May 6, 2003

• Stampede Trail, Summer 1974

  
  

  It has been months since I worked on my memoirs.  To briefly recap:

  
  

  Five years previously, I had been rescued from biker captivity by The Incredible Hulk (That was the man’s nickname; I’m not making this stuff up.), a speed freak and mid-level dealer.  We got busted and one or both of us were in jail for several years afterward. 

  
  

  Free on the streets while my husband Hulk was still locked up, I met Stony, violated my parole and went on the run.  Then I got caught and spent about 6 weeks in jail fighting extradition on parole violation.  That led to a full pardon for my crimes.

  
  

  Stony was waiting around for me when I got out, and when I’d finally had enough of his abuse and left him, he followed me from Colorado to Utah.  From there, we traveled together to Alaska, where I finally ditched him.

  
  

  I then met and fell in lovely lustful love with Charley, another jailbird I met in my official capacity as professional ex-convict for the State of Alaska.  No sooner had we moved in together, than Hulk called me asking if I would pull some strings and get his parole transferred from Oregon to Alaska.  No prob.  I sent him plane fare, my husband joined us and we became three.

  
  

  We had enough time in such family togetherness to demonstrate to my full satisfaction that two men were four times the trouble of one.  We struggled on with the triangular relationship, and I must admit it had its moments of fun.  We had three bicycles and with long-time Anchoraguan Charley as our guide, Hulk and I became familiar with our new home turf.

  
  

  I came to value my time off from work.  When my contract was up on the weekend job at Open Door Klinic where I was a crisis-intervention counselor, I resigned.  I had a few carefree weekends of long summer days and white nights.  Then I lost the second job.

  
  

  I was bummed out.  I’d tripped myself up by trusting and trying to help someone, against the stupid rules.  I had been feeling as if I had blundered into a promising career, then suddenly found that I’d blundered back out of it.  Falling back on parental programming in my crisis, I decided to make the most of the opportunity.

  
  

  To my regret, I had been so busy working 96-hour weeks plus a little overtime that I hadn’t been outside Anchorage since I got there.  There were legendary places I wanted to go:  Katmai, Nome, the Chilkoot Pass, Prudhoe Bay.

  
  

  Charley has a sardonic laugh.  It’s the only laugh I’ve ever heard him do.  He doesn’t laugh often, but he laughed at my enthusiastic travel plans.  Then he brought home a map and showed me the flaws in my plans.  I might, for example, be able to hitch a ride on a float plane from Lake Hood out to Katmai on the other side of Cook Inlet, but I’d need gear and accomodations to stay there.

  
  

  My travel budget was small.  I’d been thinking like the Lower 48 hitchhiker I was.  Now, about thirty years later, there is the Dalton Highway off across the tundra to the North Slope, but at that time, the North Slope Haul Road was not open to the public.  The construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was just gearing up to start.  Looking at Charley’s maps, I was amazed at the scarcity of roads.  So many places to go, so few ways to get there.

  
  

  We had eliminated, for economic reasons, most of my chosen destinations.  (Still to this day I have not been to Katmai, Chilkoot, Nome or Prudhoe, but I’m not really rarin’ to go anymore, either, unless I can afford to go in comfort.)  Charley asked me what it was I wanted to do, why I picked the places I’d chosen.  I answered that I wanted to get away from the city, see new places and spend time in the wilderness.

  
  

  He had the answer.  Alaska was full of places I’d never been to before, full of wilderness.  I could easily get to a trailhead on the railroad and spend a month or so walking around out there, then get out to the highway or railroad and back to Anchorage.  While I was at it, I could ride the train to Fairbanks first, and see what Alaska’s other city was like.

  
  

  I packed my gear: some stuff I’d had for a while, such as the mountaineering tent I’d boosted by mistake while trying to replace my sleeping bag that had been stolen in Santa Cruz; and a lot of essential things Charley recommended, such as Cutter’s insect repellent.  My backpack was heavy. Both Charley and Hulk said I should leave the books behind, but I took my I Ching and a thick metaphysical tome by Alice A. Bailey.

  
  

  The pack wasn’t so bad.  I could lift it alone, swing it onto my shoulders.  And as the hike progressed, the food would be coming out of the pack, into and through me.  It would grow lighter as I went.  Funny how that pack just kept feeling heavier as I went.  The Backpack of Paradox was my first problem.

  
  

  As Charley watched me pack, he said I might as well leave those cut-off Levi shorts at home.  “You don’t want to be wearing short pants out there,” he said.  Like hell I didn’t.  What’s a little sunburn?  “It’s not the sun,” he said, “that’s no problem.”  It was the bugs and the bushes that Charley thought I needed to protect my legs from. 

  
  

  I was tough, I thought.  There was a trail.  I’d traveled the great American West in shorts and halter tops.  I would put a couple of pairs of jeans in there, sure, for bad weather or formal occasions, but I’d take all three pairs of shorts as well.  It was summer, a weird wonderful kind of summer that never got dark.  Two pairs of those shorts, I never wore–just more dead weight in the incredible backpack from hell.  The sandals and moccasins, I never wore at all.  What at stupid noob I was… Cheechako all the way.  To this day, I’ve not mastered the art of traveling light, but I’ve improved.

  
  

  The train ride north was pleasant, once we got through all those trashy yards on the outskirts of Anchorage and up this valley I now live in.  If it doesn’t have a few junk trucks in the yard, it’s either not an Alaskan homestead, or it’s so far off the road no truck could get there.

  
  

  I rode in the domed sightseeing car with the blue-haired tourists and their bald-headed husbands.  We looked and looked and saw trees and mountains, but very little of the wildlife we were all straining our eyes to find.  I guess the bears, caribou and moose don’t like the trains.

  
  

  In Fairbanks, I found a coffeehouse and a tiny hippy community of transplants from the Lower 48 much like myself.  I crashed at the little log cabin home of a young woman and her small daughter for a day or two, then caught the train back south again.  Hearing my plans, someone in Fairbanks had said I needed a bear bell.  I hung a little cowbell from my pack frame so the bears could hear me coming and get out of my way.

  
  

  I told the conductor where I wanted to get off:  Lignite Siding.  He told the brakeman.  Then the conductor asked if I would be getting back on the train there in the near future.  I said no, that I was going to be hiking the Stampede Trail down to the Toklat River, then up the river to the Toklat Ranger Station and out McKinley Park Road.  He looked at me, and my backpack, and explained to me how to walk up the tracks half a mile, tie a red bandana to a tree by the tracks, then walk back to the siding and wait for the next train to stop.  I wondered if his ears were bad.  Didn’t he hear me say I was walking out another way?

  
  

  At Lignite, the train stopped just for me.  I jumped down and nearly went down under the backpack when the conductor tossed it out to me.  Before the train had pulled away, I had shrugged into the pack straps and headed out the jeep trail that led west from the tracks toward the Toklat, the summer feeding grounds of the famous Toklat Grizzlies.  I could still hear the train in the distance when I struggled out of the pack straps and dug out the Cutter’s bug dope.  For all I could tell, I might have been the only warm-blooded creature for miles.  Every mosquito for miles was homing in on me.

  
  

  I trudged along in my little black buzzing cloud, trying to avoid inhaling too many skeeters and pausing occasionally to reapply the Cutter’s around my sleeves and shorts, where the fabric wore it away and the mosquitoes swooped in for a sip of me.  This was not my idea of wilderness, either.  The trail was littered with beer cans and broken bottles of all ages.  Some of the most colorful litter was an array of spent shotgun shells in a rainbow of colors.  Then, out of nowhere, or probably out of the great big open sky behind me, a sudden downpour caught me.  I pulled my rain poncho out of my pack, looking around for some cover.  Seeing nothing but open country and the two parallel tire tracks to the horizon in two directions, I kept walking.  At least, while it was raining, the mosquitoes didn’t bother me.

  
  

  The shower passed and the ground steamed in the sun.  The mosquitoes returned with reinforcements, as if they’d bred a new generation or two during the rain.  I shucked out of poncho and pack and renewed the covering of Cutters that had been washed off.  The poncho back in my pack and the pack back on my back, my cloud of skeeters and I went on down the jeep trail.  I started wondering when I’d get to the river.  Then I came to the highway that runs roughly parallel to the railroad and river.  That meant, according to my map, that I’d gone about two miles.  Only six more miles to Eightmile Lake, where Charley said was some beautiful country and good camping for my first night on the trail.

  
  

  I have no idea how far I got on that trail.  Either I missed the little lake trail that turned off the main Stampede Trail, or I just didn’t get that far.  I’m pretty sure it was the former, but not all that sure, either.  That first two miles took forever, dragging that cloud of mosquitoes with me under the towering backpack of Gehenna.  I hiked on down that trail until I couldn’t go any more, meanwhile enduring two more sudden showers and the newly hatched millions of mosquitoes that found me each time the rain passed.

  
  

  

  
  

  My Stampede Trail campsite

  
  

  When a solid cloud cover moved in and a cold pelting rain began, I left the trail.  Climbing through brush that scratched my bare legs and removed what was left of my Cutter’s, I went up a small hill and set up my tent in a little open space between trees.  The shorts went into the pack as soon as I got into the tent and into a pair of dry Levis.  I’d gone through one little bottle of Cutter’s and part of a second.  I had only that one and one other bottle.  I knew I couldn’t keep expending it on bare legs any longer.  I was learning.

  
  

  The view from my tent

  
  

  It rained off and on–mostly on–for the next three days.  I decided that wasn’t such a bad place to camp.  I sorta liked it there in the tent with the mosquito net between me and the whining horde.  I started having a little fun with them.  Lying there in my tent with my face inches from the netting, I’d wait for an enterprising thirsty one to force the front half of her body through a space in the net, then I’d put out one mighty finger and squish her back through the nylon mesh.  Then I’d sorta flick and rub at the mesh to get as much of her off as I could, and wait for the next brave bug to crawl into my trap.

  
  

  I was glad I’d brought the books, and such good books.  I learned a lot and they put me in a reflective and meditative mood.  I searched my soul and got to know myself a bit better.  At first, I was waiting for the weather to let up to get back on the trail.  And then I started getting strong feelings and persistent impressions that the guys were getting in trouble without me, that I probably shouldn’t have left them alone.  A couple of times I built a campfire and had some hot tea and soup.  Most of the time I just lay in the tent, squashed skeeters coming through the net, thought about the famous Toklat Grizzlies, and read or reflected or meditated or thought about my two men back in Anchorage.

  
  

  After three days of that, when the sun came out and the skeeters really came out in force, I struck the tent, cleaned up camp, and headed back out the trail.  At the highway, I avoided all the hassle of flagging down a train by setting down my pack and sitting on it with my thumb stuck out.  My first ride took me all the way back to the city.

  

  • 12:02 am
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