up to fix it other than to smooth the bump out. Then they put gravel
there where the crack is. So what happens is I am tooling along, then out of
nowhere comes a patch of gravel. I hold my balance, slow down a little, and
glide across. If the patch is in the apex of a corner, I have to be even more
careful.
I head for the first town, Tok (rhymes with poke), where I
stop to eat and get my bearings. I have to change the time on my watch again and
the clock on the dash of the bike as I went through another time zone change at
the border. Tok is the major stopping and starting point for travelers coming
into and out of Alaska. It is the only town in the state, any state for that
matter, where a traveler must pass through twice. There is only one road going
in and out of the state via land. It looks really small but the map says the
population is almost a thousand, which is probably a lot around here. There are
campers and people everywhere. Everyone is converging on this little town all
summer long I imagine.
It is the evening although judging by the sun, you'd never
know. It has taken all day to travel just a few hundred miles. I am used to traveling
twice as far in a single day. I eat a light meal not feeling very
hungry. It occurs to me that I should relax for a bit, sit in my booth and write
for awhile. Unfortunately, just as I finish my meal, a gravel coated tour bus
pulls up. A senior citizen tour piles out and into the restaurant. They're
just as noisy as the Whitehorse group. Time to motor.
Dusk begins to fall as I head south and wonder what I am
going to do for sleeping. I have no interest in continuing because I cannot see
the scenery once it's dark so what's the point. I pass over the Tok River 20
miles later. I spot some campfires at the water's edge. This will work.
I hit both brakes and slow to find the access road to the
river below the bridge. I follow the path down a steep hill to the water's
edge. The bike rolls right up next to a campfire and I motion the guy over. I
ask him if he minds if I join him. He says come on over as if I were his
brother.
Ed is here with his wife and daughter. The first thing Ed's
wife, Sally, does is offer me something to eat. I sit down at their campfire as
they roast hot dogs and hamburgers over one of those tripod things over an open
fire sparking and crackling. I sit down next to the daughter, Katie. She points
down to the water's edge to a man fishing in the river.
"That's my husband, Mark," she says when I ask
how she ended up in Alaska. "Actually, I grew up in Oregon. Mark and I
married when he got into the Air Force. He was stationed at Elmendorf in
Anchorage. We liked it so much we stayed when he got out a few years ago. While
Mark and I were living in the base housing, we could hunt and fish all we
wanted, not to mention the land is just beautiful up here." She asks how
long I have been in Alaska.
"A few hours," is my reply.
"Are you staying long?"
"I am just here to get to the end of the road." She looks bemused by that. The sentence is a bit of a riddle.
"The end of the road?"
"I haven't actually thought of what exactly I want to
see or why I am here. I'm just riding around actually." I tell her the
story of landing on the Gulf of Mexico on the trip six months ago I took on the
bike. It was another 'end of the road'. I was once less than 1000 miles away
from Key West. I missed the chance because it was a Friday and I had to back in
Sacramento for class on Tuesday morning. Key West is another 'end of the road.'
"When I planned this trip, I originally wanted to ride
straight to Seward, then turn right around and ride clear across Canada. Cross
the Saint Lawrence at Baie-Comeau and straight across Nova Scotia to
Newfoundland Island. I want to stand on a rock in Saint John and stare into the
Atlantic," I say wide-eyed in the flickering light of the campfire.
"Canada's a big place, even wider that the lower
forty-eight," she replies, "How much time do you have."
"Not enough. At least not to do that."
I pause and look at her for a moment. I think she is in her
late twenties, a little on the heavy side with dark blonde hair and fair skin.
She wears one of those sweatshirts you'd buy from an outdoorsy mail-order
catalog. Her brown hiking boots near the fire start steaming as the moisture
from the dew on the ground evaporates.
"You should stay in Alaska longer than that though. I
never ever thought I would end up here," Katie adds. "But when Mark
and I spent the first four years of our marriage here while he was in the
service, I hated it at first. But Mark loved the hunting and fishing so much
that I knew we'd never leave. Pretty soon it began to grow on me. We live near
Glennallen. Mark is a fishing guide and has an airplane now." She pokes the
fire with a stick, then turns over the hamburgers. Grease drips down from the
hot meat onto the fire.
"We're up here visiting the kids," Ed adds
listening to our conversation. "We come up a couple times a year pulling
this here camper." He motions to the huge 5th wheel behind him.
"My wife and I are retired, we get to do that kind of thing whenever we
please." He looks in the direction of Sally and smiles. |
