This past weekend one of the movie channels on TV played North to Alaska, a fact that does not cause the earth to tremble or even set a slight breeze to blowing. But it took me back, back to the time when I watched it at least four or five times. For reasons that lurk somewhere in my psyche that movie, coupled with Johnny Horton's catchy song by the same name, appealed to me. Alaska was being proclaimed in the media as the last frontier and the allure proved too much for me to resist, so in the fall of 1968, almost 39 years ago, I gassed and loaded my Impala to head out for the great adventure.
A lot of country lay ahead of me on that long road so I won't even begin to recount it here, even if I was inclined to. It took me seven days to reach Anchorage after driving through Montana, Alberta, British Columbia, Yukon Territory, and Alaska. The Alaskan Highway still consisted of several hundred miles of gravel surface. It rained steadily, reducing stretches of it to slippery muck. Literature is filled with wanderers, and I had become one. My previous employment had proven stifling. I wanted to get out and see the sea, climb some mountains, cross fast running rivers, and drive until I reached the horizon and then drive some more.
The story ended with my arrival in Greeley, Colorado where I enrolled in graduate school. There's lots of story between Anchorage and Greeley, but that can come another time.
