A Long Walk Home

           How I found myself walking on the Iditarod Trail halfway between Shaktoolik and Koyuk while carrying my snow machine helmet in the middle of the night was the end result of multiple small decisions gone awry.  Anywhere along the line had a choice been made differently, I could still be riding on a snow machine rather than walking in the tracks it was making.

            When we first got married, Myra and I felt extremely blessed when we could find two dimes to rub together, but somehow we managed a down payment on a brand new 2003 Skidoo Skandic Sport 500 fan.  Being last year’s model, it was marked down and therefore that much more attractive.  The deal even included freight to our closest hub: Unalakleet.  We could fly over and spend Christmas with Myra’s mom and then ride our new machine the 90 miles north to Koyuk.

            Being safety minded and thinking the face shields on helmets would make riding more comfortable, we bought two from the same dealer we purchased our new machine from and had them shipped to Unalakleet.  The machine was put on an Everts Air Cargo plane and sent out to meet us when we went to celebrate the holidays.  We excitedly awaited the coming break from school and made our plans.

            We boarded a Hageland Cessna 207 the first day of Christmas vacation and looked forward to over eating, visiting, and finally riding our new rig.  I grew up in northern Michigan, but my experience with snow machines was very limited… as in I accidentally drove one through a neighbor’s sliding glass door once as a kid and I managed to get Myra’s short track very stuck while we were dating.  Myra was an old pro, and she has honestly always been a little of a gear head (one of the traits that attracted me to her).  With a brand-new machine, an experienced driver, and what was supposed to be good weather, the short run would be a fun little day trip.

            Christmas was a blast with Myra’s mom, per usual, spoiling us with large amounts of food and her quick-witted sense of humor.  As happy as we were to be finally hitting the trail, we were sad at leaving, creating a good-bye that was maybe longer than expected… meaning it was not as early in the day as we had anticipated setting out.  Couple that with the huge drifts that had accumulated during a Christmas Eve snowstorm, and Unalakleet was not the easiest place to exit.  Just getting to where the Iditarod Trail started north of town proved a challenge with us having to turn back once in order to find a less drifted over trail.

            Myra and I took turns driving, and though the machine handled pretty well, it was loaded down with two full sized adults, and where Unalakleet had been packed full of drifts, the trail between Unalakleet and Shaktoolik looked as though no new snow had fallen since Thanksgiving.  It was more like a black diamond mogul run at a ski resort than what I had pictured as the classic bush highway of Alaska.  In order to keep from bottoming out our suspension, we were forced to ride at 5-10 mph in some places, and could only open up a little when coming into flatter areas like snowed in valleys and ponds.

            Though travel was slow, we were both happy, only a little over a year into very new marriage and just the chance to cuddle with my beautiful bride on our new machine was enough to keep my spirits up.  And, here we were in Jack London’s Alaska living out an adventure novel.

            It was still light when we pulled into Shaktoolik and located the gas station.  We had been traveling at such a slow rate of speed that we had developed a rhythm that mimicked our ride.  I could feel my body gently bobbing as I walked through the door of the native store resembling a Carhart clad Shaggy from Scooby Doo in both gait and urgency.  Myra and I ate some of the food that her Mom had packed for us, bought some junk food to top it off with, climbed on the machine and went to find the village police officer (VPO) for directions to the trailhead in Shaktoolik that would lead us to the last part of our journey.

            When we pulled up to the VPO’s house, the sun was quickly setting and the darkness of winter fell upon us.

            “Hey, we’re traveling through from Unalakleet to Koyuk, and were hoping you could point us to the correct trail,” I said as he answered the door.

            “I’ll do one better than that, I’ll show you,” he replied, jumping on to his four-wheeler and leading us out into the darkness at high speed over every piece of drift wood within a five-mile radius.  Myra clung to the machine as we rocked and bumped over bare beach following the tail-light of the VPO’s Honda in our high-speed chase.

            “Head toward that hill,” he pointed in a sweeping gesture across the horizon after stopping, “and keep the water on your left as you head up the coast, and you can’t miss Koyuk.”

            “Water on our left, head up the coast,” I repeated with fake confidence.

            We thanked him for his time and I continued my turn driving heading in what we thought was the direction home.

            The terrain between Koyuk and Shaktoolik is not flat and so we made our way up and down the small hills and through the creek and river beds.  I had been driving for a while and was getting tired when Myra took over.  I slid onto the machine behind her and did my best to balance out the machine.  The ever-helpful young husband, when Myra dipped into a small creek bed and the machine bogged down, I gently stepped off the back and reached for the cargo rack to lift the machine up and out of the deep snow.

            Myra, the experienced driver, knew that if she hit the throttle as the machine bogged down that it would power its way out.  Between the extra fuel and the reduced load, the machine shot out of the deep snow and bounced back up onto the established trail.  I began tiredly walking toward the machine to resume my passenger position, but the machine never slowed down.  In fact, it sped up.

            I started to run, then started to yell.  I took my helmet off and yelled louder, wound up to pitch it at Myra in order to get her attention and relieve some of my frustration at watching her drive away, but reconsidered before letting it go and allowed it to fall to my side.  My yells gave way to a subdued under-my-breath grumbling as I set in for what could be a long hike.  The tail light disappeared over the next hill.

            Each step was accompanied by a grumble.

            “How could Myra just leave me out here?” grumble step.  “Make me walk all the way to Koyuk,” grumble step, “I’ll tell her a thing or two,” grumble step.

            I walked for some time before seeing a snow machine headlight crest the hill and head toward me.  The closer it got, the more it looked like our machine and the more the driver looked like Myra.  I waited for her to remove her helmet before unloading my ten-minute speech full of righteous indignation, but just couldn’t after she did.

            “I was so worried,” spilled the words, “I turned around to ask you a question and there was nothing but darkness on the machine behind me.”

            Her eyes were large with concern, and her voice was shaky.  She had driven a couple of miles before finding me missing.  It felt as though she would never let go as she hugged me.  I took over the role of driver, heading north, keeping the water on our left.

            The country between Koyuk and Shaktoolik is about as close to a moonscape as a person can get on this planet.  There are crater like dips everywhere, all full of water, some larger than others, and this quickly became an issue.

            “Is that a pond or the ocean?” I asked Myra confused in the darkness, the only seen world that which was revealed by our machine’s headlight.

            “Not sure,” Myra replied.

            We decided to keep it on our left and began winding around it.  It was early enough in the year where the trail had not yet been marked for the Iditarod, and there had not been a lot of traffic.  We were understandably excited when we happened upon a set of snow machine tracks that looked relatively fresh and appeared to be heading in the right direction.  They also followed our one rule of keeping the water to the left.  We cheered over the noise of the engine and began speeding up with new found confidence.  Following this trail would get us to Koyuk in no time.  We were almost home.

            I am not really sure when it dawned on us that there was a lot of similar looking terrain between Shaktoolik and Koyuk that appeared almost identical.  It was so similar that even the shore line shared clumps of grass that looked the same.  We passed what could have been the same clump of grass five times as we motored closer and closer to Koyuk… and then there was that clump of grass again.  The water was on our left, we were on the established snow machine trail, yet that clump of grass began to put some doubt into our minds.  We put a mark in the snow next to it just to prove to ourselves that we were not truly driving in circles.

            Back on the trail, and ten minutes later, another clump of grass that looked extremely similar, but it couldn’t have the same marking that we left…

            “We’ve been going in circles the last hour,” Myra calmly pointed out what was now plainly obvious.

            “It’s dark, we’ll run out of gas driving endlessly out here.  We need to wait for more light,” I continued with more of the obvious.

            We pulled up to a sheltered spot next to small hill, shut the machine down, and were enveloped in silence.

            “Hey, time to camp,” Myra exclaimed.

            Was she enjoying this?

            She unpacked some winter gear, a thermos of still warm coffee, a little food, and began to lay out a picnic.

            “Isn’t this beautiful?” she asked.

            “Myra… we are lost out in the middle of the tundra.  We have no idea where we are, we have limited fuel, it is pitch dark, and we have no idea how long we will be out here,” I said trying to bring my wife back to reality from whatever crazy place she was at the moment.

            “We get to do some winter camping,” she responded deciding to stay in her cheery state.  “We’re somewhere between Koyuk and Shaktoolik, and I’m with you.”

            She had clearly lost it.  The stress had gotten to her.

            Myra came over and pushed me into the snow, “Tag, you’re it,” and she bound away.

            “What are you doing?”

            “They say you need to play when you are in situations like this,” Myra explained, “keeps your spirits up, and is important for survival.”

            They?  It was confirmed, she had lost it.  She moved in and tagged me again and laughed.

            We drank some coffee, ate some food, sat leaning against our machine and I finally began to relax.  It was a warm winter night, we were safe, fed, the sun would come up tomorrow, and things would be clearer.  I was next to my beautiful wife.

            “Hey,” I shot up, “headlights!”

            “Man, I wanted to camp,” Myra responded genuinely disappointed.

            A line of four snow machines was snaking its way toward us approaching from the south and they drove right up to us: Shaktoolik search and rescue.

            We followed them back to Shaktoolik and strangely enough, the path into town involved no driftwood or bare beaches.  It dropped down onto the Shaktoolik river and wound its way smoothly into town.

            “Who gave you directions?” was asked.  “Oh, he hasn’t been out of town in about ten years.”

            The search party dropped us off on Mainstreet Shaktoolik… okay, only street Shaktoolik since there is only one row of houses in town.  We plopped down on our machine.  Looked like we would be winter camping anyway… just under a streetlight.

            “You guys need someplace to stay?” came a friendly voice.

            We followed a very bundled up individual one house down and up and onto a covered porch.

            “Come on in,” the bundled outline encouraged.

            She took off her massive parky and beaver hat.

            “Nora?” Myra asked.

            “Myra?” she replied.

            Nora and June Paniptchuk invited us in to their home, we collapsed on a nice soft bed, and woke to the smell of coffee, sausage, bacon, and sourdoughs what felt like an eternity later.  We laughed and shared stories the old way over a breakfast feast and then slowly waddled out to our machine.  Paniptchuks as well as three other drivers awaited us with machines running, warming up.  They were going to lead us half way to Koyuk.

            It was a beautiful sunny day and a joy to ride.  We made good time and were met by a welcoming party who had been worried when we did not show up the night before.  They were all smiles now, but did not rib us for our rookie mistakes of the night before, but expressed how happy they were that we would make it home safely.

            As a passenger, the warm light coming through my visor coupled with the fact that my glasses had fogged up an hour ago, the bobbing of the machine, drone of the engine, and late-night game of tag lulled me to sleep.  I woke up screaming.  We had stopped, Myra had turned and seen an icicle created by condensed breathing vapor suspended under my helmet, and she had given a tug.

            “Sorry, thought I was helping,” she said as she looked at the icicle in her hand, beard whiskers still stuck in it.

            I stayed awake for the rest of the ride.

            We may have been lost the night before, but we found a lot of things.

            “Welcome home,” our new Koyuk friends offered as we all shut off our machines.