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Travelogue,
07/03/04
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I was in Whitehorse, Yukon for three days. It's a lively, friendly
town that was once an important transportation link between the coast and the
interior.
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In its heyday a fleet of paddle-wheelers carried cargo and
passengers in and out along the Yukon River. Today Whitehorse depends on the short
summer tourist season to boost its modest economy. |
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Many families also rely
on the successive hunting seasons each year to supplement their food supply
with caribou, moose and salmon. They kill, butcher and freeze their legal limit.
It's an important part of their livelihood. One family I talked to told me
they all go on these hunts together, so the kids are growing up with it
just as their parents did. Their 11-year-old son had bagged his first caribou
recently, a rite of
passage towards adulthood and a boon to the family's larder. Hunting isn't a
sport for the people who live here. It's necessary to make ends
meet, to feed themselves
and their families.
I spent most of my time in Whitehorse in a
mechanic's shop having the RV's gasoline-powered Onan generator tuned up. That
temperamental contraption confounded two very good mechanics for
two entire days. In the end it ran better than before, but it
still doesn't always want to re-start after it has been running, which
was the main reason I sought help with it in the first place.
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By the time I left Whitehorse, the atmospheric smoke from the 100+ wildfires burning all
over the Yukon was dense enough to reduce
visibility to as little as a half-mile. That afternoon I drove by vistas of exceptionally high, handsome mountains, or so I read in the
guidebooks and
signposts. I didn't see any of it. |
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Everything was hidden behind a shroud so thick even the sun could not penetrate. It was
like twilight all day, and the air had a burnt odor to it and irritated the back of the throat.
Kind of like the New
Jersey Turnpike minus the traffic. |
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On the bright side, I did find a solution to my RV mosquito problem while I was in Whitehorse.
A nylon mesh bed tent now lets me get a good night's sleep
even when the little buggers do get into the cabin, which they're still doing at most
of my out-in-the-bush campsites. Damned if I can
figure out how they're doing it, though. |
YES!
I crossed into Alaska on the afternoon of Monday, June
28th, about 3 months and a week, and 9,500 road miles, after leaving Rhode Island.
(Odometer reads 61,383)
 
After picking up mail from General Delivery at the post
office in Tok (pronounced toke, rhymes with poke), I drove south hoping to escape the wildfire
smoke (rhymes with Tok), but
a northeast wind wafted it right along with me. It wasn't quite as bad as
it had been, but the
sky was still gray, not blue, and sightseeing was limited to whatever was
within a mile or two of the road. Still, that was enough for me to catch glimpses of some bold mountains, a
prodigious river valley and, on the far
side, a brilliantly white glacier spilling out of hidden ice fields.
I grew up next door to a family of 14 kids. The Leary's
included Michael, Tony,
Sheila, Brian, Timmy, Bethany, Kit, Molly, Meg, Kate, Dan, Sean, Noreen,
and Mat, and I can still rattle off those names as fast as any of them
can. I'm in touch with Kit Leary once in a while and he told me that Molly and
Megan both live in Alaska. Now my road was passing close to Molly's town,
Wasilla, so I contacted her and we met up.
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It's weird seeing someone you knew as a kid and
haven't seen in nearly 40 years. You have this image of them in
your mind. Mine was of a skinny little girl with pigtails and
freckles. Molly, the classic
girl next door. Of course, she doesn't look exactly like that
anymore. |
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And yet I kept seeing that face in the woman I
was visiting. The mischievous twinkle in her eyes, the honest cant of her smile. I
believe it's true, what they say, that inside every woman is the little girl she once was.
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Molly and I had a great time. We talked for hours on end,
reminiscing, catching up, relating stories of other neighborhood "kids" we're
still in touch with. It was great fun. There is something uniquely
comfortable about visiting with someone you knew well as a child. There is
no pretense or posturing in the conversation. It's like hanging out with family.
I'll be heading down toward Anchorage and then the
Kenai peninsula now. Meanwhile, I've had a request to post shorter travelogue pages more often. I don't
know if I can make a habit of doing that. It depends on when I get around to
writing up a page, how often I get online where I can upload it, etc.
I'll do that when I can, beginning now.
Next Entry: 07/14/04
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