I awoke in Fairbanks in a canvas tent on a sagging mattress that
bent me into a boomerang. I splashed water on my face at an
outside sink and left the hostel with my 50 lb. pack strapped
heavy and hip-numbing on my back. I had coffee and a roll at a
grocery store where my new employers collected me in a van.
I filled out paperwork and met folks and then met more folks. They
weighed my backpack and asked my weight and wrote it down
and then we climbed into a small, twin engine plane: myself, a
pilot, and two others. The four of us sat up front, crunched around
the cockpit controls. The pilot talked into his mic and flipped
switches and turned wheels and knobs and scribbled on his
clipboard. The propellers on either wing jumped to life and
whirred into a droning insect whine. We raced down the runway,
weaving over the center line until the wind caught us and lifted us
up. We climbed over Fairbanks into the clear afternoon and
wheeled North toward the Arctic Circle.
The plane hummed; jostling us, lifting us, and dropping us on the
currents. The land spread out into scrub-green pine trees, dead
bone-white trees, thick looping coils of flat river water, white foam
falling creeks, trapped pools of winter runoff, lakes and ponds
winking up at the sky, rounded humps and hills and snow-frosted
mountains, ice-lined ridges and gullies where the last grip of a
long winter loosened, ready to give up in the face of summer and
endless daylight.
We banked tight around a lake, the entire world slipping sideways
as we circled, peering down the length of the wing at the earth
wheeling below. The defiance of gravity never more apparent as
we wrestled with the laws of physics, and won, straightening and
lifting, rising back into the air away from the shrinking treetops,
leaving the bears we had hoped to see, unseen.
"Tighten your belts," the pilot says. "We may get hammered going
over these ridge lines."
The Brooks Range mountains grow in the distance. We sink
between hills and drop into a valley, finding the Dalton highway
again, and the Alaskan pipeline, like twin scars.
We line up with a beaten gravel lane and set down softer than I
imagine, rolling back to the earth and a waiting van, there to meet
the potatoes, melons, pizza, and us.
Welcome to Coldfoot.
bent me into a boomerang. I splashed water on my face at an
outside sink and left the hostel with my 50 lb. pack strapped
heavy and hip-numbing on my back. I had coffee and a roll at a
grocery store where my new employers collected me in a van.
I filled out paperwork and met folks and then met more folks. They
weighed my backpack and asked my weight and wrote it down
and then we climbed into a small, twin engine plane: myself, a
pilot, and two others. The four of us sat up front, crunched around
the cockpit controls. The pilot talked into his mic and flipped
switches and turned wheels and knobs and scribbled on his
clipboard. The propellers on either wing jumped to life and
whirred into a droning insect whine. We raced down the runway,
weaving over the center line until the wind caught us and lifted us
up. We climbed over Fairbanks into the clear afternoon and
wheeled North toward the Arctic Circle.
The plane hummed; jostling us, lifting us, and dropping us on the
currents. The land spread out into scrub-green pine trees, dead
bone-white trees, thick looping coils of flat river water, white foam
falling creeks, trapped pools of winter runoff, lakes and ponds
winking up at the sky, rounded humps and hills and snow-frosted
mountains, ice-lined ridges and gullies where the last grip of a
long winter loosened, ready to give up in the face of summer and
endless daylight.
We banked tight around a lake, the entire world slipping sideways
as we circled, peering down the length of the wing at the earth
wheeling below. The defiance of gravity never more apparent as
we wrestled with the laws of physics, and won, straightening and
lifting, rising back into the air away from the shrinking treetops,
leaving the bears we had hoped to see, unseen.
"Tighten your belts," the pilot says. "We may get hammered going
over these ridge lines."
The Brooks Range mountains grow in the distance. We sink
between hills and drop into a valley, finding the Dalton highway
again, and the Alaskan pipeline, like twin scars.
We line up with a beaten gravel lane and set down softer than I
imagine, rolling back to the earth and a waiting van, there to meet
the potatoes, melons, pizza, and us.
Welcome to Coldfoot.
May 25, 2005
| Flying into Coldfoot |
| Copyright 2008 by Lewis Harris. All rights reserved. |
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