This story’s about a trip. It’s a strange word. Trip. As a noun, it means a journey or excursion, going somewhere and returning, especially for pleasure, or to stumble or fall. It’s also the word used frequently to describe the experience following consumption of psychedelic substances. In all its meanings, there’s a throughline. Of being upended. Going into a situation with the best intentions, then willingly or unwillingly having your legs cut out from under you.
It’s also, kind of, about Chris McCandless. Ever read Into the Wild? It sold millions of copies in the U.S. alone since its release, spent 119 weeks on the bestsellers list, has been translated into 31 languages and is considered by some to be one of the best non-fiction books of all time. So, if you answered “yes,” you aren’t alone.
But I haven’t.
I haven’t read the book. And this doesn’t make me special. Millions of people haven’t. Why it’s interesting, at all, is because of how much McCandless’s ghost is a presence in my life, just how close his story mirrors my own.
*
Born February 12, 1968, Christopher Johnson McCandless grew up in an affluent household in Virginia, graduated from Emory University in 1990, then immediately cut ties with his family. He began traveling the country, first out West, then after ditching his vehicle, he hitchhiked to Alaska in April of 1992. There he walked into the Wilderness with ten pounds of rice, a rifle, ammunition, an edible plants guidebook, a camera, and some books. Originally, he planned to hike all the way to the coast, a distance of roughly 400 miles, but decided after about 20 that the ground was too wet and shitty for that. He settled into Fairbanks City Transit System Bus 142, which had been abandoned since the 1970’s. Its insides had been gutted and replaced with a couple beds and a wood burning stove.
In less than four months he was dead.
*
I was born February 13, 1986. My family wasn’t affluent, nevertheless I graduated from East Central University in Oklahoma in 2008. Two months later, I set out to explore the West before ditching my own vehicle and hitchhiking to Alaska. I started the trip in February with $249, finally arriving in Denali, Alaska, in mid-May. I hadn’t cut ties with my family, but I also didn’t have a cell phone.
In a state larger than two Texas’s, I landed 12 miles from where McCandless started his last trip. I stayed four months before leaving the state. From then on, I’d return every summer, eventually becoming a year-round resident in 2018, before finally moving away in 2022.
*
I became a backpacking guide in Denali in 2014 and, that summer, led a Belgian film crew to the “Magic Bus,” which is the colloquial name for Bus 142. Even though I myself had never attempted the forty-mile trek, if the Belgians asked, I misdirected them with my expertise.
The danger—aside from bears, dementia, hypothermia, etc.—is rivers. Mainly, how to cross them. If you are going to the bus, you have to contend with two. Or four, if returning the same way and adhering to the “never cross the same river twice” motif. “Savage River,” the tamer of two (despite the name) and “The Teklanika,” or “The Tek.” The Tek in particular boasts a geysering body count thanks to McCandless’s international acclaim. Both are glacially fed and most dangerous following snowmelt (early summer) or heavy rain.
Denali Park received record rain before our scheduled date in July. But the Belgians, adhering to a strict, sponsor-enforced calendar, could not rearrange or postpone the outing. At 5 a.m., we guides got instructions from our boss. We were to, by all means necessary, cross both rivers on foot, thereby illustrating where others had erred (obviously ignorance) proving had they not been so very, very dumb, they could have even crossed carrying brick-like film equipment.
We wolfed down breakfast and chased it with a coffee laxative. Then doled out provisions and awaited the crew.
*
In September of 2009, directly on the heels of my first season in The Great North, a fellow Denali-ite and I were on the Big Island, on Ali’i Drive, hunting solace for heat-tenderness in one of the many taverns adorning the strip.
Ukulele notes filled the air. Local Hawaiians advertised aloha in coconut shirts and ultra-white smiles while strumming their dwarfed instruments. Perched at the bar, muffling the music by many decibels was a blonde-haired reptile with an anchor tattoo. A seasonal-Alaskan fisherman, also just ending his summer-stint. The overall aura had me desperately hoping he wouldn’t see us. He immediately did and wanted to talk.
Alaska being the centerpiece of our conversation, the only piece, quite honestly, of his perceived, flimsy connection to us, he kept us talking for hours while also managing to get us incoherently inebriated. He continually made prey of appetizer and umbrella’ed drink alike with a snapping, violent neck motion. A one-hundred-dollar bill slapped the bar before I blacked out.
My friend and I awoke before 6 a.m., still too drunk to see. We waddled to the bus stop to start our Hawaiian Adventure.
*
Treating the crew to laxatives, we began packing.
In a half-sleep, I squinted at the label on my pack: GO-LITE. Reading it over and over, I thought maybe through sheer force of will, I could alter the physics of my bag’s contents. Meanwhile, more and more items whizzed my way. In anticipation, my shoulder muscles began to hum.
Two more packs—one medium, one small—still needed to get assigned. The smaller of the two weighed equal to my 35-pound pack. The medium one was heavier. Dumbbells? A life-sized McCandless doll? I strapped them haphazardly to my pack like dead bodies. When I stood, it toppled me helplessly backward.
Our boss hired an ATV excursion company to ferry us across the first river crossing. They were to pick us up at the same place, but on the opposite side, the following day. We had 48-hours to make 40 miles. And had to allot for shooting. We should expect this ride to be our only luxury.
*
Once in Denali, I became aware of Chris instantly. It wasn’t hard. The bus sat not far from where I lived. Inside virtually every outhouse a curling copy of Into the Wild was an arm’s length away from the cozy Styrofoam seat. Though I was never interested in natural survival stories, which is what I thought it was, I became fascinated, and am still befuddled today, by why his story is so influential.
What maybe gets close answering that mystery, is the struggle to fit into society inherent in his story. How “finding oneself,” often conflicts with being an active member of society. And leaving an identity burning on the floor as you run into the unknown is sometimes the only option.
*
The ATV crew was killing time when we arrived, eating wood and looking at Playboy’s. Once they fitted us with crash test helmets we boarded the Argos. An Argo is an all-terrain, amphibious, tank-thing.
Google it.
My driver, ignoring the road entirely, strained harder and harder to show me pictures of trout he had caught the previous weekend while I stayed airborne in the backseat. Above the roar of the motor, I barely made out that the countless, two-feet-deep streams we were driving through rarely existed under normal circumstances. They were a product of recent storms. I also caught something like river crossing on foot would be an absolute death wish.
It was also July when Chris, understanding his situation was perhaps dire, attempted to return to civilization. But he was unable to cross The Tek.
Author Jon Krakauer speculates snowmelt had punched levels up to unmanageable depths. But a fact checker later refuted this claim while looking at historic weather models. My own experience suggests seasonal rains were the culprit, though I’m not purporting that to be an absolute truth.
*
The ATV’s joyously flattened century-old trees, crashing and shredding them into the tundra. Later, when asked, the Belgians admitted they hadn’t noticed and busily lit more cigarettes. Aside from smoking, they seemed to share little in common. But they were obviously close, having worked together for years.
*
One thing universal about every place I’ve ever traveled is, if you want to know what locals think about outsiders, you don’t have to ask. In Denali, the consensus about Chris is he was ignorant and ill-prepared. It was before this term was in vogue, but today they’d label him a “trust-fund kid.” To grizzled Alaskans, he was no different from the Sprinter Van-driving cult that arrives each year with faces and dogs barely distinguishable from those that arrived the previous year, hoping to walk McCandless’s footsteps. The whole thing, in their eyes, equates to ignorance perpetuating ignorance. An endless string of search and rescues they pay for.
While I do enjoy imagining Chris holding an iPhone saying, “Okay fam, check these mega plant roots I’m going to boil on my WhisperLite, and like, vibe on some sick Nature,” I can’t say I agree with how locals have him pegged. Dude survived for months on next-to-nothing. How many influencers today could pull that off? How many 20-somethings with solar panels on their vehicle’s roof do you think gave their $24,500 college fund to Oxfam, an NGO fighting to alleviate global poverty?
*
We reached the Savage and began circling its bank like sharks. The drivers weighed the risk of continuing. Then their leader—demarcated by a large handgun strapped to his belt—plunged in. We followed suit. Floating and scraping bottom and causing arrhythmia in a handful of fish.
Safely returned to the standing position, bones broken and necks miraculously whiplashed, we looked to our gear patiently awaiting us on the ground at our feet. The team sliced back through the water, yipping and hollering until out of earshot, beer cans flying from windows like popcorn.
We donned our packs.
*
Stampede Trail (of misnomer, Stampede “Road”) leaves the George Parks Highway a handful of miles north of the little town of Healy. It flanks west, hugging Denali National Park’s north boundary. After 20 miles it ends at a small clearing where The Magic Bus sits.
The Parks Highway is one of only two roads connecting Alaska’s two main cities, Anchorage and Fairbanks. This is Middle of Nowhere land. Something as banal as a trip for groceries takes four hours. Simply walking outside could get you mauled by a bear. This is no place for novices.
Stampede is a haven for hunters. The Alaska Range, one of the state's major mountain ranges, and the one that houses North America’s tallest peak, lies directly south. Wildlife gets funneled through a handful of predictable passes in the range. While awaiting these tried-and-true migrations, hunters pop incredible boners imagining their prey having just crossed an imaginary border, where, minutes before, they wouldn’t have been able to shoot them. The hint of illegality supposedly makes the meat taste better.
If you’re patient for autumn, when most of the hunts take place, nighttime temperatures will have already started to seize up the rivers. You can easily hike or drive your vehicle and weapons all the way out, instead of risking life and limb like we were right in the middle of fucking summer.
*
Close to midnight in July of 2019, Piotr Markielau of Belarus, called the Alaskan State Troopers. The 24-year-old hiker told them his wife, Veramika Maikamava, also 24, had drowned trying to cross the Teklanika River. She’d lost her footing. The water was cold. Its levels up from recent rainfall. Before the call, Piotr dragged her body from the water. They were married less than a month.
I remember this. I also remember, in the months after, Piotr circulated a petition calling for a bridge to be built, to spare future families the same tragedy. “Fuck a bridge, yank the damn bus out,” was the locals’ response.
Is one more right than the other? Is the answer to make Wilderness safer? To grind off its edges? What exactly is lost if that’s done?
*
The blue yawned. Mosquitoes big as tennis rackets birthed directly in front of us. We wore hazmat suits, which did little to nothing to stop the affront. We tried lightening the mood with customary “State Bird” jokes, but the Belgians somehow didn’t find them funny.
In Denali, trails are few, so under the right conditions, this would have been a cakewalk. Instead, we kept hitting water every 40 yards or less. Tannin in color, knee-high in depth. Once you entered, it was like ice skating on shit. The only reprieve was knowing a few hundred-thousand mosquitoes died each time your legs went in.
At intervals, the crew ‘set up’ a scene, then continued as if nothing weird or staged had happened. I kept cursing to a minimum during these times, knowing Belgians watching at home would have a strong hold of the English language.
Everything went smoothly, until The Tek.
There, the trail dove into the water, and vanished. If you really squinted, you saw it resurface way, way, way, on the other side. The speed and turbulence of the silt-thick water chugging past was truly sickening.
Yelling over the noise, our head-guide explained, most problems, deadly ones, happened here. People want so badly to stick to a trail that instead of taking time to scout different directions and eventually taking the most prudent route, they just bomb it.
The river screamed. Rocks were getting murdered in its depths. The guide continued with his on-camera spiel. I chewed on sausage and nibbled cheese, while deftly dodging the camera. Horrors were described—lost footing, a downriver canyon housing class-IV and -V, chew-your-ass rapids.
As the crew dizzied about, searching the perfect light and angle to document the nightmare, I entertained the real possibility of dying within the next half-hour.
*
In California in 2013, I was hitchhiking out of Redding. Anyone who’s visited understands the urgency of leaving. Recently broken-up with, I was running as fast as I could from Portland.
Tears drenched a handkerchief around my head, keeping me cool while I practiced different stances to look less like a serial killer. A Ford Ranger eventually slowed, the driver and Jack Russell Terrier craning their necks before doubling-back.
“You look harmless! Get in!”
He said I could ride to where he and his family were camping. And that if I liked, and didn’t turn out to be a murderer or anything, wink, I could get a wife-cooked breakfast.
He acted like he had definitely been huffing gasoline. Maybe. Learning his birthplace was Oklahoma, the same as my own, I knew that’s exactly what it was. At least, I hoped.
The conversation bounced between Christianity, ghosts, grandfathers, and outer space. He lifted his sleeve to show me a cross tattoo, said, “Yep, God is great,” then asked if I’d grab a bottle of tequila under the seat.
I nodded like it was a totally normal and understandable sentence, then we passed the bottle back and forth a few times, and before long, we were out of that dreadful city, pulling up to a riverside campground.
His wife looked terrified. Two kids, early-teens, sat awkwardly at a nearby bench, also staring like I was a monster instead of a sad, sad, man-boy. After a beat, I realized what all the looks were about. Next to the kids stood an impressive pile of marijuana, along with various glass paraphernalia meant to turn it into consumable smoke. The man looked at his wife, winked, and said this guy can be trusted.
I was feasting on bacon and eggs. Taking a mighty rip off the bong. I asked the kids where they had gotten such a huge quantity of marijuana. One of them said, “From the fucking head shop.” After that, I kept the conversation light but kept picking at my food. I was starving! I hadn’t eaten since being dumped.
As late-morning turned to afternoon, each adult took turns struggling to arrest the kids’ attention from their cell phones. But it seemed impossible. Until Alaska got brought up, then their eyes glazed over—it might have been the pot, which was top-notch—but I think the word had them drunk.
After I blew their minds with stories of bears and whale meat soup, all of us except the wife played football and swam.
But after a bit, it was time to go. I was looking for something.
*
We looked and looked, eventually finding a less-murderous part of the river. The guides gave our safety talk, our safe-river-crossing-etiquette speech.
The daredevil, the man all others were there to film, pumped himself up. He began jumping, and at the peak of each jump, sort of popped his arms at the elbow while keeping really straight from fingertips to shoulder. Then he chain-smoked cigarettes.
The other lesser-sherpa and I jockeyed downstream to hopefully catch them with a rope bag if/when they went under. The main guide made several last-minute adjustments before trusting the crew with the crossing.
I did my best to appreciate all that was around me. To the south were foothills leading to the Alaskan Range. Over those ridges, they were still inventing new kinds of men.
The daredevil, relieved of his pack and sporting a truly desperate face, muscled his way from gravel-island to gravel-island, while the crew filmed from the bank. Once he was across, they dropped their gear and nervously followed suit.
As soon as they crawled on the other shore, the guides crossed and re-crossed the river five times, shuttling thousands of pounds of water-wimpy film equipment across the raging Teklanika.
Imagine. You have a lopsided pack weighing over half your body weight. And while the river roils, constantly punching your waistline in an attempt to throw you off balance, the bag behaves like an asshole teenager trying to drown you. So, in order to be “safe” you must unbuckle your waist and chest straps, the things saving you from spinal collapse, allowing the teenager solely to be held by your shoulders. So that when you fall, you aren’t trapped underwater by the weight of your waterlogged pack, helplessly drowning, and instead, you deftly toss the pack off your shoulders and swim off like a dolphin.
*
Once we were done, they looked at their watches and said we really need to speed things up if they were going to get all the filming done.
The trail from here is a monotonous slog. The other lesser-guide and I created space from the rest of the group after eyeballing a wordless “Sorry” toward the main guide.
We were hoping to avoid on-screen-cameos and also to achieve distance while our bodies still obeyed instruction. To keep myself busy, I began counting moose scat between standing pools. And the mosquitoes never ceased to delight.
Three miles from the bus, there is a plateau. After that, the trail gives way, descending for the final stretch. There are practically no other spots along the entirety of the route with these kinds of breathtaking views and consistently flat ground.
We had secret meetings before the crew arrived this morning, discussing the prospect of pitching camp at this location if things were going slow or anyone was having trouble. The other guide and I cleared limbs and rocks, striving for five-star appeal. Once finished, there was time to eat heavier items weighing down my pack. My sausage-turd was a goner, along with a couple densely composed trail bars. Finished, we had time to tear our shirts and pour water on our heads for dramatic affect. Hearing footsteps, we quickly looked pitiful.
They walked up looking exhausted and pissed off. Barely shuffling their waterlogged feet, staring like zombies at the ground in front of them. They dropped their packs, kicked off their wretched boots, fired up a cigarette or twelve. It was while they were grabbing snacks of their own that we laid temptation on strong.
“What a spot! Look at those views! You know, we could drop our loads, relax, fix dinner . . . what do you say? Save the bus for in the morning?”
They went crazy.
“We want bus.”
“Yes.”
“It’s all we care.”
Our eyes drifted from their meager packs to ours. “We could go tonight.
We could do that. Yeah. I mean, if you guys want.”
They conferred amongst themselves in languages we couldn’t understand. The leader then approached, head bowed, “We understand, it would be much, much easier on you if we stay for the night. So, we will go to the bus.”
We convened in a huddle.
“That didn’t work.”
“Belgians are tough.”
“Thought we had em.”
A glaciated peak pierced the blue air to our south. A sharp cone of otherworldly white floating behind the green mountains of mortals in the foreground. Comfortable because the crew and their cameras were several yards away and I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get caught on film, I ventured, “Is that, Denali?”
“It’s Deception.”
You don’t say?
I adjusted my pack, taking a few more years off my life. Once again, we took the lead and the crew followed. Next stop, Magic Bus.
*
I received this email in 2011:
“Hello There. My name is ---- and I’m from Brazil. I’m planning a trip to Alaska in March, arriving there by March 4. I want to go to the Stampede Trail, to the bus (Into the Wild). I will probably arrive in Healy by March 8 or something. I’m doing the trail alone, so I would like some hints from you. March is winter yet in Alaska, this is more better or worse to make the trail? How many hours, approximately, do you think I would take to arrive in the bus from the beginning of the Stampede Trail? Do you have any other hint for me? Thank you, and sorry for so many questions.
Best Wishes, ----"
In 2021, I lived in a cabin with no running water. The entire first week of April never saw temperatures above -40F. I assume the Brazilian to be dead out there somewhere, bones gnawed clean by wolves, bears, and the like.
*
There’s a mindset well-documented by endurance athletes, known as Oblivion. Where, magically, your body stops resisting, and you’re capable of anything. It was in this state that we met our goal.
A bus, sitting alone on a forgotten strip of tundra. A hippie spaceship riddled with bullet holes then left for dead. Home of Krakauers and McCandlesses. Windows shattered, paint falling off. It reminds you of something . . .
Having been on the move for more than 14 hours, I wanted to collapse into stillness. But I also needed to appear calm and denizen for our paying guests. So, I scouted firewood, hoping the smoke might lure our comrades in.
There was just one problem. Tripping over large piles of toilet paper, I found not a single burnable anything in the woods surrounding camp.
The Sushana River, which by comparison to The Tek might better be delegated a “creek,” sits not 30 yards west of the bus. Here, I found sufficiently waterlogged wood and drug it to camp. After some brief pillow-talk the flames spread.
Soon we had, if not a raging white-man’s fire, at least smoke to scare away mosquitoes. I grabbed the famous rusty chair of McCandless’s self-portrait where it was propped against the bus. After the lesser-guide and I snapped a couple of requisite photos, I sat down, occasionally forced to move, if for nothing more than to keep the smoke alive.
*
The crew grumbled and plopped by the fire. Once aware that smoke might keep mosquitoes at bay, they became privy to wind patterns, chasing the ash and fumes. Never in my life have I witnessed men voluntarily eat smoke that way.
We erected tents. Cooked dinner and in other ways attended caloric needs. We washed dishes. Then, so as not to attract animals, hung everything scented out of the reach of bears. After that, we decorated the edge of the fire with shoes and socks to dry (minutely) overnight.
There was last-minute filming the crew needed to do as they could foresee possibly feeling tired in the morning.
I nibbled my dinner with tree bark as a spoon. The fireside conversation took all manner of twists and turns. Then, one particular subject got breached, and it always does.
Bears.
Our head guide started in on what is probably the best bear story to date. Once the crew picked their fucking chins off the ground, they decided it was too valuable a story not to get on camera. So, with smoke and the midnight-dusk as backdrop, he recounted his horrible tale, painting us lucid and distant with his words.
While the Belgians snored, we passed around a bottle of whiskey. It had what equated to a single shot for each person. Liquor from a plastic bottle never tasted so good. The head-guide quipped, “I don’t smoke cigarettes, but if I had one, I’d smoke it.”
We agreed and went to bed.
*
If I didn’t have to shit, I would have played dead in my tent all morning until the Belgians gave up and left. Instead, after finding a sturdy tree, I dug a hole at its base, dropped my pants, and immediately started smacking mosquitoes off my testicles. The swats were heard back at camp. Once finished, I shoveled dirt on the pile still steaming.
With a look of certain doom, the lesser-guide asked if I wanted to strike out. I said yes, but first, I needed to tell the crew they have to shit in a hole.
After what felt like a million miles, we surmounted three. We were back at the plateau. Everyone else was at the bus getting even more filming done.
I shoved my backpack on its side and used it like a pillow. After double-checking the vulnerable spots of my mosquito suit, I closed my eyes, trying to ascertain what the hell it is about these trips we eventually convince ourselves are fun?
*
My grandparents didn’t have electricity in their homes until they were 18. At this point, they had already been working full-time jobs for 14 years. Neither is alive today, but well into their twilight years, I encouraged each to speak of their youth. I’ll never forget how their eyes would bulge like watermelons when they’d remember the first time they ever heard a radio.
Glory days.
Back in my youth, watching television was the primary activity of nighttime, or if you were punished. Infinitely more interesting was eating worms all afternoon.
It was close to middle-school when I used a computer. We’d leave home-room for this thing called a “computer lab,” getting 30 minutes or so on desktops that likely weighed more than our fourth-grade bodies. Late into high school, the internet finally became something people had. But, not everybody.
Not anymore.
Americans consume internet more than water or even bacon. The heavily edited life we see on screens blurs, becoming our dreams. How life should be. Shit, better than life, and with a soundtrack. A movie. Based on a book. Based on a life.
Everyone grows up not just being, but yearning to be watched.
Influencers these days peddle one of two things: ways at being more attractive and desirable, or a life completely free of responsibility.
Youth.
Whether you’re fresh out of college or recently retired, your ass wishes it was on social media posting videos from the front seat of a Sprinter van.
Take Chris McCandless. This guy left a docile, modern, at-home life, to pursue a near Buddha-like, back-to-nature existence so tantalizing that Buddha himself would have ejaculated just thinking about it.
What is Youth if not a reverting? No wonder McCandless’s story is so widely praised. So emulated. The man went caveman-level backward.
Humankind as a species gave life the finger. Instead, we chose to participate in a race. The race is called “never getting old.” It’s left us forever crying out, drowning, to be someone else, somewhere else.
Maybe I’m wrong? Maybe evolution is actually a yearning turned mechanism? Maybe those teenagers near Redding who couldn’t tear their eyes away from their phones to appreciate the wonderment of California, but at the mention of Alaska, were set drooling, mirror life when it first crawled out of the primordial slime? Maybe meaning arose from the macro? Maybe, when we’re counting coupons, losing a lover, or taking a break from doing taxes, stopping just for a moment to stare deeply into the abyss, we’re actually dreaming of being fragments aboard a comet?
Or, distractions are killing us.
*
There was nothing to do. A cloud floated past. My comrade snored lightly. And I yearned to be in dreamless sleep. Swatting mosquitoes, but also keeping an ear cocked in case I needed to feign busy bodying, I fell asleep.
*
On our feet, heading downhill—harder on the knees, easier on the spirit.
Filming was done, so we were left to wander our own heads. With no camera to fear, I felt affinity for these Belgians. They had jock rash, looked tired, distressed, forlorn, complained of blisters and muscle melt. We became brothers.
“Hey.” I buddied-up to the sound guy. “How’s it going?”
“Shit,” he sympathized. “What the hell are we doing here?”
I patted him on the back, “That’s the spirit!”
“How bout you?” he asked.
“My pack feels heavier.”
“I put tons of stuff in there while you were sleeping.”
We reached the Tek, and what took two hours before, took thirty minutes, without breaks for disaster, casting, and safety-talks. It felt like cheating.
*
In June of 2020, I was still active on that dystopian Myspace, Facebook. Scrolling, I stopped on a video. It was taken from the Parks Highway just north of Healy. In it, a military helicopter passed over my friend’s car. Something large dangling from its belly, slowly spinning. “Oh, my god,” I said aloud.
It was the bus.
Fearing attempts at terrorism, for days authorities refused to disclose its new location. I was a Park Ranger by this time, and the Park’s phone blew up. Call after call. One of these callers left a voicemail. The voice was male, his tone, “bomb threat.” How dare you take away the bus, he said. It wasn’t ours. It was the people’s bus. Dreams of today, he said, of people long after we die, will be crushed by what you did. You’re taking away future generations’ chance to discover their identity. Then he said, know what? It doesn’t matter. None of this matters. People will still go there. You can never stop them.
It has nothing to do with the bus.
*
We stood on the other side of The Tek, praising it all. Rain began to pour, pelting us the rest of the way to, and across, Savage River. Like drowned rats we constructed a circus tent out of tarp, ropes, and trekking poles.
Then it stopped.
And the sun came out.
With endless wood we built our white-man’s fire. The heat singed passing helicopters. Smiles we had and hot chocolate spiked with butter we drank, while all worked with surgical-precision to separate socks from wrinkled feet. Five feet from the fire my shoes steamed like a lake at dawn.
Soldiers from war, we passed around stories. Flattering them with our Belgium-ignorance:
“You’re really good at soccer!”
We could bet our asses.
“How are the mountains?”
Like rivers.
“The women?”
Their chests swelled, and like good patriots they claimed theirs the very best. We were the same, us and these on-screen gods.
*
In February of 2009, three days before my birthday, five before I left for Denali for the first time, I dropped in to see my mom. She sat at the edge of her porch, dwarfed by skeleton trees of winter-Oklahoma. I approached, slowly. Because she was smaller than usual.
Travis (my brother) had been arrested, she said. He and his wife took their son, born a month earlier, to a hospital, where the doctors found incongruence in the story provided, and that told by their humorless machines. They called the police before reconvening in the waiting room.
My mother shrunk.
Until then, I had accomplished nothing, but to watch the years fly by like a spirit passing through me. My mind died. All was lost. My mother, our family, my brother, alive, but a ghost.
Five days later, tears in our eyes, my brother and I held our hands up as if they might touch, except they were separated by three feet of glass. I love you, I mouthed.
Then I drove toward Alaska.
Each child has within them a bullshit radar. It is maybe at its strongest from our late-teens into our 20’s. Before we ourselves start looking for any possible way to turn time into money. But, before we get there, we see clearly what it’s all about.
Bullshit.
When I look back now on my time in Alaska, what in old age I’ll likely call my best years, what I remember is time spent at its purest. Spinning drunk under the northern lights on a mountaintop swallowed by the immensity around me. Chasing women and laughing uncontrollably. More campfires and smiles than a person can count. And dancing. Always dancing. If I could somehow get it back, I’d donate all my money to a charity aimed at fighting poverty. I’d walk out to the side of the road. I’d stick out my thumb.
*
The night came on. Steam softened and rose from the mountains. Somewhere, a wolf barked.
What the hell are we doing here?
