Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [100]
Thankfully, Alaska Airlines has a much better track record vis-à-vis crashing into lagoons and has become the main carrier between Anchorage and Barrow. You've seen their planes—they're the ones with Bob Marley on the back. It's even rumored that they're sponsoring this episode of the show. I can't say for certain. Although I do seem to spend an inordinate length of time staring at their corporate logo on the wall, far more than I would in real life, while the crew films it and me from various angles.
By sheer luck, wink wink, Aroun happens to be coming to the end of his shift and says he'd be happy to drive me into town. From this I take it that he's a PR guy from the airline. I don't even bring up such things any more. It's a waste of my time and curiosity. But I do accept his kind offer.
As I step outside the Wiley Post-Will Rogers Memorial Airport1 once again, a brutal, unfriendly cold lacerates my flesh, freezing the breath in my throat and leaving my hair and goatee crusty to the touch.
Barrow in midwinter clearly doesn't believe in making a good first impression, and risks being mistaken for a very dismal place indeed. On dark, desolate corners, signposts flap in the wind, their street names dusted with frost and barely legible. Plumes of steam pump from vents into the sky. Icicles dangle from a festoon of overhead cables like glass fangs. Cars lie buried in snow up to their windows—and when it's not cars it's abandoned snowmobiles—outside sturdy clapboard homes that lurk evilly by the roadside, lost in a postapocalyptic gloom that doesn't lift; it's merely relieved here and there by fuzzy light from streetlamps folded deep into the mist.
“Close the door, Cash!”
I don't need to be told twice. Beneath an overcast sky the color of canned ham, Aroun throws his white Alaskan Airlines pickup into gear, ramps the heater up to full blast and eases forward, letting the tires roll into the icy troughs gouged out by previous vehicles before accelerating. There's no traffic to speak of today, nobody on the sidewalks. Now and then a Sno-Cat grinds by, spitting plumes of mush in its wake. Otherwise nothing. No people, no sounds. When our vehicle's engine stalls, it peters away into an all-enveloping silence. It might be dawn out here, but there's no dawn chorus. Because there are no birds. I mean, how would they survive? They wouldn't. They'd freeze to death on the twig. If there were twigs.
“So what's Barrow like after the snow clears?”
“Muddy,” Aroun admits, slowing down from 13 mph to 9 mph to let a snowplow go ahead of us. He and the driver exchange waves.
“No trees?”
“No trees. Just mud. And moss. And water. It's not very attractive. There's nothing here. Everything we need, we have to bring in from the outside.”
“But say we do a Thelma and Louise, and we just go, we keep driving. Would we ever get out of here?”
“No. It's like a circle,” he says. “You can't get out of Barrow.”
And on that cheery note, we accelerate to 14 mph and drive on.
A mile farther on, Aroun swings off the road and brings the truck to a stop.
“Come and see.”
Night has lifted a fraction, giving way to a cheerless smudgy twilight so depressing it would make even Pollyanna suicidal. This is as bright as it will get all day.
“We're on the Arctic Ocean,” Aroun shouts, a large blob of green padding stumbling ahead of me across the tundra, “and the Chukchi Sea.”
In 1778 Captain Cook came through here on his ship HMS Disoriented, looking for places to rename, and also searching for the legendary Northwest Passage, a possible trade route that other explorers and merchants had spent centuries hunting down without success. In fact, soon after, rather than break with this tradition, Cook gave up, turned around, and went home, stopping a mere thirty miles before he would have found it.2
Slithering across sheet ice, I flounder like a blind man. A block-solid wall of white consumes my vision up, down, above, below, and sideways, every way, offering no horizon and