A Life Wasted

Seattle Trip

Larry was upset about losing his dad so I drove most of the way. When I reached the point that I couldn't stay awake any longer, Larry would take over so I could sleep. As promised there was a great deal of snow and it was frigid cold. Taking the advice of an Alaskan we talked to in Tok -- the last stop in Alaska -- we didn't shut the car's engine off. Not for a second. The car ran for two straight days.

As John promised the Cassiar Cut-Off shaved miles and time off the trip, but it is undoubtedly the most remote stretch of road I have ever encountered. The road was completely covered in snow, but I didn't think any of it was paved. There were hundreds of miles where we didn't see a single thing made by man, which includes the road as it was covered in snow. We did encounter a few north bound logging trucks, which was far from fun. It was a mountainous area and many places had serious drop offs with no such thing as a guardrail. So when a logging truck passed the snow blew around so much that visibility went to zero. All we could do was stop until the ground blizzard settled. Thankfully, we only encountered a few trucks.

The one unexpected but interesting thing we encountered on this road was a hitchhiker. This guy was standing in the middle of nowhere. Literally in the middle of nowhere. We had to stop. It would be a death sentence to leave anyone out there. As you'd expect, this guy had an interesting story. His name was Peter and he was from East Berlin. English was not his first language so communication was a challenge, but we managed. The Berlin Wall had fallen earlier that year and Peter had managed to secure a German passport and was able to travel. On a budget. He'd made it to Canada but as of yet he hadn't been able to get a U.S. visa. As for what Peter was doing hitchhiking on the Cassiar Highway in the middle of nowhere? He was actually staying with "friends" who lived deep in the bush. There wasn't a road or even a driveway to their homestead, which was many miles back in the woods. I asked Peter how he had managed to meet such isolated folks but never did get his answer. Peter's English was limited so he had trouble with difficult explanations. It had something to do with the camera store where he had worked in communist East Berlin, but I couldn't catch the details.

Peter's current mission was to post a letter from a U.S. post office. Something he needed to do to prove to his family he had reached the United States. The post office he was headed for was the tiny Southeastern Alaskan community of Hyder. Hyder, Alaska was unique in all U.S.. Hyder could be reached by road from Canada, but the town was completely cut off from the rest of the state. So much so that there was no border control between Hyder, Alaska and Stewart, British Columbia. So to post a letter from a U.S. post office, Peter had walked miles through the woods to reach the most isolated highway in North America where he planned to hitchhike to the end of the Cassiar road, then catch another ride to Stewart, British Columbia. From there he would like have to walk to Hyder. In December, with temperatures well below zero.

We wanted to take Peter all the way to Hyder, but that would have taken three hours we didn't have to spare. Instead we gave Peter our contact information never expecting to hear from him again. We were mistaken in that. Peter was like a bad penny. He kept showing up. He's a good guy, one I always enjoyed running into, but over the next year I would run into him in so many unique places in Alaska that it was scary.

Before leaving I did the math and believed we could reach Seattle in forty-eight hours. I told Larry's wife this on the phone, so Linda made a plane reservation for him that would leave Seattle forty-nine hours after we left my house in Cooper Landing. We were brain-dead when we walked into Seattle's Sea-Tac airport. Larry picked up his prepaid ticket at the counter and I walked him to the gate, which you could still do in 1989. As we reached the gate we heard them make the last boarding call for his flight. We didn't even have time to say goodbye, but Larry made his flight.

I watched Larry's plane push back from the gate then stumbled over to an Alaska Air Lines gate where I had noticed a crowd of anxious travelers. Seeing this I thought that I might be able to catch a flight home. When I reached the back of the crowd the ticket agent announced that they were attempting to get the FAA to allow them to send a single flight to Anchorage, but it was unsure if they would be approved to try. This raised my hopes until she announced the flight was full and had more than 800 people on stand by. My shoulder's slumped and I resigned myself to getting a hotel room to crash in. It looked like I would miss Christmas with my family. I hate giving up, but that's exactly what I'd done until I heard a woman in front of me say to her husband, "Could we rent a car and drive to Anchorage?" They both turned to look at me when I said, "I have a car."

These folks were from Nome, Alaska. She was the dispatcher for the Nome City Police, but ironically she didn't know how to drive. Her husband drove just fine. He drove a snow plow in Nome for the State of Alaska so he knew a great deal about foul weather driving. They'd been staying at their daughter's house in Seattle and were now trying to get home to spend Christmas with the rest of their family. When I explained my situation they immediately accepted my offer to join forces. He drove Larry's car to their daughter's Seattle home while I slept in the back seat. At their house I was put to bed while he took the car to a garage for a quick check up. He changed coolants and oil. He didn't like one of the tires so he bought a new one. He didn't like Larry's cheap chains so he bought a pair better suited to really nasty weather. While he did this his wife put together food and survival supplies. These people from Nome knew their business. When they woke me two hours later the car was packed and gassed with the motor running. All I had to do was crawl into the nest they'd made for me in the back seat and go back to sleep. I was asleep again before we backed out of the driveway. I was so tired that I had neglected to call Mary to let her know we'd made it. I never forget to call Mary, so I was really wiped out.

I woke when when we passed through Canadian customs and stayed awake long enough for coherent conversation. I didn't know their names so we did the formalities of introductions. I told them about my reason for my trip to Seattle and where I lived in Alaska and they told me where they were from and what they did. Thinking we might see Peter on the return trip since it had just been the day before we dropped him off going to Hyder, I told them about him and asked if they would stop if they saw him. The guy apologized but explained he didn't intend to take the Cassiar Cut-Off. I asked why but he just said he didn't like that road. I didn't care either way, but it would have been interesting to run into Peter again.

It's difficult to call a winter trip of 2,591 miles across some of the most rugged terrain in North America uneventful, but it was. A friend or relative of theirs had a house they used in Anchorage so I let them off there. I was tempted to get some sleep at Larry's apartment, but I wanted to get home for Christmas, so I pushed on and was home before the kids woke Christmas morning. It took a week to recover from that trip.