THE PALE LIGHT OF SUNSET: SCATTERSHOTS AND HALLUCINATIONS IN AN IMAGINED LIFE

Arctic Circle - 1999

297 1999 Arctic Circle Any minute now, I will awaken, and the ride will be over. It has never felt real. Somewhere out there, up there, away from here, is the Arctic Circle. That is where we are headed, Denali and I. In late September. On motorcycles . In freezing temperatures. If we make it, maybe, then, it might seem real. Maybe. Denali rides ahead, all 6’3” of him settled into his bike like he was born to it. I watch him lean into the curves, thankful that I have a friend like Denali. I think of other guys I had gone venturing with, guys who were sometimes fun and sometimes not, guys I could sometimes trust, and sometimes not. You can be a male, and not be a man. Denali is a man. Denali and I have some coffee, saddle up, and leave town, heading west. Five miles out of town the rain comes again and stays, a hard, driving, Lee Maynard 298 steady opening of the heavens. We bore through it, heading for the next little town, not even on the map. We blow through the town, through the one intersection, rain flashing from the passage of our tires. Outside of town, we shoot instantly into spare and desolate country. The road goes west but we want to go north so Denali turns onto a raw dirt track—a raw mud track—that drops off into a flat and disappears into a cut canyon so narrow that, if I crash in the mud, I’ll probably smack off both walls before I hit the road. I see Denali’s taillight grow quickly smaller through the rain and I drive faster. We disappear into the canyon, watching the walls close in against the sides of the bikes. We are doing 50 mph over mud and gravel and through standing water, bits of stone flying out from the sides of the tires and pinging against boulders at the side of the track, mud sticking to everything that moves. If a truck comes from the other direction , I doubt that I will see it in time to get the hell out of the way. And the rain keeps coming. It can’t get any worse than this. We break out of the canyon and see flat riding ahead. We keep our speed, mud flying from the bikes like motorboats on a flat lake. Denali’s rear tire is throwing a rooster tail of mud fifteen feet in the air and I have to drop back about thirty yards to avoid the downfall. Denali plows his bike off the road onto a turnout, nothing more than a flat area of thick mud. I follow. We turn off the engines and just sit there looking at each other, the rain still drizzling on our helmets. We are wet, cold, tired, hungry, almost too stiff to get off the bikes. But we do. Denali is taller; other than that, no one could tell us apart, two mud-covered men standing by mud-covered bikes in the middle of mud-covered nowhere . Somehow, water has pooled in Denali’s jacket, then has burst inward and sloshed down inside his pants, soaking him from the crotch down. We stand in the rain, just looking at each other. Then our hands The Pale Light of Sunset 299 come up and we both raise our face shields. We are both laughing. And then screaming. It can’t get any better than this. Days later. Many days. The wind blows all night, is still blowing when we rise early in the cold morning. We talk it over at breakfast, both of us a little tense. It isn’t the weather. It is where we are, and where we are going. By noon we will be in Fairbanks, about a hundred miles away, and early the next day we will ride due north, leave the paved road, jump onto the Dalton Highway and officially be on our way to the Arctic Circle. Maybe spend the night somewhere near the Yukon River. The morning after that . . . The Arctic Circle. Two days away. Neither of us can relax. We have no idea that this day will be a day that we will remember vividly for the rest of our lives. We ride out of Delta Junction with the wind at our backs, blowing so hard that I think we could...