|
"North
to Alaska"
Lots of people ask how I did this one. I told them that I got in
my car, drove to the Arctic Circle, and put on a Santa hat. "Yeah,
OK, sure," they'd say. My story
was, however, the exact truth.
The Silicon Valley company I worked for at the time was famous for
retaining employees by offering them a paid, six-week sabbatical after
four years of employment. (Boy, those days aren't coming back.)
I drove up the California coast, over to Las Vegas, up through Oregon,
west along the Columbia river and up to Bellingham, Washington. There, I
drove the car onto the Alaska Marine
Ferryboat, the M.V. Columbia,
and cruised up the coast of Canada to Haines, Alaska. From there, I
drove to Anchorage, where I met my cousin Bob at the airport.
Right: Ray and
Bob in 1955 |
|
|
|
Robert A. Bartlome had been my boyhood buddy and the brother I never had.
He was the one who originally taught me about computers. He'd just
been laid off, was going through a divorce, was broke and thoroughly depressed.
So I hired him to be my expedition driver. The two of us spent a
month tear-assing around Alaska in my new Subaru. The high point of
the trip was an all-day jaunt north from Fairbanks on the Dalton
Highway. We cruised up the pipeline road, crossed the Yukon river,
and kept on going.
There's nothing at the Arctic Circle except a gravel road,
endless tundra, the sign you see in the background, and clouds of the most
aggressive mosquitoes on Earth. They are the size of small birds. Left:
Cousin Bob, next to the video terminal he
designed. |
On the card it looks like I'm driving past the sign, but actually I had to back the
car up to it. Bob took the shot with a fully-extended 200mm zoom, to
collapse the field of view. Then we signed the certificates of
achievement that we'd purchased at the Yukon River gift shop, and turned the car
south. We drove down the Alcan highway to America, and then to Southern
California. I went back to work. He went back to his
divorce.
Bob was a lifelong smoker who loved to eat. He died of heart failure two years after
that trip, alone, in a motel room. I'm grateful that we had
one last grand, happy adventure to remember each other by.
|
