Voyager: Travel Writings (28 page)

This was a vehicle that for sheer bulk and brawn couldn’t be equaled by any other so-called passenger car on the highway. It might have been a guzzler, but there wasn’t an RV or an SUV anywhere that the Hummer couldn’t knock from the sidewalk into the gutter with a simple dip and shrug of one broad shoulder. It was six-foot-six in height, close to seven feet wide, and just under sixteen feet long. It was built like a bank vault on wheels, thick all over and squared. Cut. Not an ounce of body fat. Driving it was like riding on the shoulders of Mike Tyson in his prime. It wasn’t sexy, however, unless you think Mike Tyson is sexy. People, especially guys,
grinned, flashed the victory sign, and stepped aside. “Hey, champ, how’s it goin’?”

I knew I wasn’t supposed to like this car. It was the most politically incorrect automobile in America. Maybe in the world. I considered who had purchased the cruder, more forthrightly militaristic H1 model that preceded it, and who therefore would likely be first in line for the H2: Arnold Schwarzenegger, yes, I knew that, and Bruce Willis; but also Don King, Coolio, Karl Malone, Dennis Rodman, Al Unser Sr. and Jr. Ted Turner owned an H1, not surprisingly. And Roseanne Barr. And, of course, Mike Tyson, who’d bought a brace of Hummer H1s for himself and a few more for his friends. As party favors, I guessed. By and large, except for Ted Turner, maybe, this was not the green crowd.

I considered its heritage, its DNA. Its closest modern-day relative was the scruffy, friendly-looking Jeep, which had evolved out of the original, mud-spattered World War II jeep and still summoned the spirits of Ernie Pyle, Bill Mauldin, and a generation of unshaven, exhausted foot soldiers bumming a ride back to the base. The Hummer, however, was the direct descendant of the post–Vietnam War era’s Humvee, which was to the old WWII jeep as Sly Stallone was to Audie Murphy. The Humvee was a jeep on steroids, built to handle anything from Afghan road rage to a good Gulf War. Its newest, civilian incarnation, the H2, was dressed out with enough leather and polished walnut dashboard trim and high-tech add-ons to pass for chic in the Hamptons or fly on Rodeo Drive, and enough tinted glass, CD speakers, and sheer size to become the official hip-hoppers’ posse car. It was a gigantic steel jock strap. The vehicle went straight to the testosterone-drenched fantasy life of the adolescent American male, no matter how old he was, and butch-slapped it into shape. Driving down the Kenai Peninsula in my Hummer, I kept remembering how I felt when I was a kid in New Hampshire cruising around town in winter in a dump truck loaded with sand and a snowplow attached to the front, feeling larger and stronger and taller and wider and harder
than anyone else on the road. It was a good feeling then, and, I had to confess, it was a good feeling now.

Along the Russian River, a short ways south of Resurrection Pass, I saw where all those RVs, pickups, and SUVs from the Lower 48 had been headed. The salmon were running, and the people in those vehicles were like hungry bears trundling to the riverbank to pack their bellies with fish and roe. The glacial river was cold and wide and fast and mineral rich, a strange, almost tropical shade of aqua, and thousands of fishermen and -women, but mostly -men, were lined up shoulder to shoulder for miles along both banks, mindlessly, recklessly, hurling their hooks into the rushing water and one after the other yanking them immediately back with a glittering, twisting salmon snagged at the end. It was the warm-up to an annual potlatch, an ancient midsummer harvest rite, and the native people had followed the example of the bears for thousands of years. But somehow, as I drove slowly past them, these people—in their greed and desperation to take from the river as many of the salmon that survived last year’s rite as they could—seemed oddly postmodern. Postapocalyptic, actually. For soon there would be no more salmon returning here to spawn. We all knew that. Never mind the catastrophic effect of dams and oil spills and nuclear leakage, we knew that the millions of adult salmon being hooked, bagged, and tossed into coolers and freezers from California’s Klamath River north to Alaska were likely to be the last of these magnificent creatures we’d ever see. And none of these folks flipping fish into tubs and coolers looked especially hungry. They were mostly on the overfed side of fitness. So why were they pigging out like this? I wondered. This was more like a feeding frenzy than a ritual, and it sure was not a sport, I decided, and drove on in my Hummer.

Halfway to Homer, I checked the onboard dashboard computer and noted that I was averaging just over ten miles a gallon. And did I connect that fact with the feeding frenzy I’d just observed along the banks of the Russian River? Of course, I did. These were the Last Days. The planet was running out of everything except
human beings. Clean water, boreal forests, wild animals, birds, and fish—soon all of it would be forever gone. Fossil fuels, too. Gone. Yet we Americans, especially, were consuming fossil fuels at an accelerating rate, and to aid and abet our consumption, we were building and buying with each year more and more ten-miles-per-gallon vehicles—Suburbans and Expeditions and Navigators and Land Cruisers and $100,000 Hummers painted sunset-orange metallic. It was a different sort of Last Days feeding frenzy than the one along the Russian River, but related, and the planet, as if preparing to explode, was heating up. The paradox was that here in Alaska, with fewer people per square mile and more square miles of protected wilderness than any other state in the union, the calamitous effects of global warming were more obvious than anywhere on earth. Since the 1970s, mean summer temperatures in Alaska had risen five degrees, and winter temperatures had risen ten. The permafrost had gone bog soft, glaciers were shriveling, the ice pack was dissolving into the sea like sugar cubes, and on the vast Kenai Peninsula nearly four million acres of white spruce, thirty-eight million trees, had been killed by the spruce bark beetle, a quarter-inch-long, six-legged flying insect that, because of the increased number of frost-free days, reproduced now at twice its normal rate, enabling it to overwhelm the trees’ natural defense mechanisms.

I wasn’t puzzled as to why GM, Ford, and Toyota built and sold vehicles like the Hummer, the Expedition, and the Land Cruiser, and couldn’t condemn them for it; they were in the automobile business, and these behemoths were big sellers. What puzzled me was why so many Americans were jostling for a place in line to buy one. It would not have surprised me if there were something deep in the human psyche, the vestigial male chimp-brain, maybe, that makes us rush to the trough as soon as we sense it’s nearly empty and snarf down as much of what’s left as we can. It isn’t greed. It’s an atavistic fear mechanism kicking in, the sort of move made by our lower primate cousins, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, whenever they notice that the troop’s population has outgrown its food supply
and they are going to have to move to a new forest, one controlled by an unfriendly, possibly tougher troop, or else stop having sex. In a paroxysm of anxiety, the big males instantly start gobbling up every banana in sight.

Such were my melancholy thoughts as I made the long, gradual descent on the Sterling Highway from the town of Soldotna to the old Russian settlement in Ninilchik. On my right was Cook Inlet and on the far side of the bay, profiled in purple by an evening sun still high in the cloudless sky, were the volcanic cones of the Aleutian Range. On my left, as far as I could see, was the ancient spruce forest, devastated by the work of that little yellow bark beetle. The trees were withered and gray, all of them dead or dying, miles and miles of tall, ghostly specters of trees that looked like they’d been hit by radioactive poisoning, as if the Kenai Peninsula were downwind from Chernobyl. I was doing eighty along the wilderness highway in my Hummer, cruising through a vast forest destroyed by the gas-gulping culture of which there was no purer expression than this vehicle, and I was feeling bad. Not that it wasn’t fun to drive this damn thing. It was just that I’d have to be a cynic not to feel a wrench of conscience driving it here. These drooping gray trees were like accusatory ghosts.

The Russian settlement was from another century, however—a cluster of small, white, wooden houses with tiny windows and a graveyard and an Orthodox church atop a grassy hump overlooking the sea far below. It was a Chekhov story waiting to be told. I turned off the main road and found my way along a twisting lane down to the narrow beach at the base of a set of high, sandy cliffs shot through with runnels and caves. A magnificent pair of bald eagles flew back and forth along the cliffs, switchbacking their way toward the top, looking for an easy-picking supper of seagull and plover eggs. At the top, they crossed over me, gained altitude with a half-dozen powerful beats of their enormous wings, and headed out to sea, floating on rising currents toward the distant mountains. I wanted to follow them, and actually did try it for a while,
driving the Hummer a short ways into the water and south along the beach, testing the manufacturer’s claim that it could drive in twenty inches of water. It more than passed the test. For several miles I guided the vehicle over rock slabs and through shifting, wet sandbars, until the beach gradually narrowed, and soon I had no choice but to drive in the water now, for the tide was coming in, and I couldn’t go back. I could only go forward and hope that I’d come to a break in the cliffs and a road leading away from the beach before I had to abandon the Hummer to the sea.

At the last possible minute, the beach suddenly widened, and the cliffs receded, and I came upon a caravan of a dozen or more RVs parked where Fall Creek entered the sea at Clam Gulch. A herd of bearded, big-bellied beer drinkers in duckbill caps and flannel shirts leaned on the hoods and fenders of their vehicles, smoking cigarettes and talking about fishing. These were the guys known in their hometowns as “hot shits.” Their wives and girlfriends lounged in beach chairs close to a big driftwood fire on the beach and watched their kids chase their dogs.

The men spotted the Hummer first and reacted as if a mastodon were stomping up the beach toward them. Their mouths dropped; they grinned and pointed and called to their wives and kids to come look, look, it’s a goddamned Hummer! A brand-new, bright red Hummer, its huge tires thickened with clinging sand, had come dripping wet from the bottom of the sea. They waved me to a stop and crowded around the vehicle, firing questions as to its engine, its weight, its cost, and when I had answered, they and their wives and children all stepped back for a long, admiring look as I dropped it into gear and pulled away in what I hoped was an appropriately cool manner.

The Hummer did that to me—made me feel watched, observed, admired for no deserved reason. I felt the way Madonna must whenever she leaves her apartment. Every time I stopped for gas, waited at one of the three stoplights on the 225-mile drive from Anchorage, or pulled over for a minute to photograph a spectacular view of moun
tains and glaciers and sea, people came up to the vehicle and stared at it as if waiting for an autograph. They stared in an appropriating way—I felt myself enter their fantasy life. Mostly it was a guy thing, especially young guys, teenagers, and preadolescent boys, whose faces brightened with lust when they saw the Hummer. They were clearly getting off on its sudden, overall impression of brute, squared-away power. The women’s gaze had a somewhat different quality, however. To them, the profile and face of the Hummer were grotesque, weird, almost comical looking, and they’d laugh, I felt, if the vehicle didn’t also signify the presence of a man with money, which made it somehow socially acceptable. Everybody seemed to have a fairly accurate idea of the Hummer’s price tag.

When I drove it onto the long, narrow spit that was downtown Homer, slowed to a crawl by the sudden presence of Saturday night, bar-hopping traffic, a crowd gathered around the vehicle and kept pace with it, waving to me and hollering hey. You’re never lonely when you’re the only boy in Homer with a Hummer. I rolled slowly through the traffic, trying to ignore the gaping drivers and pedestrians and not wrap the vehicle around a pole or kill somebody with it.

Suddenly among the crowd a dark-haired woman in a nurse’s uniform caught my attention. She was less than four feet tall—a dwarf with a characteristically large, square face and head and short, blocky body and muscular arms and legs. She had spotted the Hummer, not me, for I was invisible to her, and a warm, utterly delighted smile spread over her face, as if by accident she’d run into a long-lost, dear old friend. I waved at her, and she waved happily back, the recipient of an unexpected gift from a stranger.

Most of the town of Homer—described by a local bumper sticker as
A QUIET DRINKING VILLAGE WITH A FISHING PROBLEM
—was situated on the long spit of land extending several miles into the Kachemak Bay and was made up of restaurants, bars, stores, and motels catering mainly to the crowds of people who’d driven here to fish for salmon and halibut. The parking lots were crammed with
RVs and pickups towing camper-trailers and boats, and every few yards was another charter fishing outfit. Halfway along the spit I came to a nearly landlocked bight, clearly man-made, about the size of a football field. A sign told me it was called the Fishing Hole. Curious, I pulled in and parked.

There was a narrow inlet from the sea and a gently sloped embankment surrounding the shallow saltwater pond, for that’s all it was, a pond. People with fishing rods stood side by side and two and three deep around the Fishing Hole, while below them the water churned with trapped king salmon, and the people along the embankment hauled them in, snagging them without bait or lures. It was a pitiful sight. I asked around and learned that salmon eggs raised in hatcheries were transferred here as smolts, held captive in floating pens in the Fishing Hole until they were large enough to be released into the ocean. Later, when they were grown and the ancient impulse to spawn kicked in, the salmon returned to the Fishing Hole, their birthplace, in actuality a gigantic, carefully designed weir, and on a midsummer night like this, huge crowds of people scooped them up as fast as they could. The people stumbled against one another, stepped in each other’s buckets, swore and shoved and cast again. “It’s called combat fishing,” a grizzled fellow in an NYPD cap told me. “It’s wheelchair accessible,” he added.