Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [99]
Somehow things were never the same after that. A line had been crossed, his umbilical cord to almost-certain glory cut, causing him to seethe with disappointment.
“By the way,” he threw out, the next time I passed his office, “has anybody told you who'll be going to Alaska with you?”
“Yes. Tasha did,” I replied.
A bolt of frustration flickered across his face. “Oh, okay.”
And, scowling, he went back to typing e-mails.
1 I read somewhere that there's so much radiation on a commercial jet that every flight you take is equal to having one X-ray. Doing a quick tally, that meant I'd had around 153 X-rays in one year! Put in 1950s sci-fi terms, that's enough to turn a small blond-haired child into a knife-wielding monster that terrorizes a village.
2 The ordeal lasted a mere six days instead of the projected two weeks. In the end, rather than wait for the Consulate staff to sober up and get their asses in gear, I had my partner FedEx my green card to me and was home in time for New Year's. My stay in London wasn't without its share of fun revelations, however. I discovered, for example, that every Christmas Day, Mandy invites all her friends over for mince pies and hot tea, after which they exchange gifts and crowd around the TV and watch A Muppet Christmas Carol in its entirety. It's a lovely way to waste a national holiday.
17
Aaaaaagh—Bears!
“WE'RE—ALMOST—READY!!”
The silhouetted figure in the North Face jacket yells at me through a megaphone of gloved hands, the words barely audible over the screeching of jet engines.
“WAIT TWO MINUTES. THEN WALK IN THROUGH THIS DOOR—THIS DOOR HERE!”—indicating to his left—“ALRIGHT?”
I'd reply only my lips stopped working twenty minutes ago. Instead I signal back with a stiff wave. Two minutes. Walk. Through door. Got it.
With a thumbs-up, he trots away, but gingerly, across the frozen runway, past the “Welcome to Barrow” sign, and disappears indoors.
Behind me, airline workers unload boxes of tortilla chips from the belly of a 737, seemingly impervious to the minus-45-degree cold.
The wind, tearing at my clothes, creates towering eddies of daggered ice particles that swirl and whip like minitornadoes around my head, then suddenly turn on me, slamming into my face with the force of an eighteen-wheeler.
On second thought, two minutes be damned!
I set off toward the hangar, using tiny steps on account of the fluid in my knees having seized up. By the time I reach the door, I'm a snowman.
“So,” I mumble to the clerk on the Alaska Airlines desk, who's called Aroun. “What's going on in Barrow?”
“It's the top of the world,” he explains. “The northernmost inhabited place in North America.”
“Is there anything to do here?”
“Yes. It's a good adventure place. You can come up here, see the Northern Lights, polar bears. What do you want to do?”
I survey the full breadth of my options, then come to a decision. “Leave.”
Barrow is 330 miles north of the Arctic Circle, cut off from the rest of Alaska by mountains called the Brooks Range, and so remote, so far from anywhere you've heard of, that it's almost impossible to reach by conventional means. I mean, you can try if you like. You could travel here: (a) on a barge, although that depends on the ocean melting, which it doesn't very often; or (b) on a dogsled, in which case we won't wait up for you; or (c) you could do what most rational people do: fly. That's how humorist Will Rogers got here in 1935. Sadly, he didn't quite get all the way here. His plane crashed into a lagoon seven miles outside of town, killing him and his pilot, Wiley Post. And I guess not much has happened since, because even today, eighty