Looking for Alaska (48 page)

Back on the road, I was still thinking about emergencies. If something happened, what would we do? If Julianne or Rita was injured, how would we reach out for help? The only way was the satellite phone Eric had said they had. Even then, if there were a blizzard or windstorm or some other weather interference, no rescue plane would be able to land on the frozen lake. State troopers were far away. What if someone cut himself or herself with a chain saw, was bitten by one of the sled dogs, fell through the ice, broke a leg in a snow-machine accident? What if Eric and his family had evil plans for us? I was angry at myself for even thinking it, yet I couldn't stop the what-ifs running through my mind. There were no pay phones, no food except what they had, only their house for shelter, and guaranteed temperatures of ten, twenty, thirty to forty below zero. We would be as isolated as any of us had ever been, dependent—totally—on a family, the head of which I'd met only twice.

We dropped out of the hills and entered the cold-holding valley that is home to Fairbanks. Eric and his family had a small log cabin in town for when Eric comes in from the wild to do vet work in Fairbanks and in the surrounding towns, especially for mushers. The trip into town is at least a four-day trip for them, and they'd found they needed a place to stay other than a motel. So they had rebuilt the small log house to suit their needs.

We found a room for the night and I called Eric at the cabin. Some young female answered, his teenage daughter. I tried to joke a bit with her, but she responded with silence, answered my questions in one or two words. Eric was out shopping with Vicky, she said; she would tell him we had called. I wondered if she even knew we were coming to stay with them. I hung up, wondering about her tone of voice, if she was just shy. Her response definitely did not alleviate my concerns, concerns that I had not mentioned to Rita. Eric seemed too nice, yet too guarded; his daughter seemed anxious. I made myself sick that night thinking about all the bad things that could befall us. And I'd hung up without giving Eric's daughter, Elizabeth, our phone number at the motel. I called back and gave her the number; all she said was “Oh.”

Eric called back a few hours later. He said that he and Vicky and this musher friend had been to Sam's Club buying dog food and supplies. He gave me directions to their place, said to meet them at about 8
A.M
., then we'd drive the 250 miles to Coldfoot and spend the night there. He mentioned something about spaying someone's dogs that evening.

In the morning it was dry, windless, and the snow crunched under our feet. An ambulance went by us on the street; I'm not sure why, but it's difficult for me to reconcile extremely cold weather with blood, high emotion, and passion-motivated injuries. In cold weather all things seem frozen, stiff, slowed down, hibernating, even the terrible things people do to each other.

We drove to Eric and Vicky's little cabin, only a half mile from where we'd spent the night. Julianne, Rita, and I had each taken long, hot showers; we were quite sure there would be no running water, much less hot water, out at their homestead. I was having a problem imagining where any water would come from out there in the Brooks Range where it was normally twenty-five to thirty below zero, and quite a bit colder at times. I doubted they had a well—that took electricity. The ice on the lake would have to be a couple feet thick. How could you get through it, and if you did, would it instantly freeze over again?

As we pulled into their street, I saw a small log home with a truck parked out front. How did that thing even run? I thought. In the back were five or six sled dogs, young and thin. A dark-haired, slender guy was leaning into the back of the pickup, lifting one of the stiff-legged huskies out. A young woman held on to the collar of this dog and another, crouching on the below-zero ground. Both of them wore double flannel shirts and jeans; the guy's outer flannel shirt appeared to have been attacked by a chain saw that spewed oil. They either lived out in the bush and hadn't washed their hair in a few weeks or were going for the Jamaican wanna-be look.

Now I remembered that Eric had mentioned to me that a friend of his, a young musher who'd just run the Yukon Quest, was loaning them some of his dogs. Eric would doctor them, fatten them up, and his kids could use them to learn mushing. Eric had said last night they were going to send the dogs on a truck that hauled freight to Prudhoe Bay. The trucker would drop the dogs in Coldfoot.

I pulled in behind them and got out. The guy, whose eyes flashed, “I'm an Alaskan wild man and that's my gig,” walked up and held out his hand. I'm not sensitive to dirt, I live on a cattle farm, but I wondered if I'd ever seen such a dirty hand. A germ fanatic would have driven back to Seward right then. His hand looked as if he used it to shovel ash from his woodstove; in fact, the best smell emanating from him was wood smoke. He had dog hair all over his clothes; maybe he had had a six-dog night last night. Who knows if he and the girl live out in the bush—they may have slept in the truck using the dogs as living blankets.

“My name's Hugh, you must be Peter.”

“Yes, I am. This is my wife, Rita, and out daughter Julianne.” I felt guilty that I was so repulsed.

Rita and Julianne are both very clean; you won't see dirt on them for long. Julianne even carries a plastic bottle of waterless antibacterial hand soap. Julianne went over, diplomatically avoiding his hand, and petted the dog he was holding. I could tell she was thinking, “What is Dad getting us into?” I avoided Rita's eyes.

“Did Eric tell you what happened?” Hugh asked. He was a slight, supercharged guy, full of energy.

“No,” I answered, not being able to read him well enough to determine if “what happened” was a good thing or bad.

“Well, the freight truck won't haul the dogs, only the dog food. We will have to fit the dogs in the vehicles somehow. Plus, I'm going with you to mush the dogs the sixty miles from Coldfoot, where we'll leave the cars to head to their place.”

Hugh walked over and opened the door to our four-wheel-drive Explorer and looked inside. We had brought enough equipment, survival gear, cameras, you name it, to fill the entire back.

“You think we could fit a couple of my dogs in with you?”

Right then the side door to the house opened and a young, blond teenage girl walked out. Even she wore just a light coat. She walked toward us, although she looked away, down the street, anywhere but at us. This must be Eric's daughter, Elizabeth, who was twelve.

Hugh spoke again. “I think Elizabeth is riding with you also.”

I looked around to see what kind of vehicle Eric owned. Surely, being a vet and making this brutal round-trip from Coldfoot to Fairbanks all the time and traveling around this part of Alaska to do his clinics, he had an outfitted four-wheel drive or a Suburban or something large. Maybe they could fit all Hugh's dogs in with them if we didn't have any room. They would have to have something supertough, even if it was really used; all metal, big enough to sleep in if you ran off the road in winter when someone might not come by all night. But in the driveway sat a tiny red Dodge Neon. I wouldn't drive that thing around Anchorage. I'd be afraid taking it on a snow, ice, and rock-and-gravel road like the Haul Road, which would rattle and shake it to death. Almost every animal that you might hit would seem bigger than it. Surely this wasn't all they had. Eric was probably out doing some last-minute shopping. Being disorganized and living where they lived would be life-threatening. You can't run out from the wilderness and buy that flour you forgot or ran out of. It might take a week to get out and back.

The teenage girl walked to within thirty feet of all of us and stopped. When I looked at her, she looked down at the ground as if she'd never looked into a stranger's eyes before. Then the door opened again and out walked Eric and a slim, brown-haired woman. She looked put together, wearing warm snow pants and matching coat and wool hat. She walked slightly behind Eric as if he were a shield.

“Hi,” he said, walking toward us. Eric seemed to be an up person, always optimistic, energetic, smart, and a bit scatterbrained.

I introduced him to Rita and Julianne. He introduced us to Vicky, his wife, and Elizabeth, his daughter, who still stood off in her own sphere.

“Do you guys have any extra room in your car for a dog or two?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Hugh told us about having to transport them.”

“I guess I should have checked the freight company a few days ago,” Eric said.

I opened the back of the Explorer and some snowshoes, felt-lined boots, and other things fell out, like a gear avalanche.

“My dogs have never ridden in a closed-up car very far. They may get sick on the way,” Hugh said.

“I'll give them a shot, tranquilize them, that'll be better,” Eric offered.

I unpacked all our stuff, laid it on the ground, and, surprise, fit a dog cage in the back. Eric picked out two of the smallest dogs, tranquilized them, and put them in it. The other four would ride with them, in the Dodge Neon, with Hugh. Elizabeth would ride with us.

They had almost no luggage, just a few small bags. Although Hugh was from Chicago, he looked as if he'd lived all his life two hundred miles from anything or anyone, as if he could burrow down into a huskies' den and live underground with them. Yet Hugh was engaging, and he had a plan. He wanted to be a big-time musher, and knowing Eric, a vet, could be a large assist, because vet bills can mount fast. Hugh had angles and was always working on selling them. He was a bush-dwelling Alaskan player. He did have a newsletter and I think he said he even had a Web site. He pulled a newsletter out of his pocket and gave it to me to read. It emphasized the romance of the wilderness, dog mushing, and the people who sponsored him. He said he was always looking for sponsors.

Eric would drive the Dodge Neon; Vicky would sit in the front seat, with one dog on her lap. Hugh would sit in back with the three largest dogs draped all over him. What little luggage they had could be crammed in any available space. I still could not believe they'd be driving a Dodge Neon up the Haul Road, built in the 1970s when the Alaska Pipeline was constructed.

Eric read my perplexed, concerned looks well. Right before giving me last-minute instructions to follow him, that we'd stop at the last truck stop to fuel up and use the bathroom, he tried to calm the deep doubt freezing my face:

“You know, we had an almost new Suburban but we loaned it to these two German students, these attractive young women we ran into at the truck stop at Coldfoot. They told us they needed to get to Fairbanks fast. Turns out they lied, went north the few hundred miles to the North Slope and the Arctic Ocean. They about trashed the thing, then totaled it rushing back to Fairbanks to catch their plane.

“I guess we should have known better. They almost got killed, rolled the thing down a steep embankment. They just left it there and hitched in to the airport.” Eric laughed his slightly-out-of-control, just-a-bit-hysterical laugh, like “Yeah, I can't believe we got into that one.” Turns out the women split the country and the scene of the accident, and there were all kinds of problems with the insurance coverage, so the Dodge Neon would have to do.

We drove up into some hills on the way out of Fairbanks. Some of the finest homes in the area were in these hills, where it could be twenty degrees warmer in winter, since “heat” rises and the difference between minus twenty and zero degrees is great. After a few miles, on a hilltop, there was the truck stop. Once we left it behind, there would be basically nothing all the way to Coldfoot, so it was important to fill the gas tank until it overflowed. Eric had told me this twice.

After we gassed up, we all got something to eat; this was the last hot food and coffee for a long, long time. I still wondered if my instincts about the charismatic Eric and his family were correct. We could still turn around, make some excuse. My darkest doubts could build him into a Charles Manson–type leader, with Vicky and Hugh his followers. Elizabeth looked nothing like him; she must look like her mother. I tried to speak with her, joke around, to bring out whatever was behind her discomfort. Nothing came out to play. Vicky was quiet, yet assured. Hugh was the faithful attack-dog type; he would obey blindly and do whatever Eric wished. Peter, shut off that imagination.

“Eric,” I asked over my second coffee refill, “who's taking care of your sons?” There were three of them out at the cabin by themselves now, their eighteen-year-old, fifteen-year-old, and nine-year-old.

“We have a young man who lives with us. He was kind of a street person in Fairbanks when I met him, but he's from a real good family back East. He's meeting us in Coldfoot, if we get there when we're supposed to. He's taking a break; it's tough staying out at the cabin and being in charge.” Eric laughed.

The young man, Tyler, would snow-machine to Coldfoot and hitch a ride with truckers headed to Fairbanks from Prudhoe Bay and be gone while we were there.

“How do the boys get along by themselves like that in the wilderness? Don't you worry about them?” Rita wondered.

I was surprised Rita asked this pointed of a question. She doesn't ask people personal questions even when they're best friends. She is a listener, a feeler. Was this an indication of her level of concern? Normally she is fearless.

“Oh, they do great,” Eric answered quickly.

“Remember that time you had to rush back because Pete accidentally cut Mike with his knife, really deep into his leg?” Vicky asked.

“Yes. I had to charter a plane in and sew Mike up,” Eric said, remembering. “I had to sew up the muscle first, then the skin. It was a bad wound. It took several stitches. Pete's always sharpening this big knife of his. I guess Mike walked into it somehow.”

Everyone climbed into the Neon after they rearranged the sedated dogs. Ours seemed more sedated than theirs. I couldn't even hear ours breathing. They pulled to the edge of the parking lot and their brake lights went on while they waited for us. If we followed them, we'd be heading into a frozen, lonesome, huge land where we would have no choice but to rely on them.