From Kosovo to Alaska- part eight (Fargo to Corner Gas, eh?)

By the third week of July 2019 I was a bundle of nerves. None of the news from Alaska was encouraging, but I had left Wisconsin and by that time was committed to the rest of the drive, all 5600km of it, to Anchorage. Tracy and I kept in touch mostly over Viber, the WhatsApp-type messaging app common in Eastern Europe, though increasingly there were few hours where we were both conveniently awake. It was hard being apart, and the university news made it seem like we would have to remain separated for months to come.

The Elton John song So That's Why They Call it the Blues had come to mind when I was still in Alabama, and it became something of a theme that summer.

Most of us know Fargo from the movie, which to be fair, didn't even take place in Fargo. I associated the movie with Ottawa, where I'd seen it years ago with Tracy and mostly thought about senseless violence and Minnesota. The city itself was a mystery, a spot on the map in a state I'd never visited, but in planning out the drive to Alaska, it seemed a logical place to stop, and I had a friend there I'd not seen in years.

Jenn and I had been Fulbrighters together in Berlin in the summer of 2008, just before DOE recruited me and the world changed. With her and Noah Zerbe, we spent two weeks studying and carousing around Berlin and Brussels, just before a summer spent in more somber Sarajevo. A microbiologist and helminth infection expert, Jenn and I wrote a book chapter together on tropical disease and security in Africa. I had seen her briefly in Alexandria, Virginia in 2009, and with her family in London in 2011. Jenn was one of those figures that passes through your life quickly but has an influence, a subtle nudging in a particular direction that only seems profound in retrospect. We hadn't had a chance to sit down and really talk in ten years, and like my other friends on the roadtrip I was looking forward to some sense of reconnection.

Jenn and Noah in Brussels, summer 2008

(More musical interlude)

While schedules were set, all plans were falling apart. The same morning that my mountain bike had been stolen in La Crosse, I received a series of texts from Jennifer saying she wouldn't be there in Fargo. Her father had an accident, she had to fly to Arizona, but, well, go there anyway and stay at her house.

Well, that was odd.

I left the Minneapolis suburbs and drove toward North Dakota, on painfully flat interstate that stretched endlessly. For me, this was the first I was driving on new routes, and I'd never even been to North Dakota before. I arrived in Fargo in the afternoon, found her house, found where Jenn said she'd hidden the key, and then felt extremely awkward in an empty house. It was big, she had ordered a cleaning service to come ahead of me, and I couldn't just sit around until the next morning.

I looked up a bike shop. Google said they had a group ride that night. Bingo.

Cycling is a strange sport, as it's highly individually based, but people also work in teams, and teams compete against each other while also cooperating. Group rides are sponsored by clubs and local bike shops, and they are also somewhat unique in sports in that strangers can drop in and participate. Groups have different characters-- the ones in DC were very Type A and competitive, the ones I knew in Georgia were extremely welcoming, though all of them will look a new rider up and down to gauge how experienced they are and if they can be trusted in a high-speed group. It's bit like high school standing there before a group ride, wondering what group one fits into, feeling a bit self-conscious about dropping into an established bunch, hoping I didn't have any glaring and embarrassing problems with the bike or kit. My first time showing up in Carrollton, Georgia had been instructive to that region. The bike shop owner, Allen, had spotted me as the new guy, walked over and asked about me, then loudly introduced me to the group and asked that everyone make sure I made it back to the shop in one piece. Some of the people I met that night later became close friends and good cycling buddies.

Slowly through the suburbs

Like most clubs, this one was composed of an odd mix of cyclists, from hard-core racers to grizzled veterans (which was I?), mostly men - but this one had at least one woman stronger than almost anyone. The ride immediately crossed back into Minnesota, wound through the tree-lined streets of Moorhead, and jumped onto straight country roads and windswept plains toward the village of Sabin. The first leg was mostly into the wind, I took my turn pulling at the front and tried being careful not to jump off the front, fighting a stiff headwind and feeling a sense of speed for the first time in a week or so. Everyone regrouped next to a grain elevator.

The next leg went straight north, and with a strong tailwind the pace picked up considerably. I kept jumping toward the front, and went with one man and woman who stepped up to around 30mph (50kph) average. I even attacked on the one small piece of elevation available, a highway overpass, then had to sit up and let others pass because I realized I was in front with no idea where I was going. Regardless, it was a way to burn off energy. I'd done easy rides for the previous days, and with no hills AT ALL, speed was the only substitute.

Strava climbing challenges in this place?

The pace back toward Fargo was more subdued, and I noticed a worrying instability in my left shoe-- when I stopped to look, I was missing two screws from my Speedplay cleats. Alarmed, I pedaled the rest of the way with my right leg, knowing I had to replace the cleats. I'd known that before, had tried substituting replacement screws in Kosovo, but the cleats threads must have been stripped. So I sat up and just marveled at the plains-- this was the very opposite of Kosovo.

I picked up pizza and beer to take back to the house, pitched a sleeping bag in the basement (I was offered a bed upstairs, but felt weird about that), and tried to rest. The next day would be long, the start of marathon driving days to get to Tracy's parents in British Columbia, and then from there to Alaska.

I'd written before that taking the backroads in Indiana was a good idea, and rather than follow the interstate straight west, and then north to Calgary, instead I drove northwest on smaller highways toward Saskatchewan. Part of me wanted to get into Canada sooner rather than later, partly I wanted to take the less obvious route, but I drove through Minot (which exists mostly for its Air Force base), got onto two-lane roads toward the border, and had all too much time to think. I really had not been on long car rides in ages. Car rides in the Balkans can only go for so long before hitting borders. Pristina to Thessaloniki was maybe three or four hours, to the Albanian coast perhaps the same or even shorter. The concept of driving for 12 hours in a day and not feeling like much progress had been made, that concept was completely alien. But here I was driving across the back roads of North Dakota, occasionally stopping for road crews, and it is too much time to be with oneself. With bad news, the prospect of even worse news, the realization that Tracy was on the other side of the globe.

The news in Alaska was still bad. One of the cyclists in Fargo was a professor at Minnesota State University in Moorhead, and couldn't believe I was driving to Alaska to take up a job there. Every professor in the US had seen the news about budget cuts in Alaska, and here was this idiot actually trying to go there (me). I was far beyond the safety of Wisconsin, hadn't seen Tracy in about a month, and felt very much alone on roads that were very much empty. Hours I could spend thinking over things, and what hit me the most was the realization that I couldn't be apart from Tracy for so long. 

I crossed the border without too much hassle, but the problem was stopping at a gas station to get Canadian cash. The Royal Bank ATM ate my card, and there was no way to get it back-- despite the employees angrily calling the local bank (most Canadians hate RBC, and I had my own run-ins with them as a student). I had to call USAA, who said the best they could do would to send a new card ahead to my address in Anchorage.

A bit dispirited, I drove even more off the main road, straight toward Moose Jaw. I was a bit comforted by how Google driving directions switched back to metric (how do I know what 300 feet is?), but there was nothing to see, it was windy as all hell, and I even had to take the road bike off the roof rack and stuff it into the back seat. But then part of my brain noticed text on the side of a grain elevator, and I braked hard into the next side road. Was it? Could it be?

I had just found Dog River, Saskatchewan, a fictional town and the setting for the Canadian comedy Corner Gas. For those who don't know the show, it's best described as Seinfeld for the Canadian Prairies, and GO WATCH IT. 

Anyway, I'd found the spot of filming, and the real village it was based on. It was the most random discovery, a link to my time in Ottawa, and.... it really was that flat and windy. C'MON I WAS EXCITED! It had been a dispiriting day, endless hours on empty roads, and here was a completely random place in Canada that held connections to our days in Ottawa, that I found completely by accident. (The original set is gone.)

I won't say that Moose Jaw was exciting, though it was friendly and comfortable, and while the former railroad station in Fargo had been converted into a bike shop, in Moose Jaw it was an expansive liquor store. I'm not sure what that meant.

If you need alcohol in Moose Jaw, you're in luck...

The next day was another long drive to Calgary, and this mostly forgettable along the drive. I was on the Trans-Canada highway, and in Calgary checked in to a motel so I could meet up with my brother-in-law Shane. We'd just missed each other the last time I'd visited Tracy's parents, and I mean just. As I walked off the plane at the Prince George airport, I could see him in the terminal waiting to board. 

With Shane and some Greek pizza

 Shane is a quiet type, and I suppose I am as well. Tracy can keep him talking for hours, but for us it was enough to reconnect over pizza.

With Kelly Cryderman

I had one other reconnection that night, since I knew I'd have to leave first thing the next morning. Kelly Cryderman had been a student of mine at Carleton about twenty (!) years earlier, when I was a grad student teaching US politics during the Clinton impeachment. Kelly had been a journalism student, the epitome of the keener who sat at the front of the class and actually paid attention in a 3-hour night course. I remembered her well from the first day. As a PhD student I wasn't sure what undergrads should call me, was nervous about having a whole 3rd year course (with my own TA), and at the beginning of class Kelly sat up like Tracy Flick and asked some question by addressing me as 'professor.' First person ever to do so, and it set a tone for the class-- funny how easily one remembers that. She's now a journalist for the Globe and Mail in Calgary, and seeing her in person after so long, now with a family, was perhaps similar to the shocks I'd had in previous weeks traveling. At least neither of us had aged a day.

The next morning I had to drive all the way into British Columbia and to Vanderhoof, nearly 1000km through the mountains. It would have been a long day in any case, but I had a plan. According to my calculations, I was just short of hitting 1000 miles on the bike for July, and I was determined to make that goal in Banff. Part of that was Tracy's fault. All the times I'd traveled to western Canada, I kept going to her hometown in the central plateau of BC, and the few times I'd driven to Calgary from there, the mountains had been socked in with clouds. The weather report for my drive said clear early, then clouds and rain. So, early. I could do that, I was known for that in Kosovo, I would get up at 4am and bike those last miles while I could see actual mountains.

Sunrise over Alberta

It's not like the roads made that easy. I left Calgary before dawn, but luckily had the Google driving directions turned on my phone, despite the straight road to Banff. I was told to exit the highway, and like a good cyber-citizen obeyed, quickly realizing there had been an accident ahead and the road was closed. I took back gravel roads for a fair distance as the sun rose behind me, then got back onto the highway just before hitting the resort town of Banff. I pulled up to a Tim Hortons, grabbed some oatmeal for breakfast, and then took the bike up the first mountain of the day, a 1000 foot climb overlooking the town. I already felt rusty for climbs, had no chance to warm up, but the biggest problem was the cattle gates set into the roads in Alberta, massive pipes that threatened to eat entire wheels at the bottom of mountain descents.

Slippery when wet

First climb

 I took a bike path along lakes for some distance, amazing views in the early morning, and then had to brave a short 2km stretch on the Trans-Canada highway to reach the second climb. I try to avoid highways when at all possible, but the further north one goes, the fewer roads are available.

Picture-perfect

 The climb up to the Sunshine Village ski resort was quiet, populated mostly with mountain goats, and so quiet after days in the car.

I braved a few more cattle gates, again on the highway, and made it back to Banff in one piece. Realizing I might be a touch short, I circled the town once more to clock in the distance I needed for my Trek t-shirt (this was important, people), and ended again at the Tim Hortons, this time with deer to cheer on the end of my 1000 mile (1600km) month-- not a minor achievement while also driving across a continent.

I still had a long drive that day, through national parks, into Jasper, British Columbia where intense crowds kept me from anything other than a 7-Eleven hotdog, into the vast expanses of Eastern British Columbia and the central plateau, through Prince George, and after another 100 km finally reaching Tracy’s parents’ house in Vanderhoof. 

I stayed there for a few days to rest and to visit with Tracy’s parents and grandparents. The sight of our car in Vanderhoof was always a little jarring, a reminder of how far I had already driven, but in the knowledge that I still had three very long days to go. There is not much in central and northern British Columbia. The normal access to the Alaska Highway was through Prince George, which I had already passed, and the only other road north was the Stewart Cassiar highway to the west, even less densely populated– and by that I mean there is one motel along a 1000km stretch of road between Smithers and Whitehorse. (And several people had been killed in Dease Lake the weeks before.)

Again, all too much time for self-reflection, for counting black bears (I counted 12 the first morning out of Vanderhoof), one giant bull moose who ran in front of my compact car, but otherwise nothing but trees and trees and more trees for around 24 hours of driving, until reaching the more tundra-like expanses of the Yukon. 

Whitehorse was almost metropolitan in comparison. I noticed I had a headlight out and was happy to find a brand new Canadian Tire in town. One guy working there said that there are about 45,000 people in the whole of the Yukon, and 30K of them live in Whitehorse. The size of territory was just staggering. I stayed in a cute B&B with tiny cabins, run by a couple who had noticed my USAF hat and insisted on feeding me a lavish dinner-- the more I protested that I wasn't really a fighter pilot or anything like that, the more they pushed. 

I had one final, long day, from Whitehorse to Copper Center, Alaska. I had planned this weeks or even months in advance, to be in Copper Center, a tiny outpost, by August 2nd. The Denali Randonneurs, the local endurance cycling club, was planning a 200-400K ride that day, and I was determined to be in on it. I can't explain the motivation for that, but the closer I came to Alaska, the more determined I became to see what I could before I was kicked out again. 

I stayed in a "rustic" (I think that's the polite term) lodge near the Copper River, really only notable for a bar and a load of fishermen, but there were some die-hard cyclists as well. Trish, an English professor at UAA who I would know in the future, Veronica the retired USAF vet, Burney the ride leader, and the Gilligan's Island cast of others... early on the morning of the 3rd we set out on a brevet, taking dirt roads part of the way (my Trek 5200 does not like such roads) to the Tonsina River, back to the Richardson Highway toward Valdez, and then... my right knee was not exactly happy having driven a manual transmission car (no cruise control) across the entire continent, and I could feel warning signs suggesting I should cut it short that day. I know it sounds strange to others if I say that "cutting it short" and embarrassing myself meant that I only rode 100 miles (160km) that day, but... cycling psychology is weird. I had to turn back early, then circle Copper Center once or twice to make sure I hit 100 miles exactly, getting back into the car and then driving the last 4 hours into Anchorage.

Mind you, I had yet to see the house I had rented. A colleague at UAA had helped arrange the rental, I had already been paying rent, but it was all a mystery. I drove through the Matanuska Valley and past glaciers and mountains, after hours finally seeing some sign of civilization in Palmer, then another 45 minutes into Anchorage. I kept thinking the Google driving directions had given up on me, I kept driving more and more into downtown, I knew from my short time there before I could only go another 1km or so before falling into the ocean, and my phone hadn't said a word for hours. The same road, keep going straight, straight, still straight, don't turn, finally turn left, turn right, turn left immediately and you will be at your destination. Huh.

Moose greeting me driving into work my second day

So there I was. A cute house in a cute neighborhood, not much to put into it except a bike and some clothes... and then what? I raided Target, Best Buy and Kohl's (I had no work clothes) Sunday morning, had to show up for work on Monday morning, to an empty college where only a student assistant was around the greet me and give me keys. I had finally made it, but now what?