“You have to pay the cost, to be the boss,” Frederick would say as the “body-in-white” was approaching our workstation along the assembly line at a General Motors factory in New Jersey.
At our workstation, I and three other assemblers were tasked with attaching the vehicles’ doors before it rolled towards other workstations in the plant to be fitted with all the components in a modern auto like the engine, interior and paint.
It was the beginning of summer in 1998 and the advent of the sports utility vehicle was accelerating. General Motors, along with other domestic and foreign automakers were ramping up production to meet a big demand for the new vehicle types, especially when the average gallon of gas nationally was barely over $1 per gallon.
Thus, the work week consisted of 6:00 AM to 4:00 PM shifts, six days per week. Frederick was sacrificing his weekends so that he could earn bigger checks with 10 hours of overtime in one day. Why he directed to me that colloquial expression but not the other assemblers mystifies me to this day; maybe he was ecstatic with the overtime and I was the only one who could hear him among the hum and din of robots welding and assemblers assembling.
He was right about the overtime, as it began to accumulate very nicely by payday. But just as we were satisfying production quotas and reveling in OT, a strike hit the nerve center of GM’s North American operations in Michigan, shuttering auto and engine plants nationwide in June because they didn’t have parts from the Michigan plant.
Bookstores of all sizes were more prevalent in the mid 1980s; visiting family in New Jersey as a 12-year old a title on a bookshelf I could reach bewitched me. “Alaska” was the tile and I thumbed through the pages that displayed life-size photographs of Alaska’s different regions: the summit of Mt. Denali, the Arctic tundra in the Brooks Range, the Inside Passage along the coast near the capital of Juneau and the Aleutian Islands in the southwest.
Frederick asked me, “What are you going to do now?” Bob Dylan said in “Hard Rain’s A- Gonna Fall” that he’d walk to the depths of the deepest, dark forest. I didn’t respond with that; I wasn’t even listening to Dylan then. But on the drive back up the New Jersey Turnpike, I figured now is the best time as ever to visit the Last Frontier and walk to the depths of the deepest, dark forest.
In 1998 the public Internet was in its infancy; Google didn’t debut until September, 1998 and I’m researching the Internet in June. A local library featured a couple of workstations and how I found the backpacking guide company, “Arctic Treks,” I don’t remember.
But I made the reservation, and then travelled to the wildly popular backpacking store in northern New Jersey, Campmor. And there I purchased all the gear: sleeping bag, backpack, hiking boots and socks, and most importantly, as advised by the guide, face netting because mosquitoes in the tundra in summer abounded.
I convinced my brother and we both embarked on July 9, 1998 from Newark to Seattle, then another flight to Anchorage. The cab driver told us, after landing after 11:00 PM, that the Alaskan Railroad Station downtown was closed; it would open at 7:00 AM.
We took out the sleeping bags from our backpacks and prepared to sleep on the streets of Anchorage. But the proprietor of a bar/restaurant a couple of storefronts away from the station invited us in and said food and drinks were on the house as he was closing shop.
He and his two friends were dazzled that two brothers from the banks of the Hudson River opposite Manhattan were about to trek for two weeks in the Gates of the Arctic National Park and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The Alaskan Railroad departed sharply at 7:30 AM towards Fairbanks, and immediately the conductor announced that we all on board had an excellent chance of seeing a cloudless summit, which is very rare, of the highest peak in North America: Mount Denali.
During the summer in the Far North, we experienced in Fairbanks the Midnight Sun, 24 hours of daylight. Our last leg of the journey was a flight on a medium-sized airline to the frontier town of Bettles, which is the gateway for mountaineers, backpackers and hunters to the Gates of the Arctic.
And then we boarded a Cessna aircraft and the bush pilot took off from the runway and climbed quickly to steer clear of the towering mountain peeks. Mile after mile of pristine tundra and wilderness whooshed by below. The pilot then began his descent, angling the plane sharply down toward a valley lake.
We landed and began to unload all our essentials, two weeks worth of food stored in containers and all our gear.
And so there my brother and I were, along with the guide Jeff, and two other lads, one from New York and the other Chicago, who started their journey backpacking various national parks in the Lower 48 and concluded their adventures in the Alaskan tundra.
Looking back thence, I would have preferred a backpacking trip rather than a basecamp trip as we could have explored more of the Arctic from different starting points. But as it was, we hiked a lot, and the mosquitoes absolutely dominated, making nature breaks nearly impossible.
There were so many memorable moments on that trip: ascending numerous mountain peeks with breathtaking views, walking out of my tent and noticing immediately to my left a large white mammal that was either an arctic fox or wolf and of course eating avocado for the first time (Jeff purchased it in Bettles).
But the most memorable of all occurred after returning from a 10 mile hike. We were all resting in our tents. The wind was strong, so the mosquitoes burrowed in the tundra. I then exited the tent to notice the valley lake’s ripples and just absorb the absolute and sheer beauty of the tundra’s wildness.
I walked to the back of the tent to look towards the tundra’s valley when I noticed movement. It must have been about a mile away and couldn’t discern the object.
Then I realized who was lumbering across the tundra: A GIANT GRIZZLY BEAR (see below!).
I quietly walked back to the tent entrances and said hushly, “Guys!”
Each one exited, staring at the lumbering griz, who kept lumbering away rather than towards us. Whew!
Suddenly, still in a exhilarating trance, Jeff says to us, “Let’s see if we can get closer.”
We collectively and in unison said, “Are you out of your F’n mind?!”
Fortunately, the griz disappeared beyond the horizon.
