The Life Exchange
Thoughts from the Alaskan Highway, part two
You can read the first part of this journey here.
Just up the highway from the motel are some hot springs. Could there be a more American sentence? I really feel like I’m acculturating now.
Having said that, we’re actually still in Canada. There are a lot of hot springs in this valley, but the motel owner back in Skookumchuck has told us we can avoid the ones which have been enclosed by fancy resorts, which will charge for access, by taking a right turn up a dirt track into the mountains and driving for about fifteen kilometres.
Up the dirt track we go, and at the end we discover a small car park - sorry, parking lot - and a path down to the river. There are three pools roughly built into the river, hemmed in by little walls of rocks, and one of them - the one which steams - is filled with people in trunks and tattoos. Only now do we remember that it is the First of July: Canada Day. Everyone has the day off, and some of them have apparently come to the springs in the morning for a patriotic dip. Paul immediately plunges in and gets into conversation. He’s one of these people to whom that sort of thing comes naturally. I hang back, which is what comes naturally to me, but in the end I decide to go in as well. We’ve come all this way. Into the hot pool I go, and then into the cold: that’ll prepare me for a long drive.
‘Happy 51st State Day!’ says Paul to the Canadians as we leave. I tell him to behave himself, and remind him that we are now in a country overseen by the majesty of King Charles III. If it weren’t for that misunderstanding in 1776, I say, America would still be in the same position as these people, and many things would be different and better. The tea would be drinkable, it would be harder to buy machine guns, and everyone would be able to spell ‘aluminium.’
We get back on the road and we drive, and we drive. The whole day is just … trees. I’m a man who loves trees - who spent much of his life campaigning to protect them, or worrying that they were all being felled, a man who has planted a thousand of them on his own land - but even I am am beginning to feel overwhelmed. The forest is so deep, so excitingly vast. I am always thrilled by vast areas without people in them. Anything could be in here. Elk, moose, bear, sasquatch. It’s been an ambition of mine since I first read about the ‘Bigfoot’ as a child to see a sasquatch, though after listening to this account of what happened to some people who actually did, my enthusiasm has dimmed a bit.
After several hours of burning rubber we begin to pass through taiga, or boreal forest, at least some of which can be traced back to the end of the last ice age, and much of which grows on underlying permafrost. It has a particular look and feel: a uniformity of tree size and stature, which is apparently due to regular fires and attacks by spruce beetles, and in some places logging operations. It’s not like the kind of tropical rainforest I have spent time in before, where the tree size varies and the canopy hovers high above. There is no seeing beyond the taiga, until you get to the mountains:
