A tour of Coldfoot

After spending a week and a half in Ferry, I hitchhiked up to Fairbanks and guided a van tour up to Coldfoot. I’ve been here since. Because I’ll be leaving Alaska in a couple days, I thought I’d do a picture tour.

Coldfoot, in 1898, was first a “boom town” during the Alaskan gold rush. It was soon after deserted, but became home to several hundred workers in the mid-70s, during the construction of the pipeline. It was deserted again until Dick Mackey, a famous dog musher, came up here to serve burgers out of a blue school bus. The truckers–desiring something more–dropped off their empty packing crates and built this cafe.

Coldfoot serves truckers and travelers who travel up the Dalton Highway–a 416-mile half-gravel, half-asphalt road that’s become popular on the reality TV show “Ice Road Truckers.” Coldfoot is in the middle of the Central Brooks Range, and the mountains we see in the pictures are between 3,000 and 4,500 feet tall.

Here’s the “Truckers Only” table. Fox News on the telly as usual.

The “Frozen Foot” saloon.

Here’s Sassy, who lives in and around the cafe.

Here’s the 52-room, Slate Creek Inn, also owned by the people who run the cafe. This building was refurbished from one of the original pipeline dormitories.

There are about 20 or so dogs in camp (outnumbering the winter population of people). They’re mostly Alaskan Huskies. They’ll be mushed throughout the winter.

Incinerator.

There are lots of old equipment, vehicles and buildings behind Coldfoot.

The Diesel generator, plus some ravens hanging out by the dump. Most of the garbage is shipped to a dump in Fairbanks.

The “Tire Shop.” There are lots of blown tires on the Dalton Highway.

Ferry

After hitchhiking 600 miles and thirteen hours with a sheet metal worker from Deadhorse (who was en route to Wasilla down south), I was dropped off in the middle of the night in Ferry, Alaska—which is not so much a town, or a village, but a scattering of cabin-esque homesteads about 100 miles south of Fairbanks near the northeastern corner of Denali National Park.

Where I was going mattered little. I was running from work and chasing after someone. This someone had traveled to Ferry to visit with friends—a family of four living a mostly subsistent lifestyle in the woods. Within driving distance of town, they have some modern amenities like electricty, internet, and cell phone service, but for the most part it’s a DIY lifestyle: growing vegetables, chopping wood, making jams from berries, and hunting animals for meat. I’d spend the next ten days with these strangers.

I stayed in their Arctic Oven, which is a 7-foot-tall, 9-foot-sided tent. It’s ideal for cold weather habitation and costs in the vicinity of $1,500. It comes with a wood stove that connects to a pipe that pops out of the roof. Outside, the temperature ranged from 25-40 degrees, but inside, when the fire was going, it was a comfortable 80 degrees.

I was eager to take part and learn about the daily tasks of their lives. Here I am separating leaves from a pot of blueberries. The blueberries would made into jams and syrups, which they’ll use for the rest of the winter.

Tyler and Erin getting the jars ready. (Erin doesn’t like having her picture taken; Tyler doesn’t mind.)

A friend, with excess meat, gave them the front quarter of a bear.

Taking my first stab at butchering.

Plain bear meat to be served over rice. Not bad at all.

Tyler, Mowat, and me, repairing a neighbor’s floor.

Koa in the greenhouse where tomatoes are growing.

Ferry funny farm: cabbage, snap peas, arugula, corn, lettuce, snap peas, beets, carrots, etc. etc. They also have honey bees.

Hauling fallen wood out on ATVs.

The Ferry cemetery.

Trying to get writing done, but Romeo made it tough with his constant pleas for affection. He would often grab my hand with his paw as if to tell me I should be using it to lavish him with caresses.

Son, Mowat, 7, unearthing a carrot.

Daughter, Koa, 10, harvesting beets.

Picking cranberries.

The geese were heading south.

Drinking from stream. They will haul large plastic canisters from the spring to the house.

Boot Hill. People commemorate lost loved ones up here.

Not sure exactly what the story of this plane is, but I’m told it was put here on Boot Hill, and didn’t land in this fashion. That’s the Alaska Range in the background.

In their cabin, there’s no shower, no flush toilet. Baths are infrequent, and visits to the Laundromat in Healy, even more so. There’s no home workout gym, no wine rack, no jewel-toned vases, no liquid-screen television (or whatever they’re called now).

It’s the sort of home where kids and dogs (and chickens, in a previous year) run wild. There’s clutter. There’s mess. But their home—absent the trappings of the modern McMansion—is full of a soulfulness, a kindness, and a warmth that is characteristic of homes whose inhabitants are tightly-knit as a family, a community, and with the environment of which they’re a part.

In the morning, I heard, then spotted, a sky scribed with V’s of geese pointing south, honking loquaciously. At night there was the trembling of a hot stove stuffed with spruce logs, then the high-pitched howls of coyotes. For breakfast, blueberry jam spread over homemade bread. And everywhere was the fall forest—a congregation of gnarled green spruce and leafless, bleach-boned birch: the latter of which form a grove of skeletons that will remain numb and bald and bitter until spring.

In such moments, I experienced the rare instance of recognizing that the “now”—the present moment—was going to be a memory that I’d always carry with me. And it would be the sort of memory whose warm glow will always beckon you back, but might be tarnished if you go back and you or it has changed in the interim.

While I’ve lived in Alaska for many years, I’ve mostly resided in dorm-like housing units at Coldfoot, or in lavish government homes when working for the Park Service. My experiences with living a frontier-esque lifestyle have been few.

And while I experienced the discomfort of bathing in ice-cold rainwater, and while it was tedious to keep the stove in the Arctic Oven full of wood, I don’t know if I’ve ever felt a greater sense of belonging in a lifestyle or more at ease with myself. It’s the sort of place that’ll wash away one’s neuroses and self-consciousness; the sort of place where it’s impossible to care about the existence of unsightly shoulder hairs.

How rare and refreshing it is to come across a home so absent of pointless decorum and so full of soul. And I can’t help but think the absence of the one fosters the presence of the other. It seems as if—in all the time we devote to disinfecting our homes to kill some one-in-a-billion germ that might cause our innards to grumble for but a few hours—we pollute what should be a carefree, easygoing atmosphere. It is a toxic obsessiveness. Cleaning—for the sole purpose of cleaning—creates a culture of stuffiness and resentment. Aren’t our bones and skin and hair borne of the soil? Why must we be so squeamish of a little dirt?

Upon heading back up north, I thought of an Inuit word the Eskimos have called “Koviashuvik.” They use it to describe “a time and place of joy in the present moment.” And while Koviashuvik is—by its very definition—fleeting, I couldn’t help but think that maybe there are ways and lifestyles and people that could make it last.

How a piña colada almost killed me

Two weeks ago, I was on my hands and knees on the floor of Deadhorse Camp’s “coworker lounge,” trying to cough, or breath, or do so something, anything, with my lungs. But I couldn’t do anything except pound my chest and look at my friends with wide, frantic eyes. I was choking to death. Moments before, I’d been drinking my third piña colada of the night. I was still wearing my red and black kitchen uniform because I’d just finished my evening dish shift. I had a friend bring up my bottle of rum that was in my room in Coldfoot, so we celebrated by making piña coladas. I was in a jolly mood, and after Liam told me about his absurd but amusing idea to start a “munchies catering business” (in which he drives to parties to serve munchies to drunks, crafting the meals out of whatever’s in their pantry and fridge), I started laughing uncontrollably. The piña colada, which had some ice cream mixed in, started to come up and out of my nose. But because it was thick with ice cream, the drink didn’t gush out of my nose like it should have; instead, it just clogged my upper respiratory area. I coughed for a few seconds, and when my lungs could no longer take in air, I dropped to my knees, holding my throat. At first, Liam and Emma (the only members of the get together), looked away. Liam thought I was throwing up, so he respectfully turned his head. Emma got up and stood over me, slightly more concerned. Seconds later, I was pounding my chest, signaling them to give me the Heimlich. But they were in a state of shock. Liam could only gently pat my back, and Emma, forgetting how to give the Heimlich, set up a chair, so I could give it to myself. “What should we do?” Liam asked. “I don’t know. I don’t know,” said Emma. With Jimmy Buffet’s “Margaritaville” (or some such song) streaming on YouTube on my computer, I realized that I was running out of air and that I wouldn’t be able to last much longer. This could be it for me. Yet even amidst the panic, I took a moment to feel embarrassed. Here I am choking to death, in my dishwashing outfit, sprawled across the floor, just halfway through my third drink. I am being killed by a piña colada…. Give me a bear, starvation, a mountain cliff, some worthy cause… Anything other than this! If I’m going to go, let me at least go in respectable fashion. Oh, how un-literary a death. And then, all of a sudden, I coughed up the thick drink that had been lodged in my throat into the plastic cup beneath me. I got up, coughed some more, sat back down on the couch, and tried to laugh it off. The party ended soon after.

***

I had disturbing dreams that night. I dreamt that I had been fasting. And after fasting for a couple days, I wanted to wow everybody and fast some more. I gradually withered away, turning into a bag of bones. In my dream, I remember thinking that there was something beautiful about dying this way. I awoke in the late morning with a scratchy throat and a slight hangover. I thought about the dream and remembered how Liam had once described to me Kafka’s short story, “A Hunger Artist.” I walked out of my room, out of camp, and towards the Sag River, the wind bludgeoning me in the face with 20 mph gusts. I was hoping to be struck by some epiphany, some lightning bolt; to be given some message about where to go and what to do with my life. Maybe I should just keep walking. Maybe I should pack my bags and put my thumb out and head south. But the epiphany never came. I just thought about this place; this barren coastal plain. I thought about how this place reminds me of the film Black Narcissus—set in the Himalayas, where some well-meaning nuns try to turn an old palace into a school. They never could, though. The palace will always be a palace—a place for kings and queens, ornaments and jewels and delicacies. The wind from the mountains drove the nuns mad. It never stopped. It moved into their rooms, invading, molesting, reminding them, like a ghost, that this place is and only will be a palace, and that you can either accept that and change or die trying to change it. That’s how I feel here. Like we shouldn’t be here—that this place is meant to be still and silent and unbothered. I looked north at the facilities, the giant drills, the mud-spattered cars. It’s like we’ve planted a big ugly town on some sacred site, some ancient burial ground. There just seems to be something wrong about our presence here, like a cathedral on the edge of a volcano, a log cabin on a city corner, an industrial work camp on the deathly still coastal plain. We don’t belong up here, at least not this way, I thought. A place like this could drive a man mad. That evening, I went back to the kitchen for my dish shift. I felt like I was a character in a story, but a poor, unassertive character in a story without a proper conclusion. Shouldn’t this be a turning point? Shouldn’t this be where I change shit around, when I change and grow, when I get the hell out of here? Instead, I just put out the salad bar and washed my spoons. We are, by nature, impressed with stories and symbols. Our lives are our stories, made up of events and people and things to which we assign symbolic meaning. And when we step outside our stories, I think it’s then that we feel most lost; when we feel like we’re losing the grip on our identity. A couple days later, two Deadhorse Camp coworkers came back from their vacation in Japan. I packed my bags, put on my rain suit, and set out in the blistering misty gales, under a bleak storm scorched sky. There was nothing grand or literary about my departure, but once I got on the Dalton and set my pack down and held out my cardboard sign to south, I was excited about the prospect of turning to a new chapter.

I got a ride with this sheet metal worker. He took me 600 miles to the south.