Driving Straight Through

Dad made a break for it. He rigged the Chrysler Caravan with oxygen cylinders, pocketed his heart and diabetes medicines and set out in mid-March, alone, age 77, on a 3,251-mile journey from his home in Anchorage to visit his mother in Minnesota, which is why my brother and I watched the NCAA basketball championship at a bar on the Yukon River.

My mother had urged him to fly to Minnesota, not drive. The highway to the continental United States is grueling. He had traveled it 50 times or more, first as a strapping 22-year-old former all-Minnesota football player and World War II medic, then as the father of four who built our family’s marina with his bare hands while also working a full-time job.

Lately, his health slipping, he conceded that he could no longer risk the journey. Yet as spring ice melted from the blacktop, he couldn’t resist one more go. The stubborn son of a German sharecropper pushed off, Thor Heyerdahl in a metallic green van.

He didn’t need a map, not for a highway he had driven since 1948. He was just out of the Navy then after serving his last year in China. He had seen “too much” there, wanted away from civilization for a while, wanted a fresh start. Joined by two friends, he climbed into a green 1946 Dodge coupe and left Minnesota for Alaska--a 4,000-mile adventure the heart of which was a 1,600-mile run through Canada and Alaska known as the Alcan Highway.

Built in a frantic eight months in 1942, the Alaska-Canada highway was to help the U.S. military defend against possible invasion of the north by Japan. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers trailblazers on foot and horses and lashed-log rafts stayed just ahead of tiny bulldozers chewing through forest and bog to lay a roadbed no wider than two city buses, with a gravel surface as rough as a bareback ride on a knock-kneed moose. It was the last great route in the opening of the West and is still the only road to Alaska.

Dad’s 1948 trip from Minnesota took a week, and flattened more tires than he could remember. Lungs, eyes, windshields--all faltered as he jounced along in a dust cloud at 25 mph to 40 mph. He drove for hours without seeing another car. He rolled past moose, wolves and caribou, stopping on mountain ridges to take in clear-to-Pluto views as the gray-brown dust settled quietly on the road behind.

To say the highway went “through” the Canadian Rockies would be a lie. It tickled them, churning up and down mountains or box-the-compass around them. You felt the land as much as saw it, every stone and pit carried up from the tires through the springs to the seat to your rump. In winter, snow made the road smoother and the peril greater. With little traffic and few snowplows, you could slide down an embankment and die of exposure. People did.

Approaching the old gold rush town of Whitehorse, Dad crossed the Yukon River for the first time. The fast, wicked water fascinated him. In the north, he was learning, nature did not need protection from man so much as man needed protection from nature. It was a lesson he tested many times during the next 55 years--and did so again in March.

He told Mom he would drive straight through to Minnesota, pulling over to sleep in his seat whenever he grew drowsy. The Great Depression farm boy never could bring himself to pay for a place to lay his head for six hours. He made Teslin, Yukon Territory, in 25 hours. Another 24 put him at Dawson Creek, British Columbia. Half way.

My mother never fully shared my father’s passion for the road. She first traveled to Alaska by ship from Seattle in 1948. Her parents had taken jobs near Anchorage with the Corps of Engineers, where my father had found work. Her parents introduced them and they married June 15, 1949. Rather than honeymoon over the Alcan, they left for Minnesota aboard a twin-propeller DC-3 scheduled for 17 stops, seated on chrome and vinyl kitchen chairs bolted to the cabin floor, alongside a dogsled team.

After that, flying was never Dad’s first choice. He drove, everywhere, and always the highway. For Christmas 1951, eager to show their first child to relatives, Mom and Dad filled the back seat of a 1949 Dodge sedan with survival gear and set out. “Looking back, that wasn’t very smart,” he said as we played a home movie of the trip at their 50th wedding anniversary. “I had no business taking them out in those temperatures.”

The grainy 8mm film shows their dark gray Dodge on a white roadway near Kluane Lake in the Yukon. Clouds rise from the exhaust. Inside, my mother cradles my 9-month-old brother. The windshield is masked by frost, except for a scraped-off section about the size of an accident report.

It was 64 degrees below zero. They covered their legs with blankets. At 72 below, he pushed the brake pedal to the floor. The brake lines had burst. Dad downshifted to slow the car and Mom looked for help in the “Milepost,” a survival guide to the highway listing the exact location of its every roadhouse and garage. They drove the next 114 miles in second gear before finding repairs.

For decades after that, Dad often drove the highway alone. It was the link between his families. Mom would stay in Alaska with their two sons and two daughters, Dad would visit his parents and nine siblings in Minnesota. His trips were long and quiet, with sparse traffic and even less radio.

My brother and I never understood Dad’s bond with a road he could avoid by spending five hours on an airliner. We never drove its length, although we did travel 180 miles of it with him in 1968. In the gauzy purple dusk of a November afternoon, on a rise above the Gakona River, we shot a moose to help feed the family. Cured for a week with vinegar water, it would taste almost like beef. We hauled the carcass back to our eight-man tent and soon heard wolves howling nearby. We lit a fire in the snow and 10-below blackness to keep them away while Dad drove to Paxson’s Roadhouse to buy a banana cream pie to celebrate the kill.

On a Thanksgiving weekend night eight years later, we drove with him 140 miles to Lake Louise. At 50-something below, under Northern Lights waving like marsh grass, we sped in snowmobiles across 16 miles of frozen lakes, past two herds of caribou, to a cabin for three days of ice fishing. We brought champagne and beefsteaks. The family business was thriving so Dad had quit his other job. He had just one child still in college. No more moose meat.

A quarter-century later, unshaven and unsteady, 93 hours after leaving Anchorage, Dad rolled up to the house he and three brothers built for their parents in Minnesota. “He looked like a hobo when he got here,” said his mother, 97. He was soon hospitalized for five days and released under orders to recuperate for a week more, then fly home. Someone needed to drive the van back to Alaska, so my brother and I agreed to fly to Minnesota. We finally would travel the road.

We meet at my grandmother’s house with plans to leave at 6 the next morning. Dad urges caution on ice, suggests we push straight through--one driving, one sleeping--tells us to go slow enough to ensure we can stop in the distance of our headlights, warns against passing cars at night and reminds us yet again how to spot moose on the road after dark by watching for the green twinkle from headlights in their eyes.

We look at a map and find Anchorage. Smack me with a halibut. Greenland is closer.

Next morning, he is up at 5 to see us off, his tiny oxygen hose trailing behind him. He suggests we detour around Edmonton. “You don’t want to get into that traffic.”

Cruise control at 78 mph, we rocket through North Dakota on Interstate 94, veer up to the Canadian border and enter Regina, Saskatchewan, in a snowstorm. We rent a room, watch a NCAA semifinal game over salads at a Boston Pizza and sleep for seven hours.

Next morning, we grab a latte and set the cruise control to 75. When not driving, my brother, an Alaska state parks official, munches dried fruit, adjusts the passenger temperature control, slips off his shoes and puts his feet on the dash. The car phone rings.

“You stop last night?” my father asks.

“Regina.”

Pause. “When you start this morning?”

“Got out about 6.”

“You must be coming into Saskatoon.”

“Just went through it.”

By sundown we’re in Dawson Creek--Mile Zero, the start of the Alcan. We think we need a “Milepost” as a safety net, so we stop at a shiny-floored Safeway. The clerks have never heard of the guidebook, nor can we find one at a nearby convenience store or two gas stations. We stay at a Best Western, with cable, and open a window because the room is too hot.

The next day we’re in the Rockies. Still no “Milepost.” The road is a bounce livelier, but paved. To our surprise, we are riding a dozen feet above the forest floor on an interstate-like roadbed cut through notches blasted into mountains and over gullies filled with the displaced earth. The highway mile signs are wrong. They are set to the original route and our odometer shows this high-speed replacement, built slowly over the decades, is 11% shorter.

We see the ghost of the original highway all around us, mile after mile, poplars pushing through its stubborn surface. It winds into the forest and drops down to a narrow bridge a quarter-mile away, then angles uphill and back to cross under our road and dive down and away again, talking to us.

It was the route Dad had taken in 1948, the farm boy who had worked with pitchforks behind horses. Under his raggedy bouncing tires was something built by calloused hands and simple machines, by engineers who followed what the land gave them, who climbed trees to mark the way when compasses failed, and drowned when they fell through river ice.

The phone rings.

“Where are you?”

“Coming to the Yukon.”

“You’re 10 miles from Whitehorse.”

Minutes later, we’re at a brass rail bar in Whitehorse to watch the NCAA championship via satellite.

The next morning, we rip along at 70 mph, until we come to Kluane Lake. The mountains roar straight out of the water here. There is no room for a new roadbed so we are returned to the original, and the rough is rising to our rumps. We slow to 45 mph, then 35, then slower around unbanked corners. We spot deer and the remains of a moose that wandered onto the highway at the wrong time. Trees hang over us. A thin layer of topsoil is creeping downslope and over the exposed alluvium, slowly healing the scars of 60 years ago. Two centuries more and the soil would reach the road.

The land flattens and a flagman stops us. Ahead are earthmovers with tires as big as the whole of a 1946 Dodge. We’re soon on fresh pavement and make Anchorage before sunset, 84 hours after we started.

Dad flies home the next day and we drive to the home he and Mom share on the highest road in the Chugach Mountains overlooking Anchorage.

“How was the trip?” he asks.

“That’s some road, Dad.”