Day 15 – Return To Daw$on City

Eagle Plains – Dawson City

250 Miles

6:00am. Eagle Plains has been destroyed. It was a brutal death. Heavy rains and angry 18 wheelers unrelented all night. Deep rivers of mud flowed across the compound and four days of held in trucker faeces was just too much for the fragilities of wilderness plumbing. Gasoline and foul language filled the air in an unwitting homage to the omnipotent Apocalypse Brain.

I don’t mind a bit of bad shit-arse jazz language, but I do object to the following terms: motherfucker, pussy and faggot. These are all terms that etch out the crooked silhouette of the imbalance of power that our great civilisation is built upon. The world steps on the faces of the weak to bathe in the warm glow of mediocrity. I’m all for equal opportunities and I don’t discriminate. I hate everyone equally.

Our tent is battered and everything we own is dribbling. Paranoid nightmares. Tired. What will Dempster look like today? As long as it doesn’t look like Inuvik, it will be dealt with it accordingly.

Cereal, toast and a full tank of gas later and we’re back on the Highway. No rain, but the car slides through the calcium chloride slime covering the road like a drunk on a boat with a goat.

We stop briefly at Ogilvie Ridge at 10:00am. It’s magnificent of course, but all we can think about now is getting back to Dawson City. We must evade the bubble.

Dawson was made famous as the epicentre of the Klondike Gold Rush. This mass migration of insanity began in 1896 when prospectors found rich gold deposits along the Klondike River. The name Klondike evolved through the repeated mispronunciation of Tr’ondëk, the original name of the area.

Daring and desperation go hand in hand. Greed is the mother of ingenuity. Stupidity is the embryo of adventure. Only when there is nothing left to lose can one truly hope for something great.

So went the inhabitation of Dawson City. Aspiring prospectors made their way from Skagway, Alaska to the Yukon River, via the notorious Chilkoot Trail, a sub-arctic cortege which saw an end to many. Unidentified faces lay buried in the snow, stepped over in the stony-eyed march for gold. Starvation, disease and hypothermia cast a farewell to the weak.

Those who survived the Chilkoot met a new failure in Dawson: there was fuck all gold. Most of it had gone by the time news of its discovery reached Seattle. All was in vain. What little was left lay buried under the permafrost, a tomb too strong for the archaic extraction methods of the time.

What kind of person would value the glory of gold over their own lives anyway? What kind of person would abandon everything and, quite literally, walk thousands of miles into the arctic? What kind of person would be capable of making these decisions and actually survive to see Dawson at the other end? A fucking badass, that’s who. And what happens when 40,000 insane badasses wind up stranded in a sub-arctic wilderness, diseased, dejected and in poverty? Shit happens, that’s what. Dawson City became the Wild North-West.

Forget gold. Semi-organised crime pays. And in a gold rush era Dawson City, it pays well. Every fucker and his mother (see what I did there?) was a thief, gangster and card shark. If you weren’t a bunko, you were a shill. If you weren’t a sharpie, you were a smoothie. Hustlers and hosers flim-flammed the flimps who gaffled the grifters.

There may not have been much gold in the ground, but these were fertile lands for antiheroes, free-thinkers and unconventional innovators such as Soapy Smith, Jack London and Scrooge McDuck.

184 miles of Dempster Highway to go, but what is Dawson now? What havoc has 100 years of Disney and Ikea wreaked here? Will we find shelf loads of Justin Bieber hand towels or will we be shot in the face in a duel at dawn? Which would be the worse outcome?

The front and back wheels slide left and right and we almost lose it on a corner. Brown ice. A slow and boring sub-arctic death avoided, we lunch at Tombstone Territorial Park.

1:10pm. End of Dempster Highway, eight days after we first began. Paved road comes four days too late. Rain runs rivers down the windscreen and we roll long hills under heavy cloud. But there are blue skies over Dawson City in the distance and it’s lit up gold like a beacon in these dark afternoon storms.

There were no winners in Us Vs. Dempster. We took from it and it took from us in a zero-sum battle to the semi-metaphorical End. We looked into the eyes of an empirical impasse and wondered what question we should have been asking. What conclusion can we draw when no question was asked? What was it that we hoped to achieve with this exercise?

As we approached Dawson City, the world, the ‘real’ world as we once knew it, looked very different. How long have we been gone for? Can it really only have been eight days? We cross the Yukon River and drive into town. What progress these beasts have made since we left!

We absquatulate into the anonymous bustle of Dawson City. I’m speaking ironically, of course, as the bustle of Dawson City is, in fact, a hustle and the streets are deserted. But something has changed. We pass the SS Keno, biggest of all Klondike sternwheelers. A lifeline during the gold rush, now permanently docked in the Yukon River by Front Street. The world is slower or I am faster. The beautifully decrepit skeleton of the old bank that employed Robert Service while he wrote ‘Ballads Of A Cheechako’ stands as testament to the anonymous struggles of gold delirium. I notice things. Weird things. We pass replicas. Replica banks, replica post offices, replica saloons. Things That Are. Things that were here before, but that I could never have known were here before. Or could I? Is Dawson City a museum? Everything that has ever happened and everything that ever will happen co-exist on the same dimensional plane. This plane is the scale of events. The scale of events is time. We experience events relatively using the axiom of ‘The Present’. ‘The Present’ is a metamembrane which moves through events at different rates and directions. The past is the future-now. So what is Dawson City?

Moosehide Slide looks down at us from the hillside disapprovingly as we walk 2^nd Avenue. Yes, we know. And we know that you know that we know. Everything is a myth here. Somehow we get talking to a dishevelled looking guy sitting outside the Downtown Hotel. He says he’s a placer miner and he struck gold earlier today. It’s in his backpack, but we are not allowed to see it. I glance inside the Downtown Hotel. I think he might actually be for real. There are plenty of replicas in Dawson, but this guy is too tapped to be a clown. He glances at my glance. “You should go in. Everyone’s real friendly in there”. And so we did.

Years ago, no-one can remember quite when, Captain Dick Stevenson was rummaging through an old abandoned cabin just outside of Dawson. Inside the cabin he found a jar containing a severed human toe suspended in pickling alcohol. The toe had been well preserved and he wondered what to do with this new found treasure as he wandered back into town. Then it hit him. It hit him like a ton of severed toes. It was obvious: drop it in a shot of whiskey and serve it up at the local saloon. The Sourtoe Cocktail was born.

That local saloon was the Downtown Hotel and, although Captain Dick has since passed away, the legend of the Sourtoe Cocktail lives on. We sit down at the bar and order a pre-emptive round of Yukon Red and before we know it Captain Dick II has signed us up for two Sourtoe Cocktails. The bar was already full of drunks eager to suck dead toe and things were starting to get a little rowdy.

Captain Dick II says that the original toe found by the original Captain Dick was swallowed long ago. Since then there have been a number of toes. The current one belonged to a local trapper and was amputated due to frostbite around 20 years ago. I’m up next, he says.

The rules are explained as my glass is primed with whiskey and dead body parts: “Drink it fast, drink it slow, but your lips must touch the toe”.

A crowd has gathered. Not being one for the limelight, I down my drink quickly and efficiently, ensuring clear lip-to-toe contact. Success. An easy victory in light of recent times. Laura on the other hand, being the showboater that she is, downed her drink, pulled the putrid digit out of the glass and stuck it in her gob like a foul necrotic cigar. She began to lick the festering hallux up and down while waving her arms in the air as a disgusted groan rose from the audience. She basked in her degenerate crapulence as surrounding stomachs inverted.

More beers as the Sourtoe crowd began to dissipate. The party is over for those of a weaker disposition and those of stronger grit could never match Laura’s heinous triumph tonight.

Eventually and inevitably, we were spilled out drunk across the streets of Dawson. Our boozy eyes had forgotten about the midnight sun and we blundered blind back to Dawson City Campgrounds.

Yukon Bath. Approaching cleanliness.

Everything we own still dribbled from the Great Trucker War of Eagle Plains, but we didn’t care. The sun fell behind the hills and while it remained above the horizon, the low light seemed to signal an end to something, but we couldn’t be sure of what. An end to our Inuvik imprisonment? An end to Dempster Highway? Whatever it was that we learned in the Arctic, it has formed a juncture. From here on in, we will look back upon our lives as before this point and after this point. It seems like a thousand years have passed in the blink of an eye. The air was cool and refreshing and we were certain that we had stumbled across some intangible truth somewhere over the last eight days, and that tomorrow would bring with it something exciting and new.

Still light. Just.

Day 14 – Death Or Glory On The Arctic Highway

Inuvik – Eagle Plains

250 Miles

8:00am. High winds shook our tent late into the night. Small rainings, but no downpour. The noise of the wind over our tent was like shredding canvas and sleep eluded me until morning.

Overcast when we call the Department Of Transport for updates on the road. No expectations. This is simply routine now.

“Dempster Highway may be open later today”.

Robot Voice leaves trail of shocked silence in its binary wake. Robots don’t lie, do they? I have become sceptical of anything the Department Of Transport has to say and I don’t know what to make of this. Should we go? If the road does indeed open and we stay in Inuvik for too long, we’ll get caught up in the rush to escape. If we leave and they don’t open the road, we’ll be spending the night ill-prepared on Dempster Highway and subjected to its ruthless and violent melancholies.

10:00am. We are taking our chances. Goodbye Inuvik. This could easily backfire. Goodbye expensive grocery stores. Goodbye toilets and showers and, well, not clean water, but, you know, taps. Goodbye taps. At least we will be moving again. Possessions thrown into car. In our rush to escape, we get lost and end up at the airport. How is that even possible? There are only about three roads in Inuvik. It fights us to the last.

10:30am. Dempster Highway. A week of storms has taken its toll. The road is a mud bath. Brown slime comes in tidal waves across the windscreen and jagged rocks strafe the bonnet. We weave through potholes flooded with corrosive calcium chloride and semi-visible trenches purpose built for axel destruction. The road is deserted. We drive for an hour without seeing another vehicle. This can only mean one of two things:

a) Everyone else knows something we don’t.

b) We know something no-one else does.

Around midday, the wheels of our car locked into a skid and we began to hydroplane across the mud. As we slowly drifted over to the wrong side of the road, I realised that we were going to die. This was not an existential awakening. This was no A-level philosophy twatism. This was real. We were about to be smeared across the Yukon tundra. The steering wheel no longer had any authority over the direction of the car, nor the brakes on its speed. Still coasting sideways across the road. It was quite graceful, in a way. A non-survivable vertical drop to the permafrost lay beyond the edge of the road. No barriers here.

I think of Bill The Trucker. No fear. No regret. Death is only scary when you are waiting for it in a Starbucks. Once again, we teeter on the precipice of enlightenment. Free of corporeal concerns, we will explore strange new dimensions that our earthly cranial prison boxes could never possibly begin to understand. No time for mortal nostalgias now. Death will be the greatest adventure of all. It occurs to me that my final thoughts were of a fat, hairy trucker selling vegetables. Shit.

This is it. Live fast, die young and leave a grotesquely mutilated corpse behind. I watch the edge of the road disappear beneath the left passenger window.

I read somewhere that the best chance of surviving a car crash is to go limp. This is why an unusually high percentage of drunk drivers walk away from wrecks unscathed. Drinking and driving saves lives, kids. Do the right thing. Today, in the here and now, however, we are far from the Arcadian pastures of floppy limbed complacency. White knuckles on the wheel and teeth ground to stumps. Buttocks clenched for impact.

And then traction. Beautiful traction.

The car pulls away from the edge of the road. I can’t help but let out a belch of a laugh. Fuck you, Sir Isaac Newton. Nothing can stop us. I didn’t even piss in my pants. Fuck you, Fitzgerald! Death is for the weak.

But traction, like our luck, is fleeting and our arrogance short-lived. We are hydroplaning across the road once more,  now in the opposite direction. Unbelievable. Fear turns into exasperation in a car crash of this length. My innate British sense of fair play has been offended by these crooked laws of physics.

Four times we blunder the edge of the road uncontrolled before the car comes to a halt. Four times death poked us in the eye. Nerves shattered. Must drive slower.

Mackenzie River Crossing at 12:20pm. Three cars ahead of us. 1.5 hours to make the crossing. Still zero cars pass us in the opposite direction. Fort McPherson. Back to Nitainlaii. Sandwiches and bladder exercise. No sign of Ghost Man.

2:15pm. The Peel River Crossing. Face to face with the end of level boss. We join the Great Queue. Engines off. Recon stroll. Our early departure has paid off and there is only about a quarter of a mile of big rigs in front of us. A few familiar faces from Inuvik too. We speak to a trucker near the front of the line. He has been there for four days. He says that the replacement cable for the ferry arrived from Vancouver yesterday, but since it was a Sunday, no-one worked and it sat there untouched. But that was yesterday and today is Monday and no-one fucks with Monday. Whatever militant arm of Transport Canada are working hard and fast to open the crossing. Word is they are aiming to open by 3:00pm.

3:00pm. The Peel River crossing will definitely be open by 5:00pm.

5:00pm. Work will be completed by 6:30pm.

6:30pm. It’s almost finished now. Tangible deadlines are no longer uttered.

7:30pm. The sound of engines spluttering back to life after days in idle coma flash down the line. Is it really happening? Has our time finally come? Electricity. A dormant colony of ants reanimated in an explosion of mundane trivialities. What are you going to do when you get to Eagle Plains?

“I’m gonna get me a gooooood hot meal.”

“I’m gonna drink me some beer.”

“I’m gonna take me a sheeeit.”

Note: The above quotes should be read in a casually racist ‘hillbilly’ accent.

The first ferry docks on the north bank of the Peel and a handful of the most dedicated truckers roll aboard. We join the small crowd of stranded adventurers watching the first crossing from the north bank. If the new cable doesn’t hold up then we’re here for another week. Not a breath is breathed.

After an eternity of silence, the ferry docks safely on the other side and our brave pioneers disembark to continue their long journey to wherever and whoever as the north bank erupts with delighted cheers. Freedom is in the air and we are drunk on its scent.

A few minutes later, we are on the move. A few meters later, we come to a stop. This is still the Peel River crossing, remember? The celebration is over and the reality is this: a traffic jam in the Arctic.

Roadside kitchen improvised. Lentil soup and bread rolls. It’s good, despite having to pick up the table, stove, gas, food, drinks and utensils to move them and the car three meters down the road every once in a while. The look on the other drivers faces is clear: why are you doing this now? Well, we have no reasonable answer to that question, but we do have good food in these bad times. If you want some, then you had better stop asking questions and get in line. We are the Peel River Mobile Soup Kitchen.

9:30pm. On ferry. I can see it now; floodwater surges, snapped cable and the dreaded ‘floating debris’. The ferry will turn to the sky and the banks of the Peel will melt into its own dark waters. We will cry out in vain as we slowly disappear from view. But no, whatever sick god is presiding over us today clearly has further torments in store for us, much more cruel and elaborate than merely vanishing into the great Iron River and being washed deep into the infinite deaths of the Arctic wilderness. No, we land on the south bank of the Peel River and live to fight another day. We have escaped the slow jaws of Inuvik and returned from The End Of The World. But what now? What happens next?

The race is on. A storm is mid-birth and we have 100 miles to cover before the bar at Eagle Plains closes. The sky is a spectrum of metallic greys oxidising over the mountains and this is the darkest it’s been since we left the damp comforts of The Rainylands. We burn southwise down the Dempster; no time to waste and I have learned nothing about road safety. In the distance, heavy storm clouds flex to the ground, dropping their soggy payload over the land and we are driving straight into it.

Dempster Highway looks incredible and brutal in the rain. The beast is awakening. Let’s hope we make it out before all hell breaks loose. We won’t find forgiveness here.

We head into Richardson Pass and toward the NWT/Yukon border. The muted rage of the mountains spills down across the road in treacherous, slow motion blows to derail us into oblivion. These are the tombs of giants. Mountain ridges spread down to the ground like ancient limbs covered in a millennia of storm and ice.

We cross the border into the Yukon at 10:45pm as we cross a more arcane border into Yukon Standard Time at 9:45pm.

The road gains elevation for the long ascent to Eagle Plains, but low cloud plunges us into near zero visibility.

Back to 10:45pm. We have officially left the Arctic Circle, six days after we first entered. The cloud thins enough for us to see a pair of grizzly bears play fighting at the side of the road. They don’t care about any of this. Axle integrity, gas prices, the mud and the storms and sitting in line at river crossings. These are of no consequence to them. Humans are surely the weakest of all species. Capable of dealing with nothing.

11:00pm. The cloud broke as we reached Eagle Plains. Last time we were here, Eagle Plains was an esoteric oasis. The hazy sub-arctic plains touched the sky under the sleepy light of the midnight sun. It was like treacle dripping through windows. It was almost still. It was a sanctuary, not from the wilderness, but from a world gone stupid.

It all looks so different now.

Almost dark.

Day 13 – Bill The Trucker And The Butterfly Boys

Inuvik – Inuvik

0 Miles

9:00am. No more rain overnight, but ominous clouds in the distance float over the Delta. My hand is getting worse. It has swollen to about twice its normal size now and, unlike yesterday, I’m experiencing some pain. Yesterday’s heat and hangover has left me somewhat dehydrated, so I boil up some water. Yellow brown dribbles from the rusty tap. The contamination warning is still in place. It will be fine once it has boiled, but I filter it through my bandana to convince myself that the first part of this sentence is true.

Sausages and eggs for breakfast. Extortionately priced from the North Mart, but it raises the mood. I try to avoid further mosquito bites which may accelerate my current allergic reaction, but they have a taste for my blood now. Antihistamines continue.

It’s Sunday. As such, I don’t expect any updates on the drivability of Dempster Highway. I don’t know what to do with the day.

Laura suggests we go to church.

Is this what it has come to? Has Inuvik driven her to such desperation as to look to a god that is clearly a work of low quality fiction? God exists for the weak to justify their lives. There is no possible justification for my life and hence no need for a god. I make the rules around here. Fight, fuck and die in an endless cycle until the world explodes and all trace of our very existence is wiped from the face of the universe. No-one would even know we were here. That is where the concept of god comes in. A convenient tool to convince the booboisie that they should continue to go to work and squeeze out their ugly babies instead of just painting walls with the backs of their heads. This would be the sensible solution to the problem of life.

Has Laura been brain crippled by Inuvik? Everything has suddenly gone a bit Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. The 1978 version with Donald Sutherland at that.

Mackenzie Road. No, of course not. She is talking about ‘Our Lady Of Victory’ also known as the famous-by-Inuvik-standards ‘Igloo Church’. As its names would suggest, it is an igloo shaped Roman Catholic church built in 1960.

Outside there is an unpleasant pro-life memorial dedicated to ‘all victims of abortion’. A small headstone. The only one in the church grounds. I wish I knew some good abortion jokes. Maybe one involving Sarah Palin and dustbins. Why did Sarah Palin’s coat-hanger cross the road…

Inside, brown wooden fixtures are flooded with streetlight orange. An uncomfortable contrast to the grey streets of Inuvik. So this is what it is like to be stuck in the intestines of a weird god.

The walls are lined with the simple block colour and basic detailing of Mona Thrasher’s work. Mona is an Inuvialuit local, partially deaf and mute following a shooting accident in her youth. Mona was taken under the wing of Father Adam (Inuvik’s parish priest at the time), assimilated and encouraged to complete the 14 murals at age 18.

A plaque commemorating the French Oblates, the so-called ‘Specialists Of The Most Difficult Missions’ rounds off this quaint exhibition of distaste. Control and sanctioned abuse are the themes of the day, it would seem.

As soon as we step out of the church, a group of leery locals wolf whistle and shout at Laura in a pretty aggressive manner as they drive past. The exhibition continues. Lewd finger formations and tongue wobbles follow as they speed off into the distance.

I probably shouldn’t do things like that.

I had heard that men get a bit rapey up here. I guess living in Inuvik would be a prison of sorts for those of certain dispositions. Don’t drop the soap or your rectum will have to be surgically rebuilt, as the old saying goes.

Back to the Inuvik Visitor Centre, not for road updates today, just for the free coffee.

Closed. Like everything else in Inuvik.

Outside the visitor centre, we meet Jamie and Andre, two students from Ottawa who, like us, are trapped and itching to get out. They were sampling butterfly species of the Yukon for their research department when they ventured too far north and the slow jaws of Inuvik closed around them. They seem to be taking it all in their stride however. They, unlike us, are getting paid to be stranded here. We swap stories. They tell us about the problems they have had here with groups of natives threatening and harassing them.

Sadly, it is true. There is a tangible tension between whites and natives. Man’s contempt for his fellow man is no more evident than it is here. Everyone hates everyone else. But mostly everyone hates whites. White culture is fucked. Dead ended; it has eaten itself. Native culture has retained some degree of reason and perspective (despite Catholicism, TV and massive refrigerators) that the white world could learn a lot from, but there is an impassable barrier of resent and suspicion – mostly justified, it cannot be denied. The only way into these northern communities would be through someone like Kyle, and that wouldn’t be cheap. His small vengeance is exploiting the white man via legitimate business. He might put on a nice show and tell you outrageous tales about life in the bush and for the right price he could even take you to all the best viewpoints and the places he never usually takes people. But we could never be equal. We would always be the tourists. How could you understand The End Of The World from someone you could never be equal to? And why should we be equal? What can we offer other than the greedy currency of the white man? Should we trade Iphone apps? Always a tourist.

A large truck with neon opening times flickering on the back arouses our curiosity upon our return. A truck with opening times? We climb the steel steps up the side of the rig. Further secrets of Inuvik. Deep breath, door opened. The cool ambience of vapour-compression refrigeration draws us over the threshold. The innards of this metal cave tower dark rectangles above our heads. We are greeted by a cold storage banquet of almost fresh produce and Bill – greengrocer and veteran ice road trucker. Bill drives to Vancouver every three weeks. In Vancouver he picks up a truck load of fresh fruit and vegetables and drives back to Inuvik to sell his wares. He stops at Fort McPherson and a few private customers along the way and in winter he drives the ice road to Tuktoyaktuk.

Bill doesn’t care about the Dempster closure, even though he is undoubtedly losing money. Bill has seen everything. He speaks in a slow deadpan, the hallmark, I would imagine, of the most hardened of big rig badasses. Bill once got stuck at Eagle Plains for a week. Last winter his truck broke down and he walked 100km to Fort McPherson. Bill eats bullets for breakfast and hydroplanes 18-wheelers into oncoming traffic for kicks. People are afraid of too many things, he says. Dempster Highway is only scary when you sit in Starbucks all day.

No fear. No boundaries.

Jump. Forget what doesn’t matter and plummet towards your inevitable demise with a smile on your face and a song in your heart. That, ladies and gents, is freedom.

We leave Bill The Trucker and head back to Happy Valley. Since time means so little here and everything is closed/broken/contaminated, I have decided to stop wearing a watch.

Dreary lunch of leftovers at unknown o’ clock. Punishment for this morning’s excellent breakfast. The universe will always return to equilibrium in the end.

Improvised icepack from bandana and soda cans, but my swollen hand refuses to return to its intended size.

Tried to kill some time in the library, but since I had stopped wearing a watch, I couldn’t find any time to kill. Read hunting magazines. NRA-psycho-bible-chumps. The key to world security is to own the biggest gun. I suppose there is some logic to that.

Later…

Huge waves of thunder crescendo through viscous cloud. There is a ferocious storm unfolding on the horizon over the Delta, but it rages in the distance and the rains never come.

Still light.

Day 12 – Two Kinds Of Poisoned

Inuvik – Inuvik

0 Miles

7:00am. The black expanse of anaesthesia. Cold and indifferent. Alone. Once, I swam in a lake of beer. Once, I bathed in waterfalls of whiskey and paddled crystalline rivers of vodka. Once, I walked the coast of a sea of wine. All lost. All memoried. Now pulled sideways through the void. This world has been evacuated. Regurgitated back into consciousness. Back retching into your wretched world. Unwanted rebirthing. The taste of petrol and rotten apples remains in my mouth even after two brushings.

Hangover.

Relentless sun even at this early hour. Woke up sweating and nauseated. What did I do last night? Disconnected images. I remember drinking with some other people from the campground. Fragments. I remember stumbling a deserted Mackenzie Road alone under the midnight sun. Leering faces of strangers in the shadow of blurry slow motion. No, that wasn’t me. That was someone else. I have nothing to worry about.

Neighbouring campers sick from contaminated Inuvik water.

Thinking nauseates me further. Everything is all wrong. My head is full of spiders. Everything is sick and decayed. Everyday objects have become sinister omens of impending doom. Strings of numbers that I’ll never understand and memories of conversations gone wrong spin my brain and churn my stomach. Welcome to the dark side. The Apocalypse Brain is out…

Sadly, I’m not a puker. I would probably feel much better after splashing the bowl with the contents of my stomach, but I haven’t thrown up since 1993 and I just can’t remember how to do it. Is there some technique I’m missing? Some form I have forgotten to fill in? Think man, think. What happened in 1993? I remember eating the fish… then came the diarrhea… then I blocked up the sink… and then I was glued to the kitchen floor. No, it’s no use! I’ll never remember how to puke.

Peel River crossing still shut. It seems to be widely accepted that the Peel River crossing is indeed the cause of our current confinement. Repair work has now ceased for the weekend. We are going to be here for a while.

Our plan is on the rocks. We should be in Whitehorse by now. We can no longer avoid the fact that we are going to have to cut out the Whitehorse/Kluane leg of the trip. Very disappointing. Kluane in particular was an important part of the journey for me. Updated itinerary: go back the way we came and hope for the best.

Covered in mosquito bites now. One about the size of a CD on my leg looks like it might be infected. Arms all deformed from the swelling. Hands are an assortment of misshapen, uncooked meat products.

45°C. Light rain around 2:00pm, but the temperature doesn’t drop. Can’t eat lunch, can’t shake the sickness. Small insects in the peripheral vision. 54 mosquito bites on my hands alone.

4:00pm. Feeling really ill now. Is it still the hangover or are my insides playing host to colonies of bacteria from the compromised Inuvik water supply?

More rain in the evening. Much heavier this time. My right hand has swollen up so much that my knuckles are no longer visible. Began antihistamines.

The rain stopped around 11:00pm, but neither Laura nor I could sleep. We commandeered the laundry room and talked until very late. Or very early.

What did I do last night?

Still light.

Day 11 – Arctic Heat Wave

Inuvik – Inuvik

0 Miles

8:00am. Dempster Highway is still shut and rumours are flying around town. Supposedly, the cable at the Peel River crossing has broken. The word is that this has never happened before and nobody really knows what to do about it. The kid in the campground office thinks it will take weeks; that is weeks – plural of week, to fix.

Inuvik Visitor Centre. In search of official information, but they are about as official as my arse and they know just about as much. They still seem happy to see us though. The heat outside is scorching and the cool air of the visitor centre provides a welcome break from this unexpected Arctic heat wave.

We push the staff for more information about the river. “High water and floating debris”. She is a broken photocopier. This is going nowhere.

Back to the campground. The mosquito situation has escalated from tiresome to torture. The only escape is inside the tent. Inside the tent, the thermometer on my alarm reads 50°C. Choose your punishment. Bono or Bundy? There has to be another way. The world is not either/or. The world is a rich spectrum of what ifs and maybes. I refuse to accept the parameters of this scenario. What would Hunter S. Thompson do in this situation?

I head to the liquor store.

Upon my return to Happy Valley campgrounds, the happiest campgrounds in Inuvik, our neighbouring campers inform me that Inuvik’s water supply has been contaminated and is no longer considered safe to drink.

Silence.

A long silence.

First it was the mosquitos, then it was the road and the heat, and now they have no drinking water. Poor bastards. It doesn’t bother me though as I have now acquired enough alcohol to kill a horse. I don’t drink water anymore.

Me and The Booze leave these wretched creatures to their suffering. The Booze looks at me with a knowing smile and we cuddle in the shade by Twin Lakes.

Still light.

Day 10 – A Memorable Brunch At Alien Lakes

Tuktoyaktuk – Inuvik

120 Miles

5:00am. The sun had moved east more than I was expecting. Meandered beach. The otherworldly dreamland ambience of last night had been pushed aside by daylight – real daylight that is, not the cold fire refractions of the eternal Arctic dawn.

Laura woke in 7:30am decadence. The practicalities of everyday life at The End Of The World take priority. Tent dropped as minivan driven in our direction. It was John, Karl’s friend and year-round resident of Tuktoyaktuk. Early morning mosquitos show us no mercy.

Tuktuuyaqtuumukkabsi Airport drivings and check in. Our flight isn’t until 1:00pm, so John offers to show us around the hamlet. For a price, of course.

Pingo. First stop. Frost belchings. Hydrolaccolith – a better name. They look like failed volcanoes. Frost heaved ponds push surrounding permafrost out of the ground. Some are hundreds of years old. Pre-digital navigation aids. Back when you had to know things to do things.

Short hike to the top. The sky is clear and the sun is punishing. Flat pingo pinnacle arrived and Tuktoyaktuk eyeballed. The End Of The World is not so strange from here. The silent stasis of perpetual dawn has been banished for now. Today is people, cars and buildings. Not many, to be sure, but it’s business as usual for Tuktoyaktuk this morning.

John drives us to his house. John is a true guide and with masterful sleight of hand, he draws our attention by challenging us to swim in the Arctic Ocean while he prepares a light meal. We lap it up, like the obedient dogs we are. Just to clarify, the Arctic Ocean is at the end of John’s garden.

I’m not much of a swimmer and my weak effort of rolling up my trousers and wading in up to my knees was obliterated when Laura, without hesitation, stripped arse naked and dove straight into the Arctic sea. I was impressed. Tuktoyaktuk’s annual naked white girl quota has now been met. These are the moments that make a marriage. If we had grandchildren, I would tell them about this. But we don’t, nor do we plan to, so this story will have to be recorded here, as a written monument to Laura’s wanton display of public nudity.

Back at John’s house. We brunched a memorable brunch: a sort of fucked up amuse-bouche of beluga whale on cocktail sticks and Frank’s RedHot. ‘Free-range delphinapterus slices with a sub-tropical red cayenne drizzling’. I’m Patrick Bateman. This perverse cultural train wreck is giving me a raging semi. Dare I start a conversation about Bono’s most admirable humanitarian work? I’ve often thought that Phil Collins must care a great deal about the little people he sings of. Have you ever wondered whether Ted Bundy was really just a misunderstood guy? Now there’s a choice: Bono or Bundy? Rock and hard place. Keep your mind on the task at hand. Beluga meat is not exactly vile, but it’s close. It’s like a strange fishy meat jelly that’s been left under a radiator for a few weeks. It’s not that it tastes bad, it just tastes somewhat wrong. Cultural conditioning in action. I notice one particular chunk has an interesting network of blue vermicular veins wriggling through it. Down the hatch. Next up we have ‘Smoke cured Arctic char with a dusting of cracked black pepper’. Much more palatable, but just not as fun. I prefer it when cute animals have to die to fill my plate.

Tuk Harbor. Sod houses. Ikea will be filling these with flat-pack lifestyle badges of honour sooner or later. The inevitable march of progress. The greedy elf-pigs of Småland are the ultimate borg and all homes, no matter how remote, will become a cell in the end. The air is cool inside these traditional semi-subterranean abodes of yesterday. The TV is a fire pit and the windows are doors. Simple freedoms.

Dirt road crossed to the Tuktoyaktuk ice house. 30 feet into the darkness dropped via trapdoor and slippery ice ladder. Layers of permafrost revealed in the walls and giant ice crystals scatter torchlight like a million broken mirrors. This is a feat of archaic engineering. Three subterranean corridors accessing 25 rooms. DIY cold food storage at its finest. There is space allocated for every family in Tuk. And it works too. It must be 35°C at the top of the ladder. Here at the bottom it is currently -12°C. John tells us that the temperature down here has never risen above -10°C. There is one problem with the Tuktoyaktuk ice house: no-one uses it. Why? Because everyone in Tuktoyaktuk has a refrigerator.

The original hunters of the north; living off the land for centuries through the worst weathers imaginable. Schooled in self-reliance; hardened to the elements. These are the ultimate survivors. The kings and queens of the Arctic. AND THEIR BIG REFRIGERATORS. THE BIG REFRIGERATORS THAT COST LOADS OF MONEY TO RUN BECAUSE ELECTRICITY IS REALLY EXPENSIVE IN THE NORTH. THE BIG EXPENSIVE REFRIGERATORS THAT COST LOADS OF MONEY TO RUN EVEN THOUGH THEY HAVE A MASSIVE COMMUNAL ICE HOUSE THAT WORKS FLAWLESSLY AND HAS SPACE FOR EVERYBODY.

Yes, living off the land indeed. We are at the edge of survival here ladies and gentlemen. Keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times.

Cold. Up the icy ladder to warm. John bids us farewell. Still almost three hours remain until our flight, so we wander unescorted. I feel like an intruder here. Not that we are made to feel unwelcome, by any means, but that it seems like Tuktoyaktuk should be reserved for people who really live this life. Preservation from the pull of the outside world. An easy option. One with little reward.

Trans Canada Trail marker – the most northern point in the trail. Cemetery – it’s bright and interesting. North Mart – further evidence of the insidious west.

We are going in.

Ah, the gentle kiss of HVAC. Back to the first world. The barely tangible fragrance of propane and synthetic polymers. Inoffensive tinkles of royalty free production music caress tile and breeze block. Glass cabinets full of cell phones and Xboxes line the walls horizontal; towering citadels of microwave meals and pornography stack verticals. A capitalist oasis. This is what you want. This is what you need.

A banquet of useless shit such as this doesn’t come cheap up here in the Arctic. $5 will buy you a pack of chewing gum. $18 and you could be the proud owner of a Justin Beiber hand towel. Or if it’s just the necessities you are after, $15 will buy you two litres of water.

You think that is unreasonable? Doesn’t matter. You will buy because buying is what you are for.

Airport conundrum. We are flying back to Inuvik in a 1980s Cessna 309. This is a plane with five passenger seats. There are six passengers booked onto this flight. One person will have to be downgraded to a charter flight and delayed by at least five hours. No volunteers. Steve The Pilot arrives to settle the matter. Straws drawn. Laura and I escape.

Steve The Pilot escorts us across the runway and into the plane. Laura sits up front in the co-pilot’s seat. I do not like flying and the smaller the plane, the greater my discomfort. This is the smallest plane I have been in to date.

After some not so reassuring confusion over the radio, the engine splutters to life and we taxi to the end of the tiny runway. The plane buzzes like a broken lawnmower and clunks over the larger rocks that are strewn across the airstrip. We gather speed. I look at my feet and wonder if there is a god. The plane shudders. A small bolt rolls across the floor and under my seat. I wish I hadn’t seen that. If there is a god, it would have to be a woman. Who else would be capable of torturing me with such subtle cruelty?

In the air and it feels like we are back on Dempster Highway, even though there isn’t a cloud in the sky. Invisible currents batter this flying metric ton of metal.

Over the Mackenzie Delta. From sea level, the Delta is a strip of green that obscures the horizon. From up here, we see it for what it really is. It is the damage zone of a billion lake bombs. It is the shrapnel from outer space explosions that have filled with sea over centuries. It is hollow earth that has begun to collapse in on itself and the oceans are draining into its empty core.

Eskimo Lakes. Unformed pingos. The cross winds died down and my anxiety levels return to everyday baseline panic.

It doesn’t last.

Turbulence returns with a vengeance. Images of flat spins and bloodied cabin relegated by writing this. Charred limbs pulled from blackened wreckage. Difficult to write whilst being thrown about like this.

Steve The Pilot had a look of total indifference on his face as we moved in to land. Either his desire to die has grown so strong that he no longer cares who he takes down with him, or this is just another day at the office in the Arctic circle.

Touch down just before 2:00pm. 90 minutes of airport time wastage follows.

Crappy Valley Hampgrounds. Our return is met with the news that whilst technically open, Dempster Highway is impassable as the Peel River Crossing has been closed due to “high water and floating debris”. There are no other roads out of Inuvik and no guesses as to how long the road will be closed for.

Afternoon to kill. Chores of the humans: laundry, cleaning tent, repacking bag. Non-essential maintenance, the refuge of a weak mind.

Inuvik is growing tiresome for me and the heat and mosquitos exacerbate matters. 9:00pm and it’s 40°C in the sun. The holes in our research are becoming apparent. This extra day here will jeopardise the Whitehorse/Kluane leg of our journey. We have a ferry crossing of Prince William Sound booked in just over a week which we will not be able to reschedule. If we stay here too long we will not have enough time to get around the Yukon and across Alaska to Valdez. There is no plan B. If we miss the ferry, our plans unravel.

Initially, I thought that Inuvik had a crude charm to it, but after stepping back in time to Tuktoyaktuk and crossing the alien lakes of the Mackenzie, Inuvik is just crude. The constant daylight is adding disorientation and sleep deprivation into the mix. Still, the most daring and magnificent decisions are often made when one’s reason is compromised, and with that in mind we head to The Mad Trapper, Inuvik’s premier dive bar. The Trapper is notorious in Inuvik, but in fairness, there are only three bars here.

Inside, we drink $7 beers as daylight streams through the windows at midnight. Tonight is ladies night at The Mad Trapper and Laura, the only lady in the bar, gets her drink half price. This could be a film set. The locals throw cold stares from their craggy faces and hazy beams of sunlight illuminate the pool table. The house band eye us hungrily as they drool out their second rate redneck refrains. Fangs primed under shadow. The trap is sprung. We have quickly become the bottom of the food chain. They close in.

Danielle steps in to save us. She is the other lady in the bar and she is very keen for us to know that her recent facial disfigurement was caused by a particularly nasty mosquito bite. That must have been one mean mosquito to give her that black eye and all those blood encrusted stitches that are running down her swollen nose. Danielle is incoherent and manic. Her near hysterical ramblings border on tears. Danielle doesn’t like the locals. She suggests that we stay away from them for unspoken reasons. But Danielle does love living in Inuvik because she gets to meet all kinds of new people. People like us. She wants to know where we are staying. We have both suddenly forgotten the name and location of the campground. I feel bad about that. Danielle is nice in a confused and insane way. But she is making Inuvik smaller and more claustrophobic than it already was. We make our excuses and say goodbye to Danielle and the vampires at the bar. Small guilts. Did we just throw her to the lions?

Daylight floods my retinas as we stumble out into Inuvik’s bleak Mackenzie Road high street. Difficult to focus. A long stumbling back to Happy Valley. Really should try to sleep.

Still light. Broad daylight.

New! Outstanding! Blog Award!!!

Dear Valued Readers,

My global network interfacing device recently informed me that I have been nominated for a “Very Inspiring Blogger Award” by a very kind Supernova. I am genuinely flattered and grateful. That anyone should consider my semi-literate, drunken rants “very inspirational” is an unexpected surprise to me, and perhaps a concerning reflection of society as a whole.

Accompanying the “Very Inspiring Blogger Award” is a set of parameters, which read as follows:

1. Display the award logo on your blog.
2. Link back to the person who nominated you.
3. State seven things about yourself.
4. Name fifteen other bloggers and link back to them.
5. Notify those bloggers of the nomination and the awards requirements.

You will note that there is no mention of any form of cash prize. I’m sure this was a simple oversight and will be corrected in a timely manner.

So, let’s get down to business. Although I admire the cyclical nature of the “Very Inspiring Blogger Award”, I don’t like rules, so I have decided to make my own.

Introducing the NEW! OUTSTANDING! BLOG AWARD!!!

The New! Outstanding! Blog Award!!! is really important and if you get nominated everyone will definitely care. I drew an award logo to go with it and everything:

Anyway, this time honoured tradition comes with a set of rules which must be followed closely:

1. Only display the award logo on your blog if you want to.
2. You don’t have to link back to the person who nominated you, unless you think your readers would enjoy that person’s blog.
3. Write whatever you want. This step is optional.
4. Reciprocal nominations are not necessary; however, if you know of any blogs that you think are worth nominating then you should do so.
5. You can notify those bloggers of the nomination and the awards requirements or not. It’s up to you.

And the winner of the first New! Outstanding! Blog Award!!! is…………….me! Thank you. Thank you. I’d like to thank Jesus and my Mom.

Well, I’ve probably semi-intentionally offended enough people by now, so I’ll leave you with a few interesting links:

Wild Earth Travel

Backpackology

Church Of Atom

And finally, once again, my personal favourite The Weekend Woodsman

Until next time…