So, where were we? Oh yeah, Chicago, being perused by the Secret Service.

I had chores to do after that – the emptying of sewer tanks, the repair of various battery accessories in the Traipsemobile, the drinking of even more beer. There were friends to see in Indiana and Ohio, a weird October blizzard to avoid in western Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, return-visit promises to be kept in Boston and New York.

The weeks flew by, not so much in a blur, but as if I were in an alternate time-space continuum, a Traipsathon bubble separate from the rest of the world. I’d found a way to live in a perpetual autumn, a universe where the leaves were always at the peak of their colors, where the temperatures were always in the 60’s or maybe the 70’s, where nothing heavier than a sweater was ever required. It was never too hot and never too cold. And I’d been in this world since July , as I made my way north from Seattle through the Yukon and on to Alaska. And it stayed with me through August and September and October and into November, as I slowly wandered south and east, a step ahead of winter everywhere I went.

It has completely screwed up my perception of time, this constant movement from one fall day to the next. Because I wake up in the same bed every morning, surrounded by all the same stuff, there’s a “Groundhog Day” sense to my life, and not in a bad way. But it compresses time and distance. Edmonton feels like it was yesterday. So does Minneapolis. And Chicago. And Cincinnati. The grass was green, the trees were full of color, the beer was delicious. Whenever anyone mentions a place, my immediate response is always, “I was just there!.” Except, when I think about it, it’s actually been months since I was Canada, almost a year since I’ve been in Texas. When was I in Colorado? Or Arizona? Wasn’t I just in L.A.? No, my friends all tell me, you’ve been gone a lot longer than you think.

Part of this, clearly, can be explained by the fact that I’ve been drunk a great deal of the time. I never really had routines when I lived in one place. But I do when I’m on the road. I find the local coffee shop. I find the local Anytime Fitness. I find the local pub. There’s a rhythm to my life that it’s never had before. And – on those rare occasions when I stay in a motel or someone else’s home – I can feel the disruption of my routine. When I don’t wake up in the parking lot of some strange bar in some strange town, I feel disoriented. It’s a glitch in the Matrix. The bubble is momentarily gone.

It’s not that I don’t know where I am. Or that the places don’t seem different. I spent Halloween in Scranton and Thanksgiving in Atlanta, Christmas in Miami and New Year’s Eve in Key West. I watched the World Series in Cincinnati and the BCS Championship in Orlando. It’s not like I wake up in the morning and go, “Holy shit, is this Charleston or Charlotte?” Okay, yes, I did that once. But, in my defense, those are very similar names.

So, as I drifted from Chicago to Indianapolis to Louisville to Cincinnati to Cleveland to Scranton and beyond, I often felt like I was a kind of alien explorer, passing unnoticed through all these places where people were going about their daily lives – going to the supermarket, sneaking out of the office early, hurrying to the high school football game – while I observed them from some other dimension. Tomorrow, I thought, they’ll be doing the same things, barely cognizant of all those other similar worlds, the ones in Whitehorse and LaCrosse and Framingham. And, tomorrow, I’ll be gone. Another day, another planet, another perfectly indistinguishable autumn day.

I take a weird sort of comfort in this, the similarities between the coffee shops and the Anytime Fitnesses and the pubs. The ones in North Dakota don’t seem all that different from the ones in Massachusetts or Maryland or South Carolina. This, I realize, is self-selection, like tuning into the NPR station in whatever town I happen to be. But, the thing is, there always IS an NPR station. And a funky locally-owned coffee shop with a goofy name that makes it seem like it was meant just for  me (Lookout Joe in Cincinnati, Fat Cat Pie Company in Norwalk, The Muddy Waters Coffee Bar in Charleston, The House of Joe in Melbourne, FL  and , my favorite, The Drunken Monkey Coffee Bar  in Orlando)  And  there’s always a pub with chatty regulars, “the best wings you’ve ever had” and an IPA on tap, brewed someplace nearby.  (Neon’s Unplugged in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine,  Mickey Gannon’s off Drinker Street in Scranton, The Federal Lounge in Durham,  The Trappeze Pub in Athens, GA,  The Pour House in Charleston and Redlight, Redlight in Orlando). Every town is interesting, at least to me, and proud of its quirks. They want you to try their lobster rolls or their crabcakes or their cheesy grits. They want you to appreciate that they make their own scones or their own barbecue sauce. They want you to know they exist. They are, generally speaking, pleased to have a stranger wander into their town. It’s reassuring, I guess, proof that they are connected to the outside world, to places they’ve never heard of and will likely never see.

There have been times when I’ve felt the rhythm turning into a rut, a sense that, even though I’m seeing different places, I’m doing too much of the same thing. Some of this, I’m sure, is the inevitable post-Alaska letdown, the lack of a short-term destination goal. Going from Athens to Charleston to Charlotte can’t help but feel a little less exciting than going from Whitehorse to Banff. Next year, when I drive to Panama, I’m sure I’ll warmly reminisce about that stretch when my days seemed so easy to predict.

In mid-November, close to my 57^th birthday, I was having more than my share of stuck-in-a-rut days. I was, once again, flirting with the onset of winter, the days getting grayer and cooler, but not quite cold enough to send me scurrying south. I visited friends in Bethesda, in Silver Springs, in Baltimore and northern Virginia. I drank coffee, I drank beer, I went from one Anytime Fitness location to another. The Beltway was my home.

The Anytime Fitness gyms, where I shower and usually do a little workout, are generally reliable places where I can ride a stationary bike, do a little yoga and, most of the time pretty much have the place to myself. The showers are usually private and available. It’s like having my very own spa.

But the one in Rockville, Maryland was filled to overflowing, people waiting in line for access to machines and only one stationary bike, a reclining model at that. And even that one was broken. Every time I tried to adjust the seat, I ended up with my knees in my chest. After 20 minutes of trying to fix the damn thing, I just gave up. I’d have just showered and left, but the bathrooms were all occupied.

So, even though it was after dark, later than I usually work out, I drove half an hour south on the Rockville Pike to the next-closest Anytime Fitness, in Kensington, Maryland. It was in a nicer area than most of the Anytime locations, which tend to be in strip malls next to AutoZones and Dollar Stores. This one was in a wooded area, next to a church, around the corner from a house with a white picket fence.

I worked out. I showered. I took my time. It was nearly 9 p.m. by the time I left the building and headed back towards the Traipsemobile, which I’d parked at the church next door. If the day had gone differently, if the Rockville gym had been less crowded or if I’d  decided it was too late to work out and just gone straight to a pub, I wouldn’t have been there when I was.

And I wouldn’t have encountered the elderly Asian woman who was walking towards the Traipsemobile as I left the gym. There wasn’t anyone else on the street. I nodded at her and, expected she’d ignore me as I got into the Traipsemobile and drove way, once again anonymous and on the move.

Instead, she called out, “Do you know the way to the police station?” I told her that I didn’t, that I was just passing through town.

“I can’t get my son to answer his phone,” she said. “ I need to find the police.”

She was insistent and, I finally figured out, was asking me for a ride. She was tiny, but not fragile. Elderly but not unsteady. And my first thought, I’m ashamed to admit, was that she might be running some sort of scam.

But the more we talked, the more I understood that she was really, legitimately frightened. Her story was confusing and asking about the details didn’t seem to help. Her son was supposed to pick her up? Where did he live? Did she think something had happened to him? Was there an accident? Where did she live? Why did she need the police again? Just because he wasn’t answering his phone?

It took me a while, longer than it should have, to figure out she was suffering from dementia. She kept repeating parts of her story, asking the same question over and over again. “Why would he leave me like this? Why? WHY?” And then she’d say, “I still have all of my marbles. They don’t think so, but I do.”

She told me her fragmented story as we drove around, as I tried to use Yelp and my GPS system to find the nearest police station, which turned out to be way harder than I expected. The nearest sub-station had, apparently, been shut down due to budget cuts. It took three phone calls and several baffling circuits of the City Hall parking lot to figure this out. The nearest open law enforcement entity was the Montgomery County Police Station in Glenmont, two towns and 20 minutes away. So that’s where we went.

Her name, she said, was Mary. The more she talked, the more confused she seemed. But her anger and frustration were real. And parts of her story, remembrances of her early life, rang true. Here’s the story Mary told me.

She was born in China in 1930 , of Japanese parents who were killed during the second Sino-Japanese war that preceded World War II. Orphaned, she was sent to Japan, to be raised by relatives who didn’t really want her. It sounded like a terrible life.

She married a U.S.. serviceman after the war and returned with him to the U.S., to Leesville, La, where they raised a son together. 20 years ago, Mary’s husband died. She was a widowed war bride, a foreigner in a southern town. That also sounded like a terrible life.

But it wasn’t, she said.  She had friends. And a garden. And a house she loved. She remarried just 5 years ago, to man in whom she had no romantic interest, but who treated her kindly. And then, last year, he died, too.

This is where the story gets harder to believe. Mary said that her son, married and living in Maryland, invited her up to visit for a few weeks after the funeral, a little vacation, a quiet place to grieve.

But instead, with no warning, he’d put her in this place that was like a prison, with locks on the doors and filled with people who, she said, were nothing like her. “They sit around all day. They do nothing. There is nothing to do. It’s like they are already dead.”

“I call my son, to ask him why he has put me in this place. Why? I cannot stay there. This is no way to live. I just want to go back to my home. Why?”

She wanted the police to find her son, not because she thought he was missing or in danger, but because she wanted him to explain what he’d done. If he wouldn’t answer his phone for her, he surely couldn’t hide from the police. She was going to get to the bottom of this. She was going to find out why.

She told the story over and over again, adding new details, but never changing the basic facts. Her real name, she said, was Takako, but Americans could never remember that, so everyone called her Mary. And her son, she said, was an orphan, too. She’d found him abandoned in Japan but had never told him. I’m not sure why, but I believed that part, too.

She wasn’t sure how long she’d been in this prison where he’d left her, with the attendants who watched her and the old people who seemed half-dead. But she noticed how the security system worked. That if one door opened, the alarms went off at every door. She waited for someone to accidentally open the front door, which everyone could see, and go there to shut off the alarm. When they did, Takako sneaked out the  the back. She escaped.

And then she ran into me, on a dark street around the corner from a house with a white picket fence.

We finally found the police station and waited for nearly an hour while the duty officer sorted things out. Takako had a number for her no-good son and her Louisiana driver’s license, long since expired.

The front porch at Arden Courts

Eventually, a little after 11 p.m., the attendants arrived from the Arden Courts of Kensington, an assisted living center specializing in Alzheimer’s and Memory Loss. It’ a half block from the Anytime Fitness. Takako hadn’t walked very far.

They assured me that her son visited her quite often, at least twice a week. She’d been there for six months and, most of the time, seemed content. But sometimes she’d get angry and demand to know why they were keeping her prisoner.

“Don’t take me back there,” she said. “I don’t want to go back.”

“Mary, it’ll be fine,” the attendant said. “Everybody’s been worried about you.”

I let them take her. What else could I do? The attendants seemed friendly and compassionate. There was no indication that she was being ignored or abused. There was nowhere else for her to go.

So I walked with her out to the Arden Care van. Before she got in, she pulled me down to whisper in my ear. “Come check on me,” she said.

And I did. I went back three days later and tried to see her. But they told me that “Mary” was taking a nap. I didn’t want to wake her. I left her some cookies and a flashlight, in case she went on another unauthorized late-night walk. There were photocopied signs above every entrance warning that one of the patients was an escape risk and to please be careful entering and exiting the building. They were playing “Walking On Sunshine” on the public address system as I left.

I drove south from there, into Virginia and North Carolina. My perpetual autumn continued. For Takako, though, winter was closing in.

So, where were we? Oh yeah, sucking those puppies down in LaCrosse, Wisconsin.

Muddy Waters

I  spent the night alongside the Mississippi River and then took the back roads east and south across Wisconsin, through Madison and Whitewater and, eventually down U.S. Highway 12 into Chicago’s far north suburbs. It was a Saturday night and I was in the mood for some electric blues. So I headed to Halsted Street on Chicago’s near north side.

Used to be the “real” blues clubs, the ones where you could get stabbed and everything, were all on the South Side and the white people who went there were considered very brave, unless they were in the Rolling Stones, which meant they could go pretty much anywhere they wanted because they traveled with their own bouncers. I never went to any of those clubs because I didn’t know anybody who knew anybody who could take me (in other words, a blues-loving black friend from Chicago) and give me an honorary “it’s okay, he’s with me” card. Also, it was the 70’s, I was young and stupid and not yet comfortable in actual guys-lurking-in-the alley urban environments. Much as anything, I didn’t know a safe place to park. So, pussy-ass little suburban white boy, I chickened out. Shame on me.

Pussy-ass little suburban white boys don’t have to worry about that anymore, because the “real” blues clubs aren’t stabberies anymore and, for the most part, they moved to the near north side. Some of them, like Buddy Guy’s “Legends” (which is actually closer to The Loop) are as much theme park as blues clubs, high-priced and tourist friendly. Souvenirs abound.

I’m not against this by the way. I want Buddy Guy to make a lot of money. BB King, too. They deserve it. Anything that makes the blues more accessible to a larger audience is a good thing. I may have grown up in Shreveport, but I didn’t listen to the blues when I was a kid. I listened to the Beatles and Top 40 and on-the-radio soul music. I wasn’t haunting black clubs or looking for Howlin Wolf records. (or, for that matter, going to the Louisiana Hayride. I was pretty much oblivious to ALL the music that was going on around me.) I had to work backwards to get there, like most of my other pussy-ass little suburban white boy friends. I heard Led Zeppelin before I heard Robert Johnson or Lightning Hopkins, the Rolling Stones before I heard Elmore James. It was the same thing with jazz. In college, I was listening to lots of fusion jazz and it took me years to work my way back from that to cool jazz or be-bop. I owned “Bitches Brew” years before I owned “Kind of Blue.” To me, as a kid, jazz was that Dixieland crap they played in the French Quarter tourist traps.

So, entry points are important.. And the more of them, the better. Which is why I’m glad the pussy-ass little suburban white boys and their pussy-ass little white girlfriends can go to the clubs on North Halsted and feel like they’re cooler than they really are, while paying too much for whiskey and t-shirts. Because the music is the real thing.

On most nights B.L.U.E.S., which is tiny and always jammed, has somebody famous or at least somebody who used to play with somebody famous. It opened in 1979 and, because it’s so small, comes closest to approximating the way things used to be (or so I’ve been told). But on a Saturday night, it’s all but impossible to get in and find a seat. I’m old.

Which is why I went up the block to Kingston Mines, which is a lot bigger, has two stages and  video monitors so that if you happen to be in the wrong room when one stage is in action, you can watch the band on tv. It sounds high tech, but the monitors are kind of shitty and the camera angles are akin to watching security footage from a 7-11 robbery. Somehow, this makes everything feel more authentic. Also they have Excellent red beans and rice.

There are long communal tables, plenty of dance floor room and they stay open until 4 a.m. The emcee is a guy named Frank Pellegrino, an old blues shouter himself, who started out as a busboy there not long after the club opened in 1968. He’s short and gruff and works the room like an insult comedian. He wears his hat low over his forehead, tends to wear t-shirts with obscene phrases and, when he’s on a roll, is this weird combination of Chuck Barris and Howlin Wolf. I enjoyed him immensely and sort of hoped I’d get to see him toss someone out of the joint, because I knew that he’d be really good at it.

Frank Pellegrino, onstage at Kingston Mines

Joanna Connors was on one stage, Carl Weathersby on the other and I spent most of the night wandering back and forth, full of red beans and beer, between the two of them, making my way through clusters of college kids and bacheloreete parties. The crowd got blacker, and better-dressed, as the night went on. Lots of people had very nice hair. It was still jammed at 3 a.m., when I surrendered, walked back down Halsted St. and went to bed.

I hung around Chicago for a couple of weeks, visiting old friends, a couple of whom live in Hyde Park, by the University of Chicago The Museum of Science and Industry and, in case you didn’t know, President Obama’s neighborhood I’d never spent time in that part of the city before, but now that I have, I can see how it suits him.

Postcard from The World Columbian Exhibition, 1893

It’s low-key, for one thing, lots of old unassuming duplexes that, when you get a little closer, are more impressive, elaborate entranceways, dark wood floors and staircases from when they were built in the 1920’s or before. There are Frank Lloyd Wright homes sprinkled in here. And then, closer to the University of Chicago campus, is the Midway that was home to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (The one in “Devil in the White City”) and, even with the buildings long gone, is still impressive. When people make references to the old Chicago Bears being the “monsters of the Midway,” this is the midway they’re talking about.

The view from Promontory Point

It’s also right by Lake Shore Drive. Promontory Point is a great place to take in Lake Michigan and Chicago skyline to the north. How did I not know this before? Possibly because I was a pussy-ass little suburban white boy?

But, to me, the big landmarks aren’t the key to Hyde Park. It’s that it’s such a mixed community, lots of bookstores and cafes that are a natural outgrowth of being near the University of Chicago. And lots of blue-collar, hardware-store kind of places, too. It’s a real neighborhood, as varied as any in Chicago. And this, I think, is why it suits Obama. You can talk to professors and plumbers with the same amount of ease, here. It’s an urban academic neighborhood, but it’s also a place that feels gritty. A little bit tweedy, a little bit blue-collar,  not an ivory tower kind of place. Mitt Romney wouldn’t be comfortable here.

But Obama was, and is. He still shows up at Valois, his favorite breakfast joint, whenever he’s in town and orders bad-for-you sausage-and-eggs combos in the cafeteria-style line. Now they have breakfast specials named for him and souvenir coffee cup available. The biscuits are terrible. But the crowd is funky. Lots of guys in work shirts with their names on them. Lots of arguing. Big-city stuff.

Valois' best customer

I don’t know that he’s ever been to Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap, but I can’t imagine that he hasn’t, considering that it’s half a mile from his house and it’s been considered the coolest bar in the neighborhood since the 1950’s. Saul Bellow used to drink here. Margaret Mead. It’s dark in there, all black paint and mahogany. People eat cheeseburgers and drink beer and talk about economic theories and stuff. How could he not have been in here?

(By the way, although the bar is officially called Woodlawn Tap, everyone here calls it Jimmy’s because it used to be owned  by a guy named Jimmy Wilson, who ran it from 1948 until he died in 1999. Ask for directions to  The Woodlawn Tap and people will stare uncomprehendingly. Ask for “Jimmy’s” and everyone knows where it is.). You will not be shocked to learn that this was my favorite place in Hyde Park.

I tried to get a look at the President’s house, but the 5000 block of South Greenwood Avenue is now blocked off by large concrete barriers and a whole slew of heavily-armed SUV’s and squad cars. I slowed down enough to wave to them. I’m sure the data banks were humming as I drove past. Somewhere, in a control room hidden up the block, some Secret Service technician was saying, “Stand down.. Other than being a moron, the subject represents no threat. He had Pop Tarts and beer for dinner.”

Still, I thought it was odd that, a few moments later, I turned left from Hyde Park Blvd onto Berkeley Avenue and was waved down by a woman who, borderline hysterical, seemed to be having some sort of engine trouble. It was raining. She was distraught. I had to stop.

She and a friend were trying to jump start her car, she said, but they couldn’t figure out how to align the jumper cables in a way that didn’t send out sparks. I’m not good at anything mechanical. It’s a wonder I zip my own pants. Still, I did what I could.

Anyone who knew what they were doing would have immediately seen that she had the positive and negative cables clamped on incorrectly. It took me three explosive tries to reach this conclusion. Still, eventually, the car started. She and her friend thanked me (and my friend Merry Beth, my tour guide for the afternoon) and drove away.

“That was a lucky coincidence,” Merry Beth said, remarking on the fact that we happened to turn the corner just as the woman had needed our help.

“Yes, coincidence,” I said, looking in the rear view mirror, thinking I caught a glimpse of a black S.U.V. Probably nothing. Probably nothing at all.

So where were we? Oh yeah, taking a right at Saskatchewan and heading into North Dakota.

I’d only been there twice before, once on The Empire Builder train, heading for Seattle, and once when I was living in Minneapolis, working for the Star-Tribune. I drove to Fargo, 250 miles away, for a story which I can’t remember. But I do remember being excited that crossing into North Dakota meant that, finally, I’d visited all 50 states. That was 1980. So, yes, I’ve been weird like this for quite some time.

But I didn’t really see much of the place on either visit. The Fargo trip was an overnight Motel 6 kind of thing. And the Amtrak trip was through a snowstorm, with everything blurry and gray. I do remember seeing a farmhouse on the prairie west of Minot, nothing else visible for miles, and wondering why the hell anyone would live out there.

A Minnesota friend once told me traveling across North Dakota was like driving across a billiard table, the dullest trip he’d ever taken.  And while it’s certainly not the most spectacular landscape in North America, I think he was being unfair. There is a gentle roll to the North Dakota hills, a certain majesty to the distances. That whole “amber waves of grain” thing is real. And sort of cool.  I wasn’t bored at all.

Also, I had something to look forward to: The second annual Fargo Beer Festival was being held on the very night I happened to be in town. Serendipity is a beautiful thing.

As is Wood Chipper Ale, the first (and so far only) offering of the Fargo Beer Company, named after the most memorable scene in the best movie the Coen Brothers ever made. If you don’t know why this is possibly the greatest beer name in America then I don’t know what to tell ‘ya, for Pete’s sake. Is it darned tasty? You betcha!

You can’t get it anywhere outside of Fargo (although surely that will change). They don’t sell it in bottles or cans. You can only buy Wood Chipper Ale at the brewery or one of the half-dozen places in Fargo that have it on tap. Or, in what sounds like the best of all possible environments, the Fargo Beer Festival.

It cost $18 to get in, which didn’t seem unreasonable since that buys you unfettered access to 73 different craft beers from all around the country. Also there would be “Authentic German Cuisine” and live music. Who could say no to that?

Apparently, no one. When I arrived at the Fargo Civic Center (upcoming events include Roller Derby and Dakota Territory Gun Collector’s Show) there was a line halfway down the block. The Civic Center lawn was ringed with folding tables and full of Fargones (yeah, I made that up) in their fall finery. This included at least 3 people in Slayer t-shirts. Everyone was exceedingly polite, since North Dakota is practically Canada, but it was a mob, a gigantic thick-ankled beer-drinking mob. I fit right in.

If we’d been anywhere else – like, say, South Dakota – there’d have been fights. Instead of free-flowing rivers of beer, they served the assorted ales and lagers in little tiny sampling cups, the kind the dentist gives you to “swirl and then spit.” It was a travesty. We’d stand in line – really long lines – unable most of the time to see what tiny cup of beer we were in line for. 10 minutes later (okay maybe 5) you’d get your precious little spit cup of IPA and move along, generally to the back of the very next line. Sometimes they’d give you two cups at once. Did you ever see Red Dawn? If the Soviets had taken us over, this is what life be like: rationed beer.

But we persevered, the other Fargones and I, trudging from one line to the next, slowly making our way around the Civic Center perimeter. Some people kept their cups like little stackable trophies, little tiny leaning towers of reeking barley and hops. I did not. Because I am not a trained seal. Also, I needed to keep both hands free.

Finally – and you just know they did this on purpose – I made it to the Wood Chipper table and the longest line of all. It was dark by then, the lawn covered with tipped-over cup columns and cigarette butts. The “German cuisine,” it turned out was bratwurst and/or Swedish (Swedish?) meatballs. That was it. I had the bratwurst, because, dammit, somebody’s got to take a stand.

But here’s the thing. I kind of liked it there. The lines eventually thinned out and the Wood Chipper really was delicious. I’d get two cups, chug em and immediately get two more. Then I had bratwurst, talked to Fargones about local politics (there’s more Democrats than you might expect) and hung out by the band, who were horrible, but also adorably drunk.

Actual Fargo Beer Fest 2011 attendees

I went to Minneapolis from there, one of my all-time favorite former hometowns. I worked for the Star-Tribune in 1980 and 1981, lived in a brownstone apartment near downtown (and right down the street from the Guthrie Theater and Walker Museum) and felt, for the first time, like I lived in an actual big city. I didn’t even mind the weather, mostly because the downtown area is connected by an ingenious network of tunnels and skywalks that allow you to get pretty much anywhere without ever going outside. Life in the suburbs, I’m sure, was difficult, dealing with snow-covered driveways and freeways and such. But living in the city was great.

I was nothing but trouble when I was there, still pretending to be pursuing a professional newspaper career but, deep down, realizing that I didn’t really want to work that hard or go to that many meetings. So, like a kid bored in grade school, I spent most of my time disrupting the class. I’m pretty sure this included making fart noises and then pointing at other reporters.

This is exactly the sort of reckless immaturity that led me to believe it would be a good idea to have fake surprise birthday for myself. It wasn’t my birthday and I was the one planning the party, but no one knew that. My college friend, Patbo, visiting from out of town, called the numbers of all my friends and co-workers – with me sitting right by him, coaching him on what to say –– and told them there would be a top secret surprise birthday at my apartment. People would hide behind the sofa, everyone would jump out and yell “Surprise” when I got home and, best of all, someone was going to hit me in the face with a pie. This, understandably, increased the affirmative responses.

What he didn’t tell them, was that I was going to hide a second pie in the desk right by the door. And then, while everyone was laughing their ass of at my pie-covered face, I would grab the pie and smack the person who’d hit me. And THAT would be the real surprise.

Except that Patbo, who has absolutely no ability to keep any kind of secret, was keeping a journal and, for some reason, allowed the designated pie-thrower – future Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist Joel Bierig – to read it. Which is how he discovered that that he would be both the pie-er and the pie-ee. He was not amused. His exact words were: “What is this shit”

Loring Park, my old Minneapolis neighborhood

We needed to re-tool. More accomplices were required. So, in what turned out to be an unfortunate twist, a very sweet woman named Emmy – at the time dating a friend of mine – volunteered to be the pie thrower. She knew that I knew, which is the only reason she agreed to throw the pie. She did NOT know about the retaliatory pie. We probably should have warned her.

Here’s Patbo’s memory of what happened: “You walk in and Emmy hits you.  She is so pleased with herself.  They all are.  (while we were calling them I was pumping up the pie hitting, giving them red meat.  They were loving it and waiting for it.)   So they are all so happy to see you get hit with that pie, which left it open for you to go to the desk drawer for the second pie.

“ Nobody noticed you, until, “wham!”  you hit Emmy.  Then there was complete silence except for me almost peeing myself with laughter and doubling over on the couch.  You were pretty pleased with yourself at that point, as was I.  But the rest of them were pissed off.  Really pissed off..”

Yeah, that took an ugly turn. It’s one thing to see a sweet young woman hit the class clown with a pie. Not nearly so funny when he hits her back. Plus, that was the moment it dawned on everyone that they’d been set up, that I must have known about the pie all along and, what the hell, was it even my birthday?

Except that, unbeknownst to me, or to Emmy, there was . . . A Third Pie. Bierig had hidden it in another drawer and while I was laughing in triumph, he nailed me with it. Bigger, harder and splattier than the first two. I had no idea it was coming. The crowd – which included R.T. Rybak, then my co-worker and now the mayor of Minneapolis –– felt that pie justice had prevailed. And we all lived happily ever after. Except for Emmy, who later broke up with my friend. Left him for her personal trainer or something.

My point being that,  generally speaking Minneapolis has nothing but fond memories for me. My last week there, after the lease had run out on my apartment, I lived in the employee parking lot of the Star-Tribune for two weeks. In a van. It’s like, foreshadowing, right? Future Mayor Rybak was also there for an actual surprise party on my last day in town. We had breakfast in the parking lot, with many mimosas,  and, as I recall, a number of employees were sent home when supervisors determined that — at 9 a.m.  — they were clearly drunk. Somewhere, there are pictures.

Now that I think about it, there was a LOT of foreshadowing in Minneapolis. A bunch of us –including at least one future Pulitzer prize winner (and yes Mayor Rybak. I’ve REALLY got to find those pictures) – used to take weekend train trips for pretty much no other purpose than drinking beer. We went to Duluth once and to LaCrosse, Wisconsin, which has the distinction of having the most bars-per-person of any city in North America. We’d walk from joint to joint, leaving whenever someone got bored and announced that it was time to “suck those puppies down.” We started calling ourselves the Puppy Suckers. I know.

After I left Minneapolis this time around, I drove along the Mississippi River and couldn’t resist crossing over into LaCrosse. It hasn’t changed much. I ended up at Buzzard Billy’s Flying Carp Cafe, right across the street from TJ Cheddarhead’s. I’m pretty sure I had something with cheese. And beer. Possibly a Leinenkugel. I don’t remember. I do remember watching clusters of young people stumbling from pub to pub and thinking, man, that used to be me.

Oh, who am I kidding, it still is. I wonder if anyone wants to get hit with a pie.

So where were we? Oh yeah, spending the night by the Alaska pipeline, 120 miles south of Deadhorse.

Which isn’t a real town, actually, in the sense that it did not exist before the North Slope oil discoveries in the 1970’s and the building of the Prudhoe Bay terminal and the pipeline. There was nothing up there but tundra and ice and caribou herds. This make sense because,  during the winter, the temperature is regularly at 50 degrees below zero, wind speeds can approach 100 miles an hour and – I swear this is true – the sun sets on November 24^th and does not rise again until January 18. It stays completely dark for 54 days. Other than that, it’s lovely.

But once they started drilling and piping they needed a place for all the workers to live and for the supply trucks to get repaired and a general store to sell mittens and stroke books and such. The oil companies, who in exchange for making everyone rich, were given possession of the coastline and all the land around it – No, seriously, they OWN the fucking coastline –built their own private town. This is Deadhorse.

It’s a horrible, horrible place, all pipelines and gas flares and mud puddles, Satan’s winter retreat. Because the surrounding area is all permafrost everything is either built on stilts or on top of layers of gravel and it’s all just butt-ugly, as if a small town were built entirely of tool sheds.

There are two “hotels,” owned by the oil companies, a “general store” owned by the oil companies and a tour bus company, owned by the oil companies. This last part is important because the only way you can get to the Arctic Ocean is on an oil-company-owned tour bus. Private vehicles aren’t allowed. So you pay them $15 for the privilege and also have to sit through an “orientation” meeting in which they tell you how oil is good and how they are very very careful not to fuck things up when they’re drilling, because they loved the environment even more than you do and, hey, if you’d let us get a piece of that Arctic Preserve, we’d drill the shit out of that, too and you wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference.

Then you get on their bus and, before they take you to their ocean, you have to stop and gawk at all the drilling rigs and pipeline arrays and they tell you a couple of cute stories about various employees that almost got eaten by polar bears. They never mention any of their employees who might have completely got eaten by polar bears, because this is Deadhorse and NOTHING BAD HAS EVER HAPPENED HERE, EVER!

Finally, mercifully, they take you to a little spit of gravel that juts out into the Arctic Ocean, as far north as you can go and still be in the United States. After that, it’s just the polar ice cap and then Russia and, no, Sarah Palin can’t see it from here.. Neither can we.

There were six of us on this tour, the very last one of the season. It was a Friday afternoon in mid-September and if I’d missed that bus, the next one wasn’t going out until the following spring. So, yeah, I cut it a little close.

Besides me, there was a German couple who’d also driven up in an RV, only they’d come all the way from Argentina, a considerably more impressive accomplishment. They’d shipped the RV from Germany to Argentina, driven north to Colombia, had it shipped from Cartagena to Panama (cause you can’t drive through the Darien Gap) and then driven up the Pan American Highway into Canada and to here. Later on, I bought them beer. It cost them $3,000 just to get the vehicle from Colombia to Panama. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I’m not driving all the way to Argentina. (Unless I change my mind or get a lot richer.)

There were also three Ohio State students, two girls and a guy,  natives of Taiwan, who seemed awfully quiet for the bulk of the tour and who I thought maybe didn’t speak English. Then, when we got to the ocean, the guy stripped off  all his clothes and jumped in the water. “Happens all the time,” said the driver, who works for the oil companies.

I took my $50 vial and, fully clothed, bent over and scooped up as much Arctic Ocean water (not owned by the oil companies) as I could, while the German couple snapped photos of me proudly displaying my tiny souvenir, a quarter cup of dirty saltwater that, as far as anyone could tell, I could have gotten from any pet store aquarium. I couldn’t have been more proud.

I spent a couple of nights in Deadhorse at the Prudhoe Bay Hotel, where everyone has to put-on booties when they enter, like NASA workers. Otherwise the place, which is pretty much a gigantic, mutant mobile home, would be caked in tundra mud and tar sands.

It’s a spooky place, which must be even spookier after winter and the 54-day darkness kicks in. It’s like a dorm, with a 24-hour cafeteria, hot meals served at scheduled hours but an endless supply of sandwiches and donuts available at all times. Half the residents when I was there were oil workers and half were hunters, who’d been out shooting caribou all day. So everyone but me was pretty much wearing either camouflage gear or orange jumpsuits. The only women were cafeteria workers and maids. It’s like prison, but without the pottery classes.

But, hey, you can have a latte, hang out in your own personal La-Z-Boy or watch television. There was a bow hunting channel on every time I walked into the rec room. I assume the only reason they’d have changed channels would be to watch “Deliverance.”

The drive back to Fairbanks was less traumatic than the drive up had been, because the weather was better. Except on Atigun Pass, where it was still snowing and down to 20 degrees. I passed some college kids, in light jackets, who were heading the other way and asking how much further it was to Deadhorse. I’d already been driving for 8 hours at that point. It was 3 in the afternoon. If they took my advice, they turned around. If not, their corpses will be visible in the spring.

By the time I got back to Fairbanks (and many beers at the Silver Gulch Brewing Company), the Traipsemobile was bouncing like a pogo stick. The Haul Road had taken a toll. Later on, I’d be told that I’d driven the last 400 miles with essentially no brakes and/or shocks. By then, I was so used to bouncing around that I’d hardly noticed.

It was nearly October before I left Alaska, with new brakes and shock absorbers. After the Haul Road, the Alaska Highway seemed easy, but no less impressive. There were black bears everywhere, caribou, moose. Whitehorse, when I got there, seemed like an old friend. And driving into Edmonton felt like a kind of culture shock. So many people. So much traffic. All those buildings and stoplights and stores. It might as well have been Chicago or L.A. My sense of the world had changed.

I replaced a windshield in Calgary, headed east to Saskatchewan, where I took a right and crossed back into the United States. North Dakota was prettier than I expected, with millions of migrating ducks, rolling wrinkled hills that looked like the fur of a Shar Pei puppy and impossibly winding rivers, glacial remnants that looked like pieces of string that had fallen, delicately tangled, onto the floor. Beautiful.

But, even though I was in a place I’d never been, going down back roads I’d never driven, it wasn’t as satisfying as Alaska. The pavement was too smooth, the towns too frequent. The only animals visible from the road were horses and cows.. Driving across the Yukon and then to the Arctic Ocean may have spoiled me. For a while, anyway.

The Alaska Highway, heading towards the Yukon-Alaska border

So where were we? Oh yeah, Whitehorse, capital of the Yukon Territory, waiting to repair the semi-crippled Traipsemobile.

It wasn’t easy. The service department at the local Dodge dealer clamed to be booked solid for the next week. The local Freightliner shop had never even seen a Sprinter before and didn’t have any of the diagnostic tools (a tri-corder or something) necessary to figure out what was wrong. (The Traipsemobile, in case I haven’t made this clear, is a Mercedes/Dodge/Freightliner Sprinter and, theoretically, can be serviced at dealerships for any of those brands.) Parts, if we could determine which ones we’d need, would have to be ordered from Edmonton and would be at least a week in arriving. Possibly by mule train. It looked like I’d be in Whitehorse for a while.

Which was not a terrible thing. It’s a funky little town, with the aforementioned saloons and breweries (Yukon Brewing Company slogan:  “Beer Worth Freezing For”)  and coffee houses. It still feels like a Gold Rush town, which is how it began. The railroad from Skagway to Whitehorse made this the transit point for all those Klondike gold panners back in 1900 trying to get up to Dawson City. This was where they all got supplies or traded their nuggets for whiskey and whores. Half the people here still look like Gabby Hayes. And yes, there’s still gold in them thar hills.

There is also a shockingly good restaurant called Burnt Toast, which has an ever-changing menu, full of great odd-for-Canada entrees like Jambalaya. It’s cool and dark and stylish and wouldn’t seem out of place in Vancouver or San Francisco. I don’t know how they survive, especially during the winter. It’s an impressive place.

As is Metro Chrysler, Ltd, , the only Dodge dealership in the Yukon, where they took pity upon me and weaseled an appointment for the Traipsemobile four days early. More importantly, they didn’t break into convulsions of derisive laughter while informing me that the only problem was a loose turbo-connector hose, dangling in a way that should have been visible to any idiot with a flashlight, including me. They hooked it up, checked to see if anything else needed moron proofing, charged me almost nothing and sent me on my way.

Approaching Kluane Lake

I was still 600 miles from Fairbanks, with the roughest parts of the Alaska Highway ahead of me. After Whitehorse the mountains get steeper, the forests get thicker and the people get further apart. The further north you go, the more the pavement undulates, the inevitable byproduct of building a road over perma-frost and semi-tundra. Most of the time you’re fine, but every once in a while there’ll be a little orange sign with an arrow by the side of the road indicating a dip in the pavement by which they mean a great heaving sinkhole that, when hit at speeds exceeding 35 mph, will separate your butt from the driver’s seat, your hands from the steering wheel and, if you’re unlucky enough, your axles from your vehicle. Slowing down is highly advisable.

But this is the stuff I came for, that sense of being Truly Out There, hundreds of miles from other humans on a two-lane road that, if you follow it far enough, will take you to the Arctic Ocean. I mean, it’s not climbing Everest or diving the Great Barrier Reef or anything. It’s just driving. But there’s a purity of doing it for it’s own sake that I find simultaneously exhilarating and soothing. When people ask me, “Why are you doing this?” the answer is, really, that I don’t know. But it’s got something to do with this feeling that you can only get when the road stretches out in front of you, a thin ribbon to the horizon, leading to a place that you haven’t been before.

So, without planning on it, maybe because I was so relieved to be on the road again, I drove all day, past Sheep Mountain and Beaver Creek and Destruction Bay, looping around almost all of Kluane Lake, which is 40 miles long and part of a massive glacier-fed water system that runs through the St. Elias Mountains and contains the largest non-polar ice field in the world. It’s gorgeous. It’s hypnotic. It’s exactly what you expect driving to Alaska to be like.

And I just kept going, past  Burwash Landing, Snag Creek and Pickhandle Lake. Before I knew it, I was at the Alaska-Yukon border, a cinder-block building in the middle of nowhere where a bored-looking customs agent waved me through with barely a glance. I drove all the way to Fairbanks where I found the Blue Loon, a pub on the outskirts of town where they have blackened halibut and  Arrogant Bastard on tap. There’s a big back room where they show movies and book live acts (including comedian Bob Zany, who I went back to see a week later.  The opening acts were local morning deejays. They did jokes about duck migration.)

I’d driven 14 hours. It was nearly 10 p.m. And there was still light left in the sky.

Fairbanks was just a way station, a place to get clean and rested (There’s an Anytime Fitness there) before I took on the real challenge: The Dalton Highway to Prudhoe Bay, 400 miles of mostly-unpaved road that parallels the Alaska Pipeline all the way to the Arctic Ocean. Parts of it are gravel. Parts of it are dirt. A few miles – less than a hundred – are paved. Most of it, including everything north of the Yukon River, didn’t exist before 1975, when the Pipeline was built, and parts of it look pretty much like they just ran a bulldozer through the woods. The traffic is almost entirely supply trucks going back and forth to the Prudhoe Bay oil terminal and servicing the pipeline along the way. Tires and windshields don’t do well here. And there’s a stretch where there’s no fuel – or anything else – for 240 miles.

It was mid September and the weather was still spectacular in Fairbanks – 70 degrees in the day, mid 40’s overnight, no bugs, the Northern Lights just starting to appear in the sky. But Prudhoe Bay was another story. There had already been snow and 25-degree nights. If I was going that far north, 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle (and only 1200 miles from the North Pole) I needed to get there soon.

But not without a talisman. Even before I started living in the Traipsemobile, I’d decided that the  minimum requirements for a successful journey would be driving as far north as possible – Prudhoe Bay – and then as far south as possible – The Panama Canal. Otherwise, I’d just be driving around aimlessly with no point whatsoever. (Shut up!)

Somehow – and I feel fairly certain this happened in a bar – I convinced myself that there ought to be a physical manifestation of this trek – something to focus on whenever I felt like I was just spinning my wheels, going nowhere in particular . (Shut up, some more!) Clearly, I needed something that could sit on the dashboard or hang from the rear view mirror.

What I needed was a vial, a container in which I could capture some water from the Arctic Ocean and then transport it to Panama where I could dump it in the Canal. And then, as foretold in the Ancient Manuscripts, the curse on humankind would be lifted and American Idol would be no more. Either that or the oceans start to boil. That’s a chance I’m willing to take.

I looked at assorted amulets and medical vials and perfume bottles, even test tubes, before buying a vintage dresser bottle from a Fairbanks antique store. I paid $50, which seems like a small price for – one way or the other – changing the world. It comes with a bone-colored holder, suitable for dashboard gluing. Perfect.

Since it was mid-September, I was something of a curiosity in Fairbanks. Most of the tourists were already gone. The restaurants were empty, places were beginning to shut down for the year. So a lot of people asked me why I was there. I told them I was driving to Prudhoe Bay and, more than once, they’d call out to someone else in the room, “Hey, this guy’s gonna drive the Haul Road.” And then they’d start to laugh.

Really? Can it be that bad? Am I nuts for trying? People drive up there in cars and RV’s all the time. And it is an actual road, right? It’s not like I’m going in the dead of winter when it’s 70 below and the wolves just hang out by the side of the road, waiting for you to die.

Yes, it is the road on  recent seasons of “Ice Road Truckers”, where they’re constantly showing video re-creations of semis sliding off of cliffs and drivers blinded by ice fog, careening into frozen bogs never to be heard from again. I’ve been on the set of Ice Road Truckers, back when the show was about actual Ice Roads, guys driving over frozen rivers and lakes and OCEANS. I went with them 25 miles off shore onto the Beaufort Sea. I saw 12-foot waves frozen solid. It looked like Superman’s Fortress of Solitude up there.

But the Dalton Highway (the Haul Road’s official name) is an actual, navigable road, not a frozen ocean. And I know how those tv guys like to exaggerate. The ugly truth about Ice Road Truckers is that, except for the fact that it’s cold as fuck, there’s not much real danger out there. The ice is 30 feet thick and the trucks are so big and heavy that they rarely slide anywhere.  That’s why the footage of a truck crashing through the ice is computer-generated,; because in real life, it almost never happens. It’s tv bullshit. (Unlike “Deadliest Catch.” Those guys are the real deal. No exaggeration required.)

But back to the haul road: The first part was easy. The Dalton doesn’t officially start until Livengood, 85 miles north of Fairbanks, which is where the pavement ends. (In case you’re an idiot, there’s a sign that says “PAVEMENT ENDS.”) And it’s pretty much gravel from there on, nicely graded for a while. You could go 45-50 miles an hour. Which I did.

Before Atigun Pass

Aspen, poplars and spruce crowd the road and, because it was already fall in Alaska, the colors were mind-blowingly bright. The mountains looked like tapestries, all red and yellow. And not just regular yellow. Radioactive, industrial spray-paint yellow. It was like that bad fake-forest wallpaper that used to be in your orthodontist’s office. Only it was real. And smelled better.

The road gets rougher the further north you go and the landscape changes with every river crossing. The Yukon River, 55 miles into the drive, was unbridged before 1974 and the pipeline is suspended across it, running parallel to the “highway.” It’s another 60 miles to the Arctic Circle from there and 60 from there is “Coldfoot” which is the last official “town” in that it has a trailer-park motel, a diner and a gas station. Diesel is $5.29 a gallon and has been since last spring. Market fluctuations don’t matter much up here.

Past Coldfoot, the potholes get bigger, the gravel less evenly graded.. Also it was raining, then sleeting, then snowing, which means the whole thing was a gelatin-slick mud puddle. The Traipsemobile was suddenly two-tone, brown almost to the roof.  Until a few years ago, private vehicles weren’t allowed up here without a special permit. I was beginning to see why.

The ugliest part was Atigun Pass, which is the highest pass in Alaska (4800 feet) and a favorite drama-point for Ice Road Truckers, who love to show 18-wheelers stalling on the 12 percent grade or teetering on the edge of the no-guard-rail hairpin turns. They tell you not to look down. It’s impossible not to look down.

I will admit that, for the first time on the trip, I was really scared. The Traipsemobile hadn’t been in real snow before (there was about 6 inches at the top of the pass), visibility was awful and climbing a mountain pass covered in slush is never any fun. Also, it was 25 degrees.

After Atigun Pass

I kept crawling along and eventually got out of the snow and across the Brooks Range. The weather was still crap – rain and sleet mostly – there were a couple of places where  I thought the Traipsemobile would surely get stuck in the mud. After which, I’d be raped by a Yeti.

But none of these things happened and somehow I made it out of the mountains and onto the long endless tundra that stretches to the Ocean. There are no trees up here. No mountains. Just me and the pipeline. And an occasional herd of musk ox.

By the time I gave up for the night – completely brain-fried – I was still 150 miles from Prudhoe Bay or, actually, Deadhorse, the company town that surrounds the oil terminal and beyond which civilians cannot pass. My plan, if I could get there in time, was to take the last authorized shuttle bus of the year – there wouldn’t be another one until next spring – to the Arctic Ocean, where I would scoop up the ocean water and then, uh, go back the way I came. (No, seriously, Shut Up!)

I slept in a turnoff, just off the highway, pointed towards the pipeline. A truck would whiz by every hour or so. Other than that, it was completely silent. And, for a change, so was I.

So where were we? Oh, yeah, getting pulled over in Calgary on suspicion of do-it-yourself license plates.

Calgary, (which, for those of you scoring at home, is 400 miles north of Missoula, Montana) was the furthest north I’d ever driven. I’ve traveled to more northern locations — to Churchill, Manitoba, Inuvik in the Northwest Territories, Dutch Harbor in the Alaskan Aleutian islands. But I’d gotten to all those places by either train or plane. For some reason – and mental illness would be a good guess – I decided it was important to see how far north I could get in my own vehicle. I mean, yes, I’ve already accomplished a lot in my life. I do have a number of Foursquare badges.

But, as meaningless accomplishments go,  driving all the way to Alaska this would a big one, right up there with that time in 6^th grade when I convinced the other kids at Creswell Elementary that I was a professional wrestler on weekends and “proved” it by slamming my own head into a tree trunk. I know. This explains a lot.

So, from Calgary, I drove 200 miles north to Edmonton, where I stayed long enough to find out that:

a) The Wayne Gretzky Statue is a coward and will not fight you no matter how many times you call it a pussy

b) Edmonton is the home of the world’s second largest Fringe Festival, which means that for a few weeks in late summer, the place is infested with jugglers and mimes. Some of them WILL fight you, although ducking a mime punch is a ridiculously easy thing to do. Jugglers, on the other hand, will fuck you up. And a lot of them carry knives.

b-plus) One of the coolest guys at the Fringe Festival (which actually is pretty great, I mean, there’s an anti-circumcision improv show in a tent. No, really, there is.)  is named Joey Hundert . He runs what I believe to be the world’s only bio-diesel powered amusement rides. He calls it Sustainaval and it features, among other things, a Gravitron that smells like french fries. I should probably write an actual story about this.

c) The giant Edmonton mall is so big that Crabtree and Evelyn have separate stores. Also there’s a water park and roller coasters and a pirate ship and a comedy club and probably a juggler-and-mime store hidden somewhere in the back. The best part of being there was that I was the only person who wasn’t worried about whether they could find their car in the parking lot.

The actual Alaska Highway starts in Dawson Creek, B.C, about 375 miles northwest of Edmonton. At that point it still feels like pretty much any rural highway, nicely paved, well-lit, stoplights in the middle of towns, McDonalds and Wal Marts readily available.

The Mile Zero signpost for the Alaska Highway is there because, prior to the construction of the road to Alaska in 1942, there wasn’t any reliable way of going north or west. People got around by bush plane for the most part and other than hunters, trappers and gold miners, there weren’t many people headed in that direction.

But then the Nazi’s bombed Pearl Harbor (I get all my historical information from Michelle Bachmann and John Blutarsky) and everybody decided there needed to be a highway to get to Alaska and the northern pacific coast. When the Russians invaded, they would then have an easy way to drive all the way to Seattle. In gratitude, they would not put everyone in gulags and/or force us to eat beets for breakfast. I’m not sure how all that stuffed worked out, but the highway got built. (Actual history here.)

It’s 1520 miles from Dawson Creek to Fairbanks, through northern British Columbia and across the Yukon Territory. It’s a long 3-day drive if nothing goes wrong. Which means no one makes it in 3 days.

It doesn’t start feeling really remote until you get past Fort Nelson, which is 300 miles north of Dawson Creek. Up to there, it’s just like any other a country highway, small towns every 20 miles or so, the prairie giving way to foothills, the poplars and aspens starting to get thicker, the horizons a little emptier.

Fort Nelson, though, feels like an outpost, full of truck drivers and oil workers, guys who have come out to the frontier to make a fortune. And they are. This is tar sands country, the goopy thick oil they squeeze out of the ground and want to pipe to the U.S. in that now-delayed Keystone XL Pipeline. So there are rigs everywhere. And lots of guys in mud-caked jumpsuits, underneath which they are wearing “Slayer” t-shirts. They show up at Dan’s Neighbourhood Pub on a Friday night, cause they don’t have anywhere else to go. They drink Rickard’s Red and the only women in the place are the waitresses, who have various degrees of resignation, acceptance and defeat in their eyes, depending on their age. The youngest one, in her 20’s, still smiles. The others don’t bother anymore.

On the plus side, there are several places to buy donuts, the last vestige of a civilized society for hundreds of miles.

Once you get west of Fort Nelson, the distances get more daunting and the scenery more impressive. There are 100 mile stretches between towns, which usually consist of nothing more than a gas station and a trailer-park motel. But there are glaciers and mountains and forests that stretch forever. There are bears hanging out by the side of the road as if they’re looking to hitch a ride. There are mountain goats and reindeer herds. And also there are lots of construction crews.

The Alaska Highway, west of Fort Nelson

Every 50 miles or so, there’s someone with a flag, urging you to slow down before you enter a mile-long section of unpaved road, sometimes dirt, sometimes gravel, sometimes mud. A couple of these stretches are so bad that you have to wait for a pilot car to guide you through, the dust cloud so overwhelming that you can barely see the flashing yellow lights just in front of you. Occasionally, the dust dissipates long enough for you to realize that you are driving alongside a cliff and that one wrong turn sends you 100 feet down into Summit Lake. So, to be on the safe side, you eat the last of your donuts.

There’s even a herd of bison in the Liard River Provincial Park, just before you cross over into the Yukon. They wander back and forth across the highway, grazing at their leisure. When they decide to cross, you wait. And there are signs strongly suggesting that you not drive this stretch after dark, because the buffalo tend to hang out in the middle of highway. Also, you can’t roller skate. (Roger Miller reference, everybody! High five!)

For a while I was following two brand-new Federal Express Sprinters being driven from the factory (in South Carolina) to Anchorage. They were driven by a retired married couple from Oklahoma who do this for a living. Federal Express flies them to the factory, gives them a destination (they’d been this way a half-dozen times before) and then flies them back home. Possible future career duly noted.

I made it all the way to Watson Lake, home of the famous signpost village, 400 miles from Fort Nelson, in a single day, early enough that I decided to keep going. What the hell, another 100 miles or so wouldn’t make any difference. The Traipsemobile was cruising. I had beer in the fridge. Plus, I’d already seen a couple of bears. Maybe I’d see a couple of more before sunset. I was having a spectacular day.

And then, about 60 miles past Watson Lake, with the cruise control on, the Traipsemobile suddenly lost power. I’d just bought diesel and my first thought was that there’d been something wrong with the fuel. Then I thought it was the transmission. Whatever the reason – and nothing like this had ever happened before – I appeared to be losing power, unable to go more than 30 miles an hour, even less on uphill grades. I assumed the engine was about to conk out. Did I mention I’d just seen bears?

There was, allegedly, a town called Rancheria about 40 miles ahead. The sun was going down. Turning around seemed riskier than going ahead. I’d have to limp along for as long as I could. I was in the middle of nowhere, going about 25 miles an hour most of the way, convinced I was about to spend the night by the side of the road.

But the Traipsemobile didn’t die. It kept chugging along, me sweating out every agonizingly-slow uphill climb. Also, I was out of donuts.

Rancheria was, in its entirety, a gas station, a motel and a diner. A way station for truckers, mostly. But the guy who owned it said he knew a little something about diesel engines. And the closest mechanic was 200 miles away in Whitehorse. He’d do what he could.

Which was nothing. He fiddled around with the engine, I looked on and nodded as if  I knew what he was doing. We determined, by means of a couple of high-acceleration attempts in the parking lot, that the engine probably wouldn’t die, it just wasn’t going to get beyond second gear. His suggestion was that I spend the night and then try limping  to Whitehorse the following day.

And that’s what I did. It was 40 degrees and raining and trucks were passing me at frightening speeds. Also – a new development – the Traipsemobile was spewing black exhaust and, every few minutes, the carbon monoxide alarm in the van would go off, forcing me to drive with the windows down.

But I made it, after  a sputtering 7 hour drive,, never going faster than 50 miles an hour (downhill). It wasn’t that bad, really, being that far from other people, having plenty of time to appreciate the vastness of it all. In the end I decided it had been kind of fun.

Of course, I still didn’t know what was wrong with the Traipsemobile. It would be 3 days before a mechanic could even look at it and, having never worked on a Sprinter before, he wasn’t making any promises.

So there wasn’t anything to do but hang around Whitehorse, home of the Yukon Brewing company and a number of fine drinking establishments, including the Gold Pan Saloon. Fairbanks was still 500 miles away. But, what the hell,  I’d been stranded in worse places. Whitehorse even had a great coffee shop, called Baked. They had donuts. I’d be fine.

So, where were we? Oh yeah, watching the sun set over Stanley Bay in Vancouver.

It’s been two months since the last real dispatch. I should apologize for that. I’m not going to, of course, but I realize it would be the right thing to do. September and October just kind of flew by. There were thousands of dirt-road miles to be covered, actual paying stories to be written and, most of all, many many beers that needed to be drunk. I couldn’t just leave them there, unattended and unloved, all those microbrew IPA’s, with their funny little names and flirty little bubbles, smelling of hops and destiny. They needed me more than I needed them. Who was I to refuse?

Maybe you’d have ignored them, just left them there in those funky dim-lit brewpubs, surrounded by strangers and slowly going flat. Not me. I’m better than that. If I’m driving through a town, let’s say Revelstoke, British Columbia, and see a sign for The Village Idiot Bar & Grill, then, dammit, I’m going in. And I’m drinking Ice Fog Ale until I can’t tell the difference between the Traipsemobile and a Zamboni. Beers are people, too. (Okay, maybe not. I might have been drunk when I wrote that.)

From Vancouver, I headed east to Calgary, where I had an assignment to write about “Hell on Wheels,” the new AMC series about the building of the trans-continental railroad. The only way to get there was through the Canadian Rockies, whose primary difference from the American Rockies is that they have subsidized health care. I kid.

I went most of the way on the Trans-Canada Highway, which sounds like it ought to be a freeway but, at least in this part of the country, isn’t. It’s a winding mostly two-lane highway, devoid of exit ramps or overpasses, that hits a stoplight at the center of every small town it passes through. (Kamloops, Salmon Arm, Edelweiss)  It meanders past small cafes and Esso stations (they’re still called Esso up here) and feels like something from the 1950’s. It’s like driving across the U.S. before the Interstate system, I imagine, smooth and efficient enough for cross-country commerce , but not just an assembly-line of four-lane same-shit-at-every-exit boredom. The highway runs through farms and ski resorts and past an uncountable number of gorgeous glacial lakes. There were signs warning drivers (suggesting, really, it’s Canada) to be on the lookout for moose and elk and deer. Weirdly, there is no road kill. I think it’s set up like a Grand Slam tennis match, where someone’s kneeling just out of sight, ready to dash out and remove any possums or porcupines the second they are struck.  In the U.S., I saw a dead deer or raccoon every couple of miles. In western Canada, not a one.

It’s a 12-hour drive from Vancouver to Calgary (not that I did it all in one chunk. I slept/passed out on Main Street in Revelstoke). And almost all of it is through forests and mountain passes that are as spectacular as anything I’ve ever seen through a windshield. Hour after hour of “Holy Shit” vistas,  towering gray granite cliffs, snow-capped ridges across magnificent alpine valleys exploding with wildflowers. You know those scenes – well, actually, every scene – in “Lord of the Rings” where they’re trudging past peaks and looking towards otherworldly horizons? Like that. I’m pretty sure I saw Orcs.

The entrance to Rogers Pass

The best of them all was the summit at Rogers Pass, through the Selkirk Mountains (the northern Rockies, really). The pass wasn’t even discovered until 1881 and I don’t mean discovered in the usual “when white people finally came across something the Native people had known about for centuries” sense. The local tribes didn’t know about it either because they never went through those mountains. There was too much snow in the winter (10 meters a year, that’s 300 damned inches) and no wildlife or food in the summer. Just those towers of gray rock. So, not being idiots, they never went up there.

But the white guys needed to find a place where the Canadian Pacific Railway could get through and Rogers Pass was the best they could do. Lots of them starved and froze to death, but they got the railway through in 1884 and the Trans-Canada Highway pretty much follows the same route. Because the railway and the highway (completed in 1962) are  prone to avalanches there are approximately 5 miles of “snow sheds” along the pass. It’s like having a mountain with a drive-through window.

Wildlife Overpass

I drove through Glacier National Park and Banff (where there are “wildlife pathways” built over the highway, grassy areas so the bears and wolves and elk and caribou can get from one side of the road to the other and eat each other, unimpeded. And they actually use it. Which, I guess, is why there’s no road kill). And then, just before you get to Calgary, it stops. Bam. Suddenly, at a place called Dead Man Flats, the road goes straight and flat and there’s nothing but prairie ahead. It must be freaky to be coming from the other direction, after days of  driving through Manitoba and Saskatchewan and then, out of nowhere, you’re in the Hall of the Mountain King.  It’s like one moment you’re in Kansas and the next you’re in Katmandu.

Calgary, which I always thought of as kind of a cow town, feels more like Dallas than it does Fort Worth, prettier than you expect it to be, but also a little full of itself, trying very hard to be cosmopolitan, but betraying itself by having a Mayonnaise Tent at the Taste of Calgary festival. But, to be fair, there were also cabbage rolls. I kid again. (I mean, yes, they had cabbage rolls and a mayonnaise tent. But they also had coconut curry chicken and Pisco sours.)

Even though a lot of this is in The New York Times story, I can’t stress enough how cool the “Hell on Wheels” set was. It’s only 15 minutes from downtown Calgary, but hidden down some bumpy back roads, on a huge undeveloped chunk of T’sim Tsuu tribal lands. There is a herd of wild horses that hangs around the set, occasionally nibbling on the tents at night when no one is around. Also, there is an electric fence around the corral where the workhouses are kept because they were having a problem with bears and cougars attacking the livestock. Let me repeat: 15 minutes from downtown Calgary.

The Calgary Food Festivall mayonnaise tent

Which is fine place, by the way. Lots of  cool little coffee shops and pubs, my favorite joint being the Hop In Brew Pub House, about a half mile from the Calgary Stampede grounds and, it turns out, an actual house. It’s an old two-story wooden house, that probably went from being a well-do-to single family residence to an upstairs/downstairs duplex and finally, a pub. The bar is downstairs in what was once the dining room. The upstairs bedrooms are filled with chairs and a billiard table and reachable only by some creaky too-steep-for-fat-guys stairs.

There are other pubs in the area, places that clearly cater to the after-work professional crowd, but the Hop In Brew has a much more varied clientele. Old neighborhood guys have clearly been coming here for a pint for many years. They have favorite tables, order the same old Molson Canadian they’ve always ordered and kind of shake their heads at all the young hippies and punks and trying-too-hard hipsters who have infiltrated their lair. But they don’t seem all that upset about it. It’s more like, “What is the deal with that haircut?”

The Hop In Brew, Calgary

You want beer, you stand in line and wait your turn. No one’s bringing it to the table. And everybody – the punks, the hippies, the old guys -  stands in line together, so very polite and Canadian about the whole thing. It’s like “Ironweed” meets a Weezer video in there. And Hophead Lenny’s RIPA (get it, it’s an IPA so strong it’ll kill you!) is a fine thing. And, even though it’s downtown, there was a Traipsemobile parking spot right around the corner.

I was in Calgary for nearly a week, almost all of it wonderful. I discovered my new musical crush Romi Mayes, who looks like Sarah Silverman and sounds like Bonnie Raitt, an absolutely killer blues/country guitarist singer-songwriter from Winnipeg (which apparently is a hotbed of female Jewish blues guitarists) who should be a star, but for some reason isn’t. Maybe it’s because she still spends most of her time playing joints in western Canada. But if she ever decides to, say, move to Austin full-time, she’ll be huge. I know this.

Really, the only downside to the week in Calgary was that, for the first time ever, the Traipsemobile got pulled over. I’d been in one of those coffee shops for a couple of hours and had noticed the police cruisers circling the block a few times, slowing down every time they got to the Traipsemobile. When I got behind the wheel, I noticed them again. I sat there for a while, waiting for them to approach me. But they didn’t. So I took off, heading for downtown and the Hop In Brew.

Romi Mayes

I went all of two blocks before they lit me up. One cruiser pulled up behind me, another pulled in front, making sure I didn’t make a run for it, I guess. This was all in the middle of a busy intersection, which must have been a real pain in the ass for all the other drivers. Sirens blaring, lights flashing, Calgary cop approaching from both sides of the vehicle.

It was the license plate that had spooked them, apparently. Not the dome, not the government-operative. paint job. But the unstickered Texas license plate. This happened once before, in Massachusetts last year, when I was momentarily a suspect in a bank robbery because an officer had noticed the possibly-made-in-the-basement nature of my plate. But that had been in a parking lot. This was the first time, I’d actually been pulled over.

I’ll be honest, I kind of enjoyed it. Because I knew how it would turn out. It’s Calgary, after all. They were very polite but very direct. I gave them the paperwork, explained that all the information they sought was on my windshield stickers instead of the plate, that I was in town to write about “Hell on Wheels” and asked if they’d pulled over any of the cast. They hadn’t.

It took them about 10 minutes to run my license and be assured that I had not, in fact, created a black-and-white Texas license plate with “T TRAIPS” on it in order to conceal my nefarious international crimes. They apologized for the inconvenience and sent me on my way.

I invited them to join me at the Hop In Brew, an offer they politely declined. As soon as they left, I breathed a sigh of relief and checked the secret compartment where I’d hidden the blood diamonds with which I planned to finance my master plan: a weather balloon filled with poutine which I planned to detonate over next year’s Calgary Stampede, drowning countless innocents in gravy.

I kid yet again. Or do I?

Hell on Wheels, New York Times, Oct. 23, 2011

My TV Guide Article about “Once Upon A Time”

(opens as PDF file)

So where were we? Oh yeah, hanging with Kenney Dale Johnson in Seattle.

I’ve done a fair amount of lollygagging on this leg of the trip, more than I expected. The plan, more or less, had been to go up the Pacific Coast, cross into Canada, drive the Alaska Highway through British Columbia and The Yukon and make it to the Arctic Ocean by early September, at the latest.

Charles Kuralt

But summer was slipping away and I hadn’t even left the lower 48. Prudhoe Bay and the Arctic Ocean was another 2700 miles north, a good chunk of the route over dirt roads and less-than-ideal mountain passes. I needed to get my ass in gear.

But first, I had actual pseudo-journalism work to do. One of the rationalizations for my headlong leap into homelessness was that I could surely find more stories to write on the road than by staying in Los Angeles. This would almost certainly be true if I were on constant lookout for those little off-the-beaten-path stories that Charles Kuralt used to do (in between lying to one or both of his simultaneous wives. Mostly though, I’ve been drinking beer, visiting friends and, uh, drinking beer.

This has not been, professionally speaking, the most effective of strategies. Although, if anyone ever wants to publish a comprehensive list of  the best bar parking lots for overnight sleeping, I’m going to make a fortune. (Quick Tip: The Trumpeter Public House in Mount Vernon, Washington is on a side street, right by the Skagit River. Very quiet. Very level. Good place to pass out.)

Until then, I need to make do with whatever assignments I can find. So I look for television shows that are filming in places other than Los Angeles and pitch my services to editors who couldn’t otherwise afford to dispatch a plane-riding, hotel-sleeping correspondent to faraway locales. If nothing else, I’m cheap.

This is how I got assigned to write about the new ABC series, “Once Upon A Time” (about fairy tale characters living in the real world, kind of) which is filming in Vancouver, and the new AMC series , “Hell on Wheels” (about the building of the Transcontinental Railroad) which filmed in Calgary. The Arctic Ocean would have to wait.

Vancouver is my favorite city in North America,  the place I’d probably live if  I could live anywhere (oh, wait. I can!) It’s stunningly scenic with a waterfront skyline and mountain range views that are better than Seattle or San Francisco, moderate weather (less rain than Seattle or Portland, not much snow,  not hot in the summer), an international cosmopolitan feel, great restaurants and readily-available Cuban cigars. And also there’s the Sylvia Hotel.

The Sylvia Hotel

When I first stayed there, in the mid 1980’s, it was kind of run down, but in a perfect sort of way. The bar felt very English, like what I imagined a real English pub to be, with bitters on tap and an old grumpy bartender who had clearly been there for decades. It was dark, stank a little (but not too much) of cigarette smoke and, most importantly, had a gorgeous view of English Bay. The food was mediocre. The rooms were small. The elevator was appallingly slow. But, not unlike the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, the seediness had a charm to it, a sense that the place had seen the comings and goings of all sorts of interesting rogues, the kind of hotel frequented by mystery writers and spies. If it had been just a tad seedier, it might have seemed dangerous. If it had been pricier,  or nicer, it would have seemed dull. The Sylvia, as far as I was concerned,  was exactly right.

It’s also adjacent to Stanley Park, the single greatest thing about Vancouver. It’s like having a National Forest inside a major metropolitan city, this massive green space with bike paths winding around and through it, views of the waterfront, the mountains in the distance, an old growth forest surrounded by cityscape. I used to rent bicycles and spend the day riding around, stopping on the English Bay side, just up from the Sylvia, to watch the sunset, smoking one of those Cuban cigars, watching the locals take their evening strolls and the sea lions and occasional otters bobbing up in the water.

Stanley Park

They film a lot of movies and tv shows in Vancouver, which is why I used to go up there a lot (the only good thing, really, about that dreadful year in Portland). I’d take one of those little 12-seater planes up from PDX, flying low over Mt. St. Helens (which still looks like a giant lanced boil) and, in barely an hour, be in Vancouver. I went up there to write about The X-Files, and Stargate and The Chris Isaak Show. I went up there, believe it or not, for the remake of Bye Bye Birdie, where I hung out in a pastry shop with George Wendt (who quite enjoys a pastry) and saw possibly the coolest live on-set performance I’ve ever seen.

Tyne Daley was doing a musical scene in a suburban alleyway at 2 in the morning, supposedly singing as she took out the trash. She’d already recorded the song, which is how they have to do it for musical numbers, and was only supposed to lip synch along with the track. But Tyne’s got too much Merman in her for that kind of shit. She belted out the song, full volume, over and over again. The crew was clearly stunned by this. It was great. And none of the neighbors complained.

“Once Upon A Time” was filming at Riverview,  former mental hospital in Coquitlam, about 30 miles west of Vancouver. Except,, it turns out, there are still a number of full-time “residents” on the grounds, apparently grandfathered in when the facility became a popular shooting location (in fact the most filmed non-studio location in Canada). So you’ve got actors and mental patients wandering around the same property. It is, as you’d imagine, hard to tell which is which. One woman walked around the grounds all day, apparently listening to an Ipod, and moaning. It had a serious “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” vibe.

Riverview Hospital "Turning Mental Illness into Mental Wellness"

Especially because, not surprisingly, the location is usually used for hospital scenes, so you’ve got lots of extras dressed as doctors and patients, all of them scurrying outside for cigarette breaks, in their slippers and robes and thus indistinguishable from the people who never get to leave. There used to be a lobotomy ward there. And an “Acute Psychopathic Unit.” There may be ghosts. In the basement. Which used to be a morgue.  I haven’t been on a set this creepy since the last time I wrote about Jerry Springer. There was yanked-out floozy hair on the carpet. Those fights were REAL. Back then, anyway.

But let’s get back to Vancouver, where I hung around for another couple of days after I’d done all my “Once Upon A Time” interviews (soon to be appearing in a TV Guide near you). As many times as I’d been there, this was the first time I ‘d driven up in my own vehicle. I didn’t expect that to be a big deal, but it was.

Flying in, clearing customs at the airport, getting that first wad of multi-colored Canadian money, taking a cab or a rental car towards that water-reflected skyline, always seemed exotic, for a moment anyway. Vancouver has, for years, been my idealized, romanticized, faraway favorite place. I felt about it the way some people feel about Paris or Venice or, I don’t know, Green Bay. It became this idyllic dreamscape kind of place in memory, not quite real. When I had fantasies about where I would be if I could be anywhere in the world, I almost always conjured up those benches by English Bay, the sun setting, smoking a cigar.

They’ve spruced up the Sylvia Hotel, re-painted the bar and the restaurant, made it all bright and inviting and not run-down at all. There’s no smoking any more, not in the Sylvia and not in Stanley Park. You can’t smoke a cigar at sunset, not legally anyway. I’m sure it’s healthier for everyone, especially the joggers who used to glare at me when they ran through a cloud of my smoke. But, still . . .

As much as I  love Vancouver – and I do — driving there in the Traipsemobile, hanging out in my very own bedroom right there in Stanley Park, seemed weirdly kind of wrong. I have to be careful about this, this new ability to take my whole world with me wherever I go. Not that Vancouver wasn’t still beautiful . But it seemed less exotic this time around, too easily attainable. There were moments where I found myself treating it as just another place on the way to somewhere else. Which is not what I had in mind.

Sunset over English Bay