The Road to McCarthy (44 page)

“Sure thing, Peete! Through that door, down the stairs, you’ll find the bar straight ahead of you. You enjoy now!”

I go down the stairs and find myself in a long, brightly-lit tunnel, a subterranean aluminum tube with an incongruous floral carpet. It’s like a set from a Polish science fiction film. At the far end I climb another flight of steps, and emerge inside the restaurant I left two minutes ago.

“Can I get you a table, sir?” asks the waitress, with no apparent awareness that she asked me the same thing moments ago. Yes, I think, you can get me a table, and I’ll take it back through the tunnel and hit Pinhead with it. I can’t have a drink here. There’d be an awkward, deathly silence, with each of us thinking how sad the other one’s life is. My best bet is to have a party in my room, so I walk to the convenience store and buy two bottles of Alaskan amber beer, a bag of nuts and a copy of the
Alaskan Daily News
. giant squid, says the headline on the front page of the paperjust as I’d hoped it would. In a world where three species become extinct every day, it’s comforting to know that Alaska can still lay on weird nature by the bucketload.

Mind you, it would have had to be a big bucket. According to the paper a fisherman was startled to see a deep-sea halibut he’d hooked rise to the surface with a monster on its back. “I thought it was an octopus,” said the fisherman, “then thought, this ain’t right, it’s got a five-foot head.” He realized he was dealing with a rare giant squid, and from somewhere discovered the imagery to deal with the situation. “It looked like a stained-glass window of a halibut, where the arms and tentacles of the squid were the lead between the panes,” he raved. “The squid had totally encapsulated the halibut. It was the most fascinating thing.”

Indeed it was. The paper says that “the mythic giant squids are rarely found and almost never seen alive.” So what did the fisherman do? “I fried up a little bit just to check it out,” he said, after gaffing and gutting the rarity. “It was incredibly salty and had a bit of an aftertaste.” Two thousand people turned up to see the remains, and the weight of the crowd started to sink the floating dock on which the unfortunate sea monster had been
carved up. “It was quite a menagerie,” said the harbormaster. “I saw the pharmacist, I saw the judge.”

The fisherman had the final word. “I cut the halibut loose and, my goodness, he was tickled pink to get out of there. This turned out good for everybody involved, except the squid.”

I drain the second beer, turn off the bedside light, and lie there in the dark thinking about my evening: Pinhead, the tunnel and the squid. Ten minutes later I get up again, open my bottle of Irish Scotch and turn on
Saturday Night Live
. It’s showing a sketch about the trend for successful forty-something white men to dump their wives for trophy relationships with elderly black women. When it finishes I station-hop for a while, but I can’t find an episode of
Cheers
anywhere. Alaska must be even more remote than I thought.

The road to McCarthy
is famous, at least among people who’ve heard of McCarthy and tried to get there. Known as “the worst road in Alaska,” an accolade that’s nailed to a tree near its start, this sixty-mile un-paved track follows the route of an old railway across canyons, past glaciers and over a wooden-plank bridge that until a few years ago had no sides. Rivets from the old rail still sometimes rise to the surface to puncture tires. The entire length is populated by bears. To enhance McCarthy’s reputation as one of the most remote settlements in North America, the road stops at a river a mile short of town, and you have to walk the rest of the way.

Today the road to McCarthy is closed.

“It’s the season after winter and before spring. It’s called break-up,” explains Neil from the McCarthy Lodge, which is where I’ll be staying if I can get there, which at the moment I can’t. “The snow and the glaciers have started to melt. There’s several feet of slush in some places, so even four-wheel drives can’t get through, but it’s down to the gravel in other places, so neither can snowmachines. Plus, it’s snowing hard right now.”

I tell him it’s sunny in Anchorage.

“Well, there’s a pilot supposed to be flying to Anchorage today, but right
now he can’t take off. If he makes it, he could bring you back, if he’s able to land.”

If he makes it? If he’s able to land? What manner of crazy talk is this?

“Or you could try and drive. Get a
big
four by four, with airbags, and plenty of steel between you and the outside world. And if you get stuck, be decisive. You gotta know whether to hike forward, hike backward, or stay in the vehicle till somebody finds you.”

How long would that be?

“Hard to say. Why don’t you consider your options, let me know what you plan to do. There’s no problem about your room, because there’s no other visitors in town.”

I go down for breakfast but can’t find it, and have to ask at the desk. There’s no sign of Pinhead, but a disarmingly normal woman is on hand to direct me back down the tunnel. When I get to the restaurant, the waitress is missing as well. Maybe she’s married to Pinhead and Sunday is their day for halibut fishing. The room that last night had been as cheery as the bar in
The Shining
is now full of happy diners. I take a window seat in the sunshine and consider my options. I think I’ll have the reindeer sausages.

McCarthy is
a couple of hundred miles east of Anchorage, on the way to the border with the Yukon territory of Canada. It is surrounded by one of the largest areas of wilderness in the world, where four of the great mountain ranges of North America collide. Nine of the highest peaks in the United States are there, surrounded by enormous glaciers, rivers and canyons, and teeming with seriously wild wildlife. McCarthy, old by Alaskan standards, dates from the first decade of the twentieth century, when it developed as a social hub for the copper mines at Kennicott, five miles away. When the mines closed it went into decline, and for a while became a ghost town. The current year-round population, depending on which source you consult, is somewhere between fourteen and twenty. There seems a good chance I’ll be able to meet them all, if only I can get there.

Unlike the other places I have been visiting, McCarthy has no known Irish connection. Something about it, though, is calling out. Having adhered for many years to the maxim “Never pass a bar that has your name on it,” it seems only right to add: “And take pains to seek out any town that does the same.” If you travel in hope rather than with certain knowledge, something interesting usually happens; and even if it doesn’t, what an absurd affirmation of identity and existence to be able to look at your name on a place sign and say, “Well. Here I am then.” Hidden at the end of one of the loneliest roads on earth, the town seems the right place to end a journey that has been driven as much by instinct as by design, and which has paid me back with many happy accidents. So I’m going there because we share a name; and because, like most people, I’ve always fancied going to Alaska, because it’s big, scary and far away. Wherever you are, it’s far away. But as well as all this, I also have a hunch. I didn’t have it when I first set out, but now I want to pursue it all the way to the end of the road.

“Aviation in itself
is not inherently dangerous, but like the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect,” says a sign on the wall of the hut. Next to it is a handbill. “$15,000 Reward. Find This Aircraft, Lost on a Flight from Anchorage. Pilot and four passengers.” Outside on the airstrip a tiny red-and-yellow plane sits on its skis among the piles of snow, looking like a toy that has been unwrapped on Christmas morning and abandoned in favor of more impressive gifts. This is how I will get to McCarthy, if the pilot ever comes back. The guy in the hut says he’s gone into town to pick up some shopping. I’ve had a look inside the plane. There are two seats and sixteen cases of beer. Perhaps he’s had to go back to pick up the wine and spirits.

I’ve hopped between tropical islands on these little bush planes, but I’ve never been in one in the kind of colossal landscape we’ll be going through today. It seemed sensible to prepare properly for such a journey, so I went into town for a couple of margaritas. After all, a relaxed coward is a happy coward. I found a comfortable, modern-looking bar called the F St. Station, which is according to the menu “the oldest bar in Anchorage in its original
location, originally an Irish pub frequented by aviators …. to our customers, especially you aviators, thanks very much ….” I didn’t like the sound of that one bit. Aviators don’t have any business drinking. That’s the passengers’ job. My afternoon departure time has already been put back twice while the pilot does his mysterious “shopping.” What’s he really up to? I looked round the bar until my gaze came to rest on the bleary-eyed soak knocking back the bloody marys in the corner. I had a vision of him tottering across the runway with a hand over one eye trying to aim the key at the handle on the cockpit door, and immediately ordered another margarita.

“Hi. I’m Kelly,” says a big, bearded, genial man who’s just walked into the hut. He’s carrying a brown paper bag containing three bottles of red wine, so he must be the pilot, but at least it isn’t the guy from the bar. Is he planning any more errands? No. It’s straight out to the plane, squeeze my little bag on top of the beer and wedge the wine down the side, door shut, headphones and seat belt on, taxi what seems like about fifteen yards along the runway, then, whoop, we’re up in the air and heading directly towards those enormous snowy mountains. “This is real flying, eh?” says Kelly, as I nod and smile and try to come to terms with the worrying sensation of being airborne in a Morris Minor. I try to distract myself by reading something, but there is no in-flight movie menu or brochure advertising expensive perfume and alarm clocks shaped like airplanes. The only reading matter available is a selection of little dials with warnings about how far it’s safe to fall if the engine cuts out. I make a conscious decision, almost certainly margarita-inspired, to stop being such a wuss and enjoy what may well be the flight of my life. I relax the ferocious grip I have taken on the dashboard, so that my fingers are only purple instead of white.

We fly to the left of the mountain range that faces the airstrip, then on through a dreamscape of white peaks we can almost reach out and touch. Far below are frozen rivers and crystalline glaciers glinting turquoise and emerald in the brilliant afternoon sun. Kelly’s deft hand on the controls inspires confidence, not least because you sense it’s important to him to get those bottles of wine home in one piece. We talk using headsets with microphones attached, looking like singers in a boy band who have fallen victim
to a mysterious aging virus. He’s good company, pointing out the different mountain ranges and the snowmachine tracks left by reckless extreme-sporters on mountainsides prone to catastrophic avalanches. As he sees me relax his fund of anecdotes starts to stray from what you want to be hearing when you’re hovering above oblivion like a special effect.

“There was a forecast for some turbulence on the way back today, but looks like we might’ve missed it. My wife and I stopped overnight along the coast one time, were meant to carry on home the next day. The forecast was for extreme turbulence, but we thought we’d try anyway, because sometimes those predictions are way out. Well, it was so wild up there it scared us.”

Well, imagine that, but I wish he’d stop now.

“We decided we’d have to head straight back to the airfield. And then we saw this other little plane, kicking and reeling about right over the ocean—and that is not a place you want to be in turbulent weather. He landed right after us, and he was whiter than the snow on the ground. Said he’d had two gas canisters in there, not tied down, just crashing all round the cockpit. The gusts were so strong they ripped holes in his floorboards ….”

Floorboards?

“…. and punctured his roof. Y’know, we think we’re in control, and we do our best, but it’s only a machine, and if nature decides ….”

Yeah, okay, Kelly. That’s enough now.

“…. that mountain over there? Well, in the 1960s a freight plane went straight into ….”

I’m trying to think of something else, but find myself remembering the Australian bush pilot who regaled me with horror stories during our flight into Arnhemland. His favorite was the one about the guy who’d waded across the river at pub closing time for a bet, and had been bitten in half by a crocodile. So he lost the bet.

“…. down a 12,000-foot crevice. Rumor was, there was a big shipment of gold on board. Nearly forty years now, and no one’s ever been able to get near the wreck and find out. Someone tried a couple of years ago, but it was too dangerous, because the snow is so unstable that….”

There’s a little electronic crystal ball on the dash that says it’s only fifty
miles to our destination, and now Kelly is pointing out of my wide window and tilting the plane, not to push me out, but to show me the McCarthy road. I can see where it skirts the edge of the glacier and the melting ice has made it impassable. As we’re rounding the glacier, hugging the side of the mountain, the winds suddenly hit. It’s seriously bumpy for the first time—but, like the man said, this is real flying, and he seems to be in control—and against all my better instincts I find myself wanting it to bump a little bit more as we swoop low over the first buildings we’ve seen since the hut at the airfield in Anchorage. McCarthy is just a handful of wooden houses, like the cowboy town in
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
where Warren Beatty was the businessman and Julie Christie came to set up the brothel. A little farther on we sweep low past the deserted structures of the Kennicott mine. We bank steeply to our left over the glacier, and make a perfect landing on the McCarthy airstrip. Kelly turns off the engine, and I get out and listen to the most silent place I have ever heard.

BEER—IT’S YOUR FRIEND
,
says an ad on the wall of the bar in the McCarthy Lodge. There are two other customers besides me and Kelly, one of whom has green hair. The woman behind the bar has radical eye makeup and facial piercings, but the modern accoutrements of these two young people are offset by the other customer, a long-haired and longer-bearded bib-overall and lumberjack shirt kind of a guy who looks like he’s been living in a log cabin without a mirror or running water since 1972. There’s an old darkwood bar counter, an impressive mirror marked “Golden Saloon” and a pool table piled with the cases of beer we’ve just unloaded from the plane. The Soggy Bottom Boys are singing “Man of Constant Sorrow” on the stereo, and the Black Butte porter we’ve airlifted in from Anchorage is full-bodied, rich in flavor and ideal, as they say in the wine supplements, for drinking now. I mean, what isn’t?