An Adventure in Spirit and Road: Canada and Alaska, Part 4: A Coda

Running the Symbolic Gauntlet, Part 4 (final)

I knew the trip was ending. I knew real life was beginning to pound its needy fist against the door of my life. I knew I couldn’t outrun or escape reality. It, of course, as always, eventually had to be faced. We were heading home. I felt slightly depressed, mostly just drained.

Adventure, going out into the world and inside of the alien country of your own psyche, was what made us grow up, locate our passion and purpose, and find ourselves in the world. It helped us individuate and separate emotionally and physically from our places of birth and our parents. The slicing of the symbolic umbilical cord, if you like.

~

The next few days were thrilling. We got onto Highway 97, and then Highway 16 again (Highway of Tears) at Prince George. The usual gorgeous landscape. We caught, off 16, Holy Cross Forest Service Road (FSR) to yet another Hip Camp farm near Frasier Lake. The drive took an hour and a half or so along bumpy, sketchy, winding dirt roads alongside rivers and lakes with mostly zero cell service.

The farm was incredible. We were alone. We parked at the site along the river. Balsam Fir and Lodgepole Pine everywhere surrounding us. Little fear of bears due to property fence. We set up the tent and relaxed, eating our MRE’s (freeze-dried Meals Ready to Eat, backpacking food). By dark we were in the tent reading. Soon we passed out. In the middle of the night Britney woke me up, scared to walk the 200 feet alone at night to the cabin-like wooden outhouse. Grudgingly, I got up and, barefoot, walked across the green field with her. As I waited for her to pee I did so myself outside. When I looked up the stars were breathtaking, bright white pulsating against the deep black of night. The Milky Way was thick and soupy and recalled to my mind 1,000 nights in the backyard with my father as a kid in Ojai, asking him about the stars, planets, aliens and galaxies.

We walked back and reentered the tent. Soon we slept. But around 3am we heard a disturbing noise, a sound which distinctly seemed like the breathy, loud harumphhhh of a bear. It sounded the way bears sound in films before they attack. I wanted to just go back to sleep and ignore it but, probably wisely, Britney forced us to sleep in the back of the cramped Prius. We did.

In the morning, while eating our breakfast MREs, we spotted our nighttime friend: A big Black Bear about 50 yards away, on the other side of the meagre fence. We watched him carefully, snapping photos and videoing him. He came closer. At one point he climbed over the fence. Jesus Christ, I heard myself say. Several times he stood up to full height. Beautiful as the area was, we finished eating, packed up and got out of there.

On the way out of the farm we bumped into the Hip Camp guy. We stopped the car and talked to him for 20 minutes. He told us complex directions on how to get the hour and a half from the farm to Highway 16 again. We recorded it with britney’s iPhone. We felt more or less confident.

But when we got back on the road the confidence dissipated.

*

First we discovered that his voice had not been recorded on Britney’s iPhone at all, or at least not in any decipherable way. We’d been standing too far away from the guy. We tried desperately to remember the verbalized directions. A right and then two lefts? Or a left and then two rights? We couldn’t exactly recall. We had cell service on my phone at the beginning. The Prius had half a tank of gas. It had gone on tough dirt roads twice now, to the glacier and to this farm. We’d be ok.

It was an adventure, right?

We’d been listening to Joe Rogan’s recent interview with Jordan Peterson and they’d been discussing the Hero’s Journey and societal initiation for boys in contemporary times compared to the past, both internal and external. The “call to adventure” was one of the main Biblical Western myths and lessons, Peterson said. Adventure, going out into the world and inside of the alien country of your own psyche, was what made us grow up, locate our passion and purpose, and find ourselves in the world. It helped us individuate and separate emotionally and physically from our places of birth and our parents. The slicing of the symbolic umbilical cord, if you like.

This was our call to adventure. In many ways my life had always been an adventure. Aren't all our lives an adventure? Isn’t life itself a grand, mysterious adventure?

We ended up taking a right and then some lefts. The road was dusty and empty, surrounded by forest and distant mountains, sometimes nearby water. Both our phones soon had no cell service. No one was around. The minutes ticked by. A half hour. An hour. The day grew warmer. The sun rose up higher in the sky. We pulled over to pee. We drank self-made tea, coffee and water from big jugs we bought. We rolled the windows down and listened to music. We discussed what might happen—how this might go—interspersed with long stretches of silence. After a while some big trucks drove past us, rumbling the little Prius, leaving raging dust in their wake. Each time this happened we rolled our windows up momentarily.

About an hour in we spotted a medium-sized Black Bear in the road ahead of us maybe 25 yards. We scared it off as we approached and it started running away from us. We slowly, carefully followed it, getting him on video. He ran into the brush and was gone after 30 seconds. (See video.)

At a certain point we got a little service on my phone. Enough to partially see the Apple/Google maps. We were going the right direction; east, towards Highway 16, slowly. Two hours had gone by. I’d been driving on and off between 25 and 70 km/hour. (We’d switched the gauge to km versus miles.) Finally, after about two-and-a-half hours of slow, rough driving, we exited out of the wilderness and onto good ole Highway 16. Thank Jesus. We made it.  

*

After hitting 16 it was easy-peasy, just cruising the highway, surrounded by the typical landscape, A/C on, music going, happy as clams. I felt the ghost of Kerouac and McCandless, but also my maternal Grandfather, a man born and raised in Texas until he was 16, once upon a time a logger in 1950s Eureka, in Northern California, where my mother was actually born. I’d seen a photo once of my grandpa with overalls and thick mutton-chops with his upper lip shaved. He looked like a hillbilly. I knew I had some of him—some of that—in me.

(By the way I should have mentioned: Britney had brought and read my copy of Hillbilly Elegy, which I wrote about here, recently.) City-boy as I’d often tried to be—living in Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, Oakland and New York City—I was, and always had been, in my bones a country boy. It was in my nature. My nature is all natural, not citified. That said: I crave both city and country. I need both, backpacking and wilderness combined with literary readings, live music, architecture, sophistication, culture, the madness of crowds.

It's just who I am. I have embraced my inner opposites. Freud and Jung would be proud.

*

Britney and I discussed hiking the whole PCT—Pacific Crest Trail—someday; six months from Mexico to Canada. Or driving around, being on the road for months at a time, possibly even years. Life was short and precious. Why waste it with homes, cities, ego and money?

We ended up staying in a lovely BnB apartment along Highway 97 in Lac Le Hache, near Mile 122 and along Lake Le Hache. It was a beautiful place run by Chinese Canadians. Very nice people. That night we got pizza in town and met the owner, a half-crazy Russian-Canadian man who empathized deeply with Ukrainians and who goes every year to Ukraine—he said he just returned from his last trip in July—and gives out free food to the suffering poor locals. A very fascinating man. He talked to us outside at our table the entire time we were there. Britney sipped white wine and listened; I ate my Hawaiian pizza ravenously. I appreciated people. I respected people. I wrote about people.

But I’d never liked people. They bothered me. Assaulted my sense of freedom and dignity and solitude and individuality. So I sat silent and let Britney ask the questions.