Survivors of an Alaskan Adventure

As the captain of the ship pulled into port in Juneau, Alaska, guiding this massive vessel as if parallel parking between other cruise ships, I thought of my mother trying to teach me how to parallel park a car. Alaska always makes me think of my mom.

One time, Mom came home from work, her eyes dancing and her tongue wagging as she played with the idea of moving to Fairbanks, Alaska. Like a cat with catnip, she pawed and batted the prospects, and I don’t remember when she lost interest. A great place to visit, but I would not want to live there.

My mom, a young widow, displayed her pioneer spirit, moving to Nevada. To gamble a move from Las Vegas to Alaska? A place known for attracting the renegade, the outlier, the odd man out who wants to stay out, this seemed perfectly reasonable to her.

“The odds are pretty good but the goods are pretty odd.”

Reference to the ratio of 10 men to every woman in Alaska

The guy who made my omelette at breakfast told me he was from Moab, Utah. He told my husband he was from Virginia. He told another person at our table he was from Colorado, which is what his name tag read: “Travis–––CO.”

His quirkiness made me wonder if the people who live and work up there have created a game to see how long they can go without telling the truth. Bait the tourists with stories, exaggerations, and prevarications. Regale your friends, Laughing all the way . . . Oh, what fun it is to lie when no one knows your game.

Alaska’s Historic Gold Rush Fever

Christened “America’s last frontier,” purchased from Russia in 1867, Alaska means “mainland––lit. object toward which the action of the sea is directed.” [1]

Today, 2.26 million people visit Alaska annually and 80,000 visit the Yukon. My husband and I did both.

On the train ride from Skagway to Whitehorse, I saw piles of dead trees, beached like giant bones of creatures once alive. Blurring past the train’s window, the only picture I could take in my head reminded me of Ezekiel’s question, “Can these bones live?”

I had to keep reminding myself I wasn’t on a ride at Disneyland.

Noella Day, female physician from Chicago who followed the Gold Fever trail at the turn of the 20th century wrote in a letter, “Now beyond the pale of civilization, we pass into the frozen zone where nature has hidden her treasure.”[2]

The Difference Between an Accident and an Adventure

In Dawson City, the tour guide arranged for my husband and me to stay in a suite in the Dawson Hotel where the next morning, July 13, the bulletin board read, “Happy Birthday to Harrison Ford who turns 66 today.” We had heard rumors in Skagway that he had been sighted. It’s a little unnerving to think that he is now 79.

That one night provided rest and calm before the storm.

On a day each person on our tour was happy to have survived, I realized a difference between an accident and an adventure.

Our group left Dawson City aboard the Yukon Queen to Eagle, where we would transfer to a bus (“land yacht”) for a 6 hour+ ride on the Taylor Highway to Tok.

One engine of the Yukon Queen jet boat caught fire. A picnic lunch on board turned to slight panic despite assurances that the current would not take us back down river.

Boarding the bus late, we were bound for the “Top of the World Highway”––reference to the entire area ahead.

Accounts varied as to how it happened, but on the first stretch of straight road after crossing a bridge and the part of the Taylor Highway called “The Saddle”––straight down on both sides 1,000 feet––our bus met an oncoming white pickup with a camper on back.

The bus driver said that the pickup dropped a wheel off the gravel road, then that driver overcorrected, threatening to crash into the bus. This led the bus driver to swerve just as he had accelerated after coming around a winding curve. The bus dropped its right rear wheels and fish-tailed until it came to a stop, trailing 45 yards of gravel before resting at a 40 degree angle.

Instinctively, passengers on the right side of the bus leapt to the left side to counter balance the weight. In those few seconds, it was easy to imagine the bus rolling down the mountainside before coming to rest against mature trees.

It felt like a long time passed before it was decided that we would evacuate the bus. Too long, it seemed to me. Gravel had blocked both the front and back doors of the bus.

reflex––the driver swerved

instinct––the passengers jumped to the other side of the bus

One of the passengers wore a T-shirt with a picture of the world: “SAVEOUR PLANET”

A play on Savior, I’d hate to think safety in this situation or the planet’s welfare depends on me. Finding myself in the wilderness magnified my awareness of the comfort of Scripture. “What is man that Thou art mindful of him?” and “Thou God seest me.”

People can believe they hold the answer to the world’s problems and at the same time fail to handle their own.

Exit through a window on the left side of the bus

No one panicked. Thank God. We were still more than 100 miles from our destination for the night.

People kept grouping and re-grouping, sharing bits of conversation, adrenalin slowly subsiding as a remarkable calm settled without complaints.

Most people started acknowledging the good: No rain; not too hot; it snowed here 2 weeks before.

One woman told me that her husband had washed and dried her jeans so that she had to wear a pair of old black pants that day. “I put the jeans on this morning, thinking I’m not going to be comfortable in these.” She was grateful not to have to crawl out a window, climb down a chain ladder in a pair of jeans she said were now 2 sizes too small.

A couple from Brazil had their 16-year-old twins, Mark and Ryan, with them. I chatted with their mom because she was shaken. I said, “If our kids had been on that bus, I would have been shaken too. It’s one thing to imagine that it might be your time to meet your maker, but . . .”

Mark and Ryan were the only kids on board. They were adorable, and like Harrison Ford (and me) have aged a bit since then.

Waiting to be Rescued

An hour passed before another bus collected us at the top of the world.

Some of us laughed about stories we had been told. Like the bicyclist wearing a yellow sign Tom the bus driver pointed out. “It’s part of the social program for bears: Meals on Wheels. And for motorcyclists, they are fast food.”

I had seen a bumper sticker: “Kids who hunt, fish, and gather aren’t out mugging old ladies.”

Reflecting on this experience, I decided that the difference between an accident and an adventure: No one was hurt.

The boat caught fire. The bus tipped over. I wrote in my journal, “What a day!”

[1] https://www.netstate.com/states/intro/ak_intro.htm

[2] Gold Fever, PBS American Experience documentary https://archive.org/details/AEGoldFever