2. So Where Exactly Am I Going?

THE EXACT PATH I can't exactly determine. I have an itinerary. It includes Gunnison Beach and Niagara Falls. Detroit and Ann Arbor. Mackinaw Island and Minneapolis. Cedar Rapids and St. Louis.

And more.

It should include five presidential libraries (Ford, Hoover, Lincoln, Truman, Eisenhower), one of which is not an "official" library (Lincoln's is administered by the state of Illinois and the city of Springfield, not the NARA.) Presidential libraries didn't get their start until Hoover.

The Badlands are included, only a few months after the fateful Drunk-Hitchhiker-Stuck-In-A-Snow-Drift Incident. So is Mt. Rushmore, only a few months after the There's-A-Blizzard-In-South-Dakota-Maybe-We-Should-Get-Off-This-Mountain incident.

Yellowstone. That includes the Old Geyser. Then north to Bozeman, where Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance takes place. The parts where he's not on the motorcycle.

The Unabomber's cabin is somewhere up there around Glacier National Park, I've been told.

And more.

I might be doing myself a disservice if I completely stuck to a plan; I will carry a map, but I should not stick to the atlas.

A friend even commented today that my trip, which has a day-to-day plan, in a sense, but no car yet, and no camping gear yet, and no food yet, had a "seat of your pants" feel to it, and that "seat of your pants" might not be the best way to plan for a road trip to Alaska.

But I disagree.

"Seat of your pants" is the ONLY way to plan a road trip to Alaska. You're not supposed to have it all mapped out. There is supposed to be an element of mischief and danger. Of mistakes and adventure.

If you plan to make it to Alaska, then you should plan to feed off of uncertainty.


THE ROAD TRIP had it's beginnings, I realize now, in my teenage years on the Long Island Sound. Back when I had finally gotten over my fear of water--and, more specifically, of putting my head in the water--and became a swimmer.

No one special, just a promotion from a wader or a drowner.

A swimmer that did the front crawl crooked and the butterfly sloppy and the breaststroke whenever he tired.

I liked to go down to the beach in the late afternoon, when the sun was tired, and dip into the ocean, warm in contrast to the cooling breeze, and head out to the deep buoys. I would swim as far as I could, hundreds of meters out there, alone, without a tube or a partner.

I'd swim and swim and swim and swim until I could look back, and see the people dotting the shore like little ants, and turn and swim more.

And I'd swim more. Swim, until the fear arrived.

It wasn't worth it to me to swim without fear. To swim without thinking to myself, in a desperate ramble of a thought, that there was no way, humanly possible, to make it to shore.

The trip wasn't worth it to me without doubt.

So I'd swim, and the fear would tense up my chest, and I'd start losing control of my breaths, and sometimes, out there deep and alone and cold and desperate, I'd even start crying. Crying because there was no one to help me back and I had to do it on my own no matter what.

A sad, pathetic, desperate cry.

And at that point, I'd turn, and I'd swim even further.

Swim until there was no way physically possible I could imagine myself making it back to shore. That the colony would continue on without me, another worker lost to the surf. And then, only then, when the fear shook my arms in front of me, when I couldn't do the front crawl, because I couldn't put my head in the water, lest I choke on the waves--

When I pushed forward with a juvenile frog kick that it mattered--

That the trip was worth it.

To know what it was like, to feel for a second, being completely at the mercy of the elements, and to accept, for whatever it was worth, that no matter how careful you were with your diet, and no matter how smart you were with your time, that in no way, whatsoever, were you meant to live forever.

You were to live for that one afternoon. At the beach. With the sun drooling in the west. Skimming the top of water, a bob, in a pool of glass.


SO THE TRIP starts on Sunday. And it is meant to go west. But west is the safety. West is made of truck stops and motels. Friends and partners. There are hamburgers on the way west and they are served with giant mounds of French fries.

But north. Where I hook a right at Montana. And head to Calgary. And climb Banff. And more north to Edmonton. That is where the dip begins.

When the summer is tired. When there is, between me and Alaska, two-thousand miles of road through the Canadian Rockies, British Columbia, and the Yukon Territory.

North. And I will drive north and north and north and north, and somewhat west, until there is no turning back--the return is equal to the balance--until the wheel shakes with the loneliness, until the sun ducks behind the Earth. The evening and the night.

And I will know, I imagine, and I hope, and I wonder, that is what I was meant to be and do and live. Four wheels on a mountain, curling about the cliff, a glare against the windshield leading me in the direction up.