Scarlet Stone

The navy blue 1968 Delta 88 Oldsmobile survived the 3,000-mile trip to and from Alaska.

S. Stone

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As I drifted to sleep the other night all tucked in under the covers after a busy day spent preparing for Christmas, I was remembering a time when things were not as comfortable … but they certainly were adventurous. Earlier in the day, I had come across a metal Alaska gold pan I painted one northern winter long ago and mailed to my parents for their Christmas gift, which nearly broke my heart because I deeply missed being there in person. The painting was of the rustic log cabin I lived in during one winter in Delta Junction, Alaska, and I remembered the last time I had been there with the isolation and the anticipation of returning home to my family in Minnesota.
The story begins in March of 1980. I was 21 years old, newly married to my husband, Nick, whom my dad called, “Big Nig the Crapshooter after a favorite character in a Damon Runyon story. We were living in a small turquoise and white canned-ham style camper in Cherry, Minn., on ten wooded acres his grandmother had gifted him. We didn’t have running water or electricity, but we certainly had a plan. We saved up money from working jobs, me at Mr. Steak in Virginia as a dishwasher, and him at his Uncle Jim’s gas station in Cherry. We were hell-bent to drive to Alaska, so that August we packed up and headed north in a navy blue 1968 Delta 88 Oldsmobile that had well over 100,000 miles on the odometer with us soon to add another 3,000 to that number! Two other couples in our group of friends had married and planned to travel with us. We all wanted adventure, and the tattered journal I kept and still have today confirms that we accomplished that.
The trip across Canada and up the unpaved Alcan Highway with its deep mud ruts had some challenges that were forgotten when we started seeing the vast and beautiful scenery. Nick had decided we needed to conserve funds on this trip, so we were eating lots of oatmeal while watching the rest of the group eat meat and vegetables. I was a do-what-you-are-told kinda gal back then and tended to go with his flow. However, I did get him to spring for a pound of hamburger on one occasion. Five days after departure, we had crossed Canada and the Yukon Territory and separated at Beaver Creek (on the Alaska-Yukon border) with us headed west in the direction of Delta Junction and the others south to Seward.
I remember the rainy night we arrived in Delta, and Nick attempted to find his friend’s property and the cabin he had helped build years prior. We slept in the car after a failed attempt to locate it. Once morning light came, we found the cabin an eighth of a mile down a wide grassy old road. It was in desperate need of work, so we camped in an old school bus that had been driven up on a previous trip. We re-chinked the log walls where rodents had pulled out insulation and put in a few windows, so it was nearly like the Hilton. There was a well and hand pump on the property, propane, and featured the-log-across-the-hole outhouse with a pull-curtain on a wire for privacy.
Nick got a job at a restaurant in Delta, and I stayed at the cabin with a loaded rifle in case a bear showed up with his words, “Don’t shoot until it’s biting the barrel,” running through my head during the long days. I started writing long, detailed letters to my family, and I suppose this is where my storytelling began. Over the next year, we lived in a couple other places including our friend’s home in Seward and a small rental cabin in Fairbanks where I got my puppy for companionship and actually named her Fairbanks. She and I passed the cold, dark days of winter feeding the barrel stove, baking bread, cooking, reading, and writing. As spring approached with welcomed daylight and warmth, we decided we were going to leave Alaska because Nick wanted to learn how to build custom log-scribed homes and had made arrangements to attend the B. Allan Mackie School of Log Building near Prince George, British Columbia for a two-week session to learn the craft. We packed and shipped several large boxes of goods back home to Minnesota and strategically fit the remaining staple items into the Olds. I was excited to be leaving Alaska because I was homesick and my brother was getting married in June, plus Fairbanks had engaged in romance with our friend’s dog, Buster, and was expecting puppies.
The plan was to drive east to Delta Junction, head through the Yukon Territory to Haines Junction, then cross the mountains to Haines on the coast where we would board the ferry. From there we would travel, getting on and off the ferry, exploring the towns of Skagway, Petersburg, Juneau, and Ketchikan. At Prince Rupert in Canada, we would take the Trans-Canada Highway to the log home building school near Prince George where Nick got permission from a random farmer to camp on his land while attending the school as he did not want to pay for student lodging.
For us, travel was not expensive because we cooked our meals on a Coleman stove, often utilizing a pop-up metal oven for baking muffins or oatmeal cookies. We also slept in the car with Fairbanks and I in the front seat and Nick taking the back or sleeping outside on the ground so he could stretch out.
We left Fairbanks on Thursday, April 16 at 10 p.m. Seems we always left on these adventures in the bloody dark of night. Why not get up early and leave? We were young, spontaneous, and he was disciplined with finances and knew his mechanics, so my Dad trusted me to go with him and so I did! We had no credit cards and very limited cash, so if something awful could have happened, who knows what we’d done … but it didn’t. We arrived back at the cabin in Delta around midnight and stayed there a day, visiting some friends we knew we wouldn’t see in a long while. The next morning, we packed up and left at 6:30 a.m. (as my old journal reveals). It’s a good thing we got an early start because we did not realize what a long, long day we had ahead of us.
The Olds rumbled toward the customs office at the Alaska/Yukon border, as I bopped along with those pink sponge rollers in my hair, and I was knitting a sweater to pass the time. However, when we got close to the border, Nick told me to put my knitting down as he thought I looked suspicious performing this activity. I must have pulled and hidden the pink rollers, too, knowing they would further incriminate us. We ended up getting searched but soon we were allowed to proceed. Farther south, we stopped at Kluane Lake in the Yukon territory, pulled out the Coleman, and heated up homemade stew. It was barren, windy, and isolated, with only an occasional car traveling one way or the other. Mid-April is not tourist season in the Yukon territory, so we were wearing the green military issue surplus store jackets and those wool pants like our grandfathers wore.
Around 8:40 p.m., in the dark, we arrived at Haines Junction and spoke to a man at a little store who told us weather was getting bad up through the mountains and the Chilkat Pass where we were headed. He said customs hadn’t closed the road yet, so we continued, knowing it was still a three-hour drive to Haines, located in the Inside Passage along the Pacific northwest coast, which meant we were driving back and forth between the U.S and Canada.
I can remember it was so black as we climbed toward the pass with the sparse tundra trees and the determined snow visible through the frosty car windows. The barren road seemed to go on forever, and we did not meet one single car as snow drifts were beginning to form across the narrowing road. As the wind picked up leaving us in blizzard conditions, I noticed tall orange plow markers along the road edges as we drove along. Nick told me the markers had to be that high so the plow knew where to go in heavy snowfall. We were moving fast enough so the weight of the Olds with its V8 engine was able to ram through the deepening drifts. Nick, usually calm, began to get nervous and said, “If the car gets stuck and buried, how will we climb out. How will the plow know we are there?” It was harrowing, the darkness, the isolation, the howling wind. I was not completely sure I’d ever see my family again … but we had to press on. 
Finally, we spotted dim headlights in front of us on approach through the whirling snow. “A car!” we blurted, then stopped to briefly exchange reports with the driver on what was expected ahead. For us, it was not going to be too long until we reached the treeline.
“What a bloody relief I thought, grateful those puppies had a long while before birth ... that’s all we needed!”
Pushing ahead, we finally started to see some scrawny trees, then more vegetation appeared as we were descending down toward the coast and out of harm’s way. Exhausted, we crossed back through United States Customs at 11:45 p.m. We learned they had closed the road back in Haines Junction right after we left due to the blizzard. We pulled the Olds off the road and slept at a wayside rest with Nick heading outside to sleep under a tarp and Fairbanks and I taking the front seat. On the morning of April 19, Easter Sunday, I awoke to the car gently rocking back and forth … just a small earthquake was all. We collected ourselves, then with Nick at the wheel and me at my knitting, we continued our journey to the ferry station and then up the inland passage to Skagway where we would begin more fascinating travels through southeastern Alaska.
About a week later, we arrived at the log home building school in British Columbia where Nick learned a craft he became very good at and would go on to build many log homes in the Ely area during the 1980s. We would return to Alaska again not long after, when Nick made a phone call, then got a job building log homes in the Goldstream Valley near Fairbanks (a story for another time). Decades of holidays have come and gone since then, with Nick and I divorcing after eight years of marriage and probably too much oatmeal, moving, or mayhem perhaps. I will always appreciate the fact he got me out of Hoyt Lakes, and we had the Alaskan adventures I never would have experienced otherwise. Aside from being the dog-mom to Fairbanks (who had her six puppies in Minnesota on my bed), I learned how to scratch-cook real fine, chink a log cabin, knit, crochet, write stories, and build a fire, just to name a few ... but I definitely prefer spending all of my holidays at home. 
Portions of this story were published in the Timberjay back in 2015.