Cash Only Next 600 Kilometers

We didn’t hold our breath during the 10-minute drive back to town but we might have if it were possible.

We had first learned of the outage the day before, trying to buy groceries in the town of Dease Lake. “No credit cards,” the cashier told us. “The internet is out. Cash only.” I handed over a couple of the plastic notes with Her Majesty’s portrait on them, which Canadians regard as money, and thought nothing more of it until we stopped further up the road at the Jade City store, which sells, as you might guess, jade figurines and trinkets. There the owner told us that the internet and phone was out in the entire province. “You’ll need to pay cash for everything including fuel until it is restored. Banks and ATMs are closed as well.”

I checked my wallet. I had about $80 of Canadian currency. It was about enough to fill the tank once but then we’d have no cash for anything else, and we needed food again, and some campgrounds only took cash. We camped that night at the mosquito infested provincial park at Lake Watson, Yukon. It cost another $20 of our precious cash and we now each had more bites than dollars. The thought of having to spend one more night with those mosquitos terrified us. We no longer had enough cash to fill the tank and Whitehorse was about 200 km away.

Thankfully, as well drove back to the Watson Lake visitor’s center that morning, four bars of cell coverage lit up on the Sienna’s Apple CarPlay screen. We had cell service! The line had been repaired. We pulled into the first gas station we saw (the only one in town). Pay at the pump wasn’t working but the attendant scribbled the amount fuel he pumped into the tank on a scrap of paper and I was able to pay with a credit card inside the store. We were back in business!

That morning we pulled over to watch a black bear with her two cubs grazing on the grass at the side of the highway. The mosquitos were forgotten.

Stopping to gawk at the scenery on the road to Haines

Several hundred kilometers west of Whitehorse on the Alaska-Canada Highway (known as the Alcan) there is a turnoff at a town barely more than an intersection called Haines Junction. Hang a left here and you’ll travel down a peninsula traversing some of the most gorgeous scenery the North American continent has to offer. The elevation of the road soars to over 3,000 meters (10,000 ft) before gliding down again to sea level all over a distance of just over 100 kilometers. Mountains whose summits are cloaked in ice, snow, and clouds are surrounded by meadows of hardy grasses and wildflowers in yellow, purple, and red.

Sixty kilometers before the end of this road we came upon a lonely kiosk occupied by a beefy young gentleman in full hipster beard. I handed him our documents, exchanged some pleasantries (he had no questions about alcohol or cannabis) and 30 seconds later, we were back in the US of A. We were that much closer to our destination for the day, the town of Haines, and our designation for this trip, the State of Alaska. It was the 49th to join these United States and the 48th I can now check off my “have visited” list.

Haines, which calls itself the ‘Adventure Capital of Alaska,’ is perched on the Chillkoot Inlet, a water way that leads to Juneau, the real capital of the state about 5 hours away by ferry, and to the Pacific Ocean.  We are staying at a small oceanside campground, which has room for around 40 RVs and a patch of grass that fits about 8 tents. We are using our tent because the tent area is more pleasant and it is cheaper than getting an RV site with power, water and sewer, that we don’t need. We look out across the inlet to the still-snowy mountains beyond.

Classic Saturday Lunch (tuna, salad, & chips) — in Haines, Alaska

The inlet itself offers views of cruise ships and ferries going by and of aquatic wildlife. This morning while drinking our coffee, Barb spotted a Bald Eagle just hanging out at the dock. There was also a ravenous raven who tried to grab some of our oatmeal from the picnic table while we were distracted by the eagle.

You can’t access Haines by road from the rest of Alaska or from anywhere in the US. You can only get there by sea or driving through Canada. It is a small town, just 1,900 permanent residents but there is a surprising amount to see and do here. The town boasts three grocery stores, a book store, an outdoors shop (mostly for anglers and hunters but some backpacking gear as well) and lots of gift shops.

On our first day here, we did a self-guiding walking tour of town taking in the American Bald Eagle Foundation and Natural History Museum, the first Protestant bell ever rung in Alaska (according to the plaque), and a farmer’s market that was light on vegetables and heavy on cookies, cake, and honey. A young lady was making pour-over coffee by the cup for $3 a pop. She was doing a brisk business. I briefly considered grabbing a table and undercutting her at $2.50.

We enjoyed a rare ‘meal out’ at the Fireweed Restaurant feasting on hummus (what else?) Greek salad and pizza. The pita bread appeared to be made fresh in house. The hummus was green and so thick it was served like a scoop of ice cream but like everything else we had, it was fresh and tasty if somewhat inauthentic.

In the next few days we will do a rafting trip to try and see more eagles and take the ‘fast’ ferry to Skagway, Alaska where will check out the ‘big city’ and ride a narrow-gauge choo choo to Whitehorse and back again.

On Friday, we’ve booked a ferry to Juneau and will spend some time there and in Sitka, which was the capital of Russian Alaska before the sale of the territory to the US in 1867. Sitka is also the capital of Jewish Alaska in Michael Chabon’s novel of speculative fiction, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (one of my all-time favorite novels).

The ferry to Juneau doesn’t arrive until 9 pm but that still gives us more than an hour to get settled before candle lighting time! Though the sun officially sets at around 10:15 pm, it never really gets dark and the sun appears above the horizon again at 4 am.  We go to sleep and awaken in broad daylight. Dusk and dawn exist in theory but I have yet to see them.

The weather in southeast Alaska has been thus far, cool and breezy with light patches of rain but today while we were hiking the rain turned heavy and we were soaked to the skin. At times like this a campground with hot showers and a laundry room is a luxury for which to be grateful. The horrific mosquitos of the Yukon have been, so far, nowhere to be seen. It’s been restful to have had a few days with no driving and as we will be leaving the van here when we go to Juneau and Sitka, we will enjoy a nice respite from the long days behind the wheel it took to get us here.

Once we return from Juneau sometime next week, we will return to the road. To visit the interior of Alaska, we will need to drive back into Canada and continue on the Alcan for another two days to reenter the state near Tok before continuing on to Anchorage as we continue our exploration of the land of the midnight sun.

It’s Not Vacation

The man in the little booth was pleasant but efficient. I presented our passports and he could see that we had completed the “Arrive Canada App” complete with records of all our Covid vaccines and boosters. Being fully vaccinated is a pre-requisite to being admitted to the country at all.

He had a large number of questions to get through and he expected me to answer them thoroughly and truthfully.

“Are you bringing any ammunition or weapons including spring-assisted knives.”

I thought about my pocket knife. No spring assist. “No,” I said.

“Any alcohol?”

“I have some beer for personal consumption,” I replied.

 “How much?”

 “Six 12 oz cans. of a delicious Montana IPA. 12 oz is around a third of a litre,” I added helpfully. (They use the metric system in Canada as in every civilized country in the world.)

“Any cannabis?”

“No”

“Really?” he said as if he hadn’t gotten that response in a long time.

“How long will you be staying in Canada”

“About a week or two. We are on our way to Alaska.”

“Is your visit for work or leisure?”

For the first time, I had to think about my response and my thoughts went back to 1986.

My girlfriend Barbara and I were about two weeks into our trip around the world. In mid-February of that year, we had both quit our jobs and with our modest savings had flown to Brussels, Belgium for $99 on the original budget airline, People Express.

We had been dreaming and planning for this trip for nearly two years but as I was learning full-time travel was not exactly what I had expected. First of all, Belgium and France in February were freezing cold and our budget required us to camp. Our budget also required us to prepare almost all our food. A night in a youth hostel or a meal in restaurant was a splurge.

I had imagined a life similar to my semesters abroad in London and Munich. Cafes, pubs, and warm sunny days strolling through public parks. The reality was we were cold, sometimes hungry, and more often than I would have preferred, wet and uncomfortable.

I was likely complaining to my partner who was (and still is) much tougher than I, when she said what became a mantra for me during our 16-month journey through Europe, Africa, India, and Thailand.

“You can’t think of it as a vacation,” she said, “This is our job now.”

I have been very fortunate. I have always had work that for the most part I enjoyed, found interesting, and meaningful. But I also never had a job that was ALWAYS fun. As I used to tell my kids: If work was always fun, they wouldn’t need to pay you to do it!

So yeah, some days in the course of my career, even many days, were challenging, frustrating, nerve wracking, and even brought me to the brink of tears. We accept these challenges not only because they pay us, but also because our work seems worthwhile and solving problems allows us to grow and learn.

Now we are about three weeks into our overland trip to Alaska and in many ways, it feels like a job.

We wake up around 6 am. Make coffee and breakfast on the camp stove. We break camp, changing over the van from sleep mode to day mode and then we drive. Typically, we drive between 5 and 7 hours a day. We stop to hike, make lunch, get fuel, buy groceries. About 3 pm or so we start looking for a place to stop for the night and when we find one, we set up camp, and cook dinner. If we are staying at a place that has showers, we get them and then go to sleep.

Most of the time the camping has been pleasant but as we have gotten further north, the mosquitos have gotten worse and worse. Last night near Watson Lake, Yukon, the mosquitos filled the van as we were setting up and nearly drove us insane with their whining and biting all night. We were on our third days without showers and were hot and sticky in the van with the windows rolled up tight against the bugs and possible bears. This morning we awoke and without making breakfast or putting the van in day mode, we drove away as fast as we could back to the visitor’s center that was comparatively bug-free. There we used the bathrooms and the free wifi and made coffee in the parking lot until we were ready to continue our journey on the Alaska-Canada Highway.

Tonight, we are in Whitehorse, Yukon the last big town before we reach Southeastern Alaska. There are fewer bugs here but at a cost. We are in a campground that is right off the highway and we are squeezed in between the massive RV rigs and the highway where the traffic is roaring by. Still it is a tradeoff that we accept gratefully and I expect that the traffic will settle down sometime after sunset. Tonight, here above 60 degrees of latitude that will be at 11:25 pm with sunrise just a few hours later at 4:43 am.

Tomorrow will be a long day as we are hoping to make it all the way to Haines, Alaska some 400 km from here.

It has been a great adventure so far and fortunately the mishaps have been few. For the most part the journey has been interesting, meaningful, an opportunity to challenge myself and to learn. Last night was unpleasant and I’ll admit at one point with the mosquitos extracting more blood than I have given the Red Cross in a single sitting, I was ready to turn around and head home. But at the same time, we have already seen an ancient forest of thousand-year-old cedar trees, the reenactment of the Battle of Little Bighorn, a moose, four bears, elk, a marmot, and longhorn sheep. We have seen some of the most stunning scenery I have ever seen. And I have answered the question, “At age 60 do you still have it in you to travel this way, to be uncomfortable, even occasionally miserable, and still find the experience rewarding?”

The man in the booth was waiting, “Work or leisure?” he repeated.

“A bit of both,” I said.

Bored of the conversation at last, he sent us on our way waving us through. “Welcome to Canada,” he said.

Murky Truths, Many Stories

A late precursor species to modern humans was Homo habilis or “handy person,” so called because of its ability to use tools. The development of tools was a pivotal moment in human development. But perhaps the greatest tool ever developed was not the hand ax or the bow and arrow but the story. The power of a story has pushed forward the boundaries of human knowledge and art but has also motivated people to persecute or even attempt to destroy other peoples. It is important to understand the difference between a story and a fact. Fact can be hard to know with assurance. It may be a fact that light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second in a vacuum but I only know that because I looked it up. I really can’t measure that myself.

Stories, on the other hand, I tell myself all the time, and who can say that one is right and one is wrong? As Yuval Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind has noted, stories are fine as long as they are useful but once they have outlived their usefulness, we probably ought to let them go and find new ones.

This week we visited the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument near Crow Agency, Montana. The site, which is managed by the U.S. National Park Service, is the site of “Custer’s Last Stand” where in 1876 George Armstrong Custer led the men U.S. 7th Cavalry to a massive defeat as he was slaughtered along with his men at the hands of the allied Lakota, Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapahoe American Indian tribes. 

Since 1946, the site had been known as the Custer Battlefield National Monument. It existed to tell a story of the brave men who tried to beat back the “savages” who would interfere with the Manifest Destiny of the white citizens of United States to occupy the continent from sea to sea. Custer and his men died in the attempt but they died heroically, according to the story.

That story made sense (at least to the white folks) in Custer’s day and still did 75 years later when codified in the name of the place in 1946 right at the beginning of the cold war with the Soviet Union.  

But in 1991 (one year after he signed the Americans with Disabilities Act and two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall), President George H.W. Bush signed a law changing the name of the Custer Battlefield to the Little Bighorn Battlefield. It was a small change that indicated that the story itself was changing.

Today, the narrative descriptions on the site tell a story of a people whose land was stolen from them, who saw treaty after treaty broken, whose way of life was being taken and who fought back heroically and won a battle to preserve their way of life although ultimately they lost the war.

We happened to visit the site on the anniversary of the battle and got to hear native story tellers, many of whom were descended directly from the Indian combatants, Crazy Horse, Rain in the Face, and Sitting Bull.

Across the street from the battlefield is a “Trading Post” (large gift shop and restaurant). As we perused the tskotches (native word meaning knick-knacks) an older Crow gentleman who appeared to work there began speaking to us. His words were almost stream of consciousness and somewhat hard to follow. He quoted Aristotle and Tip O’Neil. He had lived in Washington DC and in New York. He had worked in the financial industry, as a staffer to Mo Udall, and for the National Park Service. Now in his 80s he had returned home to live on the Crow Reservation.

Stories can change he said. A law can be part of the way a story change. The name of a battlefield changes who the heroes are.

What stories are being told now about what America is and who we are? Who gets to tell those stories and who gets oppressed or freed by them? Facts are hard to know, but the differences in our stories hint at a deeper truth.